Discontented with Freud's "Discontents"

In the year or two that immediately followed the atrocities of September Eleventh, 2001, I turned to a re-reading of "Civilization and Its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur]," to see if Sigmund Freud's magisterial deployment of the conflict between the archetypal forces of eros and thanatos, love and death, might account in some way for the destructive fury of the primitive demons who attacked civilization with its own technological power. I was disappointed, and I am going to try to account for one small aspect of my disappointment tonight.

This post will try to begin unraveling some of the unsatisfying shortcomings in Freud's essay. I should say at the outset that I think Freud occupies a position in the intellectual pantheon that is not in proportion to his actual accomplishments. He is a bravura writer, and a cogent and penetrating literary critic, but as a scientist and a philosopher, I think he is open to serious criticism. Although I was in my salad days much taken by the titanic personage evoked by Ernest Jones's bioography, I have been gradually disillusioned by the realization that most of Freud's insights, particularly as presented in the high-falutin' English translations of his work (e.g. "I and It" becomes "The Ego and the Id") are based on a very slim database, and that his observations of middle-class Viennese neurotics may not, after all, provide a sufficient basis for the sort of overarching philosophical psychology that he adumbrates. Nuff said.

Here's just one tiny footnote.

Professor Freud's discussion of "one of the ideal demands, as we have called them, of civilized society" which can be found in Section V of "Civilization and Its Discontents," (pages 64-75 of the "standard edition" published by W. W. Norton) is a curious demonstration of ignorance in the midst of profound learning, and obtuseness in the midst of very subtle acuity.

Let me explain.

Freud begins by describing this "ideal demand" as follows:

It runs: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' It is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim."

That is a very bizarre statement, as I hope to demonstrate. Bear with me.

Most of the Christians I know would say that the proudest claim of Christianity - and its unique claim - is the one encapsulated in John 3:16, rather than the one mentioned in Matthew 22:39. But that isn't Freud's most glaring obtuseness here.

Rather, I was puzzled by his blithe statement that the commandment "is undoubtedly older than Christianity." Unless this is a puckish, coy Freud, it is decidedly odd that he seems entirely unaware that Jesus was quoting verbatim, Leviticus 19:18, a text that was already more than 1,000 years old when Jesus was born.

It is an illustration, I think, that although Freud was, according to Ernest Jones's biography, proud of his Jewish identity, he was remarkably uneducated and uncurious about the Jewish tradition, and its traditional literature.

We'll develop that idea further as we describe Freud's bizarre interpretation of the Biblical commandment.

Freud goes on to give what he describes as an interpretation of the commandment from "a naive attitude." He does not attempt to understand what might have been signified by the original, terse Hebrew phrase "ve-ahavta le-re-acha k'amocha," and does not question his immediately everyday acceptance that he knows what "love," "neighbor," and "like yourself" might actually signify. Of course, plumbing the depths of meaning contained in that phrase, and those words, has much occupied religious thinkers, and in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions regarding them, in point of fact. Just who is a "neighbor" was asked, and what does it mean to "love" that neighbor. (The word "neighbor" indicates someone who is close or near to you. In one of the most interesting Jewish interpretations, that of the Sfas Emes, that "neighbor" is on one level none other than the Creator, and the commandment thus echoes that other great Jewish commandment [Deuteronomy 6:5] which Jesus indicated was the "first and great commandment" [Matthew 22:37] -- but I digress.)

To Freud, the commandment to love one's neighbor is intensely problematic. He begins by noting that his "love is something valuable which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way." These are really remarkable assumptions and assertions, that have no basis other than Freud's own feelings. He goes on to say:

If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. . . .He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him.

Again, I think that these idiosyncratic notions do not derive from the text of the commandment, but from Freud's own ideology.

After concluding that the neighbor is really a "stranger" who is just "an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake" and thus "only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share," Freud wonders:

What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfillment cannot be recommended as reasonable?

And he then concludes:

Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love, I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration.

How is that for projection? It seems clear that Freud willfully chooses not to understand that the commandment comes from a Transcendent Source, and is intended to modify and direct human conduct, rather than being a logical outcome of what Freud has come to identify as human nature. He goes on:

Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run 'Love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee', I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible than and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is 'Love thine enemies.'

To Freud, a commandment is only acceptable if it merely confirms what he already finds in human nature. The idea that civilization might be partially based on a commandment that is not necessarily in harmony with every aspect of human nature, baffles him. It seems pretty clear to me, however, that the commandments of the Transcendent Source are not intended to ratify every base impulse that may be present in human nature, but to control human behavior and thereby transform its nature.

At any rate, Freud next introduces his theme of innate human aggressiveness, saying that "men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among those whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him."

Freud's obtuseness prevents him from realizing that the Bible knows very well what real human beings are really like, and never shies away from that knowledge. The Transcendent Source of the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself knows very well what is in your heart of hearts, and that is one reason why there is more than one commandment. The commandment is part of a comprehensive structure of the 613 commandments which are intended to guide the individual and collective lives of the Jewish people, and serve not only to control their behavior, but to remake their very essence in accordance with a higher plan. And the 7 Noachide commandments serve to accomplish the same thing for the other nations.

The point is, that you cannot understand what it is to love your neighbor as yourself in a vacuum, simply because, despite its evident importance (the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Luria recommended reciting it before every daily prayer) it is a commandment that is one part of a larger systematic approach to human character and behavior.

Freud's entire discussion of innate human aggressiveness, I will leave for another occasion. My purpose this evening was merely to show that this otherwise highly educated and curious man was curiously ignorant about the sources from which the commandment he so glibly discusses emerged, and unwilling to tackle its meaning on its own terms. Like the caricature of Judaism which he presents in "Moses and Monotheism," Freud's analysis of the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is a cartoonish projection, rather than a well-studied and well-appreciated representation.

One final note: the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is not at all the same thing as the "Golden Rule," whether that Rule is stated positively, as in the Gospels, or negatively, as in the Jewish tradition, or in any one of the ways in which the "Golden Rule" is stated in the dozens of traditional cultural sources in which it appears. But that's another story altogether.