See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/221977901

On the crisis of conscience

Article  in  Australasian Psychiatry · March 2012

DOI: 10.1177/1039856211432462 · Source: PubMed

CITATIONS READS

3 27

1 author:

Bruce Lachter
University of Notre Dame Sydney Au
7 PUBLICATIONS   6 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Bruce Lachter on 15 June 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

432462
2012
APY20210.1177/1039856211432462LachterAustralasian Psychiatry
Myths and stories
On the crisis of conscience
Bruce Lachter  Consultant Psychiatrist in private practice and at South Pacific
Private Hospital, and VMO Psychiatrist at Manly Hospital, Manly, NSW, Australia
Abstract
Objective:  This paper examines the crisis of conscience as portrayed in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.
Conclusion:  The perspective of allegory allows intense emotion to be contained, and placed in a socio-cultural
context, which may work against bloodshed.
Keywords: allegory, killing, phenomenology, psychoanalysis
A
crisis of conscience arises when one is ordered
to do something one feels is wrong. The biblical
story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac for sacri-
fice represents an archetypal crisis of conscience.
This paper examines the Hebrew version of the story and
several commentaries upon it. Resemblances are noted
with Milgram’s investigation of obedience 50 years ago.
The near killing of the son by the father is also juxta-
posed with the story of Oedipus, the actual killing of the
father by the son. An exegesis of the story of Abraham
and Isaac raises several phenomenological and psycho-
analytic questions. Abraham’s utterances and their con-
text allow speculation as to his states of mind and
motivations. And in keeping with psychoanalytic theory
and practice, much remains uncertain, and various
assumptions are exposed as just that: assumptions.
Later Christian and Koranic versions of the story are left
aside, nor does this paper draw on socio-cultural or
anthropological perspectives on the practice of child sac-
rifice. But – as will be elaborated below – the son Isaac
was not necessarily a child when the events occurred. As
a timeless story, however, Abraham’s binding of Isaac for
sacrifice is a story for our time, too.
During the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram1
conducted mock experiments in which unwitting indi-
viduals were ordered by an authority figure – a man in a
white coat – to administer electric shocks of increasing
voltage upon a ‘subject’ to investigate the effects of pain
upon learning. However, the real subjects were those
administering the electric shocks, which were in fact
sham: there was no voltage, and the apparent ‘subject’
was an actor, whose expressions of escalating pain were
feigned. The point of the experiment was to study how
people react when they are ordered to carry out a task
against conscience.
148
AP
Australasian Psychiatry
20(2) 148­–152
© The Royal Australian and
New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/
journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1039856211432462
apy.sagepub.com
The bleak conclusion Milgram drew was that
… ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and with-
out any particular hostility on their part, can become
agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover,
even when the destructive effects of their work
became patently clear, and they are asked to carry out
actions incompatible with fundamental standards
of morality, relatively few people have the resources
required to resist authority.1
If ‘orders, unfortunately, seldom insist on good deeds’,2 we
may expect a high prevalence of such ‘destructive effects’.
The gist of Milgram’s findings was that subjects obeyed
orders despite the pain they inflicted on others.
According to Milgram, ‘the dilemma inherent in obedi-
ence to authority is ancient, as old as the story of
Abraham’. However, other than this brief prefatory refer-
ence, Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority, does not
return to that biblical story, a story that exemplifies ‘the
dilemma inherent in obedience to authority’ as a crisis
of conscience.
The plot of the story is disarmingly simple. Abraham
believes he is ordered by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
Abraham prepares to obey the order. At the last minute,
Abraham is told to set his son free. The drama begins as
God’s ‘proving’ of Abraham. It is not explained just what
is to be proved, but the apparent order from God is
typically assumed to represent a proving of Abraham’s
Correspondence:
Dr Bruce Lachter, 9/149–153 Sydney Rd, Fairlight, NSW 2094,
Australia
Email: lachter@ausdoctors.net
Lachter
faith, of his obedience to authority, despite a crisis of
conscience.
The implication of the title of Milgram’s book is that the
obedience will be to an external authority. The conflict
between this external authority, or command, and an
internal authority known as conscience gives rise to
stress. A disintegration of the distinction between inner
and outer is the condition of hallucinosis, where percep-
tions arising from within one’s mind are experienced as
coming from outside. According to Jaynes,3 the distinc-
tion between external command and internal thought is
a relatively recent achievement of consciousness. Jaynes
states that under stress, the distinction breaks down.
If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hal-
lucinations are similar to the guidance of gods in
antiquity, then there should be some common physi-
ological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest,
is simply stress. In normal people … the stress thresh-
old for the release of hallucinations is extremely high;
most of us need to be over our head in trouble before
we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone per-
sons, the threshold is somewhat lower …3
The notion of a psychogenic hallucinosis under stress is
broadly consistent with contemporary psychiatric ortho-
doxy.4 However, clinical experience with schizophrenia
brings Jaynes’ assumption in the opening sentence of
the above quote into question: the course of schizophre-
nia typically entails a psychosocial deterioration and
loss of purposeful action, which distinguishes its suffer-
ers from the heroes of antiquity, whose experience of hal-
lucination did not preclude them from leading nations
into battle, such as Achilles, or Agamemnon, and by
Jaynes’ account in fact enhanced their achievements.
The commonest hallucinations arise in the auditory
mode, such that voice replaces thought. Jaynes also
notes that the words ‘to hear’ and ‘to obey’ share a com-
mon derivation, ‘from the Latin obedire, which is a com-
posite of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.’ Jaynes’
reflections on the problem of ‘… the control of such obe-
dience’ return us to Milgram’s experimental subjects, as
questions of control over one’s actions: to what extent is
obedience modulated by one’s own judgment, volition,
and control? If ‘… to hear was to obey’, then that would
be expected to minimize stress. By abolishing the subjec-
tive space within which stress arises, the subject becomes
an automaton for whom ‘… the command and the
action were not separated.’ 3 Milgram defines this state
as the ‘agentic self’.1 There can be no crisis of conscience
where there is no such mental space for questions of
right and wrong, for operations of conscience.
However, to return to the original text of the story, God’s
command to Abraham had in fact been to ‘lift him
(Isaac) up’.5 The sacrifice of the son was implied – that
he be lifted up upon an altar. According to commentary,
‘He [God] did not use the word which signifies the slay-
ing of the sacrificial victim. From the outset, therefore,
there was no intention of accepting a human sacrifice,
although Abraham was not at first aware of this.’5
The notion of God’s order as sham of course resembles
Milgram’s experiment several millennia later in that no
harm was to befall the apparent ‘victim’.
This implies, however, that Abraham was all too willing
to assume the meaning of the command as being a mur-
derous one, albeit dressed up as sacrifice. Given that
Abraham’s assumption may have been a misinterpreta-
tion, questions of his motivation are evoked. As Cohen
puts it:
It should not be forgotten that Abraham would have
used the knife on Isaac had it not been for the staying
hand of God. This homiletic observation should be
enough to suggest that our humanity is indeed defec-
tive, that we are all able to turn the word of God into
something demonic.6
Rather than proving Abraham’s faith, then, God’s ‘exper-
iment’, like Milgram’s, may demonstrate an innate ten-
dency to destructiveness, as that ‘defect’ in human
nature noted by Cohen. It may be that there can be no
faith without destructiveness, for is not thought itself
sacrificed on the altar of faith? Such a reading establishes
faith as that aspect of mind that turns away from the
reality of the mind’s own destructiveness, and turns
towards obedience, as an identification with the aggres-
sor. Such agentic surrender minimizes the stress of the
crisis of conscience. The pain of conflict is displaced
onto the intended victim, who may even be hated for
‘causing’ the conflict in the first place.
Furthermore, ‘God communicated with Abraham during
the night, perhaps in a vision.’5 The implication is that
the communication was from within Abraham himself,
in the form of a dream. According to Freud, dreams con-
tain a disguised wish fulfilment.7 The further implica-
tion, then, is that the imperative to sacrifice his son – rather
than arising from the external authority of God – in fact
came from within the father himself, albeit from disa-
vowed aspects of his own mind, designated in psycho-
analytic theory as the unconscious. The disavowal in
this case arises from the shocking content of the impulse
to kill one’s own son, which could not be tolerated as
coming from within the father himself, and so had to be
projected externally, as though from God. Although
shocking, such imperatives are not controversial from a
psychoanalytic perspective, which allows for the inten-
sity of feelings between parent and child as being at
times murderous.
When Abraham departs with his son for the intended
sacrifice, Abraham says: ‘I and the lad will go yonder;
and we will worship, and come back to you [emphasis
added].’5 The implication in the use of the collective
pronoun ‘we’ is that the son would return with the
father, i.e. that the son would not be killed. Abraham
may have been obfuscating in order not to alarm those
149

he left behind as he set out on the last leg of the journey,
just as he later answers his son’s question: ‘… but where
is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ with a placatory ‘God
will provide …’ However, according to Hertz, Abraham
‘… spoke more truly than he knew.’5 This describes per-
fectly the clinical experience in psychoanalytic therapy
of the patient again and again ‘speaking more truly’
than he or she knows, which is to say, revealing in their
associations the effects of psychological activities of
which they are unaware. But, like any ‘wild’ interpreta-
tion, Hertz’s may reveal more about the analyst than it
does about the analysand: is Hertz attempting to euphe-
mise Abraham’s brutality? Or God’s?
The analytic perspective suggests Abraham’s ‘obedience
to authority’ was his response to a frightening inner
imperative, one which aroused emotional conflict, or
stress – as indicated by the contradictions in Abraham’s
words – but which even at the outset was never to be
carried out. But if the imperative impulse arose from a
dream, why was the matter not left at that – as merely a
dream? Why did Abraham spend days of travel and
stress in preparation for a terrible killing?
A certain level of psychological maturity is required to
locate dream perceptions in an inner world of subjective
reality, to distinguish them from perceptions arising
from external stimuli. According to Piaget, this is
achieved at around 7 years of age, before which dreams
are ‘… systematically considered as an objective reality,
as a sort of ethereal, rarefied picture floating in the air
and fixed before our eyes.’8
But Abraham was an adult, indeed an old man, at the
time of the story. As noted above, Jaynes argues that the
socio-cultural conditions were not available in ancient
times for sophisticated modes of thinking such as we
now take for granted, which relegates the ancient mind
to a state of developmental immaturity.3 Alternatively,
Abraham had achieved a mature level of mental func-
tioning but had regressed under stress.
Intense stress can generate hallucinations. In applying
this notion to Abraham’s state of mind, however, it is
necessary first to locate the origin of the stressor so as not
to conflate cause and effect. An externally derived order
to carry out the killing of his son cannot be both a cause
and an effect of an assumed hallucinatory state. If the
father is ordered to kill his son, and this creates stress,
which causes his mind to disintegrate into hallucinosis,
then the same order heard as a hallucination cannot also
be a cause of its own effect. The possibility remains, how-
ever, that the impulse to kill his son could not be toler-
ated as arising from within his own mind, and is
projected (externally). As noted above, this gives rise to
a possibly psychogenic aetiology of the hallucination.
Perhaps the answer to the puzzle of Abraham’s crisis of
conscience lies in a form of mental activity between wak-
ing impulse to action and dream, or hallucination – the
mode of imagination known as allegory. According to
Munz, ‘Allegorical interpretations are based on the
150
Australasian Psychiatry 20(2)
notion that if we are aware of an event that is invisible,
such as an inner turmoil, there is a visible event that cor-
responds to it …’.9 This is a perspective that the reader of
the story may adopt, as allegory is inherent in reading,
but was it the perspective of Abraham himself, or indeed
of the anonymous author? Neither author nor protago-
nist is around to say, but Abraham’s dilemma framed as
(his own) allegory suggests that the imagination’s inter-
nal theatre is allowed to run to its further reaches, in
order to prevent killing, not to enact it.
His capacity to be aware of – to imagine – the most terri-
ble act marks Abraham as sane, and indeed preserves his
sanity, his freedom of mind. If we do allow that Abraham
is really preparing his son for sacrifice, further questions
arise, again invoking Milgram’s notion of the ‘agentic
self’,1 in that Abraham is assumed to have handed his
obedience, or personal agency, over to the external
authority of God. But that is not the case: the original
text indicates that Abraham was terribly conflicted over
the sacrifice of Isaac, his beloved son. This is in keeping
with an intact self, not an agentic self.
Although obeying a powerful and apparently external
authority, Abraham is fully aware of – and fully respon-
sible for – his own actions. Such responsibility for one’s
actions is expressed by one of Milgram’s subjects who
stopped administering electric shocks to the seemingly
distressed ‘victim’, in defiance of instructions: ‘One of
the things I think is very cowardly is to try to shove the
responsibility [for one’s actions] onto someone else.’1
However, in contrast to Milgram’s experimental para-
digm, which entailed dramatically escalating protest
from the ‘victim’ of the electric shocks, Abraham’s son,
the intended victim, does not utter a word of protest.
The son’s obedience to the father mirrors the father’s
obedience to an assumed higher authority, for Abraham
had not questioned God’s order. According to Hertz,
‘There is no response in words on the part of Abraham.
His response is in deeds. He lost no time in obeying the
[assumed] will of God (emphasis added)’.5 Hertz sug-
gests Abraham’s alacrity marks the greatness of his
faith. However, nowhere is Abraham’s destructiveness
louder than in his silence. His failure to openly ques-
tion God, or to share his burden with his son – or his
wife, for that matter – represents another ‘turning
away’. Speaking permits an expression of impulse short
of deed.
Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex,10 exemplifies obedience to
blind (internal) impulse. The tragic hero, Oedipus,
unwittingly kills a stranger, not knowing that the stran-
ger is in fact his father. Oedipus later marries his own
mother, and on learning the truth, enucleates himself.
He is thus eventually literally blinded, but has been met-
aphorically blind all along. Again, this contrasts with
Abraham’s obedience, which is not blind. Although the
authority to whom Abraham succumbs, being ‘God’,
may in reality be no more than a projection of Abraham’s
own unconscious, this can neither be proven nor dis-
proven, but is a matter of faith.
Lachter

Despite his immediate and unquestioning obedience, Abe said, where you want this killin’ done?
Abraham was given pause between the order and its ulti- God said, out on Highway 61.15
mate enactment, for the sacrifice was designated to take
place 3 days’ walk away. He thus took time for prepara-
It is a frightening thought for a father to have, that of
tion, whereas in the case of Oedipus’ killing of his father,
killing his son, but sometimes that’s where his thoughts
there is no pause, and only misidentification. Abraham
may take him, down Highway 61. As Kierkegaard wrote:
is aware of consequences. Oedipus is not. For Abraham,
‘Should [a father], after having caught the greatness of
the crisis of conscience arises before any irrevocable
Abraham’s deed, but also the appallingness of it, venture
action; in the case of Oedipus, the crisis of conscience is
out on the road, I would saddle my horse and ride along
all the more terrible, arising after two irrevocable and
with him.’14 To know old Abe was there – and never shed
unwitting actions: the murder of his father, and the
a drop of blood, or at least no human blood, as he does
incest with his mother. And for Oedipus, the crisis of
sacrifice a ram in his son’s place – can be immensely
conscience itself gives rise to further irrevocable action:
important. The challenge in the face of the most intense
enucleation. The containing function of allegory was
crises of conscience is to remain in the world of limits,
unavailable for Oedipus. The story of Oedipus, of youth,
duties, accountability. Kierkegaard expressed this con-
is a story of action; for Abraham, an old man, the con-
cern: ‘Can one speak unreservedly of Abraham, then,
flicts are of the mind.
without risking that someone will go off the rails and do
Oedipus was the unwanted son, abandoned by his par- likewise [emphasis added]?’ But once a man has imagined
ents and left to die at an early age; his later life was killing his son, the thought of killing, say, his boss, is a
marked by violence, perversion and self-mutilation. But walk in the park: he can grin to himself while he thinks
throughout his life, Abraham, eventually the strong it, hear the birds chirp, feel the sun’s warmth during his
patriarch, had been able to contain great emotions, to be lunch break. As long as he is not late back for work.
responsible for his actions, to live with sorrow until
A hallmark of mental health is the recognition of the
eventual reward: ‘… he who knows how to wait need
difference between thought and action. Freud referred to
make no concessions.’11 One of the lessons the father
an ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ in obsessional patients
teaches the son in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic
‘unable to believe that thoughts are free and [who] will
story, The Road,12 is how to wait: the lesson of self-
constantly be afraid of expressing evil wishes, as though
restraint. The omniscient narrator – a kind of God in
their expression would inevitably lead to their fulfill-
creating the story for the reader – asks the father whether
ment … who believe they can alter the world by mere
he could kill the son, albeit out of mercy: ‘Could you
thinking.’16 It is only with a capacity for distinction
crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a
between thought and deed – between inner fantasy and
being within you of which you know nothing?’
outer action – that the crisis of conscience can arise.
Identifying this ‘being within you of which you know
nothing’ is the great gift and paradox of that story of In summary, the location of Abraham’s imperative as
Abraham, the patriarch and father, both the authority to self-imposed suggests various possibilities, including
the son, and the subordinate to a higher authority called dream, hallucination and imagination, or allegory. But
God. By imagining the most terrible act, and placing it in the absence of any mention of hostile feelings casts
a culturally sanctioned zone such as a dream or a story or doubt on this perspective, which assumes some mecha-
a song, we are helped not to enact it. And in experienc- nism of disavowal.
ing but not enacting a murderous impulse – that is, by
The story ends with a sudden reprieve. An angel calls to
waiting it out, and yet being conscious of it, observing
Abraham just as he ‘… took the knife to slay his son …’.5
all the while – our mental structure is enhanced.
For the angel, and for God, Abraham had demonstrated
According to Winnicott, ‘… if society is in danger, it is his obedience. But obedience to what?
not because of man’s aggressiveness but because of the
The only unambiguous and explicit order from God to
repression of personal aggressiveness in individuals.’ 13
the father was the final one: that he should not kill his
As Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling, his ‘dia-
son. Whatever the origins of this order – origins that
lectical lyric’ on the story of Abraham: ‘I don’t lack the
ultimately must revisit the question of the existence of
courage to think a thought whole. No thought has
God – Abraham does of course obey it.
frightened me so far.’14
Any conclusions that might be drawn from the story are
Whether socially accepted or not, that which we cannot
even more clouded when another question is raised:
utter and do not approach, out of fear, is likely to return
Isaac’s age at the time of the preparation for sacrifice.
to us with a vengeance, to disrupt our sleep, to corrode
According to some sources, the son was aged 37.17,18 The
our joy, until it may be ameliorated in dream or story or
question arises, what ‘If Isaac had said, “I refuse”‘17?
song, such as Dylan’s Highway 61:
Rather than being a test of the father, then, the whole
episode could just as accurately be seen as a test of the
God said to Abraham, kill me a son. son, himself an adult whose ‘father was no longer
Abe said, Man, you must be puttin’ me on … responsible for him.’17

151

Not to mention a test of the mother: ‘The immediate
cause of her death was the shock of being told that Isaac
was being sacrificed [emphasis added].’18
That’s one lethal allegory, Abe …
Disclosure
The author reports no conflict of interest and is alone responsible for the content and writing
of the paper.
References
1. Milgram S. Obedience to authority. London: Tavistock, 1974.
2. Camus A. The rebel. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Modern Classics, 1971.
3. Jaynes J. The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976.
4. Phillips LJ, McGorry PD, Garner B, et al. Stress, the hippocampus and the hypothalamic-
pituitary-adrenal axis: the implications for the development of psychotic disorders. Aus-
tralian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2006; 40: 725–741.
5. Hertz J. (ed). The Pentateuch and Haftorahs Hebrew Text, English translation and com-
mentary. London: Soncino Press, 1972.
152
View publication stats
Australasian Psychiatry 20(2)
6. Cohen A. The myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
7. Freud S. The interpretation of dreams. In Hutchins R. (ed.) Brittanica great books. Vol. 54.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952.
8. Piaget J. The moral judgment of the child. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977.
9. Munz P. Relationship and solitude. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965.
10. Sophocles. The three Theban plays. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics,
1984.
11. Freud S. Group psychology and analysis of the ego. In Hutchins R. (ed.) Brittanica great
books. Vol. 54. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952.
12. McCarthy C. The road. London: Picador, 2006.
13. Winnicott D. Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
14. Kierkegaard S. Fear and trembling. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985.
15. Dylan B. Highway 61 revisited. In Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia Records, 1967.
16. Freud S. The origins of religion. In Dickson A. (ed.) The Pelican Freud library. Vol. 13.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985.
17. Anonymous. Zohar. The book of enlightenment. London: SPCK, 1983.
18. Abrahams G. The Jewish mind. London: Constable, 1961.