Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality

PSYCHOANALYSIS, MONOTHEISM AND MORALITY
FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 12
Editorial Board
PHILIPPE VAN HAUTE, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

ANDREAS DE BLOCK, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
JOS CORVELEYN, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
MONIQUE DAVID-MÉNARD, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
PAUL MOYAERT, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
VLADIMIR SAFATLE, (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
CHARLES SHEPHERDSON, (State University of New York at Albany, USA)
Advisory Board
TOMAS GEYSKENS, (Leuven, Belgium)

ELISSA MARDER, (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
CELINE SURPRENANT, (University of Sussex, United Kingdom)
JEAN FLORENCE, (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
PATRICK GUYOMARD, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
ELIZABETH ROTTENBERG, (De Paul University, Chicago, USA)
JEFF BLOECHL, (Boston College, USA)
PATRICK VANDERMEERSCH, (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)
VERONICA VASTERLING, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
HERMAN WESTERINK, (University of Vienna, Austria)
WILFRIED VER EECKE, (Georgetown University, USA)
RUDOLF BERNET, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
ARI HIRVONEN, (University of Helsinki, Finland)
JOHAN VAN DER WALT, (University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg)
STELLA SANDFORD, (Kingston University, London, United Kingdom)
CLAUDIO OLIVEIRA, (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
PAOLA MARRATI, (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)
ERAN DORFMAN, (Free University Berlin, Germany)
MARCUS COELEN, (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany)
RODRIGO DE LA FABIÁN, (University Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, Chili)
RICHARD BOOTHBY, (Loyola University, Maryland, USA)
PSYCHOANALYSIS, MONOTHEISM
AND MORALITY
Symposia of the
Sigmund Freud Museum 2009-2011
Edited by
Wolfgang Müller-Funk
Ingrid Scholz-Strasser
Herman Westerink
In collaboration with Daniela Finzi

This publication has been financially supported by the
Vienna Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs (MA7)
and the Sigmund Freud Foundation.
© 2013 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)
All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication
may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without
the express prior written consent of the publishers.
ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2

D/ 2013 / 1869 / 3
NUR: 777
Cover illustration:
Cover design:
Lay-out: Friedemann BVBA
Table of Contents
Preface 7
Introduction
Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Herman Westerink 9
Part I: The Forces of Monotheism 15
Moses’ Heritage.
Psychoanalysis between Anthropology, History and Enlightenment
Wolfgang Müller-Funk 17
The Jewish Tradition in Sigmund Freud’s Work

Felix de Mendelssohn 31
Islam in Light of Psychoanalysis

Fethi Benslama 49
Part II: Religion and its Critiques 61
Freud’s Conception of Religion within the Context of the Modernist

Critical Discourse
Moshe Zuckermann 63
The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know, Today

Julia Kristeva 75
5
Part III: Femininity and the Figure of the Father 93
Monotheism and the “Repudiation of Femininity”

Joel Whitebook 95
Fort!/Da! Through the Chador: The Paradox of the Woman’s Invisibility

and Visibility
Siamak Movahedi and Gohar Homayounpour 113
Part IV: Morality 133
The Two Sources of Morality in Freud’s Work

Gilles Ribault 135
On Moral Responsibility: A Freudian Perspective

Herman Westerink 143
Pathology and Moral Courage in Freud’s Early Case Histories

Céline Surprenant 155
Part V: Law and Perversion 173
Does Perversion Need the Law?

Sergio Benvenuto 175
Outlawed by Nature? A Critique of Some Current Psychiatric and

Psychoanalytic Theories of Sexual Perversion
Andreas De Block and Lode Lauwaert 185
Bibliography 199
Notes on the Contributors 209
6
Preface
This volume brings together papers presented at two conferences held in 2009
and 2011 by the Sigmund Freud Foundation. Since its establishment in 2003,
the Foundation has been presenting an extensive program of scholarly events
such as these as a continuation of the activities of the Sigmund Freud Society.
The Foundation has expressly devoted itself to promoting interdisciplinary
explorations in the human sciences of the work of Sigmund Freud, of
psychoanalysis and of related topics. The contributions to the two conferences
documented here should be understood in this context.
‘The Force of Monotheism’, held on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of Freud’s death on 23 September 2009, was devoted to the
theme of the last work to be published in his lifetime, Moses and Monotheism.
Written by Freud at an advanced age, this book served as the point of
departure for an exploration of the psychoanalytic critique of religion. In
examining psychoanalytic theories, the symposium integrated perspectives
ranging from cultural studies to theology: the Freudian critique of religion
was confronted with later religio-philosophical concepts and lines of thought.
Selected papers from this autumn conference have been compiled and revised
for this publication.
In 2001 an international conference entitled ‘Does Psychoanalysis Set
Limits? Authority, Norms, Law … and Perversion’ was presented at the Sigmund
Freud Museum in cooperation with the Freud Research Group. Discussion
began around the premise that the relationship between psychopathology and
philosophical anthropology is positive and structural. Psychopathology shows
those mechanisms of the human psyche through which our subjectivity, and
thus our moral characteristics and modes of behaviour, are formed. The theories
of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, as psychopathologists in the moral sense,
stand in the focus of this assumption. From this perspective, the Freudian
superego represents not only internalised public authority and morality, but
also amoral drives which retreat from restriction and normalisation. Moral
awareness always moves between perversion and cultural morality. Before this
background, conference participants took contrasting positions in outlining
and discussing varying approaches to this thematic complex.
With publications like this one, the Sigmund Freud Foundation puts
into practice its stated objective of serving as an interdisciplinary scholarly
7
Inge Scholz-Strasser
platform dedicated to providing a discussion forum for experts and making

its findings available to an interested public. This aim is also pursued through
a regular program of scholarly events, research projects, an international
exchange program for scholars, the operation of Europe’s largest specialised
library for psychoanalysis, and special exhibitions presented at the Sigmund
Freud Museum. The wide-ranging issues addressed by Sigmund Freud
in formulating his theories are taken up within the framework of current
discourse, reformulated and presented anew.
This book, which appears in the ‘Figures of the Unconscious’ series
published by Leuven University Press, was made possible by the support
of the Vienna Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs and the Society
of Friends of the Sigmund Freud Museum, and by the sponsorship of the
Österreichische Volksbank and the Vienna Insurance Group. I would like to
thank the proof-reader Stephen Zepke, the team of editors and the staff of the
Sigmund Freud Foundation, whose efforts were indispensable in completing
this work.
Inge Scholz-Strasser
Head of the board of directors
Translated by Christopher Barber
8
Introduction
Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Herman Westerink
This book works out and connects the results of two ambitious international
conferences held between 2009 and 2011 organised by the Sigmund Freud
Foundation in Vienna: ‘The Force of Monotheism’ and ‘Does Psychoanalysis
Set Limits? Authority, Norms, Law, …and Perversion’. The first refers to the
relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, especially ‘Monotheism’, the
other is focused on the question of whether Freud’s theory entails a normative
framework and therefore at least an implicit value system, something like a
modern ethics. What the two research issues have in common is that both
quite clearly have a cultural frame. Culture in a broader sense – ‘culture’ in
small letters – cannot be analysed properly without reference to religion and
ethics. As one can see in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud preferred a
wide concept of culture, one based on an anthropological understanding.
And it is also quite evident that religion as culture has an ethical dimension.
So one may put the question; can psychoanalysis be interpreted as the
modern heir of religious tradition, as an ethic for the individual in times of
modernity? This question goes hand in hand with late-antique scepticism,
but also has similarities with Montaigne. Discussing psychoanalysis as a form
of post-religious phenomenon and not only as a form of cultural analysis
also implies an understanding of secularisation that differs from the main
stream, suggesting an end of religion in the name of the long-term project of
enlightenment. As in The Future of an Illusion Freud is generally ambivalent
with regard to religion, because it seems to be that human beings need that
kind of illusion.
The first topic of the book concerns the relation between religion
and psychoanalysis, and focuses on the question if, and to what extent,
monotheism in the strong sense (Judaism and Islam) or in a weaker version
(Christianity) fits semantically and structurally together with psychoanalysis.
One has to point out that in contemporary discourses on religion it is not so
clear what ‘monotheism’ really means and if the binary opposition between
‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’, which often goes hand in hand with a colonial
discrimination between European civilised and less civilised non-European
people, works well. In Post-modernism (for example in Odo Marquardt but
to some extent also in Jan Assmann) there is also a tendency to praise the
9
pluralism of polytheism by bashing monotheism as the dictatorship of one

God with capital letters. It would be a challenging project to deconstruct this
kind of binary with the instrument of Derrida’s deconstruction.
Freud’s relation to religion as such is deeply ambivalent. Appropriately,
the different contributions to that theme entail all the different conclusions
in the book. So there is by the end a Catholic, a Jewish, a Protestant and
even an Islamic Freud. As an heir of historical Enlightenment, religion is for
him at first glance an illusion. But it is not opium as in Marx or Heine; or
if it is opium, it is something human beings need. The same is true with
‘monotheism’. On the one hand Judaism, when seen as the pre-runner of
modern rationality has, as its critics argue, a dictatorial tendency, but on the
other hand it makes an enormous amount of human progress possible. There
is only one reason, as there is only one God in monotheistic religions. Both
modern ratio and the God of the monotheistic religions have a strong force.
As two different forms of superego (Über-Ich), they exercise power on human
beings while at the same time bringing them forwards. This is the reason
why Freud to some extent identifies with Moses. They represent a message
that asks too much of their people, who feel discomforted because they are
overburdened; therefore prophets such as Moses and Freud – this is a basic
narrative in Freud – live under permanent thread of being killed, really or at
least symbolically. Under these circumstances, the weak monotheism of the
Catholic Church can be seen as a bearable compromise.
Thus, one could argue, ‘monotheism’ is the historical precondition of the
possibility of enlightenment in small and in capital letters. Psychoanalysis is
seen here as a secondary form of Enlightenment and as a secular “religion”,
as a reflexive and intellectual modern and individualistic way of life. To some
extent, psychoanalysis is no longer only a therapy or a method of cultural
analysis, but has become an integrative part of modern life. Even people in
Western contexts who have never read one single sentence from Freud live in a
world in which psychoanalysis is implicit. This is not only because terms such
as projection (Projektion) or repression (Verdrängung) have become common
sense in, for example, political discourse. It is also quite clear that the old
binary between good and evil has been replaced by psychological terms
(perversion, neurosis, etc.). Last but not least, psychoanalysis has changed
the self-reference of modern human beings with regard to their bodies, and
especially to sexuality. Using an argument from the French-Greek philosopher
Cornelius Castoriadis one might argue that not only the Ten Commandments
or The Communist Manifesto have changed Western Culture in a way similar
10
Introduction
to the steam-engine. Also psychoanalysis has modified our cultural system, as

is the case with the computer.
In contrast to the tradition of German Idealism, Freud has described
culture as the practical aspect of the Über-Ich, as a restrictive regime, which
sets limits especially to the strong ‘sexual’ drive and all its manifestations.
But this is not the only ethical aspect to Freud. Quite clearly, Freud has not
developed an ethics as such, but the esteem for the individual as for the other,
the concentration on recollecting and the appreciation for self-knowledge
imply attitudes that have an ethical dimension and are very powerful in
Western societies, in everyday life as in political discourses.
The book chapters on ‘The Force of Monotheism’ (2009) discuss Freud’s
relationship to religion in a general way, presenting two very different if not
controversial interpretations (Moshe Zuckerman, Julia Kristeva), along with
contributions that concentrate on Freud’s concept of monotheism (Wolfgang
Müller-Funk), and the monotheistic religions of Islam and Judaism (Fethi
Brenslama, Felix de Mendelssohn). The articles of Joel Whitebook and
Siamak Movahedi/Gohar Homapounpour discuss the consequences of Freud’s
monotheism for the understanding and construction of femininity.
What interests Freud in religion basically concerns moral issues. In his
first major study on religion, Totem and Taboo, we already find evidence
for this. In the preface he writes that theories on (primitive) totemism are
largely uncertain, not the least since totemism only left minor traces in later
and contemporary forms of religion and civilisation. The taboo, however,
is the prototype of the categorical imperative, that is to say, of every moral
prohibition and inhibition operative in modern societies. Freud states that he
is basically only interested in totemism as far as it is related to taboos. From
Totem and Taboo, but also his other writings on religion, we can also infer
what Freud is not interested in when he deals with religion, what remains
difficult to understand or what continues to be a blind spot for him. He
is not interested in belief and the process of conceptualising faith – he is
not interested in religious language and symbols. He doesn’t address some
of the religious phenomena that are at the centre of the psychological and
anthropological literature of his lifetime – there are no comments on William
James’ theories on religious experience, no thoughts on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s
influential theory of primitive mystic participation in a divine cosmic order,
no critical remarks on Evelyn Underhill’s ground-breaking study on the
emotions, desires and conations involved in mysticism. When confronted
with such aspects of religion, for example when Romain Rolland challenges
11
Freud to reflect on religious sentiment (‘oceanic feeling’), Freud simply has to

acknowledge that the source of such feeling remained obscure and difficult to
fathom for him. One thing, however, Freud was sure of: religion and religiosity
could not be viewed as innate or inherited.
From his first studies on hysteria and especially also obsessional neurosis
onwards – both pathologies characterised by severe self-reproaches (sense of
guilt) that indicate inner conflicts between certain inacceptable ideas and
what he called the ‘moral character’ of his patients – Freud is puzzled by the
question of the source of both individual and cultural morality. The drives are
repressed, yes, but what is the source of this repression? Could it simply be that
his bourgeois, elite and mostly female patients had internalised cultural moral
codes and norms, for example, through some innate or ‘normal’ feminine
psychic reflex of unconditional obedience to authority? No, he points in a
completely different direction. The problem of the origin of the neurotic
conflict can be solved when we take the nature of perversion into account, says
Freud. Perversions – like neuroses characterised by strong libidinal impulses –
show that morality can be easily overridden when the libido reaches sufficient
strength. It is exactly in this strength of the libido that one must search for the
source of morality, that is, not of morality’s specific contents (for these depend
on cultural/societal conventions), but of its force. And it is the (excessive) force
of morality that marks the difference between normality and pathology. In
other words, as early as the late 1890s Freud is convinced that the individual’s
moral household does not simply reflect the morality of a certain societal
group and cultural context, but that the individual’s inner moral conflicts
originate from an inner dynamics that give morality its strength: the strength
of the psychic ‘dams’ is derived from the libidinal impulse – an idea that is
later pursued in his thoughts on how the superego (and the cultural superego)
uses drive energy to contain the drive. It is clear for Freud that the obsessional
neurotic’s sense of guilt and hyper-morality presents the best material for the
further analysis of man’s inner moral conflicts and its sources, while never
losing sight of the question of the origin of cultural morality. It is from the
perspective of pathological formations that Freud not only wants to study
human nature (see below) but also cultural phenomena that are produced by
human beings. It is here that Freud’s interest in religion comes into play – that
is, religion as far as it can be understood analogous to (mainly) obsessional
neurosis and as a product of human psychic dynamics.
Without going into too much detail, we can indeed fairly say that
Freud’s analyses of (aspects of ) religion strongly draws upon his clinical
knowledge of obsessional neurosis, and that the moral components of this
12
Introduction
specific pathology determine the agenda of most of his writings on religion

and cultural morality: The sense of guilt over the primal parricide as the key
to understanding the origin of religion, moral ideas, legislation and social
structures; the extraordinary character of Moses as the great man who
sets internal limits to his aggressive impulses; the intolerance of ‘others’ in
religions as internally organised by libidinal structures; the excessiveness of
religious commandments such as the commandment to love ones neighbour;
the advancement of intellectuality and morality relative to the emergence of
monotheism in Judaism.
It is from the perspective of pathology that Freud’s studies explain and
understand cultural phenomena such as religion. It is the key problematic of
certain pathologies and pathological formations that set the agenda for the
analyses of the moral aspects of religion (and other cultural phenomena). It
is therefore no surprise that the contributions in this volume that focus on
religion and monotheism, often also address issues directly related to morality
(paternity, authority, law, prohibition) and aspects of man’s moral affectivity
and sensitivity (drive, defence, belief, pleasure, enjoyment, helplessness,
identification). Vice versa, in the book chapters that focus on moral issues
such as the relation between law and perversion, values, responsibility and
courage, the influence of religious thought and tradition often resonates.
The international conference and workshop ‘Does Psychoanalysis set
Limits? Authority, Norms, Law, …and Perversion’ (2011), organised by the
Sigmund Freud Foundation in cooperation with the European Freud Research
Group of the International Association for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,
explored the relation between psychopathology and ‘normal’ moral capacities
and behaviour from the following Freudian premise: the relation between
psychopathology and philosophical anthropology should be thought of as
positive and structural. That is, psychopathology shows in an excessive way
aspects or mechanisms of the human psyche that constitute our subjectivity,
and as such also our moral capacities and behaviour. This point of view is
decisive for Freud’s critique of classical views on human nature. It permits
him to rethink the human condition and man’s cultural creations – taboos
and imperatives, religious worldviews and social institutions. Gilles Ribault,
Herman Westerink, Céline Surprenant, Sergio Benvenuto and Andreas de
Block/Lode Lauwaert focus their attention on Freudian psychoanalysis as a
psychopathology of the moral sense. Since Freud man’s moral sense can be
thought of as characterised by ambivalence and conflict, oscillating between
libidinal impulses and reaction formations, between perversion and cultural
morality, between – what Lacan reformulated as – desire and law. In a post-
13
secular society of which it is said that authority is in crisis, and yet in which
conformity to shared norms and values, and regulation of moral conduct in a
globalised world are strongly put to the fore, a psychoanalytic perspective on
the moral sense and its meaning for moral theory are highly relevant.
14
Part I
The Forces of Monotheism
Moses’ Heritage.
Psychoanalysis between Anthropology,
History and Enlightenment1
Freud’s essay Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion is out on a
limb, not only because it is a late work and not only because there is, as is
often observed, a mirroring effect in the text that confronts us with Freud,
the founder of psychoanalysis, as the double and the counterpart of Moses,
the founder of Jewish monotheism. Prolonging Freud’s story on Moses, Freud
could be seen as the third Moses, the Moses after his second – symbolic –
death.
But Freud’s highly speculative text is also prominent, because it is a
summary of his oeuvre that is a permanent travelling, a movement of seeking.
It confirms Freud’s attempt to give his ideas a more anthropological base
instead of a purely scientific and biological one (as is the case at least since
Totem und Tabu). But at the same time it reformulates ideas of enlightenment,
especially its critique of religion; and last but not least it entails – in contrast
to the great narratives of enlightenment – a sceptical and to some extent tragic
macro-narrative. In its kernel one finds the central message of psychoanalysis,
the plot that the past has an overwhelming power over people’s present life, on
an individual as well as a collective level. Insofar as Freud’s last prominent text
contains a more or less pessimistic philosophy of history, demonstrating that
human beings have always been and become the victims of their past. Under
certain circumstances, it becomes possible to overcome the burden of the past
and psychoanalysis is seen as an exemplary intervention on both levels.
Religion is a field that brings together three keystones of psychoanalysis;
anthropology, history and the philosophy of enlightenment. But the point
is that, as Alfred North Whitehead has shown, religion as a compound
phenomenon embraces at least four elements: 1) feeling and experience, the
existential side, 2) rite, the aspect of performance, 3) myth, the narrative
complex, and 4) dogma, the explicit discourse. I would add; 5) institution and
power. In his occupation with Moses and the historical drama of monotheism,
Freud is especially concerned with element 3 (myth) and element 4 (dogma),
1
is essay is an extended version of ‘Murder and Monotheism. A Detective Story in Close
Th
Reading’, in W. Müller-Funk, The Architecture of Modern Culture. Towards a Narrative Cultu-
ral Theory. New York: de Gruyter, 2012.
but in some parts in element 5 (power relation). Quite clearly, Freud is

interested in the phenomenon of rite, as the essay Zwangshandlungen und
Religionsübungen (1907) shows; in the essay on Moses, the tradition of
circumcision plays a certain role, but it is not central. What Freud does not
discuss in this text is the first element, the mystical element of religion, which
since the early Schleiermacher seems to be the common bond between all
religions and the elementary offspring of religion as such. Freud has discussed
this topic in Die Zukunft einer Illusion and in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
as a certain form of regression to the state of the absolute unconscious, to the
Es. In this sense, religion, the oceanic feeling, is not seen as a phenomenon
eo ipso but an illusionary reaction, a denial to become an adult person. In
a preliminary remark from June 1938, Freud says with a short glance at his
book Totem und Tabu (1912):
“Since that time I have no longer been in any doubt that the only way
to understand religious phenomena is by using the model of neurotic
symptoms of the individual with which we are so familiar to see such
phenomena as recurrences of long forgotten, meaningful events in the
prehistory of the human family; I am convinced that in fact they owe
their compulsive nature to that source, so that it is by virtue of their
content of historical truth that they effect human beings.”2
The narrative structures of the individual human being and those of human
communities are principally identical. But in the late essay on Moses it is quite
clear that Freud also reflects on a completely different aspect, namely on the
contribution of monotheism to establishing a stable symbolic order of the
father, or to speak in a Freudian terminology, of the Über-Ich. One might say
that religion in a Freudian sense is in the tension between two poles, the Es
and the Über-Ich, the imaginary and the symbolic order of the father. Freud’s
text on Moses and monotheism is not religious itself. Moreover, it does not
belong to the discourse on religion in an internal sense. It is a story about a
tricky hidden murder that implies a difficult burden and leaves a problematic
heritage for modern culture.
2
S . Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939). Translated by K. Jones. New York: Vintage Books,
1955, p. 221. “Ich habe seit damals nicht mehr bezweifelt, daß die religiösen Phänomene nur
nach dem Muster der uns vertrauten neurotischen Symptome des Individuums zu verstehen
sind, als Wiederkehren von längst vergessenen, bedeutsamen Vorgängen in der Urgeschichte
der menschlichen Familie, daß sie ihren zwanghaften Charakter eben diesem Ursprung ver-
danken und also kraft ihres Gehalts an historischer Wahrheit auf die Menschen wirken.”
S. Freud, Der Moses des Michelangelo (1914). Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1993, p. 68.
18
Moses’ Heritage
Freud’s essay is also interesting with regard to narrative analysis. Freud is

a storyteller but also a critical analyst at the same time, who deconstructs –
to make use of a term from Jacques Derrida – other texts and narratives. As
Carlo Ginzburg and later Jacques Rancière have shown, Freud has developed
a certain type of textual analysis that is similar to the method of a detective,
who, by following traces, tries to find out what really happened und who was
the murderer.3 In contrast to the mainstream psychology of his but also of our
time, many of his articles make use of literature and the arts to develop and
work out his own theory.
Already his first occupation with Moses (1914) is mediated by a famous
piece of art, Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. Also here, he makes use of his
detective method to find out that Michelangelo represents Moses just before
springing up and smashing the slabs of the Ten Commandments, but after he
has overcome his violent temper and controlled his rage. In contrast to other
interpretations, Freud is convinced that it was Michelangelo who revised the
original biblical narrative, in which Moses is really outraged and acts angrily.
Michelangelo is seen as an artist who has created a new Moses, one who may
coincide with Freud’s idea of rationalisation and sublimation. There can be no
doubt that Michelangelo’s Moses is seen as a positive figure.
Modern literature in particular has dealt with what Rancière calls the
aesthetic unconscious. Freud’s methodology works in that way, that he
reads literary documents (or sculpture as is the case in his early analysis of
Michelangelo’s Moses) in the position of a secondary author, who, in contrast
to the primary writer or artists, is able to link the aesthetic surface with the
psychoanalytical unconscious. So, two elements are central, first that Freud is
operating on a meta-level, and second that his procedure is based on a close
re-reading of a given text, which anticipates to some extent deconstructive
hermeneutic practices. It is
“(...) a method such as ours – taking from material what strikes us as

useful, rejecting what does not suite us, and assembling the elements in
accordance with their psychological plausibility.”4
3
S ee; R. Ginsburg and I. Pardes (eds), New Perspectives on Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”. Tü-
bingen: Niemeyer, 2006 and J. Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious. Translated by D. Keates.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
4
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 268; “(…) ein Verfahren, wie das unsrige, vom überliefer-
ten Stoff anzunehmen, was uns brauchbar scheint, zu verwerfen, was uns nicht taugt, und die
einzelnen Stücke nach der pychologischen Wahrscheinlichkeit zusammenzusetzen.” S. Freud,
Der Moses des Michelangelo, p. 107.
19
There is an interesting ambivalence with regard to the texts that undergo

Freud’s specific close reading. On the one hand, it seems, that only literature
and the arts are capable of representing the unconscious, the hidden, the
repressed, but on the other hand there is a deep distrust of the authors of
the texts, and especially in their own interpretations. They resemble those
people in a criminal discourse who try to deny what ‘really’ happened. Freud’s
textual analysis follows the logical structure of a cross-examination in a trial,
in which circumstantial evidence is decisive. There is, however, a difference. In
contrast to the suspect in legal proceedings, the suspected author of a certain
text or an art-work does not deny deliberately. He or she may work out the
unconscious in a narrative or other form, but is not able to read his or her
own text in a proper way. From this perspective, he needs the psychoanalyst
as the adequate reader and secondary author, as a symbolic assistance. Thus,
psychoanalysis needs myth, literature and the arts and all these symbolic forms
need psychoanalysis for its detective method. Quite clearly, Freud is an heir of
enlightenment, the representative of a second and secondary enlightenment.
The figure of the private investigator is a good metaphor for this theoretical
energy. But it refers also to the experiences of modern literature since
Romanticism, which constructs in a very paradoxical way phenomena that
can be called ‘unconscious’ and ‘uncanny’. In contrast to Rancière, I would
argue that Freud’s detective method is not restricted to modern literature
(Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’, Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’) or Renaissance art (da Vinci,
Michelangelo), but is also at work in the field of myth and mythology.
For the detective reading, the category of Ent-Stellung is central. As the
Unheimliche, the German word Entstellung has potentially a paradoxical dou-
ble meaning: disfiguration, displacement, distortion, unconscious falsification
but also restitution of the original. It is, as Freud writes in the essay, a form of
dislocation:
“The corruption of a text is not unlike a murder. The problem lies not
in doing the deed but in removing the traces of it. It would be good to
give the Entstellung the double meaning to which it is entitled, although
nowadays it makes no use of the alternative. The word should mean not
only ‘to alter the appearance’ but also ‘to move to a different place, to
shift elsewhere’, It follows that in many cases of textual corruption we
can expect to find that what has been suppressed and what has been
20
Moses’ Heritage
denied is still there, hidden somewhere, albeit altered in appearance

and wrenched out of context.”5
The distrust of psychoanalysis has to do with its discontent in fantasy. It is

fantasy that makes things come to light, but it is the same fantasy that distorts
them. Therefore fantasy and Entstellung refer to each other. So the goal of the
reader, who is at the same time a writer, is to find the true story behind the
wrong one. But the wrong one is not wrong in a simple way, but entails hidden
signs, which refer to the ‘true’ story. And when Freud compares himself with
an investigator in a detective story, then this may be understood as a metaphor.
But, in contrast, the psychoanalytic narrative can be characterised by the fact
that there is always a murder in the hidden true story, which is disfigured
by the literary text or the myth. What Freud’s reading program creates is a
new narrative, a translation from the unconscious to the conscious. In the
centre, there is a real or symbolic murder, trauma and shame. In contrast to
the narratives of the first enlightenment with its vector into the future, in
psychoanalysis, there is a tragic narrative that always refers all contemporary
occurrences to the past. All relevant events have taken place in the past and we
are in the uncomfortable position of having to deal with them. The present
is seen as the shadow of the past. The reader of the psychoanalytic narrative
behind the literary narrative is to some extent the heir of the collective murder
and of the shame and guilt that are included in those events. There is no future
in this narrative besides the idea of levelling the burden of the individual and
collective history and its traumata.
Freud’s examination, which by the way has forgotten the first occupation
of Moses by analysing Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, starts with the idea
that the protagonist in the biblical story has the wrong name. That means that
his name is not Hebraic, but Egyptian. There must be a symbolic problem
that meant this Egyptian element was deleted.
In a next step, which anticipates structuralism, the story about Moses is
interpreted as part of a general heroic, mythical narrative-matrix. His former
5
S . Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 202. “Es ist bei der Entstellung eines Textes ähnlich wie
bei einem Mord. Die Schwierigkeit liegt nicht in der Ausführung der Tat, sondern in der
Beseitigung ihrer Spuren. Man möchte dem Worte ‘Entstellung’ den Doppelsinn verleihen,
auf den es Anspruch hat, obwohl es heute keinen Gebrauch davon macht. Es sollte nicht
nur bedeuten: in seiner Erscheinung verändern, sondern auch: an eine andere Stelle brin-
gen, anderswohin verschieben. Somit dürfen wir in vielen Fällen von Textentstellung darauf
rechnen, das Unterdrückte und Verleugnete doch irgendwo versteckt zu finden, wenn auch
abgeändert und aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen (…).” S. Freud, Der Moses des Michelan-
gelo, p. 55ff.
21
pupil Otto Rank, in those times still under the influence of the master, worked
this matrix out in his book Der Mythos von der Geburt des Helden (The Myth of
the Birth of the Hero, 1909).6
Starting with Sargon of Agade, Rank analyses a group of heroes that have
more or less the same birth story, which is at the same time a family-narrative.
They should be murdered after being born, but they survive in a displaced
situation (mostly with a poor family), and then come from the bottom up to
gain the status of a hero. Rank mentions as examples Karna, Paris, Heracles,
Gilgamesh, and Oedipus. Quite clearly, Moses is this kind of hero. A hero is,
as Freud comments on Rank’s early book, someone who has revolted against
his father successfully and triumphantly overcomes him at the end.
The two families, the royal one, from which the hero originally comes,
and the subaltern one, in which he grows up, is interpreted as the fantastic
narrative version of the drama of (male) childhood. In the mythical narration,
there are two families, a difference between the lower and the upper one. In
the psychoanalytical re-narration, the two families are identical.
But especially with regard to this narrative element, there is – this is the
next hypothesis of the psychoanalytical investigator – a deviation from the
norm of the narrative-matrix of the hero’s birth. Usually the ‘heroic’ narrative
(in Rank’s sense) follows the scheme that the hero is displaced at the beginning
of his earthly life and is given to a poor family. But in the case of Moses, an
Egyptian princess finds the infant. Thus, he starts his career as a royal son and
ends as the leader of a new people. So for the investigating reader it becomes
quite clear that Moses was an Egyptian aristocrat who has been disfigured
as a Jew. And by disfiguring the disfigured, Freud starts with the first part of
his own narrative. In contrast to the hero, who, step by step, places himself
above his low beginnings during his life, Freud’s Moses starts his heroic life
by descending from a height and lowering himself to the level of the children
of Israel.
Starting with the wrong name of the hero, the story of monotheism has to
be told in a new narration, as a transfer from Egypt to Israel. Following the
Egyptology of his time, Freud identifies this early monotheism with the religion
of Ikhnaton. But this attempt to establish the beginnings of monotheism fails;
in this deconstructive reading, Moses is seen as one of the nobleman from
the monotheistic camp who flees after the restitution of the old Egyptian
polytheism. In this situation, he chooses a new people for the monotheistic
religion of Aton, the people of Israel, which has a regional volcanic God
6
. Rank, Der Mythos von der Geburt des Helden. Versuch einer Mythendeutung (1909). Wien:
O
Turia & Kant, 2000.
22
Moses’ Heritage
Jahweh. But as in every free storytelling, Freud’s narrating process becomes

self-dynamic. This is not the end of the new narrative on Moses. By also
dislocating scientific texts, Freud, a fascinating narrator, suggests that Moses
has been murdered by the Jews, and that centuries later, the Jewish people
have reinstalled Moses’ monotheism in an act of painful shame.
I do not intervene in the discourse on that subject (it would also be
interesting to refer for example to Jan Assmann’s interpretation7) and I do
not intent to discuss the plausibility of Freud’s narrative construction, his
detective story, which finds the probable version behind all the disfigurations
and mythical manipulation of the narrative. I am only interested in Freud’s
ambivalent perspective on monotheism. It is quite evident that Freud is never
interested in religion, monotheism or polytheism, as such. There are three
aspects in his essay that come from cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis
and political theology. One could argue that psychoanalysis is much more
than a therapy but a cardinal discipline, which connects cultural theory
with political theology (this is what I called the fifth aspect of the religious
‘complex’).
Freud describes the religion of king Amenhotep as an episode in the long
history of Old Egypt, but emphasises the fact that this monotheism was strict
and severe. It is a system that is constructed by orders and control. The king
gave himself the name Ikhnaton, as the representative of the new God and his
ideal (maat = justice). Freud also mentions another political function of this
kind of monotheism; expanding Egyptian imperialism was not symbolically
formatted in and legitimated by universalism and monotheism. Monotheism
is unbearable, and this was the reason why the Egyptians smashed the new
religion of Aton and the people of Israel killed Moses:
“Moses’ Jewish people were no more capable of tolerating so cerebral

a religion, of finding in what it had to offer any satisfaction of their
needs, than the eighteenth-dynasty Egyptians had been. The same
thing happened in both instances. Those who were being treated
like children and placed under constraint rebelled and threw off the
burden of the religion that had been forced on them. But whereas the
docile Egyptians waited until fate had removed the divine figure of the
pharaoh, the wild Semites took fate into their own hands and got rid
of the tyrant themselves.”8
7
S ee; J. Assman: Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge/
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997.
8
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 205. “Das Judenvolk des Moses war ebensowenig im-
stande, eine so hoch vergeistigte Religion zu ertragen, in ihren Darbietungen eine Befrie-
23
As with many other stories in the biblical narrative, the story about the
golden calf, which is at the centre of Schönberg’s opera, is wrong and true at
once, a de-figuring narrative, which hides the true killing story but includes
a trace, an index to the true story. It was not Moses who was angry, but his
new people, because he has created a form of religion that is too much for
them. So, it is not only the despotic exclusiveness but also the demanding
aspect that lead to the abolition of monotheism in history. In Hayden White’s
terminology, a tragic plot comes into play, and monotheism is interpreted as
an historical effort to bring mankind forwards by challenging its capability
of abstract thinking, sublimation and overcoming the terror of the regional
context (tribalism). Freud mentions the refusal of magic and mysticism, the
stimulation of progress in the mind, the requests for sublimation, the respect
for the intellectual and the focus on ethics. Monotheism is regarded by Freud,
the representative of a second form of enlightenment, as an impressive project
in the long run, and the restitution of the Great Father, which goes hand in
hand with monotheism, is seen as a huge step forward in human history.
But to some extent this progress is unbearable, it entails too many
reductions and unrealisable demands with regard to the structure of our drives
and desires. So the murder of Moses’ heirs might also be possible in the future.
The eternal return of the same, a cyclic moment is written into the narrative
matrix of psychoanalysis.
Why is Freud’s method of detective re-reading so successful, at least from
the perspective of the de-figuring active reader? Because there are some basic
narratives in psychoanalysis, to which all narratives in texts, sculptures (or
films) can be referred to. The Freudian secondary author, the de-figuring
reader has got a clear understanding of the motive behind the murder and
a lot of experiences with the logic of unconscious denial, which produces
falsifications that he is nevertheless able to correct.
The murder of Moses by a people, which was in Freud’s words accustomed
to a regional and unimportant volcanic God, is not the end of Freud’s own
story. There still remains a latent reminder of this crime and this collective
memory leads, centuries later, in the reconstruction of Jewish monotheism.
The difference in time and also between the protagonists has been deleted in
digung ihrer Bedürfnisse zu finden, wie die Ägypter der 18. Dynastie. In beiden Fällen ge-
schah dasselbe, die Bevormundeten und Verkürzten erhoben sich und warfen die Last der
ihnen auferlegten Religion ab. Aber während die zaghaften Ägypter damit warteten, bis das
Schicksal die geheiligte Person des Pharao beseitigt hatten, nahmen die wilden Semiten das
Schicksal in ihre Hand und räumten den Tyrannen aus dem Wege.” S. Freud, Der Moses des
Michelangelo, p. 59.
24
Moses’ Heritage
the biblical narrative along with the feeling of guilt. In this disfiguration, the
murder has disappeared. But this is only true on the rational level. It is written
into the ‘unconscious’ collective memory.
Thus, the events that are narrated in the biblical text version are based
on another narrative, which follows the logic of one central psychoanalytic
narrative; the traumatic narrative. It starts with a collective crime, which leads
to a trauma that remains unconscious (here the Jewish people is traumatised
because it is the culprit). The next and last narrative element is the urge for
repetition, which has here a positive aspect, the re-introduction of monotheism
in an act of shame.
The malicious and racist statement that psychoanalysis is a Jewish invention
becomes here a positive element, and insofar as monotheism is interpreted
as a remarkable effort and a positive tradition, psychoanalysis is part of it.
Psychoanalysis can also be seen as a return of the repressed. If there is any
positive reference to Judaism, then it is the secular confession of monotheism
that is historically centred in Judaism.
Psychoanalysis is based on stable and limited narrative matrices, which
produces endless variations and representations. To illustrate this, I would like
to present the scheme once again in a more abstract version – it is a more or
less linear narrative with a strong determinist element and a weak teleology
that entails a moment of redemption, the redemption from the compulsion
of repetition.
Freud depicts the following narrative scheme; 1) Early trauma – defence –
latency – outbreak of neurotic disorder – partial recurrence of what has been
repressed.9 But there is also another great narrative matrix in Freud’s theory,
the murder narrative of Totem und Tabu (1912), to which he comes back in
the last central essay of his work. It is the story of the great father of the horde,
who is the owner of all its female members and who is killed by his sons.
As Freud points out, he hesitates in pronouncing that humans have always
known “(...) that they once had a first father and that they struck him dead”.10
Explicitly, the author of Moses and Monotheism is in favour of regarding
monotheism as the return of the murdered father. So he establishes a direct
connection between the two narratives; Moses was the man who re-installed
the symbolic order of the father and circumcision is the visible trace of
that act. In this way, the most progressive and the most archaic elements
fit together in the figure of the father. Reason and progress, intellectuality
and abstraction appear in the dark light of a dictatorial regime. “Moses met
9
S . Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 243.
10
Ibid., p. 263.
25
the fate that awaits enlightened despots’11 The question is, to what extent
despotism and enlightenment fit together. Quite evidently, all forms of
enlightenment go hand in hand with a certain attitude of ruling power,
although it has a ‘democratic’ origin. This is true for the first enlightenment,
Jewish monotheism, and for the second historical enlightenment and for the
third enlightenment of psychoanalysis.
Christianity is seen in an interesting way first as the return of the Ammon
priests, who smashed the religion of Aton, the first monotheism in Freud’s
view. But there is also a remark in Freud that interprets Jesus as the second (or
third) Moses, but a Moses, who – in contrast to the first one – has dislocated
and substituted God the father. Later, it is seen as progress, because of the
universalistic impulse and, moreover, because it is a milder regime that has
reduced the enormous price of monotheism. But this is a double-edged
compliment. For Freud, Catholicism in particular as a synthesis between
monotheism and polytheism is far away from being a progressive power. It
is the relentless enemy of freethinking, of progress and of the realisation of
truth. This is the very reason why Christians and Jews became the object of
hatred in what Freud calls “Germany’s National Socialist revolution”.12
At least in his last years, Freud is not in favour of monotheism for religious
reasons, he, the heir of historical enlightenment, has not changed his suspicion
that religion is a childish and stupid illusion. He is not critical of it because
of its dictatorial gesture – there is only one God – which has been criticised
by liberal-conservative post-modern philosophers such as Odo Marquardt.13
There is a paradox; undoubtedly psychoanalysis has proved to be a subversive
project against the symbolic command of the fathers (including the Jewish
ones), but on the other hand its founder remains always anxious about the
future of the symbolic order and its representative of the real and metaphorical
father, who represents values that are not for discussion as is the case with the
Ten Commandments. What is in the background is a tragic history of an
imaginary subject called reason, which acts as a dictator of the people.
But there is something special in this text, namely that Freud relates his
deconstruction of the story of Moses to the contemporary political context.
He also reflects on the political function of his own thinking and his school
with regard to the dramatic political situation in 1938.
There are two interesting preliminary remarks in the third part of the essay,
which Freud published later, one remark is from March, the other from June
11
Ibid., p. 205.
12
Ibid., p. 254.
13
O. Marquardt, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981.
26
Moses’ Heritage
1938. Both short texts are remarkable, because they make clear that Freud
was a political thinker sui generis. Freud is reflecting on whether he is disloyal
to his people by publishing a text that denies its hero was a stranger, accuses
him of being its murderer, and claims that Christianity implies to some
extent historical progress. But one cannot accuse Freud of being a hidden
Jewish anti-Semite. He is critical of the Jewish religion as he is critical of all
forms of religion, he is also critical of them because he is sceptical of human
beings, individuals and collectives, as such. He meditates on the phantasm
of the chosen people, which has been adapted by the deadly enemy of the
Jewish people, the German Nazis. He is astonished about the fact that the
conservatives, including the Catholics, have seemed to become, as he says, the
guardians of progress (a statement he has to revise after the Anschluß).
The preliminary remarks operate within the liberal and leftist binary
opposition barbarity-progress, but it is not quite clear to what extent this
binary opposition fits together with another one, the opposition between
monotheism and polytheism. Freud does not make this connection to his
essay explicit, but it is quite clear that monotheism represents the progressive
and civil aspect. But what do the new dictatorships in Russia, Italy and
Germany (and now also in annexed Austria) represent? Not a traditional pre-
modern system, especially not in Italy and Soviet Russia. Freud is politically
and intellectually irritated by Stalin and Mussolini:
“We are living in particularly remarkable times. We find to our surprise

that progress has forged an alliance with barbarism. Soviet Russia has
embarked on an attempt to raise some hundred million oppressed
people to superior forms of existence. In a bold move they have been
deprived of the ‘opiate’ of religion and in a wise one given a sensible
measure of sexual freedom, but in the process they have been subjected
to the cruellest coercion and robbed of any chance of freedom of
thought. With similar violence the Italians are being trained up to
orderliness and a sense of duty. It comes as something of a relief from
an oppressive anxiety to see that in the case of the German people
the relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism is able to proceed even
without recourse to any forward-looking idea.”14
14
S . Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 217. “Wir leben in einer besonders merkwürdigen Zeit.
Wir finden mit Erstaunen, dass der Fortschritt ein Bündnis mit der Barbarei geschlossen
hat. In Sowjetrussland hat man es unternommen, etwa 100 Millionen in der Unterdrüc-
kung festgehaltener Menschen zu besseren Lebensformen zu erheben. Man war verwegen,
ihnen das ‘Rauschgift’ der Religion zu entziehen, und so weise, ihnen ein verständiges Maß
von sexueller Freiheit zu geben, aber dabei unterwarf man sie dem grausamsten Zwang und
27
I think that Freud is wrong with regard to German National Socialism,

which also fitted ‘progressive’ and archaic elements together. But what is more
relevant, is the fact that Freud does not judges Soviet Russia or Italy with
reference to their democratic standard (which does not exist), but inasmuch
as they contribute to the secondary enlightenment by which psychoanalysis
can be understood.
Here we have to end our close reading, but it is necessary to formulate
the suspicion that those binary oppositions such as barbarity and progress,
polytheism and monotheism are no longer sufficient instruments for cultural
and historical analysis. For various reasons, we have to give up theses simple
alternatives. The still actual aspect in Horkheimer/Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment can be expressed in the plot, that barbarity and progress
can change their places and mingle. And the opposition between rational
monotheism and non-rational polytheism is also to some extent crucial.
Polytheism can be understood as a hetero-stereotype of so called monotheism.
And it is not sure – I am not an expert in this field – that polytheism is
such a stable phenomenon. As the catholic example demonstrates, there are
transitions, third spaces and syncretisms. There are angels in monotheistic
religions and there is a clear hierarchy of Gods in ancient Egypt and Greece (so
that one God is on the top), and the divinities in the religion of the Vedanta
can be seen as allegories representing different aspects of the divine.
Behind the binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism,
there lurks another opposition, the conflict between myth and logos. It
was already Schelling, who in his philosophy of mythology identified the
triumph of Judaism and later Christianity with the decline of the myth.
Monotheism, as the triumph of an abstract reason that no longer needs
either visual images nor narratives, is also understood as a principle break
in the cultural history of mankind. In contrast, some, but not all critics of
‘logocentrism’ tend to rehabilitate polytheism as a polyphonic symbolic space,
which enables pluralism and political liberty (pars pro toto I mentioned the
German philosopher Odo Marquard). But this praise for diversity misses the
fact that ‘polytheism’ does not represent different beliefs and divinities on the
same political, social and economic level, but expresses, as Klaus Heinrich has
raubte ihnen jedwede Möglichkeit der Denkfreiheit. Mit ähnlicher Gewalttätigkeit wird das
italienische Volk zu Ordnung und Pflichtgefühl erzogen. Man empfindet es als Erleichte-
rung von der bedrückenden Sorge, wenn man im Fall des deutschen Volkes sieht, dass der
Rückfall in nahezu vorgeschichtliche Barbarei auch ohne Anlehnung an irgendeine fort-
schrittliche Idee vor sich gehen kann.”
28
Moses’ Heritage
shown, social and cultural hierarchy.15 Not all myths, narratives and divinities
are equal, some are more equal.
With regard to the monotheism of the psychoanalytic movement, I would
like to resist the temptation to refer to psychoanalysis as a secular monotheistic
religion, Freud to Moses, the authoritarian structures of the psychoanalytical
institution with monotheistic despotism, which Freud himself mentions. But
it is quite evident, that the monotheism of Freud needs an element that is
constitutive for any so called polytheism: narratives, narrating, and narration.
When Freud interprets Michelangelo’s Moses, the man who gave the
people of Israel God’s Ten Commandments, as a man who is able to calm
down his rage, he could have had the idea of a monotheism without rage, a
monotheism of or with calmness, an auto-image of psychoanalysis. Following
Hayden White’s rhetorical narratology, one could, however, argue that the
basic narrative of psychoanalysis in Freud has a tragic plot; monotheism goes
hand in hand with the murder of its key figures – Moses, Jesus and still as
a thread in 1938 the Jewish people – a mechanistic and deep structure of
argumentation. Metonymy is here the key rhetorical figure, but, in contrast
to White’s terminology, the radical ideology that usually goes hand in hand
with that type of narrative is broken in a strange way, as is the case with Moses’
rage in Michelangelo.
15
. Heinrich, Dahlemer Vorlesungen: anthromorpé. Zum Problem des Anthropopmorphismus in
K
der Religionsphilosophie. Frankfurt/Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1986.
29
Felix de Mendelssohn
On the 6th of January 1935 Freud wrote to his student Lou Andreas-Salomé
in Göttingen:
“My dear Lou, I can add to what you have learned about my latest
work. It started out from the question: what was it that shaped the
specific character of the Jew? I came to the conclusion that the Jew was
a creation of a man, Moses. Who was this Moses and what were his
achievements? The answer is given in a kind of historical novel. Moses
was not a Jew …..”1
Freud then summarises his hypotheses: Moses was a high-ranking Egyptian

civil servant and a believer in the first monotheistic religion - that of Aton,
which was made the official religion by Pharaoh Echnaton around 1350 BC.
When the new religion collapsed after the Pharaoh’s death Moses chose the
Semitic people of the Jews – who in this sense now became the ‘chosen people’
– to carry the religion out into exile and decreed to them the Egyptian ritual
of circumcision. Moses was murdered in a subsequent Jewish rebellion and
the memory of the deed was repressed. These Jews then united with other
Semitic tribes whose volcano-God Jahweh they merged with their own
original monotheistic Moses-God to make a new tribal deity. But the strict
monotheism remained submerged, in latency so to speak. As Freud describes
it later on in the same letter:
“The older God was always standing behind him, in the course of
six to eight centuries Jahweh became changed into the image of the
Moses-God. The old tradition of the religion of Moses finally asserted
itself. This process is exemplary in the formation of religions and was
but the repetition of an earlier one. Religions owe their compulsive
power to the Return of the Repressed, they are reminiscences of age-old,
vanished but highly potent processes in human history. I already stated
it in Totem and Taboo and now I can compress it into a formula. What
1
S. Freud and L. Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel. Edited by E. Pfeiffer. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer,
1966. Translated by the author.
makes religions powerful is not their real, but their historical truth.
And you realize, Lou, that this formula, which has utterly fascinated
me, cannot be spoken of today in Austria without inciting the ruling
Catholic majority to decree a state prohibition of psychoanalysis. And
it is only this Catholicism that protects us against the Nazis. Apart from
this, the historical foundations of the Moses-story are not solid enough
to serve as a pedestal for my incalculable insight. So I stay silent. It is
enough for me that I myself can believe in this solution of the problem.
It has pursued me throughout my whole life. Begging your pardon and
with heartfelt greetings, from your Freud.”2 [Emphasis in the original
- FdM]
Her reply is dated Göttingen, after mid-May 1935:
“Dear Professor Freud…. That you really answer me in person, relate this
to me in such a long handwritten letter – how can I thank you enough?
But what particularly fascinated me in your views was the special
character of the ‘Return of the Repressed’, namely the circumstance in
which quite sublime and precious ideas can return despite having been
for so long mixed up with all kinds of other things. Until now we had
thought of the ‘Return of the Repressed’ usually in regard to neurotic
processes: all kinds of unjustly repressed content could oppress one in
an uncanny way with rigid archaic patterns, since one could sense the
presence of something age-old and well-known but which one anxiously
defended against. But now you bring examples for the survival of what
once had been richest and victorious in life, throughout everything
that engulfed or antithetically enclosed it, remaining as our ‘truest’
possession. And just as in the Moses-religion these positive sides of
the process are at work, so also in other religions, and the Repressed
will not always seem to be involved with considerations of pathology.
What might have been rumbling in the earliest times of humanity and
what we later understood as being so clearly obsolete and wrong, all
that contains on the other hand elements of psychic forces which later
retreat behind the intellectual mode, that of reducing the affects.”3
As if the author were suddenly aware that in this last tortuous sentence there
might be something that could displease her mentor, she continues at once:
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
32
“But I’m babbling on without thinking – please excuse me!”

It is an odd fact that both correspondents close their epistles with a wish
for the other’s pardon, as if they were aware that their views might not be
entirely in agreement. In Andreas-Salomé’s opaque last sentence it seems to
me that she interprets this motif of the ‘return of the repressed’ within the
major monotheisms with a different weight than Freud. For Freud it is first
and foremost the Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit, the intellectual progress, which
returns from its repression and reclaims its throne. His admiring correspondent
at first greets this idea effusively, but by the end she is muttering darkly about
‘elements of psychic forces’ that only later retreat behind the intellectual mode
where the power of their emotion is reduced, as if she still clung to the notions
of pathology. In this dialectic between the primacy of the Intellect against
that of the archaic affects and impulses we can find a mirror of all the later
controversies surrounding Freud’s own Jewishness, as well as what is Jewish
about his work, in his creation of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s Jewishness
Freud’s personal relationship to his own Jewishness has been much written
and much quarrelled about. Here we wish only to mention the more salient
aspects; the biographical aspect on its own does not provide a particular basis
for the complex theme of our title. It is hardly surprising that in many of
the altercations over what was Jewish about Freud, the discovery falls back
on the head of its discoverer. Freud is laid out on the couch and his various
comments on his feelings about being Jewish are checked off on the basis of
their unconscious omissions and distortions. For some authors this unmasks
an inherent and unresolved conflict, for others there is a central theme of the
Enlightenment, which helped Freud emerge from his Jewish labyrinth. He
was often glad to quote the writer Ludwig Börne:
“It is like a miracle! I have experienced it a thousand times and it always

seems new to me. Some accuse me of being Jewish, some pardon me
for it; a third even praises me for it; but all of them think of it. They
seem as if they were trapped in this magic Jewish circle, nobody can get
out of it.”4
4
. Börne, ‘Brief an Jeannette Wohl’, Juden und Judentum in deutschen Briefen aus drei Jahr-
L
hunderten. Edited by F. Kobler. Vienna: Jüdischer Verlag Athenäum, 1935. Translated by the
author.
33
But first to the biographical facts. Freud’s parents were merchants with no
special education and from a pious background, in his father Jakob’s case a
Hasidic one, his mother Amalie (Malka), née Nathanson, from an orthodox
family. After they moved to Vienna when Sigmund was four years old, their
perhaps rather lax observance lapsed still further. With a few exceptions the
Jewish ritual was no longer followed although the father, who had the traits of
a liberal autodidact, knew Hebrew, read the Torah and Talmud and personally
educated his son up to his entry into the Gymnasium.
Here Freud found in his teacher of religion, Samuel Hammerschlag, an
enlightened humanist who remained a paternal figure for him for the rest of
his life. The Hammerschlags lived in the same house as the family of Josef
Breuer, Freud’s older colleague with whom he wrote the Studies in Hysteria.
Breuer’s father had been Hammerschlag’s predecessor as the religious teacher
in the Jewish civic community. As Josef Shaked notes:
“It is interesting in this connection that these enlightened, open-minded

Jews remained among themselves in their private lives, an indubitable
sign that assimilation in cosmopolitan Vienna had got stuck half-way.”5
It must have become clear to Freud, at least from his time at the university,
that the earlier liberal reforms which should have eased the assimilation of
the Jewish bourgeoisie, had become paralysed under the pressure of growing
Christian anti-Semitism. From now on he increasingly emphasised his
sense of Jewish identity, although he attached neither religious nor political
significance to it. In 1897, the year that the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger was
finally acclaimed as Mayor of Vienna, Freud joined the Jewish lodge of B’nai
Brith, which had dedicated itself to a Jewish humanism in the spirit of the
Enlightenment, as a response to the growing reactionary political and social
tendencies of the time.
Thirty years later Freud gave an interview in which he was quoted as
follows:
“I speak the German language and live in a Germanic culture. In my

intellectual sphere I felt myself to be German [! - FdM] until I was able
to observe the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. Since
then I prefer to consider myself a Jew.”6
5
J. Shaked, Freuds Judentum. Unpublished manuscript, 2006. Translated by the author.
6
I. Sadger, Sigmund Freud, Persönliche Erinnerungen. Edited by A. Huppke and M. Schröter.
Tübingen: Brandes & Apsel, 2006, p. 70. Translated by the author.
34
He made a virtue out of necessity with this increasing discrimination by

referring to the critical faculties of the social outsider, but he also made a
positive commitment to the Jewish tradition of intellectual study and high
moral imperatives. Even though he considered the religious rituals to be of no
importance in his private life or in his writings and deconstructed religion as
a whole into infantile self-deception and wish fulfilment, he sent his family
greeting cards from America for the Jewish High Holidays. He was a Jew and
struggled to attain a critical distance to his Jewishness throughout his whole
life.
But there are no traces of Jewish self-hatred to be found in him. At the
end of his life he represented Judaism as the creation of a non-Jew, who was
even later murdered by the Jews, and saw Christianity in some respects as an
improvement over the Jewish religion. But all this served him as illustrative
material for his central psychological thesis, that religion arises out of the
oedipal murder of the father, which he had already developed in Totem and
Taboo.
When in 1902 the ‘Wednesday-Society’ was formed, as an antecedent of the

subsequent Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, all seventeen members were
Jews. Josef Shaked writes on this fact:
“Some of them – like Fritz Wittels in his pamphlet ‘The Baptised Jew’
and Otto Rank in his essay ‘The Essence of Judaism’ – understood
psychoanalysis as a kind of secularized Judaism, whose mission was
to be the emancipation from sexual repression and the general cure of
human neurosis.”7
Others however, accused Freud of ambivalence toward his own Jewishness: for
instance in his distancing himself from Zionism and in his unfair tendency
to give extra privileges to non-Jewish followers such as Jung and Binswanger
out of purely tactical reasons. Such resentment is most clearly voiced in Isidor
Sadger’s Personal Recollections – at that time he could not even have known of
the Moses-book when he wrote:
“It is not correct that Freud, as he has claimed, always felt himself to
be a Jew. He would have much rather been a German but was ordered
back, much against his will, into the Jewishness he did not respect.
He couldn’t shed it despite all his efforts to be a mere German. So he
7
J. Shaked, Freuds Judentum. Translated by the author.
35
remained a Jew, but not because of loyalty to his people of origin. He

simply had no alternative, since the Christians ignored both him and
his teachings. It was specifically in regard to his Jewishness that Freud’s
character showed its flaws the most.”8
In the following passage Sadger makes comparisons with other positive

commitments to Jewishness, giving as examples Albert Einstein and Josef
Popper-Lynkaeus, and ends by saying:
“But for Freud, the third genius, it was enough just to be ‘also a Jew’,
meaning that he was not baptized. But he was never, even up to the end,
an upright Jew conscious of his national identity! I must sadly confess:
the human being in Freud was never so great as the scientific genius!”9
Poor Sadger was later murdered, at the age of 75, in Theresienstadt.

When a Jew who is neither piously religious nor nationalistic speaks of his
Jewishness it is always the context and the interlocutors, then as now, who
are important. One feels a different sense of belonging depending on whom
one is talking to. Freud’s distance and his sometimes cruel remarks about
his first Jewish students and colleagues such as Tausk, Adler, Stekel etc. is in
contrast not only to his openness toward his non-Jewish colleagues but also
to his testimonies in other contexts. In his famous letter to the B’nai Brith
lodge about his sense of Jewish identity he writes of ‘many dark psychic forces,
all the more powerful the less they can be put into words’ and of his ‘clear
consciousness of an inner identity, a secretly similar psychic structure.’
In his remarkable preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo he
returns to this theme:
“No reader of [the Hebrew version of ] this book will find it easy to put
himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the
language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion
of the fathers - as well as from every other religion - and who cannot
take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has never repudiated his
people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no
desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: ‘Since you
have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen
[Volksgenossen - FdM], what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he
8
I. Sadger, Freuds Judentum. Translated by the author.
9
ibid.
36
would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence. He could
not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt,
it will become accessible to the scientific mind.”10
He wrote this in 1930, on the threshold of his preparations for his Moses-
book, which intends to give more scientific insight not only into the essence
of Judaism, but of all other religions. At the same time this book was to
clarify his own personal relationship to his Jewishness and – this seemed to
him even more important – to place his own creation, psychoanalysis and
its continuation in a tradition that is closely connected with the essence of
Jewishness – with intellectual progress (Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit).
The Moses-book not only contains a specifically individual appreciation of
what being Jewish means, but also of tradition itself, of what a tradition is and
how it is constituted. Before we close by considering this book and its content
in more detail, it may be helpful to consider these questions first.
Which Jewishness? Which tradition?

My chosen title for this essay ‘The Jewish Tradition in Freud’s Work’ has a
double sense and can be understood in two different ways: first, how Freud
explicitly treats the Jewish tradition in his writings, and second, how a
submerged Jewish tradition secretly influences, perhaps even unconsciously
steers Freud’s work. His last great book, in a way his personal and scientific
legacy, seems to contain both aspects and give answer to both questions. It
does this however in such a mysterious way that later critics – I will mention
here only Marthe Robert, Peter Gay, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Josef Hayim
Yerushalmi, Jan Assmann and Richard Bernstein – have made the most
disparate and even contradictory comments on it.
By and large this reception can be divided into two contrary positions: on
the one hand that Freud was a universalist in the tradition of a humanistic
Enlightenment, on the other that his work was a kind of Jewish mission, a
hidden message from traditional Judaism to the modern world.
If one is on the lookout for such connections one will also find them and
if not, one could invent them (which was not utterly alien to Freud’s own
practice!). To say that psychoanalysis is a crypto-Jewish teaching is not only
an opprobrium thrown at it by its anti-Semitic opponents, but also a proud
demand from the Jewish side, to reclaim it for one’s own specific tradition. In
10
S. Freud, Preface to the Hebrew Translation’, Totem and Taboo, SE 13, p. xv.
37
this sense Freud might be comparable to Baruch Spinoza – a ‘heretical Jew’

who wished to universalise the particular Jewish mission. The scholar Ernst
Simon for example connects the psychoanalytic technique of free association
with the associative and combinatory thinking of the Talmud and indicates
other similarities between Talmud and Freudian thought, for instance in
an open-minded approach to human sexuality combined with an elevated
sexual ethic, or in a similar attitude of short-term pessimism and long-term
optimism.
Freud’s pupil Abraham wrote to him from Berlin on his Joke-book:
“our Talmudic way of thinking cannot disappear just like that. Some
days ago a small passage in Jokes strangely attracted me. When I looked
at it more closely, I found that, in the technique of apposition, and in
its whole structure, it was completely Talmudic.”11
More disrespectfully but in the same vein we read in Franz Kafka:
“It gives no pleasure to consort with psychoanalysis and I hold myself

apart from it as far as possible. Judaism always reveals its sufferings
and joys almost simultaneously with an appropriate commentary from
Rashi, and here it is the same.”12
Here we find for the most part references to the classical orthodox mainstream
in the Jewish tradition of interpreting Torah and Talmud. But two other
Jewish traditions should also be mentioned in this context, the Haskalah and
the Kabbalah.
The Haskalah has, since the time of its preceptor Moses Mendelssohn –
who was the model for the figure of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise – considered
itself as an enlightened Jewish tradition buttressed by reason, which remains
true to its basic principles but wishes to reinterpret them in the light of a
rational view of the world. It is possible that Freud’s father Jakob – with his
increased efforts at assimilation in the imperial capital – saw himself as a
Maskil, as one who wished to harmonise his Jewish tradition with the modern
world. Freud had little sympathy for this tendency. As an analyst he could
gain nothing from such a superficial synthesis. ‘Then I would rather prefer a
genuine Catechism,’ he allegedly said.
11
S . Freud and K. Abraham, A Psycho-analytic Dialogue, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl
Abraham 1907 - 1926. Edited by H. C. Abraham and E. L. Freud. Translated by B. Marsh
and H. C. Abraham. London: Hogarth Press, 1965, p. 36.
12
F. Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1958, p. 423. Translation by the author.
38
The Kabbalah is the opposing, mystical current of Judaism, which begins

with Abraham Abulafia’s secret doctrine of the hidden meanings of Hebrew
letters, numbers and symbols. Later the Zohar, the main work of the Kabbalist
tradition, appeared and we know that Freud possessed a French edition of it in
his library. David Bakan writes here:
“Some aspects of the Zohar show great affinity to the psychoanalytic

movement – for instance in the concept of human bisexuality and in the
Zohar’s opinion that one can study human beings with the same exegetical
techniques used in the study of Torah. The Zohar also contains a theory
of anti-Semitism, which seems almost identical to that which Freud
proposes in his Moses-book. Even more important is an atmospheric
similarity that can hardly be conveyed in a short description.”13
The Kabbalist tradition (the word Kabbalah means, more or less, reception,
what has been received and passed on, tradition) makes the demand that the
secret doctrines must be transmitted orally, and only to one person at a time,
especially in the form of hints and suggestive comments. Bakan writes:
“That is what Freud actually did in his clinical psychoanalytic practice

and this aspect of Kabbalist tradition is still held, in the training of
psychoanalysts, in high esteem. The on-going analyst must receive the
tradition orally in his training analysis – every modern analyst will be
quick to tell one that psychoanalysis cannot be learnt from books.”14
However Bakan’s book is itself such a collage of convolutions that he is easy

meat for the critics. After all Freud in his writings had always especially
criticised the mystical elements of religion as esoteric obscurantism and as the
results of infantile wish fulfilment and regression before the painful demands
of reality. Nowhere do we find in Freud any hint, let alone a friendly one, of
interest in Kabbalah. In a letter to Abraham about his rupture with Jung he
writes: “On the whole it is easier for us Jews, as we lack the mystical element.”15
Nevertheless in his theory of the development of religion he underlined one
aspect, the ‘return of the repressed’, which would certainly allow for such a
submerged Kabbalistic tendency.
13
D. Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1965.
14
Ibid.
15
S. Freud and K. Abraham, A Psycho-analytic Dialogue, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and
Karl Abraham 1907 - 1926, p. 46.
39
The attempts of the enlightened humanists to rescue Freud’s teachings

from their Jewish background and place them in a tradition which might seem
to stem more from the French encyclopaedists all fail somewhat when placed
against Freud’s own personal testimony. Peter Gay, the cultural historian, calls
Freud a ‘godless Jew’ and wishes to underline Freud’s atheism and his devotion
to pure scientific knowledge. Gay sees himself here as following Freud in his
recurring anxieties that psychoanalysis could become reduced to a ‘Jewish
science’.
This was an important cause for Freud’s welcoming Jung and Binswanger,
two Swiss non-Jews, into his movement and to favour them above his original
Jewish colleagues and defenders. For a long time Jung was considered his crown
prince until the break between them, especially in the matter of the theory of
sexuality, became irreparable. Under the Nazi-Regime Jung took his revenge with
a polemical tirade against the ‘Jewish consciousness’ in Freud’s psychoanalysis
and evoked in contrast an ‘Aryan consciousness’ as being ‘the most valuable
secret of Germanic man, his creatively intuitive psychic foundation’ and went
on to praise ‘the powerful emergence of National Socialism’.
Beside Freud’s professional politics in which he hoped to steer psychoanalysis
out of the corner of being a supposedly ‘Jewish science’ we also find statements
of his, mostly in private communications, which have a contrary tendency. In
a letter to the Italian author Enrico Morselli he writes:
“I do not know if your verdict is just, which sees in psychoanalysis a

direct product of the Jewish mind, but if it were to be so, I would not
feel ashamed.”16
We hear an echo of this sentiment in the words of his daughter Anna at

the inauguration of the Sigmund-Freud Chair at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem in 1977:
“Psychoanalysis has often been criticized because its methods are

imprecise, because its results cannot be experimentally demonstrated,
because it is unscientific, even because it is a ‘Jewish science’. However
one evaluates the other accusations, this last can be considered, under
the present circumstances, to be a title of honour.”17
16
S. Freud, Briefe 1873-1939. Edited by E. Freud, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1960. Translated
by the author.
17
A. Freud, ‘Inaugural Lecture for the Sigmund Freud Chair at the Hebrew University, Jerusa-
lem’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59, 1978, pp. 145-178.
40
This conflict between the demands of a universalist view of the world and of
a particularist tradition may have something of the attitude of the forcibly
converted, who must speak differently in public than to his fellows. We have
other examples of such adaptive manoeuvres by the Spanish Marranos after
the Inquisition or by the Turkish-Jewish Dönme after the fall of their founder,
the pseudo-Messiah Shabtai Zvi. Of course we know that Freud had since
his youth been an enthusiastic supporter of scientific enlightenment and
stayed this way, there was no forcible conversion. But the reciprocal dialectic
between this conviction and his attachment to the Jewish tradition cannot
only be explained by his inner tensions. As in our examples, the degree of
external discrimination or even persecution always has a certain part to play.
Straight after Hitler’s troops invaded Vienna it was decided that the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society would be dissolved and that its members would
emigrate. In his address Freud chose a particular comparison.
“Immediately after Titus’ destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, Rabbi

Jochanan ben Sakkai asked for permission to open the first school of
Torah in Yavne. We are now about to do the same thing. After all we
are used to persecution, in our history, our tradition and for some of us
in our personal experience.”
He then asked Anna Freud to read this text aloud at the subsequent World
Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich and also inserted it into his Moses-book,
on whose manuscript he was working at the time.
Freud’s identification with the Talmud scholar of antiquity corresponds
also to his identification with the figure of Moses, since Rabbi Jochanan had
in similar fashion to carry the religion of truth into exile in order to save its
existence. But here we should add the following thought: as long as Freud felt
relatively unthreatened in his scientific endeavours he exemplified the father-
complex in the figure of Oedipus, in a seeker after truth from a different
tradition which he also loved, that of Greek antiquity. But as soon as the
external threats became more real, he turned to role models in the Jewish
tradition.
In her rich and original book Freud’s Moses-Study as a Daydream Ilse
Grubrich-Simitis has researched the genealogy of Freud’s identification with
Moses and she comes to the conclusion that this always came to the fore
as a reaction to a possible recurrence of early trauma. The author sees this
original trauma in the death of his brother Julius when Sigmund was still
a small boy and in his subsequent separation from his beloved nanny who
41
must have compensated with her loving devotion for his mother’s depression.
Repetitions of trauma occur with Freud’s first visit to Rome in 1902 when he
began to preoccupy himself intensely with the Moses statue of Michelangelo.
It was at this time that Freud broke his longstanding friendship to his quirky
colleague Wilhelm Fliess, who had been indispensable to him during his self-
analysis and his work on the Dream book. Freud had indeed worked out large
portions of his theoretical constructs in his private correspondence with Fliess.
Now he no longer needed him but must still have been apprehensive whether
he could carry the edifice of psychoanalysis on his own.
The next phase of his preoccupation with Moses, his work on the
monograph on the Moses of Michelangelo – which originally appeared
anonymously in 1914 – occurs at the same time as Totem and Taboo, at the
height of the crisis of separation from Jung. Once again he felt threatened by
the rupture of an intimate relationship that had meant so much to him for so
long, with the same anxieties about the continuation of his work. Freud wrote
self-analytically to Ferenczi about a fainting fit that Freud had suffered during
a critical meeting with Jung, when they were debating his thesis in Totem and
Taboo, of ‘the importance of early experiences of death (…) (in my case a
brother who died very young when I was a little over one year old)’
The third phase begin with his final grand examination of the figure of Moses
that he took up again in 1934 and only finished in his last year in exile in
London. Here the author again sees Freud in a crisis over the continuation of
his teachings, firstly because of his approaching death and the dwindling of
his powers and secondly through the rising threat of the Nazi regime which
he saw more clearly than many authors suppose. The ‘daydream’ aspect of the
whole complex is that Freud flees from a frightening situation into a mythical
past, because of his powerlessness to overcome these forces.
Later authors may devote their energies to the questions of the origins of
the persecution of the Jews in a psychology of the perpetrators, of the Germans
or of other anti-Semites – Freud is more concerned with the Jews themselves,
with the question of Jewishness and what there is about it that again and again
provokes such a reaction. At the same time Freud is looking for a resolution
of a personal life crisis and for a future continuation of his teachings in the
midst of political catastrophe. We could remind ourselves of the words of
Lou Andreas-Salomé on the ‘return of the repressed’ in the Moses book: ‘the
circumstance in which quite sublime and precious ideas can return despite
having been for so long mixed up with all kinds of other things.’
42
So let us return now in our last section to this book in the hope that,
with all our still open questions, we will find some answers, or at least some
clarifications, here.
Who was this Moses and what were his achievements?

Let us summarise Freud’s theses and conclusions in this book: Moses,
scion of a noble Egyptian family, was a follower of the monotheistic Aton-
religion founded by Pharaoh Akhenaton. In view of the impossibility of a
continuation of this religion in Egypt after Akhenaton’s death, Moses chose
the ‘primitive’ Semites living in Egypt in order to make them followers of
this new monotheism. He established the ritual of circumcision, which was
according to Freud an Egyptian practice, in order to raise their sense of self-
esteem vis-à-vis the Egyptians. While the Egyptians then lapsed into their old
polytheism, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into the desert in order to found
a new kingdom.
But the monotheism that Moses had decreed for them turned out to be
too strict and too demanding. They rebelled and killed their leader. First they
returned to their old polytheistic religion and later, at a place named Kadesh,
the Egyptian Semites united with other tribes who worshipped the volcanic
God Jahweh. Thus arose a syncretic mixture of Moses’ original monotheism
with this local and more primitive cult, against which it however – thanks
to the energetic appeals of the Levites from the original Egyptian group and
from the Biblical prophets – managed to reassert itself. This ‘religion of truth’,
this ‘progress in the intellect’ lay first and foremost, as Kant also saw it, in the
law against making images, in the refusal of idol-worship.
According to Freud’s account we can now understand better why the Jews
are a chosen people, since they were indeed chosen – by Moses. Thus for all
monotheistic religions, and for Buddhism as well, it is a necessary condition
that they be founded by one specific man, a historic personage must be the
fons et origo of such a belief system. For the Jews this was Moses, for Islam
Mohammed, for the Christians it was the apostle Paul
“a man who was religiously oriented in the most strict sense of the
word; the dark traces of the past were looming in his soul, ready to
break through into more conscious regions.”18
18
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939). Translated by K. Jones. London: Hogarth Press,
1939.
43
Freud adds,
“it could hardly be irrelevant or coincidental that the violent murder of

another great man became the starting-point for Paul’s newly created
religion.”19
So Freud’s Moses book contains some sensational assumptions – Moses

was an Egyptian, Moses was murdered by the Jews – which would not only
embitter the Austrian Catholics but also the Jewish scholars. That Moses
was an Egyptian is not, according to Freud, the main issue and his material
evidence for this is correspondingly thin.
This is not the case with the murder of Moses, which for Freud was crucial,
although here too the evidence is skimpy. Freud had relied on the scholar
Ernst Sellin who had advanced this theory on the grounds of certain hints
from the prophet Hosea. Sellin however had been so successfully attacked
and rebutted by Jewish scholars that he later recanted and apologised. When
Freud was told of this he allegedly shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, it
could still be true.”
Why were this murder of the religion’s founder and its subsequent
repression so vital that Freud could not do without them? For Freud, ever
since Totem and Taboo, the murder of the father had become the central theme
of the development of culture and religion. The horde of brothers rises up
against the absolute tyranny of the primal father and overthrows him, but is
compelled afterwards to erect a totem, to install taboos, to let common laws
govern the community and to abreact the guilt feelings in obsessive cultic
rituals. These multiple facets of repression, together with the return of the
once repressed, are the cornerstone of Freud’s theory of the development of
neurosis within the individual, as well as of the development of culture and
society in general.
In the third part of his Moses study Freud gives us a formula for the
development of neurosis: early trauma – defence mechanisms – latency –
outbreak of neurotic symptoms – partial return of the repressed. Apart from
this we also find in his Moses essay a compendium of the essential concepts
of Freud’s metapsychology: the Oedipus-complex, the castration complex,
repression in its double function as a pathogenic factor and as the driving
force in cultural development, sublimation, the ‘family romance’ and much
more. Even though Freud always resisted any comparison of his new school
of thought with a religious formation, his understanding of symbolism – for
19
Ibid.
44
instance in his identification with Rabbi Jochanan and the Torah school in
Yavne – suggest the following: in the myth of Moses he is describing his own
teaching as a kind of secular ‘religion of truth’ which will later emerge and
assert itself over repression despite all dubious mixtures and syncretisms,
despite even the murder of his own person. In the light of recent years when
we have become witnesses to a concerted ‘Freud-bashing’ and the attempt to
utterly dismantle his personality and his teaching, we are inclined to confirm
his view. Despite all this psychoanalysis is still very much alive and kicking, we
can no longer imagine our culture without it.
To return to our theme of the development of culture and society,
Yerushalmi writes on this point:
“The readers of Moses and Monotheism have so far not understood –

perhaps because they were too spellbound by the more sensational
aspects, Moses as an Egyptian and murdered by the Jews – that the
real fulcrum of the book, especially of its third part, is the problem
of Tradition itself, not only the question of its origin but also of its
essential dynamics.”20
Freud had indeed brought an element into this discussion that had been
previously – could it be otherwise? – utterly unconscious. Thus Jan Assmann
writes:
“I must confess that I am unable to believe either in Freud’s theory of

the Primal Horde nor in his idea of an archaic inheritance of cultural
factors. Nevertheless I still hold his theory of cultural latency to be an
important insight. Freud has made us aware in lasting fashion how
such phenomena as remembering, forgetting and repressing also exist
on a cultural level and are not explicable along the customary lines of
tradition and reception. Since Freud, no cultural theory can afford to
ignore his concepts.”21
In closing we will allow ourselves a psychological answer to the question why

Moses’ murder was so central for Freud and put Freud on the couch, so to
speak.
Here is the circumstantial evidence: the murder of the father remained the
20
Y. H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991.
21
J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge/
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
45
main theme of Freud’s life, it had revealed to him the interpretation of dreams
and thus brought about a whole new science. Freud battled all his life with
loving and with inimical feelings towards his father, in which tenderness, awe,
denigration and the striving for self-assertion blended into one another. “A
hero”, he wrote, “is one who has bravely risen up against his father and in the
end triumphed over him.” The vanquished father thus however becomes in a
way immortal – who would later have ever concerned themselves with Jakob
Freud, if it had not been for his son Sigmund? As Marthe Robert remarks,
Freud “knows that his increasing physical resemblance (in old age) brings him
dangerously similar to his father and he resists this ‘return of the repressed’.”22
Freud is forced to admit how easily we become copies of our parents when we
grow old. He writes
“Even the great Goethe who, at the time of the flowering of his genius,
thought little of his rigid and pedantic father, developed traits in old
age that resembled his father’s character.”
Freud’s triumph lay in how he was able to give his own personal and clinical
experiences a universal significance. Now they could be found everywhere,
in Oedipus, in Hamlet, in Goethe, in all the great world religions – so what,
now, was there anything especially Jewish about it?
In a keen-eyed letter to Max Brod Franz Kafka writes the following:
“Better than with psychoanalysis, I am happy with the insight that

this Father-complex, from which some receive their intellectual
nourishment, does not concern the innocent father, but rather his
Jewishness. To get away from being Jewish, usually with an obscure
agreement from the side of the father (this obscurity is what is so
enraging), this is what most of those who began to write in German
wanted, but with their hind legs they still stuck to the Jewishness of the
father and with their front legs they could find no new solid ground.
The desperation over this was their inspiration.”23
Perhaps much more is hidden in the ambiguity of our title ‘The Jewish
Tradition in Freud’s Work’ which I can only hint at here. The phenomenon
described by Kafka concerns an intellectual flourishing in European culture,
a progress in intellectual development [Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit], which
22
arthe Robert, Sigmund Freud - zwischen Moses und Ödipus. Berlin: Ullstein, 1977.
M
23
Franz Kafka, ibid.
46
is most closely interwoven with the fate of the Jews in 20th century Europe.
The enormous intellectual surge in almost all kinds of scientific and cultural
activity in the first half of the century came for the most part from this first
generation of assimilated Jews. In some cases they placed their discipline
on wholly new foundations. The subsequent catastrophes of Auschwitz and
the Shoah now seem to us in today’s Europe – despite all the well-based
sociological, political and philosophical analyses on the rise of the Nazi regime
– to be nothing other than a “return of the repressed”. This is the salient
factor that has retrospectively formed our modern understanding of ourselves
as Europeans, but also deformed us. This is the reason why we are so afraid
of ourselves and also why the fateful tradition of the Jews, as Jean Paul Sartre
recognized, now affects each and every one of us. But all of this had already in
essence been seen and written about by Freud.
47
Fethi Benslama
In the mid-eighties it seemed to me necessary to deal with Islam from a

psychoanalytic perspective, although for my part there was no previous
indication this task would be necessary, since Islam occupied a ghostly presence
in the psychoanalytic literature. I say ‘ghostly’ because it appeared sporadically
and as a missing element, one already included in our field, dedicated as it
is to religion and – more specifically – monotheism. There this concept was
usually reduced to Judaism and Christianity. In addition, at the time I had the
feeling I was intruding into familiar space if not that of Judeo-Christianity,
like Ishmael after being abandoned in the desert, coming to question the
father and his legacy.
The figure of Ishmael was my point of entry for raising the question of
the father in the relation between Islam and the two other monotheistic
religions, through a rereading of the story of Hagar in Genesis,1 since the
theme of the excluded son at the origins of monotheism remains active in
different ways throughout history. Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where
he opposes the son of spirit and the son of the flesh,2 continues to play a
nagging role today in the relationships between Western Judeo-Christianity
and Islam, even in modern academic works. From this point of view, there is
an extraordinary continuation of the structure of the original disputes, and
of the hatred between the monotheistic religions to which it gives rise, hatred
not foreign to what one calls “the force of monotheism”. The hatred that
these three religions nurse towards each other – religions that are supposed
to have the same God – is structural: structural in such a way that one no
longer notices it. It is generally disguised by invoking a God of love and peace,
and through calls for reconciliation – calls that are absolutely necessary but
without real significance if one fails to take cognisance of this original hatred.
One should more precisely speak of “many” hatreds, since these are different
in nature depending on whether one considers an intertwining between
1
is was the central topic of my book: La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de l’islam. Paris: Aubier,
Th
2002. Poche Flammarion, 2004. Translated into English as: Psychoanalysis and the Challenge
of Islam. Translated by R. Bononno, Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Translated into Arabic as: Al-Islam wa ‘ilm annafs attahlîlî. Translated by Raja Ben Slama.
London: Alsaqi, 2009.
2
The Jerusalem Bible, Letter to the Gallatians, 2:4.
Fethi Benslama
Judaism and Christianity, the continuity between Islam and Judaism, or the
intersections of Islam and Christianity – where references are made to the
crusades in the news from time to time. The fact is that psychoanalysts also
more or less unwittingly inherit these disputes, and to a certain extent the
Pauline opposition between spirit and flesh. It seems to me that not even
Freud himself was immune to this, in a way, when he was asked to discuss the
case of Islam. I will return to this shortly.
In my project of bringing the psychoanalytic approach to religion and
monotheism to bear on Islam, I took as my point of departure the question
of the father – it is not necessary to say either how fundamental the father is
to both psychoanalysis and monotheism or to the relations between them –
since Freud himself introduced Islam in this way in one of the few instances
he speaks of it. He does so in Moses and Monotheism3 in a short but difficult
passage based on a quickly formulated hypothesis, which to my knowledge has
never been the object of serious discussion by French-language psychoanalysts.
Of course, this mention of Islam occurs in a subsection where Freud excuses
himself for his limited knowledge of this domain to quickly move away from
its object of investigation. It is likely that this occurrence in Freud’s last book
has not drawn much attention as Islam has only recently become a hotbed for
modern inquiry, and was previously confined to Orientalism. It is the sudden
appearance of an aspect of this religion on the contemporary world scene – on
a daily basis for the last twenty years – that leads to its being now taken into
account. But we should be careful not to equate all of Islam with the radical
movements that take a violent form. I would not make this remark – obvious
from any cultured perspective – had I not heard this confusion being made
in this very place last night. One cannot forget that all religions have their
fundamentalism, and that Christian theology – often praised today – was
also in part extremely violent, and at present still happily harbours intolerant
currents, alongside other, more liberal trends.
Nevertheless, the emergence of Islam on the world scene must be considered
within the context of a gap that must be addressed before any discussion
of the issue of Islam is possible. Whereas Judaism and Christianity passed
through a secularised re-reading in the West – a deconstruction and historical
and anthropological translation – Islam has not undergone this process to the
same extent, either in its thought, or in its social and subjective reality. This
situation implies at least two consequences I would like to quickly discuss.
3
S . Freud, L’homme Moïse et la religion monothéiste. Translated by C. Heim, Paris: Gallimard,
1986.
50
The first is that if Islam – or more precisely Muslims – really did gradually
enter modernity beginning in the nineteenth century, this entry took place
in terms of colonial violence and without the illumination of modern
thought, without the Enlightenment that remained the privilege of the elite.
It is a shadow of modernity or blind modernisation, even unconscious to
the majority of Muslims. The work of modern culture (Kulturarbeit) has not
progressed at the same rate as the material transformation of this world. The
very fact that to this day psychoanalysis remains in its infancy in the Muslim
world – even within societies that are close to Europe – is symptomatic of
this condition, as if the Muslim subject of today did not have access to the
reading material that corresponds to the conditions of his current psyche. This
might be the cause of the worrying indecipherability of his identity and his
world, which in turn lies at the root of a desperate, mass movement towards
reinstating the reassuring theological interpretation of his ancestors.
The second consideration concerns the fact that the intensification
of supply and demand for religion in Muslim societies today is not of the
same type as in societies where a secularisation of the taboo and forbidden
has occurred, and the state has replaced the traditional institution of totem,
changing the place of the patriarchal father in society’s symbolic economy.
Even if the “modern” state has been established in Islamic societies, in most
cases it has not dislodged traditional organisations, especially familial clans;
the state has been grafted onto them, has weakened them as well as evolved
alongside them, but does not have the same legal monopoly it has acquired in
other modern societies. Similarly, secularisation of the forbidden has occurred
only in part and has not reached the deep structures of subjectivity. For this
reason there is not, properly speaking, a return of what is called “religion” in
most societies of the Muslim world, because the religious structure of social
ties and its related subjectivity have not been weakened, but broken down
by the effects of the ‘scientification’ of the world view and the capitalisation
of trade. Contrary to what was previously thought – by Freud most of all –
here religion has not declined due to scientific progress but has escaped the
framework of traditional religious institutions and has been deconstructed.
The deconstruction of religion and its reconstitution via scientific discourse
and market-based logic are the defining factors of the current situation. What
is referred to as ‘Islamism’ is the major symptom of this. We should be more
precise here and consider the problem in particular regions and societies of
the vast Muslim world – although I do not have the time within the limits of
this conference paper.
51
Fethi Benslama
However, the schema of the breakdown and reconstitution of religion in

terms of scientific discourse and technology, and the appearance of a religious
world market, would seem valid everywhere, with nuances and variations
depending on the situations. It is in this sense that, more than eighty years
later, the progressivism of Freud in The Future of an Illusion4 seems to be
contradicted by present developments, although Freud envisages liberation
from religious doctrines over a longer period of time. Although this text is
strongly influenced by the historical context of Europe of the years 1920-
1930, it includes lines of thought that can be fruitful for thinking about
what is happening with Islam today from a social and subjective point of
view – it being understood that I leave to the side the important question of
the political, a question I have discussed elsewhere. I simply point out that
one cannot treat religion as just a fantasy, that religion is part of the social,
economic, and political reality in material life, and not only texts written
thousands of years ago.
On several occasions The Future of an Illusion takes into account this
concrete and material aspect, especially where Freud discusses the oppressed.
The Future of an Illusion remains a text far more complex than it appears – as
Freud’s texts often are – although this text has the distinction of comprising a
highly developed position all its own, which goes well beyond the imaginary
dialogue with his opponent (the pastor Pfister). Among the arguments likely
to be helpful to us for thinking about the religious ferment in the Muslim
world, I will borrow at least two that coincide with facts observed in the
clinical setting and contemporary cultural works.
The first concerns the secularisation of the forbidden, what Freud calls
“socially-based cultural prohibition”. Freud clearly sees that the transfer of
the attribution of prohibition from God as its author to man, and from a
requirement to believe to rational construction, opens the possibility of a
threatening leap and failure that could have serious consequences. The reason
for this is that religion is closer to the emotional truth of prohibition connected
to Hilflosigkeit (infantile distress) and the idealised father. The secularised –
which is to say rationalised – prohibition results from an emotional cleansing
that confers on it less subjective efficacy than the religiously motivated
prohibition. But it is this issue that appears central to discourses in the
Muslim world today, for example, with the staggering increase and savagery
of the phenomena of fatwas. Using all means at their disposal [tentent de
faire feu de tout bois] men of religion are attempting to prevent the process
4
S . Freud, L’Avenir d’une illusion. Translated by A. Balseinte, J-B. Delabre, D. Hartmann.
Paris: PUF, 2004.
52
of the prohibition’s secularisation, even attempting to make it religious once

again [ou bien tentent de le reconvertir religieusement]. We recently had
an example of this in a fatwa delivered by a senior religious authority from
Al Azhar University in Cairo, which proposed turning colleagues from the
office into wet nurses for the sake of circumventing sexual relations with
them – by milk transfer! You can imagine the laughter this prescription of
generalised breastfeeding provoked in the Muslim world… This tells you
that certain men of religion are no longer afraid of attempting buffoonery
to plug the holes that have appeared in the traditional moral fabric due to
modern life. But this phenomenon has been amplified because it meets an
extremely important social demand, where the amplification of the feeling
of guilt and its correlate – the demand for redemption – appears among
the masses. This is why expiation, sacrifice, and martyrdom are becoming
common facts. That is made possible in a world where the traditional bearings
of prohibition have been undermined and where jouissances’s fantasy excesses
threaten on all sides. The incentives for consumption and, above all, their
images play an important role – since as you know we devour with our eyes
as well, even when we do not want to or cannot eat. Blinding one to the
object or making it unattractive – or even repulsive – is perhaps a solution in
this case. This is the reason for the different kinds of veiling and the intense
production of ugliness in fundamentalist settings. In the clinical setting, I
observe in many patients of the Muslim tradition the difficult psychic work of
translating the emotional efficacies of religious prohibitions into secular ones.
Transference issues surrounding the figure of the idealised father – a ferocious
figure who demands sacrifice – are prominent. As long as infantile dynamics
and conflicts have not been analysed and overcome, the terror of transgression
and search for atonement remain present. But primitive beliefs are difficult to
overcome since at every point they involve a dimension of gratitude linking
the individual’s survival to membership to its community of birth, as if this
community was its species, the human species itself.
The second aspect I noted in The Future of an Illusion – and which seems
to me telling regarding the situation of modern subjects in the Muslim world
– concerns the conversion of collective neurosis into a private, individual
neurosis. Freud remarks on this in other texts, for example, those relating
to the detached position of the poet, or of the creator in the general sense,
in relation to his community. The poet, artist, writer, author (and each
modern subject becomes “author” of its own life and its historicity) is exposed
to the accusation of treason by its community. In order to access subjective
autonomy in relation to the beliefs of its community, individual elaborations
53
Fethi Benslama
require certain favourable conditions, which allow collective protections to be

dispensed with. Yet these conditions depend on scientific education and the
guarantee of political liberties that are not present in the Muslim world today.
The fashion today in certain snobbish psychoanalytic circles is a critique of
human rights, but without human rights there would not be psychoanalysis,
and expressions of the unconscious would be considered crimes! Freud includes
all of this in the work of culture (Kulturarbeit) and in the problematic he calls
“the cultural superego”, a notion that has not, in my opinion, been sufficiently
taken into account in psychoanalysis, at least in France. Briefly, I would say
that The Future of an Illusion supposes a democratisation of political and
social life that allows for the separation of the theological-political project
and confines religion’s claims of salvation to a public-private domain limited
to worship. It is this possibility that has not yet been realised in the Muslim
world today. This is neither an easy, quick, nor peaceful task – one can indeed
recall what happened in Europe not long ago. Moreover, I remind you that
nationalism has often revived the theological-political project and religious
emotions, as shown by the works of Ernest H. Kantorowicz, for example, in
Dying for the Fatherland.5 One knows the human price paid for all this in the
course of the atrocious wars Europe has known.
I would like now to turn to the hypothesis Freud proposes regarding Islam
in Moses and Monothesism. My admiration for the Freudian invention – what
I consider an advance for civilisation – does not necessarily lead me to adhere
to the word of Freud uncritically, nor to considerer his theoretical positions
as a definitive achievement, especially the speculative aspect of his thought.
As I noted at the beginning of this discussion, the passage on Islam is put
forward with many precautions and invocations regarding the insufficiency of
his knowledge. I quote the essential point of this passage:
“The regaining of the one great primaeval Father produced in the Arabs
an extraordinary advance in self-confidence which led them to great
worldly successes, but which it is true exhausted itself in these. Allah
proved himself to be much more grateful to his chosen people than
Jahve had in his time. The inner development of the new religion,
however, soon came to a standstill, perhaps because it lacked the
profundity which in the Jewish religion resulted from the murder of
its founder.”6
5
E. H. Kantorowicz, Mourir pour la patrie. Translated by L. Mayali. Paris: Fayard, 2004.
6
S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism. Translated by K. Jones. London: Hogarth Press, 1939, p.
149.
54
This formulation nicely fits the case of Islam into the context of his broader
theory of religion, especially with regard to the central question of the father
according to which the father is the basis of spirituality, the essence of which
lies in the father’s murder. However, there are two problems that need to be
addressed here.
1. In the first place, the murder of the father in Judaism – as in Christianity
– is an interpretation, if not merely a construction, by Freud, taking as its
point of departure individual fantasy. The question of the father’s murder is by
no means an issue in either Judiasim or Christianity (where it is the son who is
murdered), so Freud does not find it in Islam. One can interpret the murder of
Christ as coming close to a confession of murder by the father, although this is
still an interpretation. Hence, if one interprets and reconstructs, then one shall
interpret and reconstruct everywhere. One could also show that this repressed
murder also exists in Islam. We should recall that parricide is a structural
fantasy in all of humanity, and that its implementation as anthropological
fiction with the death of God is an effect of European modernity.
2. If Islam does reclaim the Urvater, then we are at odds with Freud’s thesis,
as with the primal father there is no social, legal, civilisational, or spiritual
structure. We return to the primitive horde. I do not know the sources of
Freud’s information on Islam although I have sought in vain. By bringing back
the primal father of Totem and Taboo to explain the sources of Islam, it seems
to me that we rediscover in Freud’s work, under a different guise, the Paulian
antagonism of spirit and flesh represented in the two sons of Abraham – on
the one hand spiritualisation through the murder of the father in Judaism and
Christianity, on the other an absence of spirituality through the presence of
brute force. Unless the primal father is thoroughly thought through – brutal,
cruel, revelling in [jouissant] his power – he continues to return, especially
where one claims to have done with him. To me this seems more consistent
with the actual history of groups of people. For example, dictators in the Arab
world today come very close to this figure of the primal father. I mean what I
say on this topic: truth surpasses fiction.
The investigation into the interior constructions of Islam surrounding the
question of the father led me to a totally different result, a result that considers
new paths of spirituality even in monotheism, a spirituality that does not
necessarily proceed from the father. This will of course strike a blow to the
paternalistic, phallocentric privilege common among many psychoanalysts,
but who cares if the movement of psychoanalysis towards Islam opens a novel
perspective, one repressed by Freud himself through his Paulinism. I would
like to retrace the major lines of thought that result from this research:
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Fethi Benslama
1. In many respects the spiritual source of Islam appears more as an

attempt to renounce the father at his very core as a theological structure, in
other words, to extricate God from any relation with the figure of paternity,
from any human system of either imaginary or symbolic filiation. The nature
of this extrication is not Aristotelian as is often claimed, but in fact dates from
a later stage – the God of the Muslim philosophers of the eleventh century.
We recall that although Islam was founded in the sixth century, the God of
the Koran is primarily Parmenidian, as suggested by the great French Islamist
J. Berque through a comparison of a Koranic passage7 and fragment eight of
Parmenides that says:
“what is, is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable

and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at
once, a continuous one.”8
The God of Islam is in fact a radically patchwork God, for it was only
later that Allah became a proper name; this word initially signified
“The God”.
2. This attempted renouncement of the father – I say attempted because

I think it is limited and comes to a sudden end for reasons I will indicate – is
predetermined by the first monotheistic writings, by the Bible itself, and in
particular in Genesis where the first genealogical and ethical organisation takes
place in relation to Abraham, his two wives – spouse-princess-mistress Sarah
and the servant Hagar – and his two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. The story of
Hagar’s revolt for having refused to be merely a borrowed womb for the masters
ends with her return to the wilderness with her son. On closer inspection,
however, we see that the God of Genesis enters into a new kind of covenant
with this woman, one that is different from the first in relation to Abraham.
The God of Genesis grants Agar her own reproductive rights, promising her
the possibility of creating a nation through descendants. Furthermore, she
has the privilege of being the only woman in biblical narrative to have seen
God without dying. I remind you that Spinoza considers Hagar a prophetess,
although she is almost systematically brought down in the writings of
commentators, primarily Saint Paul. From the earliest monotheistic writings,
7
is koranic passage comes from Sura CXII, known as ‘True Worship’: “Say: God, the One.
Th
God is impenetrable. Does not generate. Is not generated. There is none like unto Him.”
8
Translation from: http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenides.htm. Original Greek text: Diels; En-
glish translation: John Burnet (1892).
56
there is thus the recognition of another spiritual path that does not involve
the relation between God and the father, but between God and an oppressed
woman to whom is granted [reconnu] a genealogical right of her own.
3. When one examines all its symbolic value, this spiritual path is based
primarily on the ethical recognition of the right of a woman not to be a living
instrument (this is the ancient definition of the slave), or, if you will, not to be
a matrix for the masters’ benefit. For Hagar was supposed to provide a child
for her elderly and childless masters, and then disappear. This woman endures
rejection or repudiation by the patriarch, wandering in the wilderness, and
above all suffers from the fact that her child has not been saved from peril by
his father, but by God conferring on his mother the ability to find water in
the desert. At the level of what Freud considers the very root of the religious
– Hilflosigkeit or infantile distress – here we have recourse to something that
does not involve the father. It involves an alterity that hears, which can be
understood by referring to the phrase in the Bible appearing the moment
Hagar finds the spring that saves her son: “God heard the child in the place
where it is” (21: 17-20). Literally: Isma’-El, God hears. This alterity that hears
the child in its place and saves it, this woman who sees that which saves even in
the inhospitable wilderness, in her radical solitude this maternal clairvoyance
constitutes a different theory of religion – in the very etymological sense of the
notion of theory in Greek: θεωρε~ιν ‘see and contemplate’ (and in Arabic too:
nadharya ‘which is seen’). I summarise here by saying there is a spirituality
whose psychic source is hearing the Other, articulated with regard to the
mother as a response to infantile distress, which does not involve the concrete
presence of the father, to the extent that the father allows the child to fall.
4. My hypothesis is that Islam (a term that etymologically signifies that

which saves after abandonment) proceeds from this spiritual source, and this
is the reason that this religion explicitly excludes any rapprochement between
God and the father, especially if one looks at the genealogical structure of the
Bible. On the side of Isaac God miraculously intervenes in the reproductive
process of Sarah’s body (she gives birth at the age of seventy) – which is the
prototype of divine intervention into the body of Mary – whereas on the
side of Ishmael procreation takes place naturally, from the insemination of
Hagar’s body by Abraham, without divine intervention. From the Judeo-
Christian perspective, the relationship between God and the father is played
out in a fusion of real and spiritual insemination; whereas from the Islamic
perspective, there is an incommensurable gap between the two: insemination
57
Fethi Benslama
is real, and it is the survival of this insemination that is spiritual. Here the
source of faith is survival rather than life. To support this hypothesis one can
show how much of the text of the Koran is unfriendly towards fathers in
general, not exalting their figure as an ideal. So it is that the founder of Islam is
not considered a father: he is saved as a wandering orphan. The orphan is one
of the nicknames of the founder of Islam. Here there is thus a fundamental
reference to the dead father.
5. Although I cannot fully develop the attempt to renounce the father as

the source of Islamic monotheism here – something this theme merits – I
immediately point out that this proposition seems to contradict a constant
thesis by Freud. First formulated in Totem and Taboo this concerns conceiving
the Vatersehnsucht (translated as “desire for the father”) as one of the roots of
the creation of God and religious formations. However, one remembers that
in Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood Freud raises the possibility
of a renunciation of the father as a sublimation (in Leonardo), which consists
in not needing to rely on the transfiguration of the father into God. The
transfiguration of the father into God relates to idealisation, whereas the
renunciation of the father relates to sublimation. Of course, this would then lead
us to consider religion from the perspective of sublimation and not idealisation
and illusion. But why would we deny the possibility of partial subliminatory
processes in religious spirituality? One considers the contributions of each of
the monotheistic religions to the arts, literature, philosophy, law, etc. – just
about everything Freud himself considered contributions to civilisation. Until
the possibility of dispensing with God arrived in Europe two centuries ago,
civilisation was religious for most of humanity.
6. Proposing to see the attempt to renounce the father as one of the sources
of Islamic religion, I specified that this attempt does not follow through and
meet its theological limits – except in Islamic mysticism, Sufism, which plays
a very important role. Before turning to the reason for this theological failure,
I emphasise that if Islam bears the evident marks of this attempt to renounce
the father, it is also present in Judaism and Christianity in another style. I even
think that one of the strengths of the invention of monotheism really consists
in a renouncement of the preliminary father, but that this renunciation is upset
or overtaken by an inversely violent process that avails itself of the idealisation
of the father, a process which resides in the unbearable initial renunciation.
In other words, monotheism is simultaneously composed of two conflicting
forces, and indeed, it is from this conflict that all its power is derived, since
58
it simultaneously provides a solution to the renunciation of the father and

reinforces his omnipotence. At bottom I reproach Freud and psychoanalysts
who follow him in this framework for having adopted a paternalistic point of
view on spirituality, for having overlooked the existence of a feminine spiritual
path that the original monotheism glimpses but rejects.
7. The crux of this problem is the repudiation of Hagar and the repression
of the second covenant. The repudiation of Hagar – her abandonment in the
desert with her son – supposes a failing, absent husband and father, and a
covenant between the mother and God to save the son. It is a kind of reverse
pietà, a pietà of survival. She is still waiting for her Michelangelo… Why
does the renunciation of the father stop short with Islamic theology? Because
although the founder of Islam claims to be a descendent of Ishmael, the text
of the Koran does not mention Hagar, although it cites and blesses Sarah.
My hypothesis is that it was difficult for the founder of Islam to convince the
proud Arabs of the desert that they were the descendants of a servant, and of
a son abandoned by his father. Furthermore, in the Koranic recital there is a
reconciliatory meeting between Abraham and his son, while in the Bible they
are only re-united on the occasion of Abraham’s death. There is thus the return
of the spirituality of the father that covers over that of the mother. It took
more than a century and incredible debates – after the death of the founder
of Islam – for Muslims to recognise and adopt Hagar. But even today in the
Muslim world, for every nine girls named Sarah there is only one named
Hagar.
In conclusion, psychoanalytic research on Islam shows us the existence of an

attempt at a spiritual path that does not develop in relation to the father and
his murder, but the relationship between the feminine and an alterity that
hears. It is divine because it is always Other and hearing. Spirituality does not
here consist in the murder of the father – for he is already dead or absent and
abandoning– but in the survival granted to the child, who is not just given the
necessary physical aid, but also survival as recognition of distress by the Other.
This attempt exists at the origins of monotheistic scriptures, from which Islam
descends, but its theology does not support it. It continues however, in certain
paths of Sufism, and reappears in cultural productions. This is, for example,
the case in the story of Scheherazade in Arabian Nights, where the woman puts
an end to the murderous madness of the tyrant through speech alone.
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Fethi Benslama
Although I do not have enough time to talk about this line of inquiry,
I think that in the secular and democratic world, where the human rights
of all are recognised regardless of genealogy, there is the real possibility of
renouncing the father of patriarchy. Not a fatherless society as was once
believed, but a society in which one is able to rely on the father figure in order
to subsequently become independent within the larger social and political
context. I think this is a new spiritual attempt by humanity, there where
monotheism has failed, but there is no guarantee that this attempt will not
meet the same failure, especially due to the commodification of the world
and human desire. Psychoanalysis should explore this possibility, recognizing
that the feminine is also a bearer of spirituality, after The Future of an Illusion,
which is to say, after the disillusion of a future without illusion.
Translated by Rockwell F. Clancy
60
Part II
Religion and its Critiques
Freud’s Conception of Religion within the
Context of the Modernist Critical Discourse
Moshe Zuckermann
A critique of religion can take various forms. The form it takes can range
from an immanent investigation of dogmas, and thus of intra-religious
animosities arising from differing conceptions of God and belief, to a critique
of religious institutions, which nonetheless does not call belief into question
as such. Or it can go further, to the point of an agnostic questioning of the
very existence of a god or the atheistic assertion of his nonexistence, that is,
to a negation of the relevance of any and every religious belief. The concept
of critique varies according to the nature of its object. Immanent critiques are
concerned with refining, sharpening or reinterpreting religious truths such as
those which have been formulated in the great historical transformations – for
example in the transition from poly- to monotheism or in the reform of the
Christian church through Protestantism – or as they have been manifested in
the antagonism and hatred periodically arising between the major religions.
Critiques of religious institutions generally relate to the effects of religious
practice within the context of political and social relationships. Voltaire, for
example, combated the Catholic Church’s assertion of power, particularly in
its political alliance with the aristocracy and with state absolutism, but he did
so without questioning the raison d’être of belief as such. As a Deist he felt
committed to maintaining a tolerant belief in God, and he considered this
belief to be a necessary part of human existence. A radical critique of religion,
by contrast, aims at defining the essence, function and effect of religiosity in
extra-religious terms as a means of refuting religion, dispelling its power or
eliminating it completely. It is not content to merely philosophically clarify
epistemological doubts regarding the existence of a god: it rests instead upon
the fundamental atheist assumption that the divine is a cultural product of
the human being, and that religious belief arises from human needs that have
nothing to do with transcendental divine power per se.
Two early writings by the young Karl Marx could be considered
paradigmatic for such a radical critique of religion. The fact that both of them
spring from an emphatic criticism of the critiques of religion formulated
by two other great thinkers indicates both the weightiness of the historical
context and the radicality of their approach and their general orientation. The
Moshe Zuckermann
following passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of

Right (1843–44) went on to achieve particular fame:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of
soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”1
In this text’s long reception history, the opium metaphor has become
exceedingly well known, a perennial slogan of rare ubiquity. The narcotic
element calls to mind a seductive blurring of consciousness, in other words
the blatant manifestation of that which had already crystallised in the young
Marx’s thinking as a category of false consciousness, of ideology. The equation
of religion with ideology would later become an especially potent factor in
Marx’s critique of religion (which in this respect is related to that of both
Nietzsche and Freud). With regard to the widespread use of this dictum,
however, the double function that Marx attributed to religion has received
little attention. It is remarkable how he sees religion as an expression of
something that goes beyond it, but at the same time also as a manifestation
of a rising protest against this something, which religion is an expression of.
The misery that Marx initially speaks of as being religious is in fact real social
misery. He is not content, however, to merely expose religion’s ideological-
manipulative function: he also gives voice to a certain forbearance toward this
function. As a traditional cultural institution with a monopoly on matters
of the soul, it is – measured against the status quo, ‘the heart of a heartless
era’, the ‘soul of soulless conditions’ – ultimately ideology, false consciousness.
But all the same, Marx also recognizes in religion the ‘sigh of the oppressed
creature’. He understands its comforting function within the despair of real
social misery, and he is aware that society’s experience of suffering needs this
safety valve – that is, as long as the true cause of this suffering reigns over the
world.
Heinrich Heine, who supplied Marx with some of his most important
cues, summed up the problem using the vehicle of poetry (at roughly the same
time). In Germany: A Winter’s Tale he tells of the song of a young girl with
a harp, who he heard upon crossing the border from France into Germany:
1
arl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Early Writings.
K
Translated by R. Livingstone and G. Benton. London: Penguin, 1992, p. 244.
64
Freud’s Conception of Religion
She sang of love and lovers’ woes,

Of loss, and fates that sever,
Of meetings in a better land
Where grief is purged forever.
She sang our mortal vale of tears,

The joys that end in sadness,
The world where souls, redeemed at last,
Attain eternal gladness.
She sang the epopee of heaven,

The song of loss and sighing,
With which they lull the populace,
Big booby! when it’s crying.2
Here Heine does not separate religious ideology from the interests of its
authors:
I know the song, the text, and the men

Who wrote the song, and taught her;
I know that in private they drank their wine,
And preached in public water.3
Against the bigoted manipulations of the ruling ideology he pits the alternative
of an emphatic call for human liberty:
I will write you a new, a sweeter song;

You shall sing it without a quaver;
We will build the kingdom of heaven on earth
’Tis a better plan and a braver.
We shall then be happy and starve no more:

We whom the earth was spoiled for;
No longer shall lazy bellies waste
What busy hands have toiled for.4
2
einrich Heine, Germany, A Winter’s Tale, caput 1, stanzas 5-7, http://helios.hampshire.
H
edu/~jjwSS/projects/winterstale/poem/
3
Ibid., stanza 8.
4
Ibid., stanzas 9-10.
65
Moshe Zuckermann
There would be bread for all on earth, and not only bread, but luxury and
‘beauty and pleasure’ as well. All of these things could also be obtained in this
world:
And angels and sparrows may have our share

Of the vague delights of heaven.5
Heine does not fully dispense with the category of heaven qua the Kingdom of
God: he populates it with the subaltern office-holders of such a kingdom, but
then he ironically fractures the motif of heavenly existence by intermingling
the sparrows among the angels. He rigorously insists – disregarding all
conceptions of the divine – that the earthly institution of religion fulfils a
pronouncedly ideological function by delegating redemption from human
want and suffering to heaven. The extent to which Heine is interested in
putting forth an atheistic argument must remain an object of speculation.
He is not addressing the question of belief as such, rather the problem of
the social consequences of institutionalised religion. Accordingly, religion
does not become ideological solely by presenting the non-real as real, but also
where it can be shown to exhibit manipulative qualities in the service of the
exercise of worldly power.
Marx, in turn, devotes his attention to the social dimension of that which
allows religion to become the ‘opium of the people’, and thus also to its
function as an instrument of domination. This line of thinking is formulated
early on and with aphoristic density in the Theses on Feuerbach, written in
1845 but first published (with slight modifications) by Engels forty-three
years later. The sixth thesis of this early text states:
“Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But
the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.
In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations. Feuerbach, who
does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently
compelled: 1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the
religious sentiment as something by itself, and to presuppose an
abstract – isolated – human individual; 2. Essence, therefore, can be
comprehended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, dumb generality which
naturally unites the many individuals.”6
5
Ibid., stanza 12.
6
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1. Translated by W. Lough.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 13–15.
66
This line of thinking centres on the postulate that the human individual is an
essentially social being, an ‘ensemble of social relations’, which thus must also
determine his religious inclinations. The seventh thesis states:
“Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’

is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he
analyses belongs to a particular form of society.”7
The form of society, however, must be understood as a manifestation of human

practice, as the following eighth thesis correctly formulates:
“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory
to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the
comprehension of this practice.”8
It is this causal anchoring of religious belief in social reality that allows Marx
to recognise religion’s ideological dimension, namely that which makes it
into an important structuring element in society and into a source of faulty
thinking perpetuated throughout history. It also allows him to recognize the
socially rooted psychical foundations of its power: condemned on account of
its narcotising character, religion is nonetheless apostrophised as the ‘sigh’ of
the socially ‘oppressed creature’.
It is not without reason that Freud, who is just as interested and no less
atheistic in exploring the psychically founded need for religious belief, also
brings to bear the narcotic metaphor in his characterization of religion. He
speaks of the ‘bittersweet poison’ that is infused into the human being from
childhood onward, and he is well aware of the effects of such ‘sweet’ cultural
intoxication. And yet he insists that the human being can do without the
consolation of ‘religious illusion’, although it is said that he would hardly
be able to endure the hardness of life, the cruelty of reality without it. Freud
considers religion to be an illusion, albeit an illusion that, as a civilisational
neurosis, has had a deep impact on human history. Its power manifests itself
phylogenetically in the compulsively perpetuated cultural process of an
archaic reanimation of an Urvater (primal father) murdered by the sons of a
primordial horde. Simultaneously, this collective cultural pattern is continually
fed anew by the ontogenetic (in other words individually lived) experience of
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
67
Moshe Zuckermann
the Oedipus complex. Correspondingly, one should think of the individual

in a society emancipated from religion, in which he would “no longer be the
object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence”, as a child “who
has left the parental house where it was so warm and comfortable”. Now,
Freud maintains, humanity has reached the point at which this infantilism
must finally be overcome. “Men cannot remain children for ever; they must
in the end go out into ‘hostile life’.” It is a matter of ‘education to reality’.9
This is admittedly easier said than done, as one must conclude from Freud’s
own work. That the human being cannot remain ‘eternally a child’ does not
mean that he does not, as Freud clearly states, remain so on certain levels.
It has quite a bit to do with the avoidance of ‘hostile life’ (which is highly
understandable when one considers, from the perspective of civilisational
history, what mere survival has demanded from the human being). It also results
from the ontological dilemma that Freud sees at the root of the hostility of
life, namely the conflict, hardly ever overcome, between the pleasure principle
and the reality principle, or between the inborn drive to seek pleasure and
the pleasure-inhibiting or -denying reality of life. Where Schopenhauer had
conceived more generally (and with metaphysical overtones) of a Will, which
for him proved to be the cause of human misery in the world (and which caused
him to develop a profoundly pessimistic philosophy of civilisation),10 Freud
identified a biological predisposition of the human being, from which there can
be no escape. All the same, this predisposition must be mastered: civilisation
is only possible at the cost of the anguish experienced in the renunciation of
instinctual drives. The indissoluble link between discipline, self-discipline and
civilisation should certainly be seen as a prestabilised determining framework
of human existence. Its coordinates are modifiable within the development
of civilisation, but as a transhistorical fundamental structure it can never be
completely overcome. Hence the discontent of civilisation remains – as it was
for Schopenhauer – the historical destiny of humanity.
To a great degree, it was this insight that led Freud to the logic of the
metapsychological writings of his later years. Despite all the controversy
surrounding their basic approach, one must take Totem and Taboo, The Future
of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism
seriously, because in them Freud is phylogenetically extrapolating that which
can be considered an essential ontogenetic fundament of his thought. If
one understands the Oedipal conflict as the central axis of Freud’s theory
of individual human development, one cannot ignore the hypothesis that it
9
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 29ff.
10
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Köln: Anaconda, 2009.
68
feeds in Totem and Taboo, namely that of the murder of the primal father at
the hands of his tribe, or more specifically of his sons. This hypothesis returns
in a more specific context in Moses and Monotheism. These are the central
writings in which Freud endeavoured to outline the civilisational genesis of
religion, and thus of monotheism. Without Oedipal conflict as it occurs in
the individual (and the premise of its universality) as an underpinning, Freud
would never have come upon the idea of seeking out the collective equivalent
in religion. The search would make no sense: if the thesis of the murdered
primal father is not to remain a ‘just-so story’ and take its stand as a legitimate
hypothesis that “proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more
and more new regions”,11 then it must be understood in the context of the
Oedipal conflict. While the collective determines the reproduction of the
internalisation of domination within the individual, it is individually also
the core – the transhistorical bond, so to speak – of that which flows into
the collective in the Oedipal internalisation of domination as an unresolved
search for the father. Correspondingly, religion – to put it succinctly in the
terms by which Freud arrived at this insight – should be thought of as a
civilisational neurosis, whose origin rests in a collective context, but only
because in this origin something is established that structurally prestabilises
and perpetuates within the history of civilisation the fundamental need for
religion understood as a search for the father. Thereby it is of great significance
that this fundamental need is understood as being rooted in the psyche itself,
and thus beyond the control of puristic rationality. A critique of religion in
the spirit of the Enlightenment, as one can still identify in Marx, has since
Freud demanded something more: overcoming the unresolved fundamental
needs of the psyche.
Marx’s characterisation of religion in the terms of ideology and Freud’s
interpretation of it as an infantile illusion form a fruitful complementary
relationship, and thus they have undergone a conceptual synthesis of major
relevance for the analysis of modern psychopolitical processes in the theory of
the ‘authoritarian character’ as it has developed in the thought of the Frankfurt
School.12 A coded insight into the essential affinity of the emancipation from
both religious and political authority is already found in Heine: while he
speaks of Robespierre’s ‘rigid epilepsy’ as the eradicator of the French royal
house, he holds Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to be “the sword that slew
11
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition, vol. 18, p.
122.
12
Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The
Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.
69
Moshe Zuckermann
Deism [in Germany]”. Admittedly, Heine also remarks that Kant, through his
differentiation between theoretical and practical reason, “as with a magician’s
wand, revivifies deism, which theoretical reason had killed”.13 Actually, one
must differentiate between the enlightening pathos pervading the thinking of
Marx and Freud and Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, with its association
of reason and religion. The corpse of deism, revivified in Kant’s practical
reason, has lastly fallen prey to the rigorous atheism of Marx and Freud (in
this context one can also count in Nietzsche), and it should be buried with the
greatest possible expedience.
Accordingly, atheistic critiques of religion advance on several fronts.
First and foremost, of course, they rigorously deny the existence of any god.
They hold that religious belief is based on delusion, and with emancipatory
intentions they stand against it, particularly because they have identified
the ideology behind religion’s consciousness-blurring attraction and falsely
consoling function. Here they are not content to make emphatic and
enlightened pronouncements of knowledge and truth: these critiques are
decidedly aimed at the social structures providing the raison d’être of religious
ideology. Their insistence that the human being is no longer to be treated like
a child is based on the recognition of the absolute necessity of unmasking
the instrumentalisation of real human powerlessness and the interests
behind its perpetuation, and of engaging in political practice and social
struggle to overcome any religious colouring of this powerlessness. Atheist
critiques are well aware that they are not acting in an abstract space isolated
from history, and thus they are well aware of the civilisationally stabilising
psychical preformation of the human being with regard to his predilection
toward irrational belief, be it out of a need for consolation, be it as an escape
from the unendurable nature of real life, be it founded in strivings against a
perceived loss of meaning, be it driven by a fear of the human individual’s
own sovereignty and responsibility. The setbacks of a misguided secularisation
– which led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, the abyss of an
enlightened abstinence from all religious belief, the failure of the endeavour
to overcome the ‘heartless world’ and the ‘soul of soulless conditions’ – have
pulled the rug out from under atheism’s feet. Religious fundamentalism has
celebrated a veritable resurrection in all of the world’s religions, infiltrating
the political sphere and nourishing an ideologisation of the increasing social
misery that can be observed throughout the world. Cognisance must be taken
of this pendulum swing of history. There is a need for reflection upon that
13
Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany. Translated by J. Snodgrass. London:
Trübner, 1882, p. 107ff.
70
which has gone awry, whereby the idea of enlightenment and its original drive
toward emancipation must be recaptured. False consolation and promises of
better hopes in the hereafter cannot be allowed to expand in new ideological
garb. Now as ever, God cannot be expected to provide any easy solutions.
The human being must again want to assume the stance of a true subject of
history. In his endeavour to achieve the objectives of his struggle, he must
achieve them without God, but also without the deification of godlessness
or the veneration of new idols. He might feel lonely in this position. But
he has no choice. He must educate himself to reality, if he is to historically
combat and radically overcome the ‘soul of soulless conditions’ and ‘real
suffering’.
The difficulties involved in achieving this end can be appreciated not
only in the fact that the secularisation that has taken place in various world
religions has not been crowned by resounding, to say nothing of conclusive,
success. It has also become readily apparent that the discourse in philosophy
and the social sciences surrounding this problem has in the meantime reached
conclusions that have – against the originally rational and enlightened
terms in which it was cast – established categories profoundly hindering the
emancipatory investigation of religion’s ideological dimension, or even called
it into question entirely. Freud displaced issues that Marx had continued to
anchor in society into the sphere of psychical needs. Hence the bottom was
knocked out of the rationally (and historically) determined impulse toward
overcoming religion. If psychical needs can essentially be explained in terms
of society, but for their part exert an effect on the form of society, one finds
oneself, as it were, in the ever-revolving cycle of civilisation, from which there
is no convenient exit. There are two factors that must be kept in mind: First,
the function once served by traditional belief in God as a substitute for the
father has been delegated culturally into areas of collective existence that seem
to have been relieved of their original religious impulse. It is primarily the
Frankfurt School’s theory of the authoritarian personality that has been able to
analyse the impact of socially formed psychical needs, which through religion
are closely related to the civilisationally reproduced search for the father, in
their interaction with the formation of ideologies and of historical-political
constellations. Thus one should reflect not only upon social structures in
which religion directly exerts repressive and reactionary influences, but also
upon new phenomena of secular modernity, in which impulses that were once
religious have appeared in new forms of political ideology of a regressive nature,
whereby their religious origins as such can no longer be easily recognised.
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Moshe Zuckermann
Secondly, one should also bear in mind the degree to which substitutes for
religion – as a result of the extreme deficiencies of secularisation’s diversion
into a search for new authorities – have in the meantime taken up residence as
the authoritarian forms of the modern culture industry, where unrecognised
as such they can pursue their malfeasant aims.
The establishment of new agencies of authority is readily apparent: in
ever-increasing devotion to a media culture flooding into every aspect of
life, complete with its characteristic manifestations in the star cult and the
fan mentality; in the voyeuristic spectacle of the talk show, where freaks and
lowlifes exhibit their wretched misery, eliciting the public’s cheers and jeers
for their violent outbreaks of communicational inadequacy, while within the
throng gawking at these modern gladiators each individual tacitly projects his
own life onto the humiliation occurring before his eyes; in the readiness, in
the meantime a mechanical reflex, to submit to every new and professionally
staged seduction to consume. Be it art or entertainment, political occurrence
or natural disaster, be it murder or starvation, the lotto draw or the resignation
of a minister: everything degenerates to a commodity within the presentation,
perception and exploitation structure of the market. Death in Africa has a
prime-time value that can be translated directly into an economic quantity;
it is consumed as an item whose efficacy is measured against the subsequent
item, against the next sensation, against the viewer quotas of the following
sitcom. There is a profoundly authoritarian aspect to the fetishised adulation
of a complete virtualisation of life, which is not necessarily steered from
‘above’ but is all the same prepared ‘behind the scenes’. Even TV weathermen
and -women are fuel for the star cult. The family, states Adorno, follows “the
habits of its own social, ethnic and religious group”,14 and here one can well
say that fundamentally nothing has changed. Nonetheless, a worthy topic of
investigation would be the degree to which these ‘habits’ are determined by the
models proffered by family sitcoms, and thus the ways in which the ‘economic
factors’ of the culturally industrialised media world influence the “behavior
of parents toward their children”. The question of whether this promotes
fascism in the conventional sense cannot be answered here. An answer will
only become apparent in the case that objective historical conditions for its re-
emergence have developed. Inasmuch as authoritarian personality structures
continue to be considered the ‘human foundation’ of fascism, one can assume
that traditional authoritarianism has become out-dated in modern societies,
and thus that the danger of a return of fascism as perceived by Adorno and
14
eodor W. Adorno, ‘Resüme über Kulturindustrie’, in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica.
Th
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 60ff.
72
Fromm has been alleviated. And yet one can pose the further, and all the more
pressing question of whether this authoritarianism has not found its (un)
worthy successor in the immanent logic and structure of the culture industry.
Translation: Christopher Barber
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Julia Kristeva
Brief Historical Overview

When approaching the immense continent of religious experience from a
psychoanalytical point of view, my thoughts are directed to Sigmund Freud,
to his genius that, from Totem and Taboo (1912) and Moses and Monotheism
(1930) – to only cite these two – opened up a new way of thinking religious
experience. By thinking about it, I mean: by living through it. I would like to
address, here, the paternal function of Moses. Freud explored this fundamental
axis of monotheism while attentively studying neurosis and psychosis, relying
heavily on its tragic dramatisation by Sophocles, and the anthropology of
the late 19th and early 20th century. He followed this line of thought to the
discovery of how the Oedipus complex and the consequences of the incest
taboo function to bring about the emergence of the capacity for psychic
representation, access to language and the development of thought as well as
the cathexis of our fantasies in diverse religious constructions.
An essential step in the post-Freudian approach to religion was taken by
the structuralist inspired work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan.
Observing the universality of the incest taboo,1 Lacan devised his conception
of the ‘symbolic’ as the realm of the Law, which regulates desire in the Oedipal
complex. This complex is understood as deriving from a primary or symbolic
interdiction against incest, unrelated to any biological factors necessitating
such a taboo. ‘Transcending’, in a sense, human lineage, the ‘symbolic’
coincides with the incest taboo, and would be the substratum or at least the
condition, a condition, of the ‘divine’. Moreover, the ‘symbolic’ has come to
be defined as encoded by linguistic structures themselves (“God is language,”
and “God is the Unconscious”, or even, “God is unconscious”). Consequently,
‘the symbolic’, frames the relationships of kinship, if and only if “the symbolic
position” of the Father is maintained as an anthropological, paradigmatic
and unconscious constant whatever the historical variants of paternal roles
throughout history may be. Here it is legitimate to ask a question: would the
‘symbolic’ be a “theological drive” which seeps into psychoanalysis? Is it the
1
“ The Rule par excellence, the only universal one which guarantees the domination of culture
over nature”, C. Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Problem of Incest’ in The Elementary Structures of Kinship,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 28.
Julia Kristeva
“symbolic position” being understood as an idealisation of the norm or the

Law as an insurmountable authority? Even as the transcendental function of
the speaking being – because of the very fact that he speaks and regulates his
kinship? When structuralist psychoanalysis affirms that the symbolic “is not
in man but elsewhere”, is this not a way of showing God the door out? Lacan
responded that there “is no Other of the Other”: we can interpret this statement
as meaning that no exterior mandate can guarantee the foundations of the
symbolic order, which is nothing more than a chain of linguistic, parental,
interpretive, and cultural signs in which the speaking being is caught: “we are
so far inside that we can not get out of it”.
A third post-structuralist and feminist-inspired movement examines
the role of the “second sex” in the attempt to deconstruct the monotheist,
paternal onto-theology. Here, we should highlight and discuss what this
feminist movement has established by examining the work of students and
researchers in divinity schools and colleagues in gender studies, notably in
American universities. And because the maternal vocation is a key figure of the
sacred, on the border of biology and meaning, and because secularisation is
the only civilisation that lacks a discourse on motherhood, it is up to modern
psychoanalysis to further current research on the early mother-child bond, the
understanding of which is key to ensuring the survival of our species.
To further simplify this perfunctory overview of several essential points of
the interface between psychoanalysis and religion, I shall add that listening to
the Freudian unconscious allows us to think about transcendence (and I don’t
forget Husserl’s transcendental ego with its phenomenological consequences)
as immanent to the speaking-being. It is like an irreducible alterity that inhabits
us and which modulates the power struggles of the bonds of desire in the
Oedipal triangle, between the speaking being and his maternal and paternal
imagos. There exists an irreducible alterity that is universal and dual (father/
mother, man/woman) but no less plural because it conjugates in the singular
for each of us: an ardent pole of singular desires, this otherness makes me
speak, think, love, hate. Religions celebrate it as a limit or figure of the sacred:
the Other-than-man, which manifests itself in the plurality of polytheist Gods
while monotheism insists on the unicity and singularity of this universal and
irreducible alterity coextensive to the unicity of the speaking being. Do you
call this God? Let’s talk about it.
What exactly is the Copernican discovery of psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis
discovered that “there is the Other”; the other that makes me speak – that I
invest in and from whom I separate – by love – and – hate. Traces of these
immemorial experiences are inscribed in me and that I do not control, traces
76
of “love-hate”, a strangeness in me which alters and transcends me, and which

we will call the unconscious. It invites me to consider each person in his/her
irreducible alterity: “every I is an Other”.
This immanentist conception of transcendence which inscribes the Other
in Me has already been seen in Christian theology and in Christian inspired
philosophy. But more radically than other branches of monotheism, Judaism
was constituted as the witness of this alterity that is intrinsic to the speaking
being. A neurologist friend recently reminded me of a story my grandmother
used to like to tell of a gentile who asks a rabbi to teach him the Talmud. The
rabbi begins with the story of two Jews who, walking on a rooftop, fall down
the chimney. One comes out all black, the other all white. The rabbi asks
which man will go and wash himself. You know how the rest of the story goes.
The Rabbi teaches the Gentile how to think from the other’s point of view.
With a rare obstinacy, the Jewish people shows – in regard to world history
– that the Other exists; by devoting itself to a Yahweh who sets it apart from
others, and simply by existing politically as the “chosen people”, it is therefore
Other, (and non-proselytising). The assertion of the existence of the Other
can take the shape of a state – the State of Israel – which seems to me a
necessity that is more than metaphysical today. It becomes an anthropological
necessity if it incites all others in the globalized world to try to think from the
point of view of the other.
Having given this sweeping overview of the interface between psychoanalysis
and religion, and in regard to the immense continent we are opening up, I’ll
address six themes:
1. A psychoanalytic approach to believing and knowing.
2. The Bible: taboo versus sacrifice or how to construct the subject in
man.
3. The beaten son and/or father of Christianity: from love to death,
until sublimation.
4. Islam or how to understand the problem of murder.
5. Secularization and cultural diversity: ruptures and questioning.
6. The Threads of Freedom.
1) A psychoanalytic approach to believing and knowing

Let us take psalm 116:10: “He’ emanti ki adaber...” “My trust does not fail
even when I say, ‘I am completely wretched.’ In my terror I said, ‘No human
being can be relied on.’” Saint Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians
4:13, said echoing Psalm 116, “Epistevsa dio elalisa” (Greek translation),
“Credidi, propter locutus sum” (in Latin), “I believed and therefore I have
77
Julia Kristeva
spoken”, in English. Because, a few lines before this statement, the psalmist
evokes God’s merciful ear (“I love the Lord because he hath heard my
voice and my supplications…”), the loving Other, and, by collecting the
many interpretations of the Hebrew word ‘ki’ (‘and’, ‘because’, ‘despite’), I
understand the verse as follows: “Because You speak to me and listen to me, I
believe and I speak, despite the unnamable.”
The context of the psalm is more explicit: it associates the faith (‘emuna’
in which we hear the root ‘amen’, faith or belief ) that charges the enunciation
with specific, indifferent and, even, deceptive meanings. Faith holds the key
to the act of speech itself, even that of complaint (“I’m unhappy”, “people lie
to me”, etc.). Because I believe, I speak; I wouldn’t speak if I didn’t believe;
to believe what I say and to persist in saying it grows out of the capacity to
believe in the Other and not from the inevitably disappointing existential
experience. But what is this ‘belief ’?
The Latin credo comes from the Sanskrit ‘kredh/sraddhà-’ which denotes an
act of ‘confidence’ in a God, involving restitution in the form of a divine favour
accorded to the faithful; it is from this root that the financial term ‘credit’ was
derived; I set down a good and await my pay. The psychoanalytical experience
of the child and the adult attests to this crucial moment of development where
the infans projects himself onto an outsider with whom he identifies: the
loving father. Primary identification with the father of individual prehistory,2
dawn of the symbolic outsider who replaces the fascination and the horror of
the dual interdependence of the mother-and-child, this confident recognition
offered by the father-who-loves-the-mother and is loved by her and that I, in
turn, devote to him, changes my stammering – into linguistic signs, whose
value he determines.
Signs of objects, but mostly signs of my jubilations and my fears, of my early
years of life, spoken words transform my angst into “a believing expectation”:
Gläubige Erwartung, wrote Freud.3 Loving paternal listening gives meaning to
what would otherwise be an inexpressible trauma, a nameless excess of pleasure
and pain. But it is not I who construct this primary identification, nor is it
the loving father who imposes it on me. The primary identification is “direct
and immediate”, like lightning or a hallucination. It is through the father-
loving mother’s sensitivity and discourse – a mother to whom I still belong
and remain inseparable – that this ‘unification’ of me-in-another-who-is-an-
outsider imprints itself in me and structures me. Before Laius (the Oedipal
father), the imaginary father, by recognising me and loving me through the
2
Cf. The Ego and the Id. 1923.
3
‘Traitement psychique’, in Résultats,idées, problèmes,I, Paris: PUF, p.8.
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mother lets me know that I am not her but other, and makes me believe that
I can ‘believe’. Freud uses the word ‘cathexis’ (Besetzung). To believe and/or to
cathect, not in him as the ‘object’ of need or desire, but in his representation
of me and in his words – in the representation that I make of him and in my
words. “I believed and therefore I spoke”.
On this foundation alone, my need to believe, thus satisfied and offering
me optimal conditions for language acquisition, can be accompanied by
another capacity that is both corrosive and liberating: the desire to know.
Carried by this faith that lets me hear a loving/loved outsider, I burst into
questions.
Who hasn’t witnessed the pleasurable trance of a child asking questions?
Still straddling the border between the flesh of the world and the kingdom of
language, the child knows with a hallucinatory knowledge that all identity –
object, person, himself, the adult’s response – is a constructible-deconstructible
chimera. Lacan thought that the motto for psychoanalysis should be ‘Scilicet’:
“you can know”. He forgot to mention that “you can know” if and only if
you believe you know. From knowing to believing, and vice-versa, such is the
eternal turnstile of speakbeing (parlêtre).
The Ego, writes Freud in The Ego and the Id, is made up of verbal traces
and perceptions: this co-presence of perception and verbalisation establishes
itself henceforth as a ‘region’, a ‘district’ at the border between the Id and the
consciential Superego and, by this very fact, as the object par excellence of the
cure.
Psychoanalysis’ experience of this frontier, neither purely interior nor simply
exterior, is meant to transform inexpressible mnesic traces of the “thing alone”
(das Ding), of more or less traumatic excitation, into perception/verbalisation
on the condition that transference – ultimately Oedipal – occurs.
Freud, who was the least religious man of his century, did not hesitate
to postulate, by commenting on the destiny of paternity, “a high design for
humans”: “Das höhere Wesen in Menschen”. Far from betraying some idealistic
regression, this theorisation indicates logics of an immanentisation of
transcendence, which the founder of psychoanalysis discovered by and in the
process of transference within the “speaking cure” he invented.
The analysis makes new ties – cathexes – possible. I will say that the tie
– cathexis – the cure enables the analysand to establish is none other than
the tie of the investment – cathexis – of the symbolisation process itself.
For the ‘object’, whichever it may be (sexual partner or friend, professional
role, symbolic idea, etc.), and however optimal it may seem, cannot exist in
the long run unless the speaking-analysand subject is capable of infinitely
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constructing-deconstructing its meaning: from the need to believe to the

desire to know, and vice versa.
And I insist firmly on this fact: it is this displacement of the speaking
subject with respect to itself, this infinitesimal revolution, constitutive of our
practice, which disturbs the world. My fear is that psychoanalysts are not
clever enough in the art of selling this exceptional singularity that consists
in “speaking in psychoanalysis”: I think that I can know (Je pense que je peux
savoir). And yet this experience seems to me to be the only one that can save
us - not from a ‘culture’ that psychoanalysis has revealed to be dominated by
the death instinct – but by diverting this death drive – deferring it, rerouting
it, knowing its causes. The experience is infinite and questions the very
conditions of speaking, including the need to believe.
2) The Bible: Interdiction Versus Sacrifice, or How to Construct the Subject in

If it is true that biblical election constructed the subject in man, as suggested
by Cardinal Lustiger, a psychoanalytical reading of the Bible will find therein
a veritable “strategy of identity”. The distinction pure/impure, tôhar/tâmê,
appears in the biblical episode of the holocaust that Noah offers to God
after the deluge. The opposition, though it is not absolute, inscribes itself in
the fundamental concern of the biblical text to separate, to constitute strict
identities without any mixing. The theological corpus is based on this gap
between man and God. Yet this fundamental difference, in fact, subsumes
others: life and death, vegetal and animal, flesh and blood, healthy and sick,
alterity and incest.
Biblical impurity is straight off linked to the religious cult because the
impure is excluded from the Temple, it concerns things (food, menstrual
blood, leprosy, gonorrhea etc.) not immediately related to the sacred place.
It is, therefore, secondarily, by metaphor, that impurity concerns the temple,
just as, consequently, that which is excluded from it, in particular idolatry.
The space and the law of One do not exist without a series of separations:
oral, corporal or even more generally material and, in the last instance, relative
to the fusion with the mother. The pure/impure scheme bears witness to
Judaism’s battle against paganism and its maternal cultures, a struggle essential
to its constitution. In our personal lives, this scheme points back to the force
of the struggle that each of us must lead to separate from the mother and
become a speaking subject and/or a subject of the law.
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By its emphasis on taboo, the Bible protects itself from sacrificial

intervention or at least subordinates sacrifice to taboo. Biblical abomination
would then be an attempt to halt murder. By upholding abomination, Judaism
distinguishes itself from sacrificial religions. With biblical abomination, does
religion not clearly aim to surpass itself?
Patiently, meticulously, obsessive defences – which Freud underlines in
Jewish religious rituals – against the desire to kill transform the death drive
into an ideal self, the taboo into ethics. What initially appeared to us as a
foundational opposition between man and God (and the following sequence
of separation: vegetal/animal, flesh/blood) consequent to the initial contract
“Thou shall not kill” becomes an entire system of logical oppositions. Different
from the holocaust, this system of abomination presupposes it, and guarantees
ethical efficiency. Semantically dominated, at least initially, by the life/death
dichotomy, it eventually becomes a code of differences and similarities in
relation to the Holocaust, and finally replaces it.
Contrary to certain structuralist psychoanalytical schools who see the
symbolic Law as an absolute, the prophetic insistence on abomination as a
permanent theme in the very ‘election’, signals that the strategy of identity
is never gained once and for all. And that if the symbolic paternal order in
which the identity of the speaking being is constituted is certainly absolute
and universal, but it is nevertheless singularly contingent, and must ceaselessly
be won over by he who is elected by it.
Our tendency is to hastily reduce Freud to Future of an Illusion, and we’re
not exactly wrong to do so, for it is always a question of aiming for the abuses
of religious obscurantism when it stirs up conflicts around identity. But we
forget that not only is illusion indispensible to psychic life (as attested to by
the role of fantasy in the psychoanalytical process), it even constitutes it (let’s
think of the ‘transitional’ role according to Winnicott). We forget the extent
to which imaginary constructions (myths, fables, narratives, religious stories,
rites and all the arts) constitute for Freud the ‘precursors’ in his quest for logics
intrinsic to the life of the “psychic apparatus”.
The logic of biblical abomination and its psychoanalytical elucidation
seem to me to constitute a radical means of sounding out the emergence of
the subject in man, on condition that it puts into action, into place and into
metaphor-metonymy the series of separations that articulates singular identity
and/or symbolic election, such as it operates by the agency of the Other as
Creator.
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3) The Beaten Son/Father of Christianity: From Love to Death to Sublimation

Although paternal connotations of the divine Creator in the Bible abound, it
is Christianity that actively and perseveringly exploits the paternal axis of the
symbolic order, and it does so specifically through the complex relationship
between Jesus – the Man-God Son of God and God the Father Himself.
Without claiming to offer an exhaustive overview of this complex topology, I
would like to propose a possible interpretation alongside a rereading of Totem
and Taboo (1912) and ‘A Child is Beaten’ (1919) by Freud, yet also informed
by my clinical observation of the “desire for the father”, of sado-masochism
and of its sublimation.
Remember that for Freud the murder of the father is a foundational act, a
historical reality in human civilisation. In a similar way, for Christians, Christ
is a historical character and the murder they commemorate is a real one. I am
only interested in the psychic reality, which generates fantasies in the subject
who believes in such events, whether or not they actually occurred.
What would happen if Jesus were not only a child or a beaten brother,
but a beaten father – beaten to death? By combining the son and the father,
this scenario has the advantage of appeasing both the incestuous guilt that
weighs on the desire for the Other (Sovereign Father) and of encouraging
virile identification (even in the case of girls and women) with this tortured
man: but only under the cover of masochism promoted, even recommended
by this double movement.
The path is thus paved in the unconscious for the Oedipal father, who is
usually the agent of the Law and Prohibition, to be now able to fuse with the
subject of the guilty amorous passion that ‘I’ am, as a girl loved by this same
father. The superman father is humanised, even feminised by the suffering
he undergoes; and because of this he is at once my ideal love object and my
double, an ego-ideal. A complicit ‘us’ is formed by and in the father’s passion.
From here on we shall share love, guilt and punishment together.
It follows that, for the unconscious, these father/daughter reunions
suspend the incest taboo in and by the suffering of the two punished lovers,
in such a way that this suffering will necessarily be experienced as a marriage.
The suffering of the father beaten to death – sexualised under the “whip of
faith”, this love without pity (to paraphrase Baudelaire: “sous le fouet du plaisir,
ce bourreau sans merci”) is the paradise of masochism, but also its only way
out: sublimation.
By placing the fantasy of the father beaten to death at the summit of the
evangelical narrative, so that it calls out for our identification, Christianity
does not content itself with reinforcing prohibition of desires; paradoxically it
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displaces them and paves the way to work through them, to sublimate them.
However, being beaten as this son-father is beaten, the subject’s unconscious
releases his desires from guilt’s hold, and enables them to take form in what
must be called sovereign, divine suffering. This is no longer the suffering
of guilt that is the suffering resulting from transgression of Law, but rather
suffering as the sole way leading to the union with this ideal that is the Father.
A new kind of suffering: Christic or Christian which is not the flip side of the
Law but a suspension of Law and guilt to the benefit of jouissance in idealised
suffering. A jouissance in calling out, in longing, in the essential failure of
satisfying the desire for the father: the suffering-jouissance in the ambivalence
of the longing for the father, of the reorientation of desire towards the father
(remember the Latin ‘versus’ from which the French vers le père and hence
père-vers). I do not say that the father beaten to death does not make suffering
commonplace or banal, nor does he authorise incest but, by the glory and
grace of our suffering-together, of our com-passion, he adjusts and justifies
suffering. Moreover, the adoration of the beaten father leads to another
otherwise fundamental consequence: with and beyond the surreptitiously
accepted incestuous link with the father, it is symbolic activity itself that I am
encouraged to sexualise through paternal passion.
The activity of representing-speaking-thinking, attributed to the father in
patrilineal societies and which connects me to him, now becomes the privileged
realm of sadomasochistic pleasure, the ‘kingdom’ indeed, where suffering
opens out, justifies and appeases itself. Along with Freud, we call sublimation
this displacement of pleasure starting with the body and sexual organs and
culminating in representation. Perversion and sublimation are the flip sides of
this flexibility, if not of this fabulous suspension of the incest taboo induced
by the beaten-to-death father. Through this fantasy, Christianity maintains
the inaccessible ideal, on the one hand, and on the other, it also resexualises
the ideal father-son, whose happy suffering links me to his passion. By the
Eucharist, first, but also by the intense activity of aesthetic representation.
4) Islam, or How to Reflect upon the Problem of Murder

What is the relationship between the divine and the paternal function in
Islam? Numerous specialists point to the ‘resemblances’ between Allah and
Aristotle’s God, “that final unmoved mover, at the periphery of the universe”
(Phys. VIII, 10), who would perhaps even be a cause of the world, distanced
from the world. This God would be this ‘source’ of Islamic radicalism, pushing
believers to the point of mechanical obedience and terror!
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The pivotal figure of this paternity at once juridical and loving is none
other than the biblical Abraham who spares Isaac: for his obedience to the
divine commandment moves God Himself to the point of making him
suspend, with the sacrificial judgment of the son, the passion between men,
the ‘Oedipal’ desire (Freud would say) to death. In Islam, the fundamental
event presents itself differently. In Moses and Monotheism Freud points out
that in Islam there would be a “recuperation (Wiedergewinnung) of the sole
and great original Father”, (Urvater) but that it would “lack the development
that produced, in the case of Judaism, the murder perpetrated against the
founder of the religion”, which Christianity, on the contrary, would be on the
point of admitting.
Let us add to this the fact that in Islam uncertainty persists around the
identity of the son to be sacrificed or spared: is he the illegitimate Ishmael of
Agar or Sarah’s legitimate Isaac? Furthermore: how do we interpret the fact
that in the Koran Abraham dreams of the sacrifice (rather than receiving the
injunction from God Himself ): is this dream an unconscious desire to possess
the son, in all senses of the term, to take pleasure in him and to abolish him?
Or is it a veritable avoidance of immolation and murder? “Only a dream?”
These ‘details’ structure the subject of the three monotheist religions
differently, both in its relationship to the Law and to the bonds between
men, and in the sadomasochistic pleasure experienced in the murder of the
other, by the killing of the child in oneself, and even by one’s own death.
For Freud, Islam remains foreign to the development of this love-hate of
and for the father experienced in Christianity. This is due less to a supposed
loyalty to Aristotle than to a split from Jewish and Christian monotheisms,
by distancing its conception of the Divine from all ideas of paternity as well
as from numerous crucial points of the Bible and the Gospels that relate to
the loving bond between the Creator and His creations and to the autonomy
of the believer’s mind: thus, for example, the absence of original sin in Islam
(guilty for having listened to Satan, Adam and Eve are chased out of paradise,
but their posterity does not bear the burden of their fault) or the sacralisation
of the Koran, revealed to Mohammed alone and, therefore, the belief that the
revelation was not in part received from the Jewish-and-Christian tradition,
but deformed by them.
Where do we situate the major difference that makes difficult and even
prevents a possible meeting with Islam? By identifying this difference with
an aggravated ‘Aristotleism’, we fail to question the specific character that
constitutes, to my mind, the Muslim’s relationship to divine authority – a tie
likened to a juridical pact – which departs from the bond to a paternal Creator
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whose function is to elect (in Judaism), or to love (in Christianity). Of course,

Sufism and notably Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), brought subtle developments to
the “big sacrifice”, interpreted in the tradition as a sacrifice of the self, the
‘nafs’ or psyche in the face of nothingness. It is nevertheless a concern that
certain particularities of Islam which I have pointed out very schematically
make improbable, even impossible, an Islamic theology or even a ‘discussion’
between its Sunni and Shiite branches, and certainly any open dialog with the
two other monotheisms.
There is all the more reason, therefore, not to give in to the terrorizing,
even terrorists drifts latent and internal to Islamic obedience, but to try to
emphasise the most open currents of thought, as well as anthropological and
sociological, even psychoanalytical research devoted to Islam today, in order
to open the dialogue.
For, although Islam seems today far from a possible interpretive return
to its history and its resemblances-differences in relation to its monotheist
predecessors, the current political and economic reasons that seem to explain
this impossibility, only hide the structural difficulties that constitute it.
For this reason, it invites those who read religion as an analysable given –
anthropologists, sociologists, and psychoanalysts – with or without specialists
of religion, to attempt approaches likely to create bridges beyond the
differences anthropologically identified and interpreted.
Whatever it may be, the manner in which Islam has become stuck in
the fundamentalist mire raises a more general question concerning homo
religiosis within his very structure. Homo religiosis would only know how to
transcend the love-hate that overwhelms him by stepping aside: by taking
himself as the object of thought; by developing his theology, or better, the
infinite interpretations of his need to believe, and the multiple variations of
his needs to believe. Is this not what Freud accomplishes when he claims that
it is possible to speak one’s love of the other, infinitely? Would psychoanalysis
be a variation of theology? It’s ultimate variation?
5) Secularisation and Cultural Diversity: Ruptures and Questioning

As individuals who have been trained and versed in the secular tradition,
the issue of stigmatising secularisation is one we must address. We must
remember that, by stigmatising secularisation, Arendt attacked the reduction
of human difference to the generality of “zoon politikon” becoming the generic
‘Man’ in a reductive understanding of the “rights of man”. Though Arendt did
not reject the fact that a certain atheism may have contributed to the end of
ethics, she maintained that the totalitarian phenomenon is unique. She also
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took great care to differentiate her philosophical questioning from whatever

religious position it may be, by connecting the political use of the ‘divine’ to
the pernicious nihilism she combats:
“Those who conclude that because of the terrible events of our time we
should turn back to religion for political reasons seem to me to show as
little faith in God as their opponents.”
The last, but not the least enigma which the third millennium and its galloping
globalisation confront us with concerns the mutations of the status of the
singular subject itself, which, whatever its forms, was constituted in the wake
of the Greek-Jewish-Christian tradition. The disruption of Oedipal structures
in the recomposed family – due to the weakening of paternal authority, the
assertion of the psychic bisexuality of the two sexes and assisted reproduction –
do not really abolish, to my mind, the universality of anthropological constants
such as were discovered and set down by monotheist religions, and which
psychoanalytical experiences since Freud have been trying to elucidate. These
disruptions, however, oblige us to confront, with a combination of firmness
and tolerance both the ethical codes needed for the subject’s autonomy of
thought which were crystallised in the stride of this tradition and through its
ruptures; and their transgressive, rebellious, queer or impure contingencies.
A new fact: modern secularisation and its new techniques asserts these
transgressions not as perversions (of Oedipus, the Law, the symbolic order)
but as invitations to modernity to invent new kinships, new families, new
legalities.
On the other hand, people whose psychic life has been formed by different
religious contexts – Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, animism,
etc. – and who do not seem to share the same logic of libertarian singularity,
yet due to globalisation find themselves attracted to certain ideas uncovered
and continually developed by psychoanalysis, all these phenomena push us
strongly to rethink these discoveries (hence, the triadic trials of Oedipus for
example, among others). In a context where religions shy away from rather
than welcome these challenges, it is up to psychoanalysis to interpret these
differences – beyond the clash of religions. And to assure their respect as well
as the defence and the illustration of this model of individuation and human
freedom of which our therapeutic experience reveals the fecund complexity
for individual and collective fulfilment. This is the heritage this tradition has
handed down to us, and of which psychoanalysis is the rebellious child who
knows how to pay his debts.
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I recently presided at an International Standing Forum on Religion,

organised by the Psychology Department of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and the Israeli Psychoanalytic Association, an interdisciplinary
institution that aims to approach religious phenomena from a secular
perspective. Like, perhaps, some of you, I have visited Jerusalem’s Biblical
quarters, so intensely charged with memory. While wandering through these
streets, I saw the Wailing Wall and realised that it is not the vestige of a bygone
time, nor is it a memorial that preserves us from possible future Shoahs,
though it is that, too. These rocks, blanched by years that appease a tormented
earth, the mineral predestination of the history of Israel; the notes slipped
into the cracks, confiding to the rock, sorrows turned into hope through the
written word; the women who walk away backward as if their bodies could
not “be parted from it” – parted from hope, salvation, eternity… This wall
and its rites trace a scar visible from heaven, which situates each of the globe’s
inhabitants between wound and rebirth, collapse and survival. In this sense,
the Wall is an anthropological truth, which confers to those who revere or
share it, a persistent dynamic energy.
Similarly, I felt that, with the Mount of Olives, the spasmodic density of
Jerusalem reveals itself in its very contraction. David and Absalom, Salomon…
Bethany, the Ascension… The curve of the hill unites the breast of Mary and
the shape of the Pietà, while the torture of the Son is appeased in the faded
green of the olive trees, the branches of which stretch out over the graves
below.
At the birth of my son, a name imposed itself, sovereign and vulnerable:
David. According to the tradition, the letter ‘d’ signifies ‘poor’: the king can
only be he who doubly recognises himself as poor! For, the royal victor over
Goliath was a mere shepherd who played the harp. And his ancestor, Ruth
the Moabite, both excluded and foreign, made her sovereignty curious and
hospitable, hungry for others and for herself as Other.
While Bagdad, with its Sumerian memory and its Muslim present is ablaze
in daily explosions, while in the shadows of Taliban drug lords working the
poppy crop, women in burkas set themselves on fire out of desperation. I
return to the meaning of Akeda as explained to me by the Chief Rabbi of Great
Britain. According to him, Akeda goes beyond any “narrow sense of identity”
and opens the path to “dignity in difference”. The Covenant would be a “bond
of trust” which manifests the “tender concern of God” since it considers that
“a bond does not exclude other bonds” and that, consequently, the traditional
enemies of Israel, Egypt and Assyria can be “elected together with Israel”. The
Covenant would not be unique but… double? Triple? Infinite?
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Greek-Jewish-Christian civilisation alone continues on from rupture to

rupture, while breaking with “the threat of tradition” (according to Tocqueville
and Hannah Arendt). Today we know that this “broken course” giving rise to
extravagant freedoms of which the most precious is the freedom to think –
this “broken course” also presents a major risk if we content ourselves with
pointing to the abuses of obscurantism, and forget to probe and appreciate the
benefits of this ‘course’. God is not necessary, in fact, but the need to believe –
both a carrier net and a strangling knot – is, to my understanding, both a pre-
religious and pre-political anthropological necessity. I have discovered that
the illusion of eternal life can attenuate a fear of death and turn a Carmelite
named Saint Teresa of Avila into an ecstatic writer who analysed herself:
“Look for yourself in me”, the Eternal Other was to have said to her; then
she transforms herself into a “business woman” who shook up the politics of
the Church. Present and past history teach me that the promise of absolute
love lavished by an Ideal God the Father soothes the sadomasochistic rivalries
of brothers… when it doesn’t sharpen them to death. And I question myself.
Because secularisation alone was able to “cut the course of tradition”, we can
finally reflect on all traditions, without ecumenism, by putting them into
perspective and hearing how they resonate.
6) The Threads of Foundation

Some theorists have brought our attention to a double Jewish modernity: a
normative modernity (which would begin with Herman Cohen’s Religion of
Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) and with Franz Rozenzweig’s The
Star of Redemption (1921), to develop in the 50s with the rebirth of Jewish
thought in France, notably that of Levinas); and a critical modernity with
which we associate the names of Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt.4
Normative modernity stands in opposition to historical positivism
by way of how it deciphers modern significations in the tradition’s texts.
Hermeneutical, it integrates the subjectivity of the interpreter and (in the
wake of Heidegger proclaiming that the “hermeneutic circle” belongs to “the
very structure of meaning”) actualises the meaning implied in the ancient
texts. The ancient sources of the Jewish tradition thus become quotes endowed
with an ‘aura’ (‘transcendence’) that, for the modern authors, confers upon it
the authority which the ancient sources previously held; but they also possess
an argumentative strength comparable to philosophical reasoning.
4
f. S. Mosès, ‘Have The Threads of Tradition Been Cut? On Two Forms of Religious Moder-
C
nity’, La Revue des deux mondes, April 2002, pp. 102-114.
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On the other hand, adepts of critical modernity consider that the Jewish
tradition was reduced to a series of fragments of texts; there remained but
scattered debris in a godless world, defined by Arendt (borrowing Tocqueville’s
formulation) as such:
“The threads of tradition have been cut, and we can no longer reconnect
them (…) what we are left with (…) is a fragmented past which is no
longer capable of inciting us to make value judgments.”5
In regard to Kafka, Benjamin writes: the only thing that would subsist is
“the rumour of true things ”, “a sort of theological gossip where out-dated
and antiquated things are discussed”. Benjamin had shown that even this
fragmented universe, composed of disparate myths, decomposed and
recomposed in extravagant, even absurd ways, allowed for a ‘recycling’ of the
old meanings. Thus, in Kafka’s text ‘The Silence of the Sirens”,6 sirens enchant
the hero, not by their song as in the Homeric tradition, but by their silence.
Yet far from descending into dementia, the “cut threads” of tradition incite
Kafka’s imagination to reinvent Ulysses’ ingenuity, and though this seems
ambivalent, laughable, and absurd, perhaps, in truth, it is merely uncertain
and open to the unknown. On the other hand in Kafka’s Letter to My Father,
by rejecting the empty legitimacy of the de-Judaicised father while inciting the
discovery of another legitimacy, at once abject and enviable, to be reinvented
from the past, Kafka proposes a constant, infinitely open-ended ambiguity.
We can conclude that after the fashion of certain rabbinical exegesis that
doesn’t hesitate to subvert the apparent meaning of texts radically, “hope is
perhaps found” in “the dazzling discovery of the unhoped-for”, “beneath the
debris of a fragmented tradition, allowing us to find in the past the sparks of
hope still buried there”.
Here, we reach a final paradox: the balance between ‘conservatives’
and ‘revolutionaries’, between the “nothingness of Revelation” (where the
Revelation keeps its validity but does not signify anything, according to
Scholem), and “the rumour of true things” or “theological gossip” (according
to Benjamin). Given my analytical and linguistic experience, this paradox
leads me in turn to propose a third possibility, one which is already underway,
in the obscurity that still blankets psychoanalysis and those inspired by it,
outside of the blinding brilliance of the globalised spectacle. What I’m referring
5
Ibid.
6
Cf. S. Mosès, ‘Ulysse chez Kafka, Le silence des sirènes’, in L’Infini, no. 75, Summer 2001,
pp. 80-95.
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to is a new way of interpreting the Jewish and Christian tradition informed

by psychoanalysis, beyond the severed threads, without limiting reflection to
the melancholic contemplation of the “field of ruin” and “fragmented debris”
(Benjamin). The time has come where it will be possible for the prodigal son
and daughter not to return to the father’s house which doesn’t exist in itself, but
to recognise their debt to it and to re-found the house indefinitely, patiently
through recourse to the meticulous erudition of archaeologists and historians,
and to interpretations offered by visionaries capable of actualising it.
In my understanding, this process has always been at work. Modernity
helps us to become aware of this perpetual re-foundation and invites us to
accelerate its pace. Indeed, the mythic past – especially that of revelatory
religions – has never ceased to cut itself off from itself (as the rabbis have
said). And yet critical modernity, with proponents such as Arendt, is right: the
threads were cut here, in the Greek and Biblical tradition in an unheard of way,
by the double caesura, first of Christianity, then followed by Enlightenment,
of which the seeds were sown in the Baroque Age. And I’m happy to stress
this Baroque contribution to the reformation of the tradition, here in Vienna,
in Austria, a major centre of Baroque art. Yet a nostalgic reading could not
exhaust the meaning of this double rupture, both radical and prolific in the
re-actualisations and sudden revivals of creative subjectivity.
To put it differently, it falls upon us at the beginning of the third millennium,
to re-evaluate “the cut threads of tradition” taken up by normative modernity
and critical modernity in relation to the whole of the Greco-Judeo-Christian
tradition and what it bequeathed to Islam, and by including in our approach
this radical mutation in analysing discourse that is implied by the Freudian
discovery of the unconscious. The “cut threads of tradition ” cannot settle for
a desolate critical modernity. One must reinterpret the memory it unravels,
yet differently from the pioneers before and after World War II.
Born of the break with Christianity, which accentuated the infinite
creativity of the speaking subject, activated by the Renaissance, stirred up then
quieted by the Protestant Reformation, the revival of the “hidden dimension”
became accessible to mystics, notably to those of the Baroque Revolution,
known as the Counter-Reformation. The extraordinary vitality of the Baroque
Age was much more than the doubtful and unstable gap between the sign
and signification, bandaged by allegories and ready to tip backward into the
emptiness of meaning, diagnosed by Benjamin’s melancholic reading, so
pertinent in the 19th century, and yet so mute before the likes of St. Teresa
of Avila and of Bernini. The Baroque Age introduced transcendence into the
immanent jouissance of the bodies of both sexes, a prodigious subjectivity-
90
in-love invaded Europe, a jouissance that was continually destructible and

endlessly reborn. Carried by the astounding growth of European humanism,
halted or animated by the coexistence of Jews and Christians – a situation
in which exterminatory cruelty alternates with sublime collaboration, more
often apocalyptic than fertile – this jubilant subjectivity would take forms
both democratic and elitist, mystical and social. It descended into persecution
that led to the expulsion of Jews from Spain, continued on with the Russian
pogroms and culminated in the horrors of the Shoah. Yet it resisted the horrors
as well, and survived them. The complex dynamic of this historical and spiritual
élan does not only lead to a break with tradition. It reinterprets this tradition
and redirects it: not as an “eternal return”, but as a re-foundation in which the
‘broken’ foundation continues to act in subterranean and unconscious ways.
Following the Renaissance and the Baroque Age, this permanent rupture-
and-refoundation was continued and radicalised during the Enlightenment.
Distinguishing itself from the ‘bad’ modernity with its “tabula rasa” which
dominated post-romanticism at the end of the 19th century, another
modernity, reborn, baroque and inhabited by Enlightenment values ceaselessly
works in a more or less occult, even initiatory way, towards recovering lost
time, to transmute and recreate, to find again.
Let us not be afraid of these modernities; they are ours. The Enlightenment
“cut the threads of revelation” but by exclusively pointing to the obscurantist
abuse of the need to believe; from this we have harvested the incommensurable
advantages of freedom that other traditions envy us for and hypocritically
practice. Today we know that the audacity of this break flared up often,
most notably with the French Revolution, and to the point of denying the
anthropological and pre-religious universality of this very need to believe
which invests I in You and vice versa.
I consider the Freudian theory of the unconscious as one of the finest
discoveries of the 20th century; as one of our major keys it is probably the
most able to open the door leading to the repository of memory: beyond the
“cut threads” of which the symptom can be described as the individual or
collective repression of the emergence in Being of the fundamental properties
of language which constitute the subject of enunciation. By remarking that
God has become unconscious, psychoanalysis brings about a transmutation
of values that can help break down desire and thought inhibiting individual
resistance as well as being able to offer an alternative to a collective loss of
meaning. A new modernity stands out against the historic perspective that I’ve
just formulated, it is a more-than-critical-modernity. Let us call it analytical.
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Julia Kristeva
Am I too optimistic in betting that it is possible, not to install an “eternal

return” of tradition as such, but to reinvent/recreate a refoundation? Only an
analytical modernity careful to elucidate its antecedents would be likely to
take on this task.
Is this elitist analytical modernity for a “happy few” in decline in Europe today?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only waiting to bounce back – even if only
in the Old World, by transferring the historical and spiritual élan of Judeo-
Christianity attentive to its modern mutations, onto other emergent and
already developed geopolitical zones. It will discover – has already discovered
– anthropological constants in the ancient texts that secularisation rapidly
repressed and which have re-actualised differently in minds and societies over
the course of history. We have no other choice regarding today’s conservatisms
and fundamentalisms than to link normative modernity with critical
modernity by way of analytical modernity which takes up and questions that
which, from the cut threads, remains a mutating anthropological constant.
Benjamin found in Proust traces of “immaterial analogies” which “brought
back forgotten cosmic experiences”. The need to believe and the pleasure of
knowing seem to me, as I hear it from the couch, like pre-political and pre-
religious needs which must be fulfilled for the child to acquire language and
thought. But doesn’t the psalm, repeated by Saint Paul say just this: “I believed
and therefore I spoke”? The ecstasy of Teresa of Avila explored the psychic
life that in its essence is amorous. “Know yourself in me” is only possible if
I am in love with the other. Only the passionate, sensual, and sublimated
risk, transmutes the fundamentally sadomasochistic burn of desire into this
remoulding, which drives self-transcendence to happen outside of oneself,
into endless works, into active existence: for, the life of the saints themselves
is social and transmittable ad infinitum.
By situating the break operated by Christianity and the Enlightenment
in the complex history of ruptures and interweavings of Judaism and
Christianity, I pick up the thread of these biblical interpretations which, from
the foreigner and modern critique are the hidden figure par excellence that
re-invents revelation.
As a conclusion, I would like to ask you to take this reflection as an
invitation to journey down a long road that goes back to prehistory, runs
through the Unconscious, and heads toward the unknown. I would gamble
that it opens a new phase for encouraging our common ambition to explore
the memory of religions while using analytical experience as our guide,
and with the contributions of all other human sciences and philosophical
developments of those who wish to join us.
92
Part III
Femininity and the Figure of the Father
Joel Whitebook
I.
At its heart, Western civilisation contains a drive towards unification. This
drive, according to thinkers from a number of theoretical persuasions, helps to
explain the link between Occidental rationality and the project of domination.
When the multifariousness of existence is reduced to unity, when the unique
entity is subsumed under the abstract universal and transformed into a
fungible cipher, the world becomes the stuff of domination. As Horkheimer
and Adorno observe: “From Parmenides to Russell, unity is the slogan of the
Enlightenment.” According to instrumental reason, everything that “does
not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion”. The
Enlightenment’s “totalitarian tendency,” they go on, “seeks to reduce the
world to a “gigantic analytic judgment”.1
The impulse toward an abstract and unifying universal was imparted to
the West by the two traditions that converged to form it, namely, Hebrew
monotheism and Greek philosophy. The monotheism of the Jews posited an
uncompromising demand for one transcendent God and for the exclusion and
repression of all competing deities, which means, of all otherness. Similarly,
the quest of Greek philosophy was for the arche – the fundamental principle
or cause of all things. This quest constituted a program for the reduction
of the diverse manifold of phenomenal experience to, if not one, at least a
minimum number of archai.
As we know, the question of the one-and-the-many was one of the
central topics of Greek philosophy. And the history of the way three Greek
philosophers – namely Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aristotle – dealt with
this issue will help us in addressing the problem of monotheism. Parmenides
postulated an unequivocal, unified and undifferentiated conception of Being,
but could not account for movement, becoming or the many. And, on the
other hand, although Heraclitus’ theory of flux could account for movement,
becoming and the many, it could not conceptualise the minimal degree of
unification that is necessary for identity and knowledge. History shows that
1
eodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by E. Jephcott.
Th
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, pp. 7-8 and 16.
Joel Whitebook
neither of the two antinomian positions – Parmenides’ or Heraclitus’ – can be

maintained, and an adequate solution requires a third position.
We should note that both of these Presocratics philosophers shared the
assumption that the One is, by definition, an unequivocal and undifferentiated
unity. But whereas Parmenides accepted its existence, Heraclitus denied it.
Indeed, it was not until Aristotle questioned the assumption and asserted
that ‘One’ is equivocal and is articulated in various ways – in other words,
until he introduced a notion of a differentiated unity – could the impasse
of his predecessors be resolved. Furthermore, in addition to introducing
a differentiated conception of the One, Aristotle also introduced the
developmental notion that a thing can achieve varying degrees of unity as its
telos unfolds.
My claim then is that without the notion of a “differentiated unity”, the
problem of monotheism cannot be adequately addressed.
II.
With these considerations in mind, let us turn to Freud. A number of
commentators have rightfully observed the link between his inadequate
understanding of women and his myopic theory of religion.2 Regarding
women: after the rise of feminism and the pre-Oedipal turn in psychoanalysis,
one fact, in particular, about Freud’s writings strikes the contemporary reader
as astonishing and calls out for explanation. Namely, the figure of the mother is
largely absent from all aspects of his work – from his metapsychology, his case
histories, his theory of technique and his account of religion and civilisation.
Recent scholarship allows us to formulate a biographical explanation of
“the missing mother” in Freud’s thinking. Specifically it challenges the myth
of “my golden Sigy”, which held that Freud had the good fortune to be the
firstborn son of a happy and beautiful mother who adored him. In contrast,
the new work shows that Amalie Freud was a depressed, narcissistic and
volatile woman and that her son’s first three years were marked by a confusing
and perhaps incestuous family constellation, which included significant
trauma. These include: the death of a maternal uncle and, more critically,
of a younger brother; the abrupt abandonment by the Kinderfrau who had
cared for and protected him; an atmosphere of severe financial insecurity;
and separation from his extended family and exile from Freiberg, the town
where he was born. The child that emerged from this “original catastrophe”
2
See for example, Loewald, Ivan Hendrik and Sprengnether.
96
was, as Louis Breger observes, a “premature adult”.3 As a result of his massive

disappointment with the two most important women in his early life, his
mother and his Kinderfrau, he effectively repudiated femininity, seeing it
as the dangerous realm of helplessness, dependence, sensuality, fantasy and
emotion.4 Young Sigmund became an androcentric, controlled, self-sufficient,
puritanical and hyper-rational Yeshiva bucher, who kept his feelings in check
by devoting himself almost exclusively to his studies.
It is safe to say that Freud was, if not frightened of woman, at least highly
uptight, uncomfortable and inhibited around them. As a young scientist
in Trieste, he reports to Silberstein that he was intimidated by the “Italian
goddesses” who strolled in the piazzas.5 Similarly, when he was in residence
at Salpêtrière, Freud writes to Martha that he was scandalised by the brazen
exhibitionism of the Parisian women and the shameless voyeurism with
which they crowded “round nudities as much as they do round corpses in
the Morgue”.6 To be sure, in later life, he had close relationships with female
colleagues like Lou Andreas Salomé and Maria Bonaparte and treated them
with considerable respect. But these were largely intellectual and professional
relationships and did not involve deep emotional or erotic contact. Freud was
a self-proclaimed ‘androphile’, who wrote to Fliess: “As you know, in my life,
woman has never replaced the comrade, the friend.”7
I believe that Freud’s fear of re-experiencing the trauma of his early
development, in particular his mother’s depression, prevented him from
exploring the topics of the mother, femininity and early development more
adequately in his work. In later life – in fact, after his mother had finally done
him the service of dying at the age of ninety-five – Freud finally took up the
topic of female psychology and came to acknowledge these shortcomings.
He admitted the existence of a stage of development having to do with the

“first attachment to the mother”, which preceded the Oedipal stage – just
as “the Minoan-Mycenean civilisation” lay behind the classical “civilization
of Greece”. And he also admitted that, for him, this early stratum was “so
grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify” that he had
great difficulty in penetrating it. “Women analysts,” he suggested, might have
3
S igmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’, Standard Edition, vol. III.
4
See Shelly Orgel, ‘Freud and the Repudiation of the Feminine’, Journal of the American Psy-
choanalytic Association, 44, 1996, pp. 45-67.
5
Sigmund Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881. Edited by A.
J. Pomerans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1990.
6
Sigmund Freud, ibid., p. 188.
7
Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887-1904. Edited
and translated by J. M. Masson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 447.
97
Joel Whitebook
more success in this realm than he had. It is worth nothing that such figures
as Melanie Klein and Margaret Mahler proved that this was indeed the case.8
Insofar as we consider it psychologically, the West’s historical and cultural
drive towards unification “leans on” the psyche’s own intrinsic tendency
towards synthesis and integration. This tendency itself can be traced to what
Freud called “the original psychical situation” [psychische Ursituation].9 Though
different theorists have conceptualised “the original psychical situation” in
different ways and given it different names – for example, primary narcissism,
the symbiotic phase, the undifferentiated psychic matrix or the monadic core
of the psyche – they agree on one point: that it is a plenum-like experience
of unity, fullness and perfection and a denial of externality, otherness and
privation.10 And once the original experience of unity has been broken,
individuals strive to recapture it, in one way or another, throughout their lives.
The point to be stressed is that everything depends on how one tries to
recapture that original unity. Castoriadis has argued that the concept of unity
– like the concept of the demonic – is totally ambivalent: it can lead to the
best things in life and the worst things. Castoriadis claims that, in the most
archaic strata of our psyches, “the demand for total unification” represents
“the master of all desires”. If it is pursued directly, in an unmediated and
undifferentiated form, it becomes “the monster of unifying madness”, which
pushes to eradicate all difference and otherness.11 As such, it provides the
psychological basis for the various forms of narcissistic pathology, which
seek to omnipotently remodel the world in the psyche’s image. And it can
provide the psychological source of totalitarianism, which seeks to transform
its subjects into compliant ciphers who can be dominated and controlled, as
well as the domination of nature, which seeks to reduce the diversity of our
natural habitat so that it becomes the material for exploitation.12
8
Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 226.
9
Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), Standard Edition, vol. 14, p. 134.
10
I am aware that many infant researchers and relational analysts claim that the notion of an
original undifferentiated stage has been refuted, but can only refer the reader to an argument
I have made elsewhere, demonstrating that their claims are ideological and overstated. Joel
Whitebook, ‘First Nature and Second Nature in Hegel and Psychoanalysis’, Constellations,
vol. 15, No 3, 2008, pp. 2-9.
11
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cam-
bridge MA: MIT Press, 1987, p. 298.
12
In a reference to the “Führer Principle” [Führerprincep], Adorno refers to this “paranoid zeal”,
which attempts to assimilate all otherness to the subject, the “Ego Principle”. Theodor W.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.G. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1972, p.
22 and 26.
98
When the original demand for unity is differentiated and sublimated,

however, it can lead to the most cherished products of the human spirit.
As Castoriadis observes: “An essential dimension of religion (...) but also an
essential dimension of philosophy and of science derive from this” striving for
unity. “Whether it is the philosopher or the scientist,” Castoriadis continues,
“the final and dominant intention [of reason] – to find, across difference and
otherness, manifestations of the same ... in phenomenal diversity – is based on
the same schema of a (...) primary unity.”13
Han Loewald maintains that in Freud’s official theory, reality is essentially
a paternal function. The “alien, hostile [and] jealous” father is the main
“representative” of the demands of reality. The father’s intervention – a hostile
“force” thrust on the psyche from the “outside” – severs the libidinous tie with
the mother. This breaks the sensuousness primary unity of the pre-Oedipal
phase and creates distance between self and object. As a result, the child is
ejected into the hostile world of triadic reality. At the same time, however,
the paternal function serves an absolutely essential function. For one thing, if
it is not associated with excessive aggression, the paternal position promotes
articulation, individuation and autonomy and protects the individual from
the psychotic dangers of “maternal engulfment”.14 For another, the “nom du
pere” as Lacan calls it, constitutes the “decisive step in the establishment of the
ego as based on the reality principle”.15
The official model of the psychic apparatus, which corresponds to the
official paternal conception of reality, is, according to Loewald, exclusionary.
Its function is to discharge tension and get rid of things. According to this
tension-reduction model, the ego seeks to deal with “inner or outer demands
or influences” (Loewald, 1978a, p. 176) made on it by excluding them.16 In
other words, it seeks to unify and strengthen itself by narrowing and reinforcing
its boundaries and keeping the heterogeneous demands of “instinctual-
unconscious life” – as well as the tension associated with them – out. Using
the language of the earlier part of our discussion, it should be clear that the
exclusionary model of the psychic apparatus entails an undifferentiated form
of unity.
13
Castoriadis, ibid., pp. 298-299.
14
Ibid., p. 14.
15
Hans Loewald, (1951), ‘Ego and reality’, The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Mono-
graphs. Hagerstown Maryland: University Publishing Group, 2000, pp. 7-8.
16
Hans Loewald, ‘Ego Organization and Defense’, The Essential Loewald, p. 176.
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Joel Whitebook
Loewald makes the crucial point, which we will return to later, that the
presumed strength and cohesion of the ‘strong’ ego is actually a form of
weakness,17 in that it is achieved by narrowing the ego’s domain, impoverishing
its content and rigidifying its relation to inner and outer reality.18 Instead of
exemplifying strength, the exclusionary ego resembles a familiar pathological
mode of ego formation, namely that of the obsessional. Unfortunately, many
analysts, including the ‘official’ Freud, have often taken this pathological
modality as the normative model for ego development.
Following his usual interpretive strategy, Loewald locates elements of an
unofficial ‘maternal’ position in Freud’s thinking on the relation of the psyche
to reality and tries to construct an alternative account out of it. Unlike the
classical position, the unofficial position does not begin with a monadically
self-enclosed psyche functioning according to the pleasure principle – with the
model of the unhatched chick enclosed in its shell – and then tries to explain
how it can open up to a painful and hostile reality. Instead, the ‘maternal’
position begins with “a unitary whole” – an undifferentiated matrix that
encompasses mother and infant – and then seeks to account for how psyche
and world become differentiated out of it. In other words,
“mother and baby do not get together and develop a relationship;

rather, the baby is born, becomes detached from the mother, and, as
a result, a relatedness between two parts, which originally were one,
becomes possible.”19
From the maternal perspective, which stresses relatedness, pleasure and

sensuality, reality is not initially and intrinsically hostile to the ego. On the
contrary, it is “intimately connected with and originally not even distinguished
from it”.20 The existence of the “oceanic feeling”, which Freud believed was a
residue of an “inclusive – indeed, an all-embracing – feeling corresponding to a
more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” at the beginning
of life, testifies to the existence of this original state. Loewald suggests that this
sense of oneness can point to the possibility of another post-phallocentric and
post-scientistic way of relating to reality.
As with the paternal conception of reality, the maternal conception has its
dangers as well as it advantages. While it represents the realm of relatedness,
sensual pleasure, union and reconciliation, the maternal conception of
17
ans Loewald, ‘The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’, The Essential Loewald, p. 241.
H
18
Ibid., p. 240
19
Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’, The Essential Loewald, p. 11.
20
Ibid., p. 8.
100
reality also contains the threat of de-differentiation and ego loss, which is
simultaneously loss of the object. When the ego loses its differentiation, it also
loses its object, for its object only exists in contradistinction to it.
Just as he did with the ‘unofficial’ conception of reality, Loewald locates
an alternative conception of Freud’s notion of the psychic apparatus. If, as we
have seen, the official model of the psychic apparatus was meant to explain
how things “are gotten rid of ”,21 the new model accounts for exactly the
opposite: how things are preserved “in the realm of the mind”, which means
how the mind grows and becomes more differentiated.22
In elucidating his “psycho-archaeological” approach to the psychic
apparatus, Freud takes the city of Rome as his model.23 The feature of the
‘Eternal City’ that makes this approach possible is its stratification, which
allows for the simultaneous coexistence of material from different historical
epochs. With the psyche, the possibility of simultaneity is even more complete,
for it is possible for two mental objects to occupy the same psychic place at
the same time.
With the psycho-archaeological model, the main job of the ego is not only
to regulate tension, but to integrate and reintegrate all of the heterogeneous
and often conflicting strata into a differentiated whole, a process that requires
the constant introduction and maintenance of “fresh tensions”.24 For Loewald,
ideal development consists in the ego’s “assimilation or inclusion” into its own
organisation of the material that impinges on it from inner and outer reality.
The ego is strengthened and enriched materially, owing to its incorporation
of that content, and its range is enlarged in so far as it acquires the possibility
of “free intercourse” with the domain of unconscious-instinctual life and the
ability to influence and be influenced by it at the same time.25
Unlike in the tension-reduction model, the ego no longer has to vigilantly
ward off what it had experienced as its dangerous other; the ego’s flexibility,
suppleness and spontaneity are increased. Finally, the ego becomes the
beneficiary of the energy that is now attached to it. This means that, rather
than “getting closer to a state of rest”, with “higher ego organization (...) there
is more life”.26 (Loewald, 1972, p. 74).
21
Hans Loewald, ‘On Motivation and Instinct Theory’, The Essential Loewald, p. 119.
22
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 69.
23
Carl E. Schorske, ‘To the Egyptian Dig: Freud’s Psycho-Archeology of Cultures’, Thinking
With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. Edited by Carl E. Schorske. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, pp. 191-218.
24
Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, Standard Edition, vol. 19, p. 47.
25
Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, Standard Edition, vol. 20, p. 98.
26
Hans Loewald, ‘On Internalization’, The Essential Loewald, p. 74.
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Joel Whitebook
Before turning to Freud’s discussion of monotheism, it is necessary

to register a warning concerning our discussion of Loewald and the two
conceptions of reality. Now that Freud’s patricentrism has been fully exposed,
it is not a question of “swinging from a paternal concept of reality to a maternal
one”,27 or, to put it differently of replacing the “Father of the horde with the
Mother Goddess”.28 Rather, the ego must, Loewald argues, continually pursue
“its course of integrating reality” – the paternal and the maternal – into “new
synthetic organizations”.29
III.
That Freud’s theories of religion and civilization are patriarchal is hardly
controversial. Indeed, he has often been pilloried as the arch-apologist for
the paternal role in psychic life. In Moses and Monotheism, published in
1939, Freud more or less repeats the claim he had made twenty-five years
earlier in Totem and Taboo: namely, that the “father-complex” – the murder
of the primal father and its sequelae – accounts for the origins of religion,
morality and law.30 And Freud sees Jewish monotheism – with its jealous,
angry and demanding father-God; its insistence on complete transcendence;
prohibition on images; exclusion of the mother-Goddess; suppression of
polytheism and repudiation of magic; and, especially, its valorisation of
Geistigkeit (intellectuality or spirituality) over Sinnlichkeit (sensuality) – as the
patriarchal religion par excellence. In Moses and Monotheism, composed in the
1900s when European Jews were facing the threat of total annihilation, Freud
drops the pretence of writing a “value-free” history of the Jewish religion and
produces a brief defending, indeed celebrating, the Jewish accomplishment.
In these texts, as Richard Bernstein observes, Freud
“is no longer the disinterested psychoanalyst seeking to understand the

origin and nature of Jewish monotheism, but a partisan, speaking in his
own voice as a passionate ‘godless Jew,’ taking pride in the spiritual and
intellectual power of his own tradition.”31
27
Loewald, ‘Ego and Reality’, The Essential Loewald, p. 12.
28
Andre Green, On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 253.
29
Loewald, ‘Ego and reality’, The Essential Loewald, p. 17 and Loewald, ‘Sublimation: Inquiries
Into Theoretical Psychoanalysis’, The Essential Loewald, p. 452
30
See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Standard Edition, vol. 23, p. 24 and 58.
31
Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998, p. 35.
102
And, for Freud, the greatest and perhaps most distinctive accomplishment of
the Jews is “Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit” (the advance in Geistigkeit) they
brought about in human history.32
In 1938, when the cancer-stricken leader of psychoanalysis was too
weak to attend the 1938 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical
Association in Paris, he dispatched his daughter Anna to speak in his place.
The text he selected from his last testament, Moses and Monotheism, for her
to read to his followers, before they would be dispersed around the globe in
the psychoanalytic Diaspora was the one concerning “Der Fortschritt in der
Geistigkeit”. This, in other words, was the fundamental value that Freud –
who, like Rabbi Jochanan be Zakkai, was forced into exile after a calamity
to his people – wanted to reinforce in his followers before he took leave of
them.
In ‘Monologue with Freud’ – the concluding chapter of Yosef Yerushalmi’s
Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, the author ‘risks’ extracting
an implication from Freud’s thinking, which, he believes, the founder of
psychoanalysis “felt deeply but would never dare to say”. Addressing Freud
directly, Yerushalmi observes,
“I think that in your innermost heart you believed that psychoanalysis

is itself a further, if not final, metamorphosed extension of Judaism,
divested of its illusory religious form but retaining its essential
monotheistic characteristics, at least as you understood and described
them. In short, I think you believed that just as you are a godless Jew,
psychoanalysis is godless Judaism.”33
The claim that Freud saw psychoanalysis as the secular heir to the Mosaic
tradition is, I believe, correct. But the idea is not so deeply buried in Freud’s
thinking as Yerushalmi would have us believe. Indeed, in his discussion of
Yerushalmi, Bernstein argues that the concept of the “advance of Geistigkeit”
plays a systematic role in Freud’s opus. He recalls the famous passage from the
‘Preface’ to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo where Freud embraces his
Jewish identity:
“No reader of [the Hebrew version of ] this book will find it easy to put
himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the
32
Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 24, pp. 111-115.
33
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991, p. 99. See also Bernstein, ibid., pp. 114-115.
103
Joel Whitebook
language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion

of his fathers – as well as from every other religion – and who cannot
take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has never repudiated his
people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no
desire to alter the nature. If the question is put to him, ‘Since you have
abandoned all the common characteristics of your countrymen, what
is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great deal
and probably its very essence.’ He could not now express that essence
clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to
the scientific mind.”34
The conventional wisdom holds that Freud never succeeded in discovering

that ‘essence’ of Judaism. Against this, however, Bernstein maintains that
Freud’s commitment to Geistigkeit constituted the (non-religious) essence of
the Judaism with which he identified.35
Many a secular Jew, the present author included, takes considerable
pride in the claim that the commitment to Geistigkeit represents the essence
of at least one tradition within Judaism. But lest legitimate pride put a halt
to critical thinking – thus violating the Mosaic imperative for the relentless
critique of the idols – I want to complicate the picture.
Freud the psychoanalyst taught us that all fundamental concepts are
ambivalent; for example, hate always accompanies love, and civilisation rests
on a dark underside.36 But when he assumes the position of the partisan,
extolling the virtues of Geistigkeit, he seems to have forgotten this lesson. His
praise becomes almost unequivocal. Why is this so?
An important paper by Carl Shorske will help us answer this question.
Shorske argues that in the first years of the twentieth century Freud became
caught up in the wave of Egyptomania that was sweeping Europe. One of
many such manic eruptions since the Renaissance, it celebrated Egypt as:
34
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition, vol. 15.
35
See Bernstein, ibid., p. 84.
36
Those who charge Freud with being a self-hating Jew miss an essential point: namely, that
love, as Freud taught us, is always ambivalent, which means it is always accompanied by
hate. That Freud could express aggression towards his people, and say some very unpleasant
things about them, does not contradict the idea that he loved them. On the contrary, if he
did in fact truly love them, we would expect – on the basis of his own theory – the hatred to
be there. Those individuals who demand unambivalent love for the tribe are not only pre-
psychoanalytic and naïve, they have to disavow their own aggression.
104
“that mysterious land [which] promised access to the womb of culture

and the tomb of time, to the original and the hidden, the voiceless
(infans) childhood of humanity.”37
Now Egypt had occupied a place in Freud’s imagination ever since 1867 when
he had read his father’s dramatically illustrated copy of the Philippson. But,
in that context, Egypt primarily served as the stage setting for Jewish history
– especially the stories of Joseph and Moses. After 1900, however, Freud’s
“intoxication with things Egyptian” fostered, as Shorske observes,
“interests that were in drastic contradiction to the faith of his fathers

and even to the male orientation of psychoanalysis [indeed] interests
closer to the project on human bisexuality he had announced in one of
his last letters to Fliess. In the early years of the twentieth century, Freud
came to view Egypt as a land of the primal mothers and of religiously
expressed bisexuality. It touched ultimate and even dangerous questions
of the psyche to which Freud had devoted scant attention before he fell
under Egypt’s spell.”38
Let us remember that the first years of the twentieth century were the years
when Freud was struggling to come to grips with the end of his friendship
with Fliess – a struggle that continued well into his relationship with Jung.
Partly sparked by this struggle, he began to undertake a remarkably open,
flexible and, one might say, polymorphic exploration of sexuality.
In a letter dated 7 August 1901, he is explicit about his belief that
homosexual – ‘androphilic’, as Freud, the ‘truth-teller’, euphemistically
puts it – conflicts were playing an important role in the break-up of their
friendship.39 In the same letter, he also announces his attention to publish a
work on “Human Bisexuality”. While the work was never published, the letter
shows that the subject was on his mind.
37
Schorske, ibid. p. 205. Egyptian artefacts constituted many of the early purchases in Freud’s
antiquities collection. And when he returned to London in 1908, after a twenty-three year
absence, “what meant most to him,” Jones reports, “was the collection of [Egyptian} antiqui-
ties (. . .) in the British Museum.” Indeed, according to Jones, “he did not go to any theatre,
because the evenings were given up to reading in preparation for the next day’s visit to the
museum.” See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. New York: Basic
books, 1982, p. 52.
38
Schorske, ibid., p. 204.
39
See especially Freud’s letter to Fliess dated August 7, 1901.
105
Joel Whitebook
The radicalism of Freud’s approach to sexuality during this period can

also be seen in the opening pages of the Three Essays on Sexuality. In this
work, published in 1905, Freud deconstructs the conventional view of normal
sexuality – as aiming at heterosexual intercourse – and shows that human
sexuality is, as Laplanche observes, essentially perverse.40
Unlike an animal instinct, which is hard-wired, more or less complete
and has a predefined object, the mature human sexual drive is the result
of a developmental process in which several component pregenital drives
supposedly coalesce. Moreover, compared to the situation in the animal
world, the link between the ‘aim’ of the human sexual drive and its ‘object’ is
relatively weak. Because the object “is merely soldered on” as Freud puts it,
humans can satisfy themselves with an enormous range of objects, including
imaginary ones.41 What this means is that, far from being ‘self-evident’, the
phenomenon of heterosexuality in humans, as Freud observes, itself “needs
elucidating”.42
Freud’s exploration of homosexuality and bisexuality, sparked in part by
his interest in Egypt, came to theoretical fruition in his paper on Leonardo
da Vinci. In Freud’s study of the Italian artist, he analyses an early memory of
Leonardo’s, where a vulture-like creature descends into the child’s crib and hits
him on the mouth with its tale. Analysing the dream in terms of Leonardo’s
later homosexual development, Freud interprets the figure of the vulture as
a “phallic woman”, thus introducing “a new figure on the psychoanalytic
scene”. What is important for us is that Freud arrives at this interpretation
via his associations to “the vulture-headed Egyptian mother goddess, Mut,”
who, according to Schorske, was “one of Egypt’s original hermaphroditic
divinities.”43 Freud, in other words, arrives at Leonardo’s archaic preoedipal
sexuality via Egypt.
It is well known, however, that Freud’s study of Leonardo contains an
infamous howler, originally pointed out by Meyer Schapiro, which critics
have had no hesitation using in an attempt to discredit the text in particular
and applied psychoanalysis in general.44 When preparing the Leonardo
monograph, Freud apparently took over a mistranslation from the German
40
hile the iconoclasm of these sections is partly undermined later in the work by Freud’s
W
introduction of a normative view of sexuality – whereby the polymorphous component in-
stincts are supposedly unified under genitality – they have nevertheless been cited by sexual
liberationists of all stripes since they first appeared.
41
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, Standard Edition, vol. 7, p. 148.
42
Ibid., p. 146 [addition].
43
Ibid., p. 206.
44
See Meyer Schapiro, ‘Leonardo and Freud: an Art-Historical Study’, Journal of the History of
Ideas. 17 (1956), pp. 303-36
106
texts he was working with and systematically employed the German word
Geier, meaning ‘vulture’, for the Italian word ‘nibbio’, which should have
been translated as ‘kite’.45 For our purposes, the accuracy of the Leonardo
interpretation is of little consequence. What we are trying to establish is the
association between Egyptian culture and the world of archaic maternal and
hermaphroditic deities in Freud’s thinking at the time. And this much is
beyond dispute.
According to Shorske, another text in which the fruits of Freud’s
Egyptological research show themselves is ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal
Words’. The paper assumed the form of a review of a book by a philologist,
Karl Abel, published much earlier in which the author argued that, in the
primary language of Egypt, “a single word denoted,” as Schorske puts it, “an
idea and its opposite.”46 Neither the primary processes of the unconscious
nor the primary language of the Egyptians followed the law of the excluded
middle. Just as Egypt’s bisexual deities didn’t have to belong to one sex or
the other, so “primal words” could mean one thing as well as its opposite.
As opposed to the clarité of the Enlightenment, sexual and conceptual
indeterminacy marked the culture of ancient Egypt.
IV.
When Freud returned to the topic of Egypt in the thirties – a time when
European Jewry was facing a catastrophic threat – he sought to defend the
Jews by portraying them as a Kulturvolk, who stood in opposition to Nazi
barbarism. To do this, he turned away from the polymorphic and polytheistic
land of primal mothers and bisexual deities he had explored three decades
earlier, and turned to the land of Akhenaten’s rigorous monotheistic
enlightenment. While Freud’s new approach may have been appropriate given
the political situation, he paid a considerable price for it theoretically. Because
of “the advent of Hitler and the problem of saving the Jews,” as Schorske
argues, he left behind the radically new concepts concerning archaic psycho-
sexuality he had unearthed on his first Egyptian dig – “concepts that could
break through the essentially male confines of most of Freud’s cultural theory”
– and turned back to the masculinist terrain of Totem and Taboo and the
patriarchal figure of Moses.47
45
ere is of course no reason why a kite with a tail could not be seen as a representation of a
Th
phallic woman.
46
Schorske, ibid., p. 206
47
Ibid., p. 207.
107
Joel Whitebook
Politically, Akhenaten was, Schorske observes, “a man after Freud’s heart, a

radical-reformer.” As the “pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty,” he
“was the nearest thing Egypt produced to a European enlightened

despot of the eighteenth century, like Joseph II of Austria.”48
Akhenaton assumed the throne in 1375 B.C. under the name of Amenophis
IV and seems to have taken Nefertiti as his queen at about this same time.
In the fifth year of his regime, for reasons that remain obscure, the pharaoh
changed his named to Akhenaten, created a new iconoclastic religion based on
the sun God Aton and built a new city to celebrate him.
Akhenaten’s theology was as progressive as his methods were violent. While
the religion may not have been monotheistic in the strict since, it moved
in that direction by de-personifying its God and instituting a single unified
entity, the sun, as its deity. Furthermore, not only did it have no truck with
salvation and life-after-death, which were traditional concerns of Egyptian
popular religion, but it also promoted the this-worldly ethical values of truth,
order and justice.
But, along with the belief in a single God, Freud notes that religious
intolerance, a phenomenon he believes had previously been alien to the
ancient world, “was inevitably born”.49 Akhenaten was in fact “forcing a new
religion on his Egyptian subjects – a religion which ran contrary to their
thousands-of-years-old traditions and to all the familiar habits of their lives.”50
The pharaoh closed temples throughout the kingdom, forbade illicit forms of
worship and confiscated temple property. He even went so far as to have the
word “Gods” removed from ancient monuments. Such a violent assault on
ancient customs and beliefts was bound to produce a counter-attack. And it
did. The measures taken by Akhenaten provoked, according to Freud, “a mood
of fanatical vindictiveness among the suppressed priesthood and unsatisfied
common people, which “was able to find free expression after the king’s
death.”51 Thus, just as the achievements of Joseph II’s reforms were undone by
the reaction of the Catholic Church, so, after Akhenaten’s short-lived dynasty,
a “gloomy interregnum” destroyed the achievements of his Enlightenment
and re-established “the ancient religions of Egypt”.52
48
Ibid., pp. 207-208.
49
Compare to Jan Assmann.
50
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Standard Edition, vol. 23, p. 20.
51
Ibid., p. 23.
52
Ibid., p. 24.
108
Freud’s thesis is that Moses was an aristocratic member of Akhenaten’s

court who subscribed to the pharaoh’s ideas and tried to keep them alive after
his demise. To accomplish this, he chose a relatively undistinguished tribe,
the Hebrews, and, by his own personal power, forged them into the Jews, a
people who subscribed to the pharaoh’s monotheistic religion. Schorske notes
an ironical implication of Freud’s position. “In effect,” he writes,
“Moses made Egyptians [qua monotheists] out of the Jews, so that they
might preserve the highest culture his country had achieved.”53
Furthermore, as the incident of the golden calf dramatically demonstrates, the

Jews were no less resistant to the rigorousness of Moses’ monotheism than the
Egyptians were to Akhenaten’s. Indeed, according to Freud’s scandalous claim,
the Hebrews went so far as to murder Moses because they could not tolerate
the severity of the monotheistic demands he was imposing on them. Finally,
Freud could see in Moses a man, who, like the enlightened individuals of his
own time, gentiles and Jews alike – for example, including Thomas Mann
and Freud himself – had to leave their home and go into exile to preserve the
values of civilisation.54 “When,” Schorske observes, “Freud argued that Moses
was an Egyptian, it has been said that he thereby deprived the Jews of their
greatest hero.” Schorske, however, believes “the opposite”: namely, “that by
making Moses both the Egyptian heir to Akhenaten’s enlightened legacy and
the creator of the Jewish people,” he was actually establishing that the Jews
were “carriers of the highest marks of civilization.”55
A consideration of one of Freud’s main sources on Egypt, the work of the
aptly-named James Henry Breasted gives credence to Schorske’s claim that
Freud intentionally presented a one-side view of Egyptian culture in Moses
and Monotheism for political reasons. Breasted, the founder of Chicago’s
Oriental Institute, had written his dissertation in Berlin on the Hymns to Aton,
and as a progressive Protestant, he held views that were similar to those of a
godless Jew like Freud. In his 1905 classic The History of Egypt, Breasted was
eager, as Schorske observes, to trace the emergence of Egyptian culture “out
of the chthonic darkness to the achievement of rational enlightenment in
the reign of his hero, Akhenaten.”56 Unlike Freud, however, Breasted did not
53
54
hen he emigrated to London, Freud wrote to his son Ernst, “I compare myself with the old
W
Jacob, whom in his old age his children brought him out of Egypt.” Quoted in Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. III. New York: Basic books, 1981, p. 225.
55
56
109
Joel Whitebook
feel compelled to exclude the other sensual [sinnlich] side of Egyptian life
under the young pharaoh. If “the god Aton was dematerialized the earthly
life and cultural forms of his cult were far from it.” They were in fact quite
sensuous. Not only would an Egyptian nobleman of the time enjoy a “rich
sensual life”, but the art work of the period abandoned “the stiff, hieratic
geometrical tradition of Egypt,” and introduced “a sensuous plasticity worthy
of art nouveau.”57 There is no doubt that Freud was familiar with the texts
emphasising Sinnlichkeit in the Egyptologist’s studies. The relevant passages
are underscored in the volumes of Breasted’s works in Freud’s library. It is
simply the case, as Schorske observes, that he “selected from Breasted’s History
what connects the Egyptian Enlightenment to the Geistigkeit he sees in the
Jews” and intentionally excluded the other side of the picture.58
V.
In our exploration of the questions of monotheism and psychoanalytic
technique, we seem to have strayed a long way from our discussion of
Parmenides, Heraclitus and Aristotle. But what we learnt from Aristotle –
namely, that a differentiated whole, which integrates unity and difference, is
the only way to escape the standoff between the two Pre-Socratic philosophers,
which is a standoff between two fundamental figures of thought. Elsewhere,
in a discussion of Loewald, I have argued that one needs a model of a
differentiated whole to explicate the idea of psychic health, and I don’t want
to pursue that question here. Rather, what I want to address is the question
of a differentiated unity with respect to monotheism. I must stress that what
I am interested in is not a theological problem having to do with the nature
of God or his existence. Like Freud, I am a Feuerbachian and believe that
religious representations are projections of our inner states onto the world.
I therefore want to explore what might be called a psycho-philosophical
question concerning the fundamental shapes of thought we use to organise
our experience.
I am assuming that the criticisms of rigorous monotheism and Geistigkeit
that I have raised – which are echoed in Aron’s criticisms of Moses and Kohut’s
of Freud – are valid. Having said this, I immediately warn against a danger.
The proper response to abstract Oneness – to “identity thinking” as Adorno
called – is not to embrace, as many ‘postmodern’ thinkers have, dispersion,
57
Ibid., p. 210.
58
Op. cit.
110
difference, nomadism, indeterminacy, incommensurability, madness, alterity

and so on. To rush from Parmenides into the arms of Heraclitus does not get
one anywhere. Again, the only way out of the aporia is through a concept of
differentiated unity.
Loewald believes, as we have seen, that Freud was groping towards a
notion of a differentiated unity in his discussion of Rome in the first chapter
of Civilization and its Discontents. While this may be true, Freud’s criticisms
of Christianity show us how far he was from appreciating its necessity. Let me
be clear, I am not interested in criticising Christianity, any more than I am
interested in defending Judaism (or any other religion for that matter). What
I am concerned with is elucidating the structure of Freud’s thinking in this
context. Freud raises one central criticism against Christianity:
“In some respects the new religion meant a cultural regression as

compared with the older Jewish one (…). The Christian religion did
not maintain the high level in things of the mind to which Judaism had
soared. It was no longer strictly monotheist.”59
By taking over many of the rituals and deities of surrounding religions and
by introducing intermediary figures like angles and saints – not to mention
the Trinity – Christianity, Freud argues, regressed back in the direction of
polytheism. What’s more, by introducing the Madonna, it also reinstated the
mother Goddess and regressed back from strict patriarchy.
Now these points only count as criticisms if one uncritically valorises,
as Freud did, the uncompromising monotheism of the Jews, Geistigkeit. If,
however, one questions that valorisation, one can stand Freud on his head.
These innovations on the part of Christianity can then be viewed, from the
viewpoint of the psychology of religion, as making up for the deficiencies
of monotheism. By introducing intermediary figures between humanity and
God, Christianity may have been striving to reintroduce the differentiation
into the abstract oneness of monotheism. And by placing the Madonna in
a central spot, Christianity may have been addressing humanity’s yearning
for the mother, something Freud could not understand because of his own
traumatic experience with Amalie and the repudiation of femininity that
resulted from it. Indeed, these two innovations – which respond to deep-
rooted psychological needs that were ignored by Judaism – may help explain
why historically Christianity has gripped the imagination of so many more
people than Judaism.
59
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 88.
111
Joel Whitebook
Finally, there is the question of the Trinity. If we don’t view it simply as

obscurantist mystification meant to explain the unexplainable and, instead,
view it as a psycho-philosophical figure of thought, then we may gain some
appreciation for it. For, viewed from this angle, it represents, as Hegel
recognised, an attempt to think through the nature of a differentiated unity –
how three is one and one is three – and confront the conundrums associated
with it?126
112
Fort!/Da! Through the Chador:
The Paradox of the Woman’s Invisibility and Visibility
Siamak Movahedi and Gohar Homayounpour
“[E]ach of us enters the world through the body of a woman, – a carnal

enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding, rather than
fleeing, condemning, or idealising the body of the (m)other, we need to
recognize her in ourselves,” writes Sprengnether.1 Perhaps it is the recognition
of her in us that is too threatening as a secret to be divulged, and perhaps
it is the recognition of her in ourselves that revives the trauma of her loss.
The body of the m(o)ther – the mother and the woman as the other – has
always been under attack oscillating through visibility and invisibility; being
attacked for being visible – unveiled – and being attacked for being invisible
– veiled. What is it to be a woman? Is a woman defined by her anatomy, by
her physical body, or is what she wears part of the definition of womanhood?
Freud’s (1925) question, “what does a woman want?” is not separate from
the cultural discourse that identifies someone as a woman in her visibility
and invisibility. And in line with Hélène Cixous’ utilisation of the incidental
French connection between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see),
how can we know what we do not see and how can we see what we do not
know?2
In this paper, we will try to present a psychoanalytic reading of fantasies
surrounding the chador, a veil-like outer garment worn in public by some
Iranian women, treating it as a psychic object that comes to life in relation
to others within a particular cultural context. Eschewing an Orientalist’s
ideological position, we will attempt to examine the social and psychic
function of dress, and the chador in particular, and the significance of the
preoccupation with such clothing in fantasy for men and women. We will
also argue that fixation with making the woman invisible and visible through
chadoring and de-chadoring may be traced to a ‘fort-da’ movement of sending
away and recalling the (m)other as posited by Freud.3
1
M. Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990, pp. 245-46
2
See, H. Cixous and J. Derrida, Veils. Translated by G. Bennington. Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
3
S. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (1920-1922), pp.
1-64.
Although one can undertake an analysis of the chador or veil as it is

presented in literature, in this paper we are interested in the chador as an
object of desire, a psychic envelope, a container, a transitional object, or a
second skin ego. Our focus is on the subject’s relationship to a particular
object of fantasy that ‘holds’, ‘hides’, ‘covers’, ‘veils’, or ‘dresses’ the body, a
theoretical model similar to the rhetorical use of the concepts “second skin”,
“skin ego”, or “psychic envelope” by prominent psychoanalysts such as Bick,
Anzieu, and Houzel.4
The chador is a traditional outer garment that is worn by some traditional,
rural, or religiously devout women in public in Iran. It is itself a pre-Islamic
dress code. Some have traced the origin of the chador to the Achaemenian
Persian Empire in the sixth century BC. The purpose of the chador was
to keep women of high social status away from the gaze of commoners.5
Regardless of its history, the chador, like any other object that marks public
and private boundaries, is highly over-determined. It cannot be pushed into a
one-dimensional analysis of one kind or another.
The chador as an item of dress is both a social and a fantasy object. As a
signifier it travels through different chains and slips under different ‘signifieds’.
As a performative object of representation, it can be placed in many different
explanatory schemas and can be subjected to a variety of interpretations. As an
item of dress, it is the site for multitudes of social and psychological functions.
It is a complex entity located within the public and private contexts at varying
intra- and inter-psychic axes. It is neither merely a social thing nor can it be
reduced to something purely psychic. Nevertheless, the chador (or any form
of veil) has captured only the Orientalist’s gaze of the West. In the West any
chador or veil-like outfit is seen as a sign of women’s oppression.6 Nothing
4
S ee; E. Bick, ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations’, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 49, 1968, pp. 484–486. D. Anzieu, ‘The skin ego’, Psychoanalysis in France.
Edited by S. Lebovici and D. Widlcher. New York: International Universities Press, 1980,
pp. 17–32. D. Anzieu and H, D. Ouzel, et al. (eds), Psychic Envelopes. Translated by D.
Briggs. London: Karnac, 1990. (Originally published as Les Envelopes Psychiques. Paris: Bor-
das, 1987). D. Houzel, ‘The Concept of Envelope’, Psychic Envelopes. Edited by D. Anzieu et
al.. London: Karnac, 1990, pp. 27–58.
5
See; F. El-Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance. Oxford: Berg, 1990. A. Zahedi,
‘Contested Meaning of the Veil and Political Ideologies of Iranian Regimes’, Journal of Middle
Eastern Women’s Studies, 3(3) 2007, pp. 75–98.
6
In June 2008, the highest administrative court in France upheld a decision to deny citizenship
to a 32 year-old woman because she wore a veil. In an interview published in the newspaper
Le Parisien (July 17, 2008), a French-Muslim woman of Algerian descent remarked that a
veil “is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that promotes
inequality between the sexes and is totally lacking in democracy” (The New York Times, July
19, 2008). The totalitarian project cannot always be attributed to an external political system.
More often we are trapped in our own internal totalitarian system.
114
seems to be as threatening to the illusion of women’s agency as wearing a

chador, and nothing seems to be as threatening to the illusion of men’s power
as the inability to see the body of the veiled woman.7
The obsession with covering women’s hair in sacred rituals and places is
traditionally shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.8 Although it is the
Muslim woman who is today under attack for being either visible or invisible,
its history does not begin with Islam. In ‘The Silkworm of One’s Own’, Derrida
writes about Saint Paul’s insistence on veiling the woman and un-veiling the
man.9 The controversial law forbidding veil-like clothing that hide the face in
public went into effect in France on Monday April 11, 2011. From its very
first day, many Muslim women challenged the law in public and in courts.
Balasescu has argued that the veil dispute in France is primarily about the
disruption of the free flow of the gaze, which implicitly questions the French
cultural obsession with visibility and transparency. The veil has become a major
French preoccupation whose removal as an obsessive object “would mark the
success of the ‘civilizing process,’ the fetish of the colonial enterprise, and,
later on, the apple of discord in metropolitan France.”10 Balasescu contends
that the veil dispute in France is primarily about the disruption of the free
flow of the gaze, which implicitly questions the French cultural obsession
with visibility and transparency. The chador is seen as the insertion of a private
space in the public arena. We believe it is rather the confrontation of two
different patriarchal orders, where the opacity of one unwittingly exposes the
false transparency of the other.
The obsession with chador (Tchador) in France and more recently in
England may speak to a much deeper, subconscious conflict over the country’s
colonial past. In fact, the term tchador or ‘chador’ as used in France today is
7
or an Arab feminist’s view on the veil, see L.Abu Odeh, ‘Post-Colonial Feminism and the
F
Veil: Thinking the Difference’, Feminist Review, No. 43, 1993, pp. 26-37.
8
A. Zahedi, ‘Contested Meaning of the Veil and Political Ideologies of Iranian Regimes’, Jour-
nal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, 3(3) 2007, pp. 75–98.
9
Derrida cites from a letter by Paul where he argues that: “the head of every man, is messiah;/
the head of woman, is man; the head of the messiah, is Elphim./Any man who prays or
transmits his inspiration head covered [pas ancer proseuklpmenos e propheteuton kata kephales
ekhon…omnis vir orans, aut prophetans velato capite] dishonors his head./Every woman who
prays or transmits her inspiration head uncovered/dishonors her head, yes, as though she
were shaven./If then the woman is not veiled, let her also shave herself!/For the man is not
obliged to veil his head:/he is the image and the glory of Elohim;/Woman is the glory of
man./For man was not drawn from woman,/but woman comes from man./Man was not
created for woman,/but woman for man./So the woman must have on her head a power [an
insignium of power, a sign of authority, potestatem, exousiam],/because of the messengers.”
(Cixous and Derrida, ibid, 76)
10
L. H. Balasescu, ‘The Veil and Fashion Catwalks in Paris’, ISIM Review 15, 2005, p. 20.
115
an entirely ideological construction. The chador is an Iranian outer garment.

No one wears the chador in France, least of all French Iranians. MacMaster
and Lewis write about the political debate over the choice between terms
foulard, voile, tchador, hidjeb, fichu, turban, khiemar, cagoule, mante, mantille,
couvre-chef, robe, sitar. The term used by the media was by no means un choix
neutre et innocent, write MacMaster and Lewis. “In general the right-wing/
populist press, including Le Parisein liberer, Le Figaro and Le Quotidien, opted
to use the term tchador”.11 The term tchador was preferred because it evoked
the ideologically negative image associated with Iran. This may very well be
behind the political opposition in France to allowing the introduction of
chador-like designs on fashion catwalks in Paris.12
The reaction to the chador in the West, may exemplify Kristeva’s notion
of confrontation with the abject as a response to the threat of the collapse
of meaning and blurring of boundaries between self and other. The phallic
discourse on chador may thus be viewed as an ‘intellectualised’ form of
debasement of the abject, “not an ob-ject facing me which I name or imagine,
[... nor] an otherness ceaselessly fleeting in a systematic quest of desire” but as
the nameless feminine Other that “has only one quality of the object – that of
being opposed to I” and of being a threat to my social identity.13
In its function as an object of covering, the chador – or any dress – is a
site for both social and personal signification. It functions as a symbol and an
iconic sign. In the latter sense, it may even turn into a hysterical symptom.
As a symbol, the chador may function as part of what Claude Lévi-Strauss
has called the elementary structure of kinships that enforces the prohibition
of incest and regulates the “circulation of women” in patriarchal systems. It
may also enforce a symbolic function in public by structuring the woman’s
unarticulated impulses, emotions, representations, and memories that
originate in her personal history.14 This may in turn introduce chadoring –
hiding and covering – into the syntax of the unconscious bridging the domains
of social and personal, very much in line with Levi-Strauss’s contention that
“the mental and the social component of social reality are undistinguishable”.15
11
. Macmaster and T. Lewis, ‘Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling’, Journal of Euro-
N
pean Studies, Vol. 28, 1998, p. 131.
12
See the exchange between Moruzzi (1994) and Galeotti (1993) over the use of the term ‘cha-
dor’, and over Galeotti’s ‘philosophical’ justification of the expulsion of three Muslim high
school girls for wearing headscarf at school in 1989 in France.
13
J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York:
Columbia UP, 1982, p. 1.
14
C. Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’, in Structural Anthropology I. Translated by C.
Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoept. Garden City: Anchore, 1967.
15
C. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Stur-
116
The chador may also be regarded as something like a potential space similar
to Winnicott’s “intermediate area of experiencing”,16 wherein various strands
and threads of personal and cultural experience are woven together, i.e., the
space where the internal representations of the mother and the father meet.
In the West, the chador has become re-symbolised accumulating
paradoxical signifiers. It has turned into a highly visible social space for some
Muslim women to hide. It has become a foxhole, a place to retreat into and
a position to protest from. Interestingly enough many Muslim women in
the West who enjoy much more social freedom than their mothers in their
old country have recently opted to be veiled, and thus become too visible in
public. The Algerian sociologist, Monique Gadant, has questioned the cliché
of coercion as an explanation for these women’s stylistic metamorphosis. She
attributes the French position on the veil to the working of a colonial and
ethnocentric ideology. She writes:
“One would be blind not to see that numerous women are wearing the
hijab without being forced to do it by anybody. (....) Before denouncing
the hijab, reductively conceived as a symbol of oppression – the women
wearing it being found to contradict what are supposed to be their
interests and the truth about themselves as told by others – one should
take some time to reflect on these women’s motivation.”17
Motivation may speak to one’s individuality and desire that if not collectively
defined is undermined by engaging in the public ritual of invisibility through
the mask of the veil. At the same time by wearing the veil-mask these women
become all too visible on the streets of Paris or London.
The chador or any other clothing item regardless of its cultural or religious
significance is a signifier of a particular identity. It is part of the self and is used
in presenting a particular image to both the self and the other.
The most astute twentieth century observer of individual social behavior,
Erving Goffman, writing about “the identity kit”, refers to clothing as one of
the components of the package needed by the individual for the presentation
of self in the front stage of the everyday life. “The identity kit” is the set of
mer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 22.

16
. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First
D
Not-Me Possession’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 1953, p. 90.
17
Quoted in A. E. Berger, ‘The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic
Veil’, Diacritics, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1998, p. 98.
117
personal possessions that constitutes the person’s objects of investment in his

or her sense of self.18
Dress has a great deal of narcissistic value. There is a great deal of
narcissistic investment in dress (as an element of the identity kit) needed for
the construction and presentation of a particular self. But to Goffman, the
presentation is made to an external audience with which the actor is engaged in
an interactive process. This is why the stage or the front where the interaction
takes place is critical in forming one’s identity performance. Dress as an item
of the identity kit is critical in the front stage. The presentation of the self in
the back stage (hidden from the audience) is different. Goffman’s discussion
of the actor’s failure at strategic self-presentation in public implies that the
actor has difficulty navigating between the back and front stage.
Objects that are used in the front stage to project a desired identity are
social objects, they are objects desired by the Other. Dress is a social object;
a cultural fur, a second skin, and the desire to come across as conventional,
conformist, fashionable, chic, cool, hip, unconventional, nerd-like, or punk-
like is part of the person’s attempt to present a particular identity to the Other.
The sociology of fashion may speak to that dynamic. But what about the
ritualistic process involved in the presentation of the self in the back stage?
Are the front stage and the back stage real social spaces or are they spaces in
the person’s fantasy? Is the audience in the front stage, real people unrelated
to the person’s internal audience in the private psychic space? When do the
elements of the identity kit in either the front or back stage represent personal
objects rather than social things? When does the cultural fur turn into the
psychic skin?
Any social object that we use for self-presentation in public contains traces
of a narcissistic investment that make them into personal, psychic, or self-
objects used in a parallel process for presentation to one’s inner audience.
Thus, to the psychoanalyst, the distinction between the front stage and the
back stage may come close to the distinction between the manifest and latent
dream content. In that sense, the identity kit in the back stage may speak
more to the individual’s ‘core’ self.
For Foucault, the essence of power as captured in the panopticon is the
asymmetry of seeing-without-being-seen.19 Among the Tuareg in northwest
Africa, men rather than women wear the veil. The higher status of the man,
the more he conceals his face. Usually only a man’s eyes and the top of his
18
E. Goffman, Asylums. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
19
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New
York: Random House, 1977.
118
nose are visible. Thus, it may be argued that the chador, rather than a defense
against and protection from the “inspecting male gaze”, may paradoxically
become objectified and interiorised as that very gaze. The woman becomes the
object of the gaze under the chador while at the same time protected from it.
If we were to choose a single social metaphor to represent one’s personality,
one’s face, one’s cover, one’s holding environment, the container for one’s ego,
one’s psychic skin, one’s mode of self-presentation to the world, and one’s
ambivalence between hiding and exposing one’s core self, it would be the
dress. Yet, psychoanalysts have shown little interest in exploring this most
potent signifier of psychic structure. Flügel is one of the few early analysts
who wrote about the psychology of clothing.20 His thesis was that clothing
had three different and, at the time, conflicting functions: protecting the body
against cold, covering up feelings of shame, and its decorative function. He
also wrote extensively about the symbolic – i.e., sexual – meaning of different
clothing items.
Consider the following dream reported in analysis:
“I was in my old neighborhood where we lived when I was 10 or 12.

I was to take a long trip and I was late for packing. I went through
some of my old clothing items and found a pair of body tight jeans
that belonged to a friend who dresses badly. Then I heard my mother
screaming in protest. I rushed to my parent’s bedroom. My mother
was mumbling something about my dad’s infidelity and how he was
interested in someone else’s nightgown. She pointed to a nightgown
that was on the bed. I remember that was the nightgown that my
mother used to wear. I screamed at her saying that he hasn’t done
anything wrong and left the room.”
Without going into the clinical detail of this case and considering only the
manifest dream content, we note how much this young woman is struggling
with her oedipal and pre-oedipal conflicts, guilt, feelings of betrayal and
ambivalence over separating from the mother. The mother tends to be
implicated directly or indirectly through fetish objects of clothing items that
cover the private spaces.
20
J . C. Flügel, ‘Clothes Symbolism and Clothes Ambivalence’, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 10, 1929, pp. 205–217, and J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes. London:
Hogarth Press, 1930.
119
Consider the following clinical vignette that involves such fetishism:21
“The patient, a transvestite man who had been suffering from an

uncontrollable urge to wear women’s panties and brassieres in bed
or during intercourse enters analysis upon the recommendation of a
psychiatrist who had found him simply incorrigible. After many sessions
of couple therapy, his wife had filed for divorce finding his perversion
intolerable. The psychiatrist had diagnosed him as transsexual and the
patient himself suspected that he might be gay although he had no
sexual desire for men. He insisted in his analysis that wearing women’s
undergarment in bed was ‘the only way he could continue to exist’.
The analyst saw no reason why he should give up that vital habit. After
one year of analysis the patient meets an attractive woman in a bar with
whom he establishes an instant rapport. He discloses his secret to her in
the first meeting confessing that he would feel much safer in bed only
if he wore women’s negligee and panties. The woman sees no problem
with that stipulation and at their second meeting she brings him a very
sexy negligee as a gift commenting how beautiful he would look in
it. The following day the patient begins to talk on the couch about a
new memory (or fantasy) that when he was very little his mother used
to dress him up in her own negligee telling him that he was her most
beautiful little boy. The patient convinced that he had found the love
of his life, marries the new woman friend after a few months, and the
urge begins to dissipate.”
The following is a recurring dream of a young woman patient of ours who,

while trying to hide in her analysis, feels exposed, naked, and too visible:
“I am told that I have to get all my stuff together because of some

impending disaster; I am looking mostly for my clothes to join
everybody else on an enormous ship that is leaving the city, and yet
every time I fail to get fully dressed. Anxiety takes over me in every
episode of the dream. I am unable to find the last article of my clothing
such as my underwear, a pair of shoes, my blouse, my jacket, and so on
in order to be able to join the parting ship.”
21
e are grateful to Dr. Virginia Filomena Cremasco (personal communication) for sharing
W
this case with us.
120
In a semiotic analysis of any social object or event, attention is focused on the

processes through which its meanings are constructed within a cultural context.
One can also study, like Barthes, the language of fashion magazines in order
to unpack the linguistic code of what he called “written clothing”.22Analysis
of the signifying structures behind the representation of the body and the
constitution of the sexual subject through clothing and dress is in the domain
of social semiotics. A similar analysis may be conducted on the level of the
individual’s psyche within a particular cultural context. At times the distinction
between the personal semiotics, i.e., the private meaning of a cultural object
such as chador or any other clothing items for a particular psyche, and the
social semiotics may breakdown. In fact, the distinction between public and
private semiotics should be made only for analytic purposes. Fredric Jameson
has controversially argued for the inclusion of Marx along with Freud in the
analysis of third-world texts. To him, the third world narratives,
“even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly
libidinal dynamic – necessarily project a political dimension in the
form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is
always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world
culture and society.”23
We believe Jameson’s thesis extends to all narratives (regardless of the type of

world) in that, following Levi-Strauss, “the raw material of social phenomena
consists in the common aspects of mental structures and institutional
schemata”.24 From that perspective, we may speak of the transformation of the
chador from a social symbol – a site for the law of the father – into an iconic
sign – a maternal site for possible hysterical symptoms.
For Freud, clothes are simply fetishistic items based on the repression of the
drive to ‘see’ and “be seen”.25 To Freud, women’s interests in dress and fashion
all have a fetishistic function. They come to worship the object – the clothes
– that prevents (i.e., represses) their wish to be seen. Men’s preoccupation
|
22
R. Barthes, The Fashion System. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1983.
23
F. Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15
(Autumn 1986), pp. 69–70.
24
C. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Stur-
mer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
25
L. Rose, ‘Freud and Fetishism: Previously Unpublished Minutes of the Vienna Psychoana-
lytic Society’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 57, 1988, pp. 147–166.
121
with women’s clothes – here some men’s obsession with women’s chador – is
explained by the same principle. They come to worship that which prevents
them from seeing the woman’s erotic body. They become chador fetishists
(i.e., hejab) because of the repression of the desire to look and the wish to
penetrate and enter the mother’s body.
De Lauretis and Richards, contend that hiding, covering, or disguising
for the woman reflects her fear of the man’s envy and his devaluation of her
femininity.26 For a woman, the female body is an erotic object of paramount
value. “Clothing serves as a barrier, allowing her to remove a bit at a time,
testing whether the lover will be further attracted or repelled by her femaleness.
Thus, the removal of the clothing in stages is an important part of courtship.”27
Sayyid has argued that femininity in Western views is authentic only when
it is unveiled.28 This places the veiled subject as “something lesser, not quite
real, not quite the right thing”.29 However, Irigaray claims that the veil is the
mask of femininity in mythology beginning with Athena:
“Athena is always veiled and that is, I think, the basic ornamentation of
the female body. And Athena is also called Pallas which means wound.
The ornamentation becomes the veil over the wound.”30
We suggest that as a psychic object, the chador is a remnant of the maternal

container. The maternal function of containment is displaced onto the chador
conjuring up the sensation of the mother’s bodily presence. In other words,
the chador does not just cover the body – it envelops the psyche and serves the
function of a second skin for the ego.
Anzieu conceives of the psychic skin as an image that the child’s ego uses
early in life to represent itself on the basis of her experience with the surface of
the body.31 This image provides the sensory content for the child’s sense of ego
26
. De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: In-
T
diana University Press, 1994 and A. K. Richards, ‘Ladies of Fashion: Pleasure, Perversion or
Paraphilia’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77, 1996, pp. 337–351.
27
A. K. Richards, ibid., pp. 339.
28
B. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed
Books, 1997.
29
A. Treacher, ‘Reading the Other: Women, Feminism, and Islam’, Studies in Gender & Sexual-
ity, 4, 2003, p. 69.
30
L. Irigaray, ‘Luce Irigaray’, Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States.
Edited by E. H. Baruch and L. J. Serrano. New York: New York University Press, 1998, p.
158.
31
D. Anzieu, The Skin Ego. Translated by C. Turner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1989. (Originally published as Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunod, 1985.)
122
in the mirror, the mother’s gaze. The subject’s ego, the imaginary integrated
sense of the body is captured in the mirror through identification with the
gaze of the (m)other. The gaze of the (m)other holds and contains the image of
the ego. The gaze in its mirroring and reflecting function works to constitute
the self and stand for desire, for completion through the other.32 The nostalgic
desire to share a skin with the mother is the core fantasy modulating the
experience of closeness and touch with the object world. The fantasy may
present itself as a fantasy of sharing with the mother’s life experiences of joy,
pain, suffering, depression, or madness. Objectification of this core fantasy
into dress – e.g., the chador – may translate into a life-long search for a dress
that completes the person by placing her in the maternal psychic sack. It
is here that the pursuit of the ultimate fantasy-dress comes close to Lacan’s
notion of the object petit à.
To Anzieu, the “skin ego” is a metaphor that represents the structure of
the mind. It is a sensory template for the emerging structure of the ego. Like
Winnicott’s concept of transitional object, it is a mental representation of the
holding environment, a part of the maternal space. The skin ego is part of the
mother’s body, an intermediate chronological structure between fusion with
the mother and differentiation, a mother-child envelope (or shared skin) that,
in its contact with the environment, may be experienced as secure, flexible, or
as damaged and painful.33
Here we should add that we use the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in reference
to their respective functions of maternal and paternal. A man (a nominal
father or a male analyst) can perform the maternal function of containing/
holding in a dyadic structure and a woman (a nominal mother or a woman
analyst) can perform the paternal function of observing/reflecting/interpreting
in a triadic structure.34 The conventional referents of such gendered signifiers
are normative rather than natural or biological. In that sense, nothing can
exemplify our point better than Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s concluding
statements in her biography of Anna Freud, which describe her last few days
in October of 1982:
“Struggling for words, Anna Freud asked Manna Friedmann to stop

by 20 Maresfield Gardens on her way to the hospital: she would find
32
J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.
33
L. A. Kirshner, ‘The Skin Ego’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 1990, pp. 543–546.
34
D. Birksted-Breen, ‘Phallus, Penis and Mental Space’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
77, 1996, pp. 649-657.
123
hanging in Anna Freud’s bedroom closet the Professor’s Lodenmantel

which had been ritualistically cleaned and refurbished every year since
the end of the war. Then, when they went off to the park, the Kinderfrau
and Anna Freud, she, shrunken to the size of a school girl, sat wrapped
inside her father’s big wool coat.”35
The mother of ego psychology herself found nothing more containing than
her father’s heavy coat to house her ailing ego.
In a forthcoming clinical analysis of the psychic functions of the chador
for some Iranian women we have suggested that this clothing item of hiding
may envelope the psyche and function as a second skin ego and as a shield
against a perceived intrusive world. It may also work as a punitive maternal
superego, a “holding cell” in a jail that paralyses the separation/individuation
process. It is very unlikely that a girl will wear a chador if her mother does
not. In some curious way, the mother seems to be more concerned than the
father about protecting the girl from the “male’s gaze”. When a girl who had
been wearing chador is de-chadorised, she usually reports a profound sense of
betrayal of the mother. We have presented cases of young women angry with
their mothers over their insistence that their daughters should wear the chador.
Some of these young women would even engage in self-destructive attacks,
self-cutting, and suicidal behavior as a protest against the mental anguish that
they experience within a patriarchal system. For these women, the chador
certainly does not seem to have a ‘holding’ function, à la Winnicott; it is more
like a holding cell in a jail. As a defensive strategy to control the fear of pain
inflicted by the internal punisher, they engage in self-destructive behavior in
identification with the aggressor.
Anzieu argues that the failure of the containing function of the skin ego
evokes various forms of anxiety and diffused excitation. When
“the psychical topography consists of a kernel without a shell; the

individual seeks a substitute shell in physical pain or psychical anxiety;
he wraps himself in suffering.”36
Anzieu writes of situations when
35
E. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud. A Biography. New York: Summit Books, 1988, p. 453.
36
D. Anzieu, ibid., p. ,102.
124
“the envelope exists but its continuity is broken into by holes. This
Skin Ego is a colander: thoughts, and memories are only with difficulty
retained; they leak away.”37
For some young women trapped in the chador, the skin ego is so tight and
suffocating that it does not allow anything to escape. They have to physically
make the skin into a colander through self-cutting so that the aggression
required for self-assertion can escape. They go through unsuccessful symbolic
rituals to cut themselves out of the imaginary shared skin with the mother
and eject the persecuting object within. In Lacanian terminology, they are
facing the formidable task of tearing themselves away from the imaginary
relationship to the mother and the chador as its metonymic substitute.
While some analysts see self-cutting as an unconscious strategy
of demarcating the self-boundary,38 others see cutting as a strategy of
dedifferentiation, which is a part of the core fantasy of non-separateness from
the maternal object.39 To Woodruff, cutting serves the function of undoing
the unbearable maternal separateness and loss.40 It can be considered an
enactment of the wish to return to the maternal body. Woods called cutting
“the expression of an excited but deathlike union with internal oedipal
parents”, or a consolation for feelings of abandonment.41 To Podvoll, such an
act is an instance of “the flight (…) from symbiotic wishes towards a primitive
love object to a reliance on the autoerotic use of one’s own body”.42 Such
cases remind us of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. The young women’s
self-cutting becomes a part of an attempt to mark the boundary of the self
against what Wyatt has called the maternal jouissance, i.e., “the unconstrained
expression of maternal love and violent rage with a sense of entitlement to the
use of the child’s body and psyche, without limitation”.43
37
. Anzieu, op. cit.
D
38
See, J. Muller, Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Pierce, La-
can. New York: Routledge, 1996 and S. Doctors, ‘The Symptom of Delicate Self-Cutting in
Adolescent Females: A Developmental View’, Adolescence Psychiatry, 9, 1981, pp. 443-460.
39
See, J. Woods, ‘Layers of Meaning in Self-Cutting’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 14A,
1988, pp. 51-60.
40
M. E. Woodruff, ‘Flesh Made Word: Cutting Back to the Mother’, Psychoanalytical Review,
86, 1998, pp. 701-708.
41
J. Woods, ibid, p 51.
42
Cited in Woods, ibid., 51.
43
J. Wyatt, ‘Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher’, American Imago,
62, 2005, p. 457.
125
At times the horror of disintegration due to a defective container and a

porous psychic skin presents itself through a chronic need for being touched
and being watched, for seeing and for touching. If sexualised, this need
manifests itself through exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism and
other perverse conditions.44
Many analysts – mostly women – write about the invisibility of women45
and report on the pervasive assumption of the veiled female core.46 They
speak about the experience of invisibility among women as a reflection of the
internal representation of femininity. For example, Reenkola writes about a
woman patient who despite her claims of invisibility animated the analyst’s
inner visual screen with her fascinating imagery. The young woman patient
presented a visual contradiction between her clothing that hid the contours
of her body and her pre-teen hairstyle. The patient’s central fantasy that
reflected her self-experience was of having a paper bag over her head, faceless
and invisible to others. She tried to hide behind the mask of invisibility
recognisable to no one.
“[T]he paper bag seemed to function at one level as a way of protecting

her identity without her having to say ‘no’ and, at another level, as a
way of hiding her sexual body and its desires.”47
Of course, there is a difference between the socially constructed conditions

that render members of certain groups invisible and the individual’s own inner
experience of invisibility. And we hypothesise that there is no relationship – at
least no positive correlation – between the two. Although we have no data,
we do not think that women who wear chador experience a higher level of
invisibility than those who do not. We agree with a point made by Zizek that
the appearance of openness is at one time a method of estrangement and a
44
S ee; H. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self. A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of
Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York: International University Press, 1971; R. J. Stoller,
Sexual Excitement. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979; J. McDougall, Theatres of the Mind.
London: Free Association Books, 1986; J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘Sadomasochism in the Per-
versions: Some Thoughts on the Destruction of Reality’, Journal of the American Psychoana-
lytical Association, 39, 1991, pp. 399-41; A. Goldberg, ‘Sexualization and Desexualization’,
Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 62, 1993, pp. 383-399; J. Sekoff, ‘Blue Velvet’, Free Associations,
4, 1994, pp. 421-446.
45
R. Krausz, ‘The Invisible Woman’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 1995, pp.
59-72.
46
E. M. Reenkola, The Veiled Female Core. New York: Other Press, 2002.
47
Op. Cit.
126
way of keeping the perceived toxic subject, the other, at a distance.48 Nude
beaches are hardly the sites for open erotic encounters.
One recurring fear reported by some Iranian women who struggle with
throwing away the chador is that of becoming a prostitute. This fear (and, at
times, wish) stems largely from an internalisation of the voice of the mother.
But there seems also to be an illusion that the chador – a type of transitional
object – somehow magically protects one from falling into a moral abyss, no
matter what fantasies one may entertain or what actions one may take. Here,
the chador seems to give the woman the illusion of a sanctuary or an envelope
that keeps the contradictory parts of the self together. In this sense, the chador
also begins to mimic the illusive quality of a transitional object, in that it
is interposed between the self and the environment. She operates under the
illusion that she will be immune to all dangers as long as she operates within
that potential space.49
There is a popular poem in Iran by a well-known satirist, Iraj Mirza (1874–
1926), about the chador. The man in the poem seduces an unidentified
woman in a dark alley and makes love to her with her face completely covered.
The woman goes along with the sex but resists taking off her chador and
showing her face, fearing sin. She thus remains anonymous. The poem was
at the time a rhetorical attack on tradition and the religious establishment
that kept women oppressed and imprisoned. Yet, it tends to suggest that the
cardinal transgression is to leave the mother, i.e., to throw away the chador,
rather than to engage erotically with the father. The poem also speaks to the
poet’s Oedipal fantasy. As long as the woman’s face is hidden and her identity
disguised, the man can entertain his unconscious incestual fantasies. But the
poet, despite his conscious intention, gives the woman the agency to resist.
His fantasy is that the woman chooses not to unveil her face, as if she resists
the total surrender by saying that “my sexual enjoyment is my power over
you.” And the poet – the man – accepts his own surrender and controls his
desire through writing. We should also note that the idea of sin is ultimately
about the face – being seen – and if the woman is not seen, then sex may not
enter into the equation of sinning.
For women to withdraw in the maternal sack is a different phenomenon
than for men to negate and reaffirm the woman in cultural or multicultural
48
S . Zizek, ‘The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?’. Lecture in Cambridge Massa-
chusetts, 2009. Retrieved from http://forum-network.org/lecture/slavoj-zizek-monstrosity-
christ.
49
D. W. Winnicott, ‘Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain op-
posites’, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International
Universities Press, 1967.
127
settings. One movement is in the service of symbiosis and linking [maternal]

and the other is in the service of separation [paternal].50 Men’s fixation with
making the woman invisible and visible through chadoring and de-chadoring
reminds one of the ‘fort-da’ game, which enables the child to tolerate separation
and mourn the lost object.
The ‘fort-da’ is the name of a game that is structured in terms of repetitive
performances of affirmation and negation, recall and repression, or presence
and absence. The game exemplifies our negation of the other for the shadow
of the lost object we mourn. Freud reports observing his grandson throwing
small objects away from him under the bed or into a corner in order to get
into another move of looking for them.51 As he made the objects disappear,
he excitedly uttered something sounding like ‘oooo’. Freud later noticed that
his grandson was doing the same thing with a wooden reel to which a string
was attached. As he made the reel disappear by throwing it away behind
the curtain, he uttered ‘oooo’ and as he made the reel reappear, he joyfully
yelled ‘da’. Freud and the child’s mother interpreted ‘oooo’, to refer to the
German word ‘fort’, meaning “gone away” and ‘da’, to be the German word
‘da’, meaning “here it is”. Freud interpreted the game as the child’s attempt
to assert mastery over the uncertain situation of separation from the mother,
i.e. the mother’s disappearance and appearance. The game involved the child’s
symbolic struggle to keep alive the fantasy of the mother by rejecting its
external representation. By throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’, he
would claim mastery and would
“revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case
it would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need
you. I’m sending you away myself ’.”52
The oscillation between colonial and post-colonial masculine fantasies in

the West of unveiling and veiling Muslim women may also be traced to a
similar attempt at the repression of the Other through a fort/da movement of
negation and affirmation, of presence and absence, a psychic repetition of an
earlier attempt at the symbolic mastery and pursuit of predictability. But as
Loselle argues, the absence or negation in such movements is a repression and
avoidance of the other:
50
. L. Carveth, ‘Dark Epiphany’, Psychoanalytic Contemporary Thought, 17, 1994, pp. 215-
D
250
51
S. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (1920-1922), pp.
1-64.
52
Op. Cit, p, 16.
128
“This is not a simple opposition but a precondition that linguistically

and metaphysically contradicts itself by asserting that something is in
order to say that it is not. Fort/da in the same uneven way repeats what
is not, a nonpresence which in advance must be posited as a presence
but which is in fact a nonpresence (in this investigation nothing and
negation become confused). One finds the same problem in la-vie-
la-mort as living dead and as the posthumous notion Freud has (in
advance) of himself. It is the systematic avoidance of the other: positing
and withdrawing the pleasure principle in fort/da fashion and finally
throwing it into the beyond of the death drive.”53
One way of destroying or negating the other – Fort! – is through the extension
of the narcissistic object relation – to deny its real otherness so it can be kept
as an imaginary fantasy object – Da! – to harbor our projections. This is one
motivation behind hyper-veiling,54 all chadored women come to look exactly
the same like a set of disembodied figures on a Rorschach item as seen in
Shirin Neshat’s photography.55
The relationship between the psychic object and social thing is mediated
through complex processes. One cannot be simply reduced to the other.
Looking at the place of the chador in both sociocultural and individual psychic
53
. Loselle, ‘Freud/Derrida as Fort/Da and the Repetitive Eponym’, Comparative Literature,
A
Vol. 97, No. 5, 1982, p. 1184.
54
N. Macmaster and T. Lewis, ‘Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling’, Journal of Euro-
pean Studies, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 121-135.
55
Shirin Neshat is an internationally known New York-based Iranian photographer who has
mastered the artistic presentation of Iranian women in chador. Through various visual cultur-
al productions she has tried to present the complex spiritual, psychological, social, and sexual
lives of Iranian women. Her work is clearly ideological and subject to a polarised and heated
controversy in literary and art criticisms (V. Vitali, ‘Corporate Art and Critical Theory: On
Shirin Neshat’, Women: A Cultural Review, 15(1), 2004, pp. 1–18; A. Rounthwaite, ‘Veiled
Subjects: Shirin Neshat and Non-liberatory Agency’, Journal of Visual Culture, 7, 2008, pp.
165-182). Some writers look at her work as a form of postcolonial allegory, and as attempts at
the interrogation of gender identity in Islam (I. Dadi, ‘Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Post-
colonial Allegories’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 34, no. 1, 2008, pp.
125-150). Others view her work as a neocolonialist project of presenting the veiled woman as
a non-individuated exotic other for Western viewers. Moore finds Neshat’s work particularly
troubling in that it is marketed for the Western gaze and is a response to an unexhausted
“Euro-American desire for the culturally Other” (L. Moore, ‘Frayed Connections, Fraught
Projections: The Troubling Work of Shirin Neshat’, Women: A Cultural Review 13(1), 2002,
pp. 1–18). Shaw (‘Ambiguity and Audience in the Films of Shirin Neshat’, Third Text, 15: 57,
2001, pp. 43 -52) sees Neshat as engaging in the reification and objectification of women in
Iran rather than as participant in a complex discussion of the social construction of gender
identities.
129
space, we argue, along the same lines as Judith Butler,56 that the very act of
covering or uncovering (veiling or unveiling) the body ends up mapping the
female body, demarcating the private, personal, public, and social, and thus
constituting the gendered identity, defining the nature of sexuality, forming
the objects of desire and constituting the man and woman’s subjectivity. The
dress rehearsal, the performance of exhibiting the hiding rituals of the body
comes to create the illusion of a particular ego.
Ironically, Iran provides only a cultural laboratory for the interrogation
– albeit exaggerated – of the feminine and symbolic. The woman’s body as
the only site for the articulation of sex and eroticism has come to claim a
private space in the public domain.57 By inhabiting the feminine body, the
woman has come to need protection from the man’s desire. Lack of freedom
and autonomy is the price she has to pay for being the only gender and the
only sex. The mother herself frightened by her own corporal and libidinal
body tries, as part of her own narcissistic struggle, to act as the guardian of
the symbolic to keep her daughter clean and virgin for the father. In line
with Irigaray’s thinking, we may even say that the mother has already been
murdered.58 What masquerades as a mother is simply a maternal guardian
of the father’s desire.59 In fact, the picture of the woman in Freud and Lacan
involves matricide. The precondition for entrance into a discursive system
of language and culture is said to be the murder of the mother.60 In her
critique of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism,61 Baym has argued
that the conceptualisation of a pre-Oedipal mother or a preverbal state also
56
J. Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory’, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Edited by S-E.
Case. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
57
See; S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1974; M. Wittig, Les Guéril-
lères. London: The Women’s Press, 1979; J. Butler, op cit..
58
L. Irigaray, ibid.
59
G. Homayounpour and S. Movahedi, ‘Transferential Discourse in the Language of the (M)
other’, Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 2012, pp. 114-143.
60
L. Irigaray, ibid.
61
Writing on the Lacanian concept of lacking an object, Johnston remarks, “... the lack embod-
ied by this special type of object is the result of the loss of the dyadic bond between infant and
mother. Through the defiles of the mirror stage, the mother is transformed into an other, an
intersubjective alterity. As the other, the child no longer sees her desire as under the control
of its narcissistic, pseudo-omnipotent will. The presubjective dyad dissipates in light of this
recognition by the child (Lacan, 1977). As a result, the intangible signs of the mother’s desire
(more specifically, her gaze and voice) become the impossible objects of a hindered jouissance
– ‘the gaze, qua objet à, may come to symbolize this central lack’ (Lacan 1977, 77).” (A. John-
ston, ‘The Driving Force of Lack’, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 23, 2000, p. 61)
130
ascends to the male fantasy of appropriating the mother and her language.62
It minimises the mother; her figure may be glorified at the expense of placing
her outside of language. The preoccupation with the pre-Oedipal mother
misses the pervasive presence of the mother in all layers of the psychic
structure.63
We should also note that theories defining different lines of development
for girls and boys (in terms of constructs such as attachment, separation,
individuation, etc.) are primarily cultural narratives and have little to do
with the anatomical structure of the sexes. As a result, we must be careful not
to explain a culture-specific phenomenon in terms of theoretical constructs
in a different culture. For instance, the popular and oft-quoted assertions
that define masculinity in terms of separation and femininity in terms of
attachment speak to individualistic cultures’ values or fantasies about gender
roles. In Iran, both boys and girls are very attached to their mothers. Their
selves are equally embedded in that relationship. This raises questions about
why, in a culture where the laws of the father are structured to make the
woman invisible in public, the boy tends to be so attached to the mother.
Perhaps by keeping the woman under the chador, the man forms the illusion
of separating from the mother – at least in visual fantasy. Thus our remarks in
this paper should not be interpreted as one of treating the women or mothers
outside the cultural dynamics of the patriarchal system. Although we have not
studied these patients’ mothers, research on the intergenerational transmission
of trauma64 leads us to hypothesise that these mothers have transmitted their
fantasies and internal representations to their daughters in an attempt to work
through their own repressed and conflictual sexuality.
Benslama, argues “the history of truth in Islam begins with the unveiling
of a woman.”65 However, the old fear of men over the sight of the woman’s
uncovered head prevalent in the world’s three monotheistic religions persists.
Angels are said to shy away from the sight of the woman’s hair while demons
are attracted to it. Is man the angel who is afraid of the truth of the woman,
or is he the demon who doesn’t shy away from her truth?
62
. Baym, ‘The Madwoman and Her Language: Why I Don’t Do Feminist Literary Theory’,
N
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 3 (No.1/2), 1984, pp. 45–59.
63
We should emphasize that our aim in this paper has not been to present a sociological analysis
of the status of gender in Iran, and we do not want to imply that Iranian women are not in
the position to negotiate their way out from the maternal realm.
64
See Bernstein (1993), Lieberman (1999), Silverman and Lieberman (1999).
65
F. Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam. Translated by R. Bononno. Minneapo-
lis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 134.
131
Perhaps, men are afraid that she who has given them the truth can take
it away from them. Perhaps this is why in most cultures the maternity role
is over played at the expense of womanhood, and boys are socialised to hate
women but love their mothers. They enter the world through the body of a
woman but make their life project to control it by laws, to structure it by dress
codes, to condemn it for being the site of sexuality, to negate it as a lack, and
to attack it as inferior. Perhaps it is the recognition of her in themselves that is
too threatening as a secret to be divulged, and perhaps it is the recognition of
(m)other in themselves that revives the trauma of her loss.
132
Part IV
Morality
Gilles Ribault
It has been already pointed out that Freud’s statements about morality seem to
be ambiguous and even contradictory. On the one hand, we know that Freud
is an eager advocate of cultural institutions and of all that human civilisation
has acquired throughout its history in regard to spirituality or a sense of an
ideal. By reading his work, we can learn that culture stands for the progress that
has led human beings beyond animality. Morality and its rules appear, from
this vantage point, as a sharp and sometimes cruel principle of renunciation
that humanity needs in order to master its drives. But, on the other hand,
through more careful observation, we realise that such a praise of moral values
is not to be found in all of Freud’s texts. To be more specific, Freud develops
this opinion chiefly after 1923-1924, when the Oedipus complex is becoming
to Freud the core of the psychic history and eventually the main foundation
of the civilised man. Thus, if we go back to earlier publications, for example
to ‘Die “Kulturelle” sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität’,1 we can
easily remember that the first Freud’s assessment about morality was more
qualified and was even critical regarding its repressive consequences. Ideals
and moral values were indeed the principles of inner conflicts that could lead
to pathological effects. It would be illusory to try and remove the difficulty
by asserting that if Freud has always criticised the excess of morality, yet he
never challenged morality itself. For the whole problem lies within: Morality,
which Freud ends up considering as normal and unique, is precisely the one
he characterised previously as being zealous and exacting, and from which
humanity had to be set free.
What can be understood about this real and important discrepancy?
After being held up as an efficient method for helping the individual to resist
over-demanding cultural aims, did psychoanalysis eventually turn into a
mere educational task? It seems that its new purpose became that of leading
humanity to accept its difficult submission to inner laws. If, to quote Freud,
the “individual is an enemy of culture”, which camp does Freud finally choose
to support? We would like to consider this contradiction as an opportunity to
draw out two different lines of argument in Freud’s conception of morality.
1
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Gilles Ribault
If, to start with, we lay our discussion upon that great work Totem und
Tabu,2 it is clear that Freud acknowledges tight links between moral rules,
taboos and neurotic inhibitions. A taboo can be seen as an archaic form
of moral obligation. Freud defines it as the result of a repressed aggressive
impulse, that is, a disposition related to a compulsive defence. We don’t know
why we have to comply with it but we feel with a blind and powerful sense
of urgency that it has to be done. A taboo looks like an obsessional symptom.
However, not all moral prohibitions are taboos. Indeed, Freud describes the
“religious or moral obligations” as something else. With this second group
of ethical elements, it is not anymore a question of a stringent repression
but of the ambivalent love of authority that, as we know, Freud staged in the
Darwinian tale of the original horde. Religious and moral laws are tightly
related to respectful feelings which increase within the brothers’ society after
the murder of its leader: what this magnetic figure wanted when he was alive
became an inside law for his murderers after his death. With this kind of rule,
Freud explores a new modality of the neurotic side of ethics: a narcissistic love
which submits the ego to the stern laws of the superego. As it will be explained
in ‘Zur Einführung des Narzismus’,3 moral ideals are the conditions of
repression and must thus be regarded as a central element of the pathological
conflict characterising neurosis. At that time, Freud considers the secondary
narcissism as a bequest of the primary one that every man must overcome to
enter adulthood. Therefore, a morality based on subjection to an ideal or to
any moral laws can’t be considered as free from the infantile condition. We
thus clearly understand the recurrent comparison in Totem und Tabu, between
taboos, pathological inhibitions and moral laws: all of them are founded on
neurotic conditions.
Hence, if our analysis doesn’t mislead us, Freud must have developed
another idea of moral rule, more specifically, a morality without any
pathological roots. And we can easily check our hypothesis in the text that
we have just mentioned. Indeed, reading this great work through, we can
find out a third notion of moral necessity. Freud makes a difference between
the inhibition involved in taboo, the obedience to laws and the mere inner
disposition that make us feel spontaneously inclined to conform to a rule. The
Freudian metapsychology here re-enacts what the Ancients, and Aristotle in
particular, termed ‘hexis’ and what the Romans have translated into ‘habitus’.
“Where does virtue come from?” was the great Greek question.
2
3
136
Philosophers used to answer with a vague reference to ‘habit’ without ever

accounting for it. Freud puts forward that the moral features that define a
character are not habits but mostly remains of infantile conflicts: shyness,
shame, disgust, for instance, are psychic formations replacing opposite impulses
which have been overcome. The reaction generating these ‘Reaktionbilduneng’
that Freud regards as a successful repression,4 regularly appears during the
grieving process in which people who are suffering a loss adopt one or a few
psychological attributes of the lost one. This reaction can also occur at the
origin of essential moral limits like incest- or murder-prohibitions. One can
prevent oneself from killing because of the culpability or the angst; but one
can also be simply reluctant to commit such transgressions and experience a
natural refusal if one were prompted to do so. In the first case, one belongs
to the Dostoievskian world with its tormented characters; in the second, one
behaves as the wise and virtuous man according to Ancient philosophers or as
Freud himself in accordance with what he reveals of his own morality.5
Readers of Totem und Tabu have often neglected this third kind of moral
rules that arise after the murder of the Leader of the horde. It should be
pointed out that the norms set up by the brothers’ guilt, immediately after the
misdeed, are not the same as the ones that, later on, stemmed from the post-
murder rivalry. The first ones are the ground of religious principles, the second
of social bonds. In his concise and acute style, Freud writes that the ruling out
of incest, for example, does not find its genuine root in a feeling – culpability
or any other – but in a “practical necessity” (praktische Begründung)6: all the
murderers wanted themselves to become the chief which they killed together;
all claimed full sexual rights on the females of the group; in both cases, they
all had to forsake their desire. Humanity learns its main moral lessons from
what the Greeks named Ananké: the necessity that is experienced when the
only way out of insoluble problems is to let go. To Freud, loss and grieving
tears is the painful path to wisdom. The mythical scene of the killing of the
father represents only the ‘beginning’ of culture, not its origin and then not its
necessary frame. The real source of society goes back to the birth of the bonds
that Freud called “social feelings” which have nothing to do with religion,
neurosis or guilt.
4
The process of a successful repression is described in ‘Triebe und Triebschicksale’, Gesammelte
Werke, vol. 10. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 255-256.
5
Letter to Putnam: the 15th of July 1915. James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis: Letters
Between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sandor Ferenczi, and Morton
Prince, 1877-1917. Edited by N. G. Hale and translated by J. B. Heller. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. 1971.
6
Totem und Tabou, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp.
173-174.
137
Gilles Ribault
The point we are making here has of course a heavy significance for
understanding what Freud meant as well as for appreciating the meaning of
the analytic work itself. For we can reasonably describe this work as a moral
process. But of what kind of moral process is it? When Freud pointed out
what succeeded in the cure of the young Hans, he put it in this way: “sie (the
analytic cure) ersetzt die Verdrängung durch die Verurteilung”.7 It appears in
this passage that the final condemnation provided by the therapeutic process
pertains to morality, but a morality free from repression or from any inner
conflicts. This ethics consists of a mere progress of Bewußtsein, of consciousness
and definitely not in a victory of a severe conscience, the Gewissen. If human
societies had no other basis than the ambivalent love for a totem – or any inner
substitute – depicted within the members of the original horde, there would
be no hope for civilisation to know another morality than the one which has
dominated it until now. The individual could not expect to defeat his neurotic
problems through an analytic cure if he were locked in an Oedipus complex
seen as an universal unconscious legacy. All the human morality would be
then the one supported by the narcissistic organisation of the superego: an
Übermoralität.8 In such conditions, how could a cultural progress ever get rid
of religion and neurosis? It is true that Freud ended up sharing this point of
view after the article ‘Das Ich und das Es’.9 Nevertheless it is impossible to
think that this pessimistic conception belonged to Freudian views before this
turning point. Indeed, for a long time, Freud believed in the curative virtue
of his new psychological method. The possibility of overcoming neurosis –
individually or socially – was an established fact to him. The border between
psychic normality and pathology meant a lot as long as the Oedipal complex
remained a peculiar structure and still so, when it was raised up to the mould
of neurotic disease. But it becomes impossible to imagine a mind released
from the infantile narcissistic love and its ensuing conflicts when the Oedipal
complex is to be held as a universal and necessary construction from which
nobody escapes. Morality and religion are then to be regarded as two similar
answers to the same issue: the anguish in front of a diffuse threat coming
either from heaven or from nature or from existence itself.
How can this stunning change of mind be accounted for? Before setting
out our hypothesis, let us focus on the first conclusion of our investigation:
the question of the status of morality in Freudian thought does not claim
7
‘Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjahrigen Knaben’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Frankfurt a/M.:
Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 375.
8
‘Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose’,Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Ta-
schenbuch Verlag, pp 451.
9
138
a single answer. This does not mean that Freud answers in manifold and
indistinct ways. We have tried to bring to the fore that the ambiguity that
splits the Freudian outlook is to be connected to two different kinds of moral
rules coming from two distinct sources. The trouble begins when one of these
two models, the pathological one, casts a shadow on the other. What happens
isn’t a question of logic but of psychology: Freud is caught up with his own
neurosis that, for a long time, he was able to observe and to analyse in his
own inner life. The Oedipus complex, which was strongly ruling his infantile
desires, first of all inspired his investigations and then overwhelmed him. On
a theoretical level, this complex then became a universal psychic organisation
that it was impossible to leave behind. From the key article, ‘Das Ich und das
Es’, Freud explicitly considers the superego as heir to the paternal Oedipal
figure. This complete revolving turn is not to be taken as a redirection that
Freud clearly endorsed but as an unconscious shift that simply weakened and
darkened the consistency of the previous analyses.
Be that as it may, the issue of the status of morality in Freudian thought
raises a question whose stakes meet current philosophical interests. To put
it straightforwardly and concisely, we could simply ask: is Freud a post-
modernist thinker? Is Freudian psychoanalysis the first intellectual enterprise
to acknowledge that society doesn’t need ideals or transcendent values to
gather people and make them live together? The first Freud helps to conceive
of a culture without Gods and sacred obligations, based on moral rules
created by mere physical and human necessities. This cruel reality could be
enough to raise humanity to civilisation. The fall of idols stand for the end of
a type of culture, not for the death of culture itself. It is this insightful view
that contrasts sharply with the traditionalist complaint against the present
that Freud tends to abandon in the last period of his work. This evolution
actually shows up that Freud was always divided. His academic training and
the Viennese society he belonged to could have made a pure classical man of
him, only keen on Goethe, Michelangelo and Roman or Egyptian antiquities.
But Freud loved Shakespeare, Leonardo and J. S. Mill too. His scientific
background and his therapeutic practice probably helped him to open himself
up to modernity, if not to post-modernity. The conflict between these two
trends of his personality is revealed in the ambivalent relation Freud developed
to America. The type of horizontal social bonds within a communicational
society of which he was able to conceive, was at the same time something he
loathed. Rather than a critical theory, the Freudian anthropology is then to be
deemed as a thought in crisis, split between two approaches of morality which
are not mere conceptions but ways of experiencing and living.
139
Gilles Ribault
Let us conclude our investigation by stepping back and asking two

general and broader questions. The first one concerns the fate of the second
Freudian view on morality within the psychoanalytic community. After
Freud, psychoanalysis didn’t get rid of the heavy inheritance of this morality
exclusively thought as a set of inner laws commanded by a superego.
Consequently, on a clinical level, the problem of ethics vanished into the
pathological issue of guilt: how to confront it in order to weaken it, to
decrease its intensity? The aim was no longer “to cope with the inner conflict”
but “to regulate it”. Reinforcing the ego, or more modestly, driving out the
unconscious motivations of the neurotic anguish, doesn’t make any difference:
in both cases the superego was granted to be an unavoidable structure. In
this dark inner landscape, differently depicted by Melanie Klein as well as
Anna Freud, no light could rise. Lacan certainly tried to contrive some way
out from this hopeless theoretical situation. With this purpose in mind, he
originally put forward that the Oedipal organisation could be the origin of
the best as well as the worst. The neurotic contradiction between drives and
their prohibitions was to be considered by him as a fruitful ordeal, as a mere
‘function’ – “la fonction paternelle”.10 Through the impossibility of reaching
the maternal object, the child experiences the process that will precisely set up
his own desire. The main interrogation is then to know how to keep human
desire alive. Lacan is thus to be recognised as the thinker who has given back
to psychoanalysis the ambition to speak about ethics. Nevertheless, his new
standpoint is grounded on the former normative basis. Lacan persists in
holding the narcissistic formation of the superego as a necessary and even
precious psychic principle. He sees in it the path to an autonomous desiring,
a condition that Freud took for granted as long as the child developed bonds
with the others.
The second point brings us back to the Freudian morality without obligations
or laws. It opens new approaches to the current evolution of our European
society. What future is there for a culture whose morality would no longer
be founded on principles that help individuals or nations to love themselves?
Should this society occur, what new pathologies or social discontents would
emerge? What could rise from the Oedipus’ decline? To rephrase this question
in Freud’s last meta-psychological terms, we could freely quote the well-known
and concluding words of ‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’: could a human
culture, and to what extent, get rid of this isolated destructive drive that,
since remote times, has expressed itself through self-aggressions and a love
10
Séminaire V. Les formations de l’inconscient. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
140
for domination?11 Freud’s ambiguous and cautious answer has been severely
criticised by more than one commentator. Its undeniably pessimistic value lies
in the personification of the drive of destruction regarded as a natural principle:
an eternal “Heavenly Power”. Previously, in ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’12 this
drive wasn’t original but stemmed from one of the two genuine archaic
principles aside Eros: the death drive. A few years earlier, Freud could have
thus raised the question: in the eternal fight between erotic impulses that
bind together and the death drive that divides, who knows up to which point
the first could be able to turn into loving bonds rather than into aggressive
impulses? Such a formulation would be less pessimistic but wouldn’t however
promise a necessary final dissolution of moral self-aggression. It would leave
utterly undecided the question of the manners through which Eros could
manage to neutralise his opposite principle in a society free from the superego.
The challenge of psychoanalysis today might be to wonder if the various ways
by which our traditional societies are passing away would not be the ones by
which Eros gets rid of the destruction drives and succeeds in dominating the
death drive. Such work would probably provide innovative meta-psychological
models that will give future psychoanalysis an unpredictable face.
11
‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’,Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Taschen-
buch Verlag, pp. 506.
12
141
Herman Westerink
A long tradition
My interest in the issue of moral responsibility in Freud’s writings has been
triggered by a larger project I have been working on over the past two years:
the filiation between Freudian psychoanalysis and Reformation thought – a
project which originated from a single germ cell, namely a statement in Lacan’s
seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis where he suggests that we can only
fully understand the moral problems Freudian psychoanalysis addresses when
we recognise the filiation or cultural paternity with certain aspects of Martin
Luther’s theology in particular, and Reformation thought in general.1 If we
would be contented with the general view expressed by Elisabeth Roudinesco
that “Lacan translated Freudian discourse into a language familiar to Catholic
tradition”, then perhaps we shouldn’t overemphasise the importance of some
references to Luther and the Reformation.2 And yet, there is good reason to
do so when we consider the general scheme Lacan works with in his seminar
on the ethics of psychoanalysis – a scheme that is already introduced the year
before at the very start of his sixth seminar on desire and its interpretation.
There he mentions Baruch Spinoza side by side with the Puritan poet John
Donne as two of the few precursors of Freud. The work of both men bear
witness of what Spinoza had expressed in a single formula, namely that “desire
is the very essence of man” – a formula that in a sense is the motto or leitmotiv
of the seventh seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis.3 Lacan opposes this
1
J . Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII. Edi-
ted by J.-A. Miller, translated by D. Porter. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 97.
2
E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. Chi-
cago: Chicago University Press, 1990, p. 262. Compare also M. de Certeau, Heterologies.
Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 59.
3
J. Lacan, Le désir et son interpretation. Séminaire 1958-1959. Paris: Éditions de l’Association
Freudienne Internationale, Publication hors commerce, 2000, p. 16; B. Spinoza, Ethics. Edi-
ted by G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, III, prop.59, def.1. In
his explanation of the formula Spinoza adds: “I understand by the name ‘desire’ all human
endeavours, impulses, appetites, and volitions, which vary in accordance with the disposition
of the same man, and which are often so opposed to each other that a man is dragged in dif-
ferent directions and does not know where to turn.” In this formulation we find elements that
appeal to Lacan: firstly, man is ruled by an uncontrollable blind desire, and secondly, desires
can oppose each other and evoke conflict.
Herman Westerink
motto to what he calls a hedonist tradition and the identification of pleasure

and the good object (convergence du plaisir et du bien), adding that such ethics
can only be realised within the limits set by an authority (morale du maître)
disciplining, controlling and regulating the subject’s habits. In such ethics
desire is exiled from its proper place in human nature, confining it to a realm
of bestiality and perversion outside the right moral order.4 In the seventh
seminar this hedonist tradition is further elaborated. Lacan identifies it as
the Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy.5 He associates this tradition
primarily with a “calculation of the proper paths to follow”, and the choice of
“the middle path” of modesty and temperateness as the ideal path in a moral
order. For him this tradition is all about the possibility and the effect of linking
the dialectic of demand, need and desire “to that well-founded and legitimate
function we might call the service of goods” (service des biens). If psychoanalysis
would confess to such a moral philosophy, it could be perceived as a utilitarian
theory and practice that accommodates social and political interests by shifting
the subject’s demand for happiness onto the playground of common welfare
and shared norms. The human instincts are then constructed in such a way
that they are made into “the natural law of the realization of harmony”. Lacan
denies however that the ethics of psychoanalysis are about producing such
harmony.6 He refers to what in the Middle Ages was known as the facientibus-
principle, that is, to try and do our best – be virtuous and do good – “insofar
as it is possible”. In such a train of thought a real “confrontation with the
human condition” is avoided.7 No surprise that he focuses on the point on
which this morality turns and becomes impossible: in view of the topology
of desire.8
4
J. Lacan, Le désir et son interpretation, pp. 13-14.
5
J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 221.
6
Ibid, p. 303, 312-314.
7
Ibid, p. 303.
8
Ibid, pp. 314-315. For a theologian it is not difficult to recognise a Lutheran trait in this
critique of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as representative of what Luther calls scholastic
Sautheologen. Aristotle and Aquinas may deserve some praise for mapping the natural law
inscribed in the human heart, which guarantees that ignorant sinners or gentiles can do good
works. Luther even praises Aristotle for his knowledge of civil righteousness and law. He
writes that uneducated and unjust persons who need moral training should read Aristotle’s
ethics. And yet, before the face of God, this civil righteousness means nothing and distracts
us from what a person should actually be concerned about, man’s sinful disposition, that
is to say, the selfish desire that obstructs and corrupts man’s relation with God and fellow
man. W. H. Lazareth, Christians in Society. Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2001, p. 145. For Luther this distinction between civil righteousness and
individual faith/sin was an important aspect of his teachings on the so-called two kingdoms
or governments.
144
Lacan’s references to Luther fit the scheme of his critique of a whole

tradition in moral philosophy including Aristotle, Aquinas, utilitarianism
and ego psychology. The “mad man from Wittenberg” is called upon as a
precursor of Freud, who, by thoroughly analysing human nature in the
context of his theological polemics with Erasmus, radically denied the good
as such, deconstructed the belief in good works as illusions, emphasised the
fundamentally bad character of the relations between men, and revealed that
at the heart of human destiny there is desire, or more precise, there is hatred
as the fundamental passion God infused into men; hatred as the cause and
foundation of the symbolic law.9
According to Lacan, the leading tradition in moral philosophy is continued
in certain forms of psychoanalysis such as ego psychology that expect that
self-knowledge or knowledge of human nature will help to dissolve inner
obstructions and uncover a hidden or repressed meaning and purpose that
supports moral action in everyday life. The aim of such psychology is to
connect or reconnect the right motivation with the right action. But that
doesn’t take us very far, says Lacan. It is the kind of self-knowledge that
is only the embryonic form of that old γνώθι σεαυτóν, the kind of self-
knowledge that is only interested in this self as far as the decantation of good
instincts and motives is concerned. Freud, however, went beyond this form
of self-knowledge, when he stumbled upon phenomena such as the negative
therapeutic reaction that provoked the question of whether self-knowledge
would naturally imply that everything will work out well all by itself. “Will
there be nothing but goodness?” once the deeper layers of desire have been
excavated.10 The answer is a simple and plain “no”. When, according to Lacan,
“we are to consider an analysis completed for someone who is subsequently to
find himself in a responsible position relative to an analysis, in the sense that he
becomes an analyst himself ”, then such analysis and responsible position will
“in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human
condition”. This mature form of self-knowledge is defined by a responsible
position (position responsable) towards oneself and the confrontation with the
human condition, that is to say, the confrontation with desire, its transgression
beyond the law, its abyssal object, its evil aim (jouissance) – in short, the
dimension of desire that confronts hatred, evil and death.
Lacan’s position is opposed here to a trend in ego-psychology in the 1950s
that reasoned that therapy aims at insight and self-knowledge by which
one should hold oneself responsible for one’s evil wishes so as to be able to
9
J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 96-97.
10
Ibid, p. 312.
145
Herman Westerink
reject these wishes – that is the price to pay for maturation.11 In some recent
studies on psychoanalysis, ethics and responsibility this train of thought has
been continued. Moral responsibility is here immediately associated with a
degree of mature self-control, willingness to face and accept reality, and to
meet obligations and duties. Being responsible for one’s desires and impulses,
enables a person to identify their sources, meanings and purposes in order to
finally renounce or modify them “in the interest of greater adaptation and
maturity”, or to integrate them “in more effective and productive ways”.12
Despite all differences, both Lacan and his opponents agree that there is
at least one meeting point between psychoanalysis and moral philosophy,
and that is that both formulate theories on the subject’s desires, impulses and
motivations – in ethics such formulations are necessary for the assessment of
the subject’s moral choices and acts. In this paper I want to consider Freud’s
view on moral responsibility as exactly such meeting point.
“Good” and “evil”

Freud is a clinician, not a scholar in ethics. Nevertheless, he was intrigued by the
question of the source and emergence of both individual and social morality,
its key dynamics and its effects. Within this context he addresses concepts that
are central in various ethical theories: happiness and pleasure, constructions
of good and evil, duty and the categorical imperative, love of fellow men,
responsibility, etc.. Nevertheless he carefully avoids his psychoanalytic theories
and practice from becoming an ethical theory in the sense of a critical and
systematic reflection on human moral behaviour that develops principles of
right moral conduct and organises the relations of human beings. But ethics
is more than developing rules of conduct or defining right moral action. It
has to start with an analysis of motives, perceptions, inclinations, desires,
11
. Fingarette, ‘Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Moral Guilt and Responsibility: A Re-eva-
H
luation’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 16 (1955/1), pp. 18-36; E. H. Mad-
den, ‘Psychoanalysis and Moral Judgeability’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 18
(1957/1), pp. 68-79.
12
W. W. Meissner, The Ethical Dimension of Psychoanalysis. A Dialogue. Abany: SUNY, 2003,
p. 207 (chapter 10). Compare also E. Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991, pp. 96-100; N. Sherman, ‘Taking Responsibility for Our Emotions’,
Responsibility. Edited by E. Frankel Paul et. al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999, pp. 294-323. Nancy Sherman argues that psychoanalysis is a tool for effecting the deep
changes in human character that Aristotelian ethics merely points at: the harmonising of
emotions and their transformation into the realm of reason and self-control. Psychoanalysis
can thus be utilised for the moral education of character. Ibid, pp. 320-321.
146
expectations and the web of authority and power structures that forces itself
upon the individual in a demand of obedience or adaptation. At this point,
ethical reflection connects with psychoanalysis. He is constantly analysing and
re-evaluating aspects of human behaviour, disentangling the ambivalences and
inner conflicts in such a way that a person may gain insight. Sometimes such
analysis leads to statements about good or evil aspects of human beings despite
his avoidance of ethics, which can lead to rather paradoxical testimonies, such
as this one:
“Ethics are remote from me. (…) I do not break my head very much
about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human
beings on the whole.”13
Whereas Freud never applies terms like good or evil, moral or immoral to large
groups or cultures, stresses the conventional character of such distinctions, and
rather focuses on the excessive demands or illusionary ideals in culture, he does
use such concepts in his analysis of individuals, applying them as seemingly
self-evident. An example can be found in his case study of the Rat Man where
Freud states that the contrast between the conscious and the unconscious can
be assimilated within the contrast “between a moral self and an evil one”.14
In the case of the Rat Man the unconscious is then simply named evil, since
it contains all the repressed affects and perceptions that Freud associates with
hatred, sadistic and destructive impulses, and selfishness. As regards this
evil, he sometimes explicitly mentions that psychoanalysis sustains what in
Christian tradition had already been identified as man’s natural inclination
towards evil.
And yet, things are not that simple. When Freud discusses the low morality
of the state and the brutality of man in the first years of the First World War,
he criticises those who defend the idea that moral development consists of
eradicating the evil human tendencies and replacing these by good tendencies
through education in a civilised environment. He argues that “in reality, there
is no such thing as ‘eradicating evil’”, since strictly speaking the “human
impulses in themselves are neither good nor bad”. There is no such thing as
an evil self. There are only natural instincts which are similar in all people
and which aim at the satisfaction of certain needs. Such instincts are only
classified as good or evil “according to their relation to the needs and demands
13
. Meng, E-L. Freud (eds), Psychoanalysis and Faith. The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar
H
Pfister. New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 61. See also W. W. Meissner, The Ethical Dimension
of Psychoanalysis. A Dialogue. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, p. 5.
14
S. Freud, ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, Standard Edition, vol. 10, p. 177.
147
Herman Westerink
of the human community” – society categorises selfish and cruel impulses as

evil. As regards man’s brutality, Freud reasons that a person’s character can
only “inadequately be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’”, since a person is either
good or bad in specific relations, most times he is both at the same time in
his ambivalences towards important others. Besides, strong ‘bad’ impulses in
early childhood are often the condition for later ‘good’ inclinations through
a sense of guilt – bad instincts thus cause good behaviour.15 The surfacing of
brutality is not only the expression of primitive inclinations. In fact, Freud
argues, the innate aspect should not be over-estimated. At least as important is
the fact that man is mislead by culture, including ethical theorists that regard
human beings ‘better’ than they actually are, since culture is only interested
in good behaviour “and does not trouble itself about the instinctual basis of
this conduct”.16
These ideas from ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ are impor-
tant, since from then on Freud mostly uses quotation marks when he writes
of “good” and “evil” impulses. Of course one may ask the question why he
still wants to use these concepts of good and evil when the human instincts in
themselves are neither good nor bad. An answer is formulated in one of the
introductory lectures written about the same time, the lecture on the censor-
ship of dreams:
“We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men only because other
people disavow it and thereby make the human mind, not better, but
incomprehensible. If now we give up this one-sided ethical valuation,
we shall undoubtedly find a more correct formula for the relation
between good and evil in human nature.”17
Freud has reasons for emphasising evil, namely finding a correct formula for
the relation between good and evil in human nature. Correct, I believe, can
be equated here with truthful. It is opposed to what Freud in his essay on war
and death identifies as “hypocrisy” and “illusion”, that is to say, the refusal to
recognise ‘evil’ impulses and the related erroneous optimism expressed in the
exaggeration of the capacity of people to adjust to socially acceptable moral
standards. It is this estrangement from the instinctual disposition, this refusal
to accept the “truth” (as Freud calls it) and tolerate life as it is, that stands in
15
S . Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, Standard Edition, vol. 14, pp. 281-
282.
16
Ibid, pp. 283-284.
17
S. Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, Standard Edition, vol. 15, p. 147.
148
the way, not only of self-knowledge, but also of understanding one’s fellow
man, and thus of a better assessment of the relations between human beings.
Moral responsibility
We have already seen that Freud in the case of the Rat Man identifies the
unconscious as evil pointing at the repressed feelings of hatred and his sadistic,
cruel impulses. As regards this repressed evil Freud tells his patient that he
ought not to consider himself responsible for these traits in his character,
since these impulses had originated from his infancy and were thus merely
derivatives of his infantile character. The Rat Man should know that “moral
responsibility could not be applied to children”. In fact, moral responsibility
was to be regarded the mature effect of a development out of the infantile
predispositions.18 Moral responsibility is here seen as a certain degree of
self-control, which seemingly supports readings of Freud that focus on the
development of a mature autonomous ego. Yet, Freud adds an important
footnote: “I only produced these arguments so as once more to demonstrate
to myself their inefficacy”. Hence, Freud at the time had strategic therapeutic
reasons to tell his patient what he told him – a strategy that is afterwards
considered inefficient. In fact, he does believe that in a way his patient is
responsible for the evil traits of his character, also when these traits are infantile
derivatives. A few years later Freud returns to this issue:
“Even if a man has repressed his evil impulses into the unconscious and
would like to tell himself afterwards that he is not responsible for them,
he is nevertheless bound to be aware of this responsibility as a sense of
guilt whose basis is unknown to him.”19
Freud is saying here that a person cannot be absolved from moral responsibility
by dissociating from a part of himself, assigning the evil impulses to a past
infantile state or – which amounts to the same thing – to the will of the gods
as “exalted disguises of his own unconscious”. The sense of guilt will betray
him, revealing that the evil impulses are really a person’s own impulses.
The issue of moral responsibility is a central theme in a part of a 1925 text
in which Freud elaborates some additional notes on dream-interpretation:
18
S. Freud, ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, p. 185.
19
S. Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, Standard Edition, vol. 16, p. 331.
149
Herman Westerink
‘Moral Responsibility for the Content of Dreams’.20 Freud argues that when
dreams have given no offence to dream censorship, they express “immoral,
incestuous and perverse impulses or murderous and sadistic lusts”. He then
poses the following question: “Must one assume responsibility for the content
of one’s dreams?” His answer is this:
“Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of
one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them? Unless the content of
the dream (rightly understood) is inspired by alien spirits, it is a part
of my own being. If I seek to classify the impulses that are present in
me according to social standards into good and bad, I must assume
responsibility for both sorts; and if, in defence, I say that what is
unknown, unconscious and repressed in me is not my ‘ego’, then I
shall not be basing my position upon psycho-analysis, I shall not have
accepted its conclusions (…). It is true that in the meta-psychological
sense this bad repressed content does not belong to my ‘ego’ – that
is, assuming that I am a morally blameless individual – but to an ‘id’
upon which my ego is seated. But this ego developed out of the id, it
forms with it a single biological unit, it is only a specially modified
peripheral portion of it, and it is subject to the influences and obeys the
suggestions that arise from the id.”21
I want to make two remarks on this answer. First, in this passage we see that the
meta-psychological distinctions, such as those between id, ego and superego,
can be misleading notably when the ego is associated with good and the Id
with evil or bad – to recall: in the case of the Rat Man Freud did make such
simply distinction. Freud now argues that one should not loose from sight that
id and ego (superego) form a biological unit, and that the ego is nothing but
a modified portion of the id.22 Psychoanalysis is therefore not about applying
20
S . Freud, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a Whole’, Standard Edition,
vol. 19, pp. 131-134. In this text he deals with a problem addressed in The Interpretation
of Dreams, namely the question of accepting moral responsibility for the immorality of the
dreams. Freud had added some remarks on this issue in 1914 arguing that a distinction
between the psychical reality and the factual or material reality should make people less
reluctant in accepting responsibility for the immorality of their dreams. After all, once we
understand the functioning of the dream, we would find its content less ethically objectiona-
ble, since “the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does”. S. Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, vol. 5, p. 620.
21
S. Freud, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a Whole’, p. 133.
22
In ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud had already indicated this when he made clear that the super-
ego is the (unconscious) part of the ego that represents the id, e.g. that casts the id’s wishes in
a concrete form. In the passage on moral responsibility this is again expressed. S. Freud, ‘The
150
the distinction between a good healthy ego and the evil id in a psychology
that aims at strengthening the ego’s control over the id. For, associating good
with the ego and evil with the id will strengthen defence mechanisms that on
the one hand will consist of projections (I am not responsible for the dream,
but some alien force is) and on the other hand sustain narcissistic illusionary
wishful thinking (I am good). Freud argues that “the ethical narcissism of
humanity” should be contented with both the evidence of “his moral nature”
(censor, conscience) and “his evil nature”. Whoever would like to be “better
than he was created” will probably attain nothing more than “hypocrisy and
inhibition”.23 Hence, one should hold oneself responsible for the content of
the dream, not because the mature ego ought to be morally strengthened
against and in control of the id, but because ego and id are a single unit, or
better even, because the ego is only a specially modified peripheral portion
of the id – it is merely the id’s surface, so to speak – the unity of ego and id
implies the decentring of the ego.24
Second, the answer to the question of whether one must assume
responsibility for the content of one’s dreams reflects Freud’s earlier ideas from
‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’. Certainly, he writes of holding
oneself responsible for the psychological truth of one’s “evil nature”, the “evil
in the id”, the evil or immoral impulses, and yet he also clearly mentions that
the concepts of good and evil are “present in me according to social standards”,
that is to say, according to the relation of the impulses to the needs and
demands of the human community. The human impulses are in themselves
neither good nor bad, but labelled as such according to what is perceived in
society as the major hindrance to civilisation: “the constitutional inclination
of human beings to be aggressive towards one another”.25 So, Freud is not only
saying that one must honestly hold oneself responsible for the content of the
dream, because the dream is one’s own dream and not someone else’s dream.
He also reasons that one must assume responsibility for the classification of
Ego and the Id’, Standard Edition, vol. 19, chapter 3.

23
24
I think Philip Rieff was right when he named Freudian ethics an “ethics of honesty”. The inef-
fective method of suppressing certain instinctual impulses by means of a repression that is too
severe should be replaced by another procedure. This was what Freud aimed at by working
through the layers of hypocrisy, secrecy and fantasy. He aims at a more truthful assessment of
both one’s immoral and moral nature – man is “not only far more immoral than he believes
but also far more moral than he knows”. Admitting one’s nature, working through one’s
wishes, desires and impulses, and holding oneself responsible for them, is the formal creed of
psychoanalysis. P. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. New York: Doubleday, 1961, p. 346;
S. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 52.
25
S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 142.
151
Herman Westerink
this content according to social standards. In order to grasp what Freud is

talking about here, one should bear in mind an earlier remark he had made on
moral responsibility for the content of dreams: it is easier to take responsibility
for the evil content of dreams when one distinguishes psychic reality from
material reality, that is to say, when one distinguishes the evil thought from the
evil act.26 In our text Freud takes up this train of thought when he writes that
he “will leave it to the jurist to construct for social purposes a responsibility
that is artificially limited to the meta-psychological ego”.27 When it comes to
the question of practical consequences, psychoanalysis has little to contribute
to criteria of moral conduct. I think we can say it as follows: in order to find
the correct formula for the relation between good and evil in human nature,
i.e. for a thorough assessment of one’s motives, needs and desires, one should
accept the social standards of good and evil, but postpone its application
in moral acts. The process of reflection that includes social standards can
only bring self-knowledge when the evaluation of the human condition is
disconnected from moral action, and when the reflection does not turn into
condemnation, rejection or dissociation.28 There is thus always a certain
mildness in this self-evaluation, that in my opinion reminds us of Freud’s
view of the superego in his essay on humour (1927), when evil can both be
recognised as well as put into perspective by a superego that avoids attacking
the ego, but in fact supports the tolerance of opposites such as evil and good
– or at least “bad” and “not that bad”.29
Acceptance of moral standards does not imply subsequent adaption to these
standards – it primarily enables a truthful self-assessment as it decomposes
narcissistic and neurotic constructs, that is, deconstructs hypocrisy and
inhibition. Moral responsibility as holding oneself responsible for one’s evil
wishes and desires, is then about a truthful evaluation of one’s capacity to relate
to others and to adapt to societal norms or to meet duties and obligations.
Moral responsibility in the Freudian sense is first of all about questioning
the possibility of socialisation in civilisation in view of one’s evil nature as
exposed by social standards of good and evil. And even after that, the answers
to the questions “What ought I do to?” or “How should I behave?” are still
suspended. When we think of ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’
or Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud instead focuses on two things that
26
See footnote 4 page 33.
27
28
Compare J. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005,
p. 46.
29
S, Freud, ‘Humour’, Standard Edition, vol. 21, pp. 159-166. On this essay see: J. W. Barron
(ed.), Humor and Psyche. Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Hillsdale (NJ): The Analytic Press, 1999.
152
result from self-knowledge, namely first, the knowledge of fellow men as the
one who also has an evil nature, hence as the one who is not better than
me, and second, a critique of the severity of society’s ethical demands and
implementations of the social standards of good and evil.30
30
S . Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, p. 285ff; S. Freud, Civilization and
Its Discontents, p. 143ff. Notably in the Christian commandment to “Love thy neighbour as
oneself ” Freud detects a fundamental misconception of human nature and an excessive trait
of cultural morality.
153
Pathology and Moral Courage in
Freud’s Early Case Histories
Céline Surprenant
In characterising the difference between the Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud
approaches to the causes of hysteria, James Strachey, the English editor of the
Studies on Hysteria, spoke of a “remarkable paradox” concerning the scientists’
intentions and what they actually achieved. While Breuer aimed to deal with
psychical processes in “the language of psychology”, he explained hysteria by
dealing with the nervous system as an electrical one, replete with “intercerebral
excitations”. As for Freud, he hoped to develop a physiological and chemical
explanation of hysteria but in fact presented psychological analyses.1 In that
description, one of the registers of the Studies on Hysteria is missing, namely, the
moral register. In their treatment and theoretical work with hysterics, Breuer
and Freud came up against what they called ‘incompatible’ or ‘irreconcilable’
ideas as what may have become, under certain conditions, ‘pathogenic’ ideas.
The latter had mostly a sexual content, and opposed the “deeply-rooted idea
of moral purity”, as Breuer put it in his discussion of hysterical conversion.2
In dealing with these ideas and the hysterical symptoms related to them, they
had to take into account their patients’ moral sensibility and moral character,
even though, the topics of morality and of “moral character” form only a thin
thread within that early work, until the topic of morality emerges in a first
essay on the subject in ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’
(1908), which announces the later critique of the demands of civilisation on
the individual.
The occurrences of these ideas were fundamental to the traumatic theory
of hysteria, however, Breuer and Freud played down the fact that, whether or
not they became pathogenic, irreconcilable ideas took part in a moral conflict,
because they concentrated on the psychical processes whereby the memory of
certain ‘traumatic’ ideas and scenes became pathogenic. Does that mean that
the clash of ‘irreconcilable’ ideas did not occur solely in the moral register, and
that they did not deal with the sexual content of the ideas as being relevant
1
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. xxiv.
2
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. xxiv.
Céline Surprenant
to the moral sphere alone?3 Is the moral sphere the most important source of
“irreconcilable ideas”? One case is particularly significant for examining the
somewhat understated moral register in the Studies on Hysteria, namely, that
of Miss Lucy R. The case attracts our attention to how the moral character of
the patient and their ideals might be at play in the onset of hysteria, or at least
in the explanation of the onset of hysteria. However, the moral element is far
from being prominent, and from being the object of elaborate developments
in the reporting of the case.
The role of the moral character of the patient or of her holding certain
moral ideas in the onset of hysteria, or of neuroses in general is not clarified.
It is not only in the Studies on Hysteria, however, that the introduction of
the psychoanalytic outlook, or even the pre-psychoanalytic outlook, would
seem to displace the moral outlook. Just what happens to moral thinking and
acting under a psychoanalytic regime remains at issue, even though Freud has
remodelled the idea of moral conscience (Gewissen) and of shared morality,
and has proposed means for giving up “religious illusions”. Judging by works
on Kultur and on “civilized” morality (Civilization and its Discontents (1930),
‘The Future of an Illusion’ (1927)), Freud would seem to have explored the
moral implications of psychoanalysis and the contributions it could make to
the moral sphere. However, the topic has not always been a declared object of
interest, and the purpose of the following essay is to begin to re-evaluate the
understated place of the moral register in early Freudian psychoanalysis, prior
to the emergence of an explicit concern with morality, by focusing on one
of the cases in the Studies on Hysteria, and the theoretical discussion on the
mechanisms of neurosis, as it is being elaborated in 1895.
Miss Lucy R’s case

The third case history of the Studies on Hysteria, Miss Lucy R’s, presents a
stage of Freud’s thinking on the formation of hysterical symptoms and their
‘removal’ by means of the cathartic method, or by ‘abreaction’. Freud treated
Miss Lucy R in 1892 while he was on the point, in collaboration with Breuer,
of establishing, through observations of patients during hypnotic treatments,
that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences”, or that “hysterical symptoms
3
S ee how Breuer sends us back to Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations for understanding the
“physiological pattern for the generation of pathological, hysterical phenomena as a result of
the co-existence of vivid ideas which are irreconcilable with one another,” as though, it did
not matter which sphere of ideas were at stake (Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 211).
156
are derivatives of memories which are operating unconsciously”.4 However,

Breuer and Freud were developing two kinds of explanation for that state of
affairs, and two kinds of therapeutic procedure. Breuer coined the expression
“hypnoid state” to describe how certain ideas became pathogenic because they
were expelled from the ego when they were first experienced, and so produced
a “splitting of consciousness”, or a “dissociated state of consciousness”.5 Breuer
and Freud believed that the fact that these ideas remained active even while
being forgotten was the cause of hysteria, at least until the cathartic method of
‘abreaction’ was applied. Moving away from Breuer’s ideas of the hypnoid state,
Freud came to believe that all forms of hysteria (hypoid hysteria, retention,
conversion hysteria) might be brought about by processes of defence and
classified under the heading of “defence hysteria”.
Let us briefly recall the case. Miss Lucy R was a thirty-year old English
governess employed by a widowed factory director. She had olfactory
hallucinations (that of a burnt pudding and of cigar smoke) and was suffering
from tiredness and lassitude.6 The case focused on the olfactory sensations
as hysterical symptoms, the sources of which were to be found in traumatic
events. Freud uncovered three scenes. The first one was the source of the smell
of burnt pudding, which became a “symbol” of the trauma. The governess had
received a letter from her mother while she was playing with the director’s two
children, who had prevented her from reading it. She had interpreted their
gesture as an expression of their fondness for her. While this was taking place,
the pudding she was cooking had burnt. She wanted to leave the family, but
was bound by a promise she had made to the children’s dead mother that she
would take care of them as though they were her own children. The letter’s
arrival, Freud wrote, was turned into a trauma because of the conflicting
affects attached to the alternative between going to her mother or staying
with the children.
The uncovering of that scene was not the solution to the problem because
it did not explain that the conflict should have led to a conversion rather than
“remaining on the level of normal psychical life”,7 the level at which moral
conflicts could take place. She had experienced a conflict around the children’s
game with the letter because she was dissatisfied with her situation, and was
worried about her decision to leave, on which the director had asked her to
reflect. Recalling the condition for the acquisition of hysteria – “an idea must
4
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 7; Standard Edition, vol. 3: p. 212.
5
Standard Edition, vol. 2: pp. 11-12 and 285-86.
6
See ‘The First Patients’ in L. Appignesi and J. Forrester, Freud’s Women (pp. 113-116), for
situating Miss Lucy R. within the set of Freud’s patients.
7
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 116.
157
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be intentionally repressed from consciousness” – Freud searched for that idea

in the first scene. Freud had guessed that the event had been traumatic because
she was in love with her employer. Instead of denying that this was the case,
Lucy R had responded that she both knew and did not know about that, only
that she “wanted to drive it out of her head and not think of it again”.8
The uncovering of her love alone did not suffice to cure her. There was in
fact, a second scene to be disclosed; one which could explain the smell of cigar
smoke, and which in fact was more ancient than that of the smell of burnt
pudding. It was a dining-room scene, in which a guest had tried to kiss the
children goodnight on their way to bed. The director had then had a violent
outburst against the guest who should not have allowed himself to do so. The
governess had then felt “a stab in her heart” and the scene had been frozen
with the ambient cigar smoke, because she had found the director so violent
towards one of his friends. Still, none of the two scenes were the solution to
the riddle of Lucy R’s symptoms. The violence towards the friend was attached
to still earlier a scene in which a lady acquainted with her employer had kissed
the children on the mouth when leaving them. The director had then scolded
the governess and reminded her of her duty to protect the children from
such occurrences. If he had loved her, she had thought, he would not have
scolded her in that way, and would have talked gently with her, as he had once
done. The outcome of the cure was successful; after nine weeks, the patient
was ‘happy’ and ‘transfigured’.9 She was still in love with her employer and
was entirely clear about her lack of prospects with him, but it “ma[de] no
difference” because, “after all” she had said, “she [could] have thoughts and
feelings to [herself ]”.10 Lucy R had also replied, in answer to the question as
to whether she had been ashamed of being in love with her employer, that
she was not so because “one is not responsible for one’s feelings”11 (this idea is
repeated in Fraülein Elisabeth von R.’s case).12
Miss Lucy R’s case illustrates the mechanisms of acquired hysteria, the
sine qua none condition of which was thought to be that “an incompatibility
should develop between the ‘ego’ and some idea presented to it”.13 That basic
principle allowed Freud to classify various neuroses according to which method
the ‘ego’ adopted for getting around the conflict.14 In hysteria, the excitation
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
158
that is attached to the idea is converted into a bodily symptom, or as Freud

put it, into “a somatic innervation”, and as a result, the incompatible idea is
“repressed from the ego’s consciousness”.15 The idea is thus not completely
fended off. A bodily memory to which an affect is attached remains (what
Freud called the “physical reminiscence”) and makes the hysterical person
suffer. Freud said that the idea took its revenge and became pathogenic.16
Once that set up was established thanks to conversion and repression, there
was no hope for further change otherwise than through the ‘abreaction’ of the
reminiscences.
It is in that explanatory context that moral cowardice and the lack of moral
courage come disjointedly into play, for what could have been done before the
onset of hysteria so as to prevent it had not been done. Shifting into the moral
register, ambiguously as though mechanisms possessed a moral character,
Freud stated that
“The mechanism which produces hysteria represents on the one hand

an act of moral cowardice [einem Akte moralischer Zaghaftigkeit] and on
the other a defensive measure which is at the disposal of the ego. Often
enough we have to admit that fending off increasing excitations by
the generation of hysteria is, in the circumstances, the most expedient
thing to do.”17
However, even though it was true that it is sometimes more expedient (for
the person, for the entourage, in view of the pleasure that can be gained?)
to generate hysteria (as the governess did) for fending off increased levels of
excitations (or in another register, irreconcilable ideas), more often, however,
a “greater amount of moral courage [ein größeres Maß von moralischem Mute]
would have been of advantage to the person concerned”.18 Freud did not
specify further the alternative scenario that could have taken place, nor does
he define “moral courage”. His inquiry does not apparently pertain directly
to moral qualities.
The characterization of the mechanism of hysteria in this moral way sits
uneasily with the classification of the mechanisms of hysteria, obsessions
and paranoia according to their methods (Letter to Fließ, Jan 1, 1896). Are
we to understand that moral qualities are attached to neurotic mechanisms?
It is not clear what having had a greater amount of moral courage would
15
16
17
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 123, GW I: 81-82.
18
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 123, GW I: 81-82.
159
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have consisted in: would it have been successfully to “push aside” an idea
prior to its hysterical conversion, that is, to have the strength to win over
the mechanism before it would have set in? Or could it have consisted in
tolerating incompatible and offensive ideas? Would Miss Lucy R have had
a greater degree of moral courage, would she have confessed her love to her
employer?19 Or would she, had she felt ashamed, had the strength consciously
to reject her affection for him? To show moral courage in that way would have
been different than the attenuating circumstances the governess invoked in
her defence. Why should she feel ashamed of being in love with her employer
given that after all, as Freud reported her saying, “one is not responsible for
one’s feelings”?20 The governess passed from defending herself of her love by
saying that she had not been responsible for that state of affairs, to being quite
happy to have “thoughts and feelings for herself ”,21 after the cure, after the
link between her symptom and her love has been identified. Does her move
from one position – from pushing aside the responsibility for her feeling away
from her – to the other – to defending one’s feeling by affirming that they are
hers – show a progression in “moral courage”? If so, would the cure then be a
means of strengthening moral courage?22
The Concept of Defence

Miss Lucy R’s case raises the question as to the origin of the concept of
defence. In this early elaboration of the concept, which is linked to other early
occurrences of the term ‘repressed’, the process was deemed to be ‘intentional’
or ‘deliberate’.23 On beginning to treat Miss Lucy R, Freud thought that
the young woman was ‘intentionally’ pushing aside some idea or other.24
James Strachey argued in his introduction to the Studies on Hysteria, that
‘intentionally’ may have served merely to indicate that there was a motive but
19
ef to the “feeling the pangs of conscience’ due to the conflict between “firmly-rooted com-
R
plexes of moral ideas in which one has been brought up and the recollection of actions or
merely thoughts of one’s own which are irreconcilable with them” Standard Edition, vol. 2:
p. 210.
20
21
22
In the conversation between Freud and Lucy, Freud asked why it was that she was “unwilling
to admit of [her] inclination? Were you ashamed of loving a man?”—“Oh no”, she replied,
“I’m not unreasonably prudish. We’re not responsible for our feelings, anyhow” (Standard
Edition, vol. 2, p. 117).
23
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 10n.
24
160
not that there was any conscious intention. Nevertheless, the case study shows
that consciousness, intention and knowledge have something to do with the
mechanism of hysteria and neuroses in general, and with the motives that led
Breuer and Freud to postulate unconscious processes of thought.
Freud had elaborated the concept of ‘defence’ between 1894 and 1896,
notably in ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’ (1894). ‘Defence’ then referred
to how the patient experiences the emergence of incompatible, sexual ideas: an
affect due to an experience, an idea or a feeling overwhelms the ego, because
it cannot deal with the idea by thinking.25 Faced with such an occurrence
of incompatibility, the patient pushed the thought away (these expressions
will be the basis for elaborating the kind of exclusion in which repression
consists).26 However, the idea was never completely suppressed; the weakened
idea remained in consciousness as a sort of parasite and formed, Freud said,
the nucleus of a psychical group.27 Freud was not saying that the “effort of
will” involved in the process of pushing aside the incompatible idea was not
conscious, but rather that it was not necessarily pathological; it was closely
linked with attempts such as the one that one of Freud’s patients expressed,
when she was faced with a disagreeable idea: “I tried very hard to put it away
from me and not to think about it anymore.”28
Studies on Hysteria contains, on the one hand, many insights that will
be later developed, such as for example, on ‘construction’,29 on the “work
of mourning”,30 or the clinical fact of resistance,31 to mention but a few
occurrences. Freud will abandon and/or modify diverse conceptions elaborated
in it, such as, for example, the “pressure technique”, which he used for treating
Lucy R and Elisabeth Von R., among others. That technique consisted in
applying one’s hand on the patient’s forehead so as to encourage them to
remember and to tell of unpleasant memories.32 Just as the concrete, physical
pressure involved in that technique eventually led to a psychical method, the
25
26
See Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archives, on the concepts of repression and defence.
27
The defence by the ego consists, in the case of conversion hysteria, in disinvesting the idea
of its “sum of excitation”, which is then “transformed into something somatic” (Standard
Edition, vol. 3: p. 49). In obsessions and phobias, the ego forms a substitute or surrogate for
the disturbing, unconscious idea in consciousness in the form of an obsession. A third kind
of defence is the one that leads to psychosis, to a state of “hallucinatory confusion”. Methods
of defence determined the forms of the illness, even though they are interrelated, to remain
at the level of Freud’s first conception of defence.
28
29
30
Standard Edition, vol. 2: p. 162
31
32
Standard Edition, vol. 2: pp. 107-145.
161
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act of pushing aside, which apparently required a conscious effort of will,

remains operative in the idea that hysteria results from the repression of
incompatible ideas.33
In what way is the moral sensibility of the person involved in the
conscious act of fending off? What happens to the moral sensibility when the
defence and the “fending off” are unconscious?34 When the patient declares
consciously to want to push aside an idea, she is not far from revealing her
‘moral’ motivations for doing so, as though she acted in conformity with her
moral sensibility. However, what role does the moral sensibility play when
“pushing aside” an idea becomes the matter of unconscious processes?35 Does
the moral sensibility of the subject retain any power at the level of unconscious
processes?36 In the later essay on ‘Repression’, the idea of moral courage would
seem to be withdrawn when repression is not conceived in terms of “fending
off” offensive ideas alone, but fending off “instinctual impulses”.37 In Studies on
Hysteria, there are excitations and affects, but repression sends us back mostly
to the rejection of ideas and linguistic phrases and to the bodily conversion to
which they give rise. The process of repression was conceived as being, if not
simply continuous with, at least compatible with the rejection of ideas for the
moral reasons that the patients invoked, as though it could also be expressed
as that kind of rejection. The question would seem to concern the history of
Freud’s ideas: what happens to moral sensibility and moral qualities prior to
the introduction of the Über-ich into the theory? However, the understated
discussion about the role of moral sensibility and moral qualities in the onset
of neuroses suggests that morality in the Freudian corpus is not limited to
the well-known Freudian theses on the renunciation of the drives for the
purpose of civilisation. Other processes (and notions) than the Über-ich,
such as the “gain from illness”, or what Freud also called, the “sluggishness
of the libido”,38 following Carl Jung’s idea of “psychical inertia”, might be of
equal importance for tracking down and for understanding the ambiguous
33
S ee ‘Freud’s Psychoanalytic Procedure’, where Freud wrote that he “avoids touching [patients]
in any way” (Standard Edition, vol. 7: p. 250).
34
Through the process of symbolisation Freud provides an aetiological account of what hap-
pens to the affect attached to the repressed idea in conversion hysteria (it is ‘converted’ into
a bodily symptom). Does that account allow us to follow the vicissitudes of the “moral sen-
sibility” of the subject?
35
See ‘Repression’ (1915) Standard Edition, vol. 14: p. 147.
36
In the 1915 paper on ‘Repression’, Freud uses the simile of the unwanted guest at the door,
a simile that he had used in the ‘Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’ (1910 [1909] Standard
Edition, vol. 11: pp. 25-7), to illustrate palpably the process.
37
Standard Edition, vol. 14: p. 147 and 152.
38
162
role of the moral sphere in the 1892 case (but as we would like to argue, also
throughout the Freudian corpus, besides the well-known works on civilisation
that we mentioned above). It is when he is discussing the “gain from illness”
that Freud also speaks of the cowardice and moral courage.
Freud’s reference to the “commonest example” of a gain from illness in
the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1916-1917) might allow us to
understand better the passage relating to moral courage in Lucy R’s case. A
woman was treated badly by her husband, and became ill. Her illness, wrote
Freud, was a “weapon in her battle with her dominating husband”, because
it was admissible to complain about her illness, but not about her husband.
Thanks to her illness, a doctor will help her, her husband will allocate money
to her treatment, and she will be able to go away, etc. Here was a case where
to be ill offered a considerable gain. However, in the long term, neurosis itself
can become a source of unpleasure, so the ego’s creation was not the best
outcome in the conflict. What it is to have moral courage is more explicit. The
woman finds a gain in illness, Freud wrote, because “she [was] too cowardly or
too moral to console herself secretly with another man” or because “she [was]
not strong enough to separate from her husband in the face of every external
deterrent, if she has no prospect of supporting herself or obtaining a better
husband and if in addition she is still attached to this brutal husband by her
sexual feelings.”39
39
Standard Edition, vol. 16: pp. 382-83. See another occurrence of the idea of moral courage, in
a text in which the idea of virtuous disposition is explicit (Freud is marvelling at the cryptom-
nesia that made him discover the same truths as Popper-Lynkeus on dreams). From Freud’s
paper on Josef Popper-Lynkeus we read: “In dreams hidden impulses were stirring which
stood in contradiction to what might be called the dreamer’s official ethical and aesthetic
creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses, turned away from them and refused
to acknowledge them in day-time, and if during the night he could not withhold expression
of some kind from them, he submitted to a ‘dream-distortion’ which made the content of
the dream appear confused and senseless. To the mental force in human beings, which keeps
watch on this internal contradiction and distorts the dream’s primitive instinctual impulses
in favour of conventional or of higher moral standards, I gave the name ‘dream-censorship’.”
(SE 19: 262) Freud ends his homage to Popper-Lynkeus’s book Phantasien eines Realisten
(1899) in which there is a story that reproduces exactly the core of Freud’s theory on dream-
distortion ‘Traumen wie Wachen’, or his defence of his discovery if one prefers, by stating that:
“What enabled [him] to discover the cause of dream-distortion was [his] moral courage. In
the case of Popper it was the purity, love of truth and moral serenity of his nature” (Standard
Edition, vol. 19, p. 263) This is what Freud says in the longer paper on Popper: “Distortion
was a compromise, something in its very nature disingenuous, the product of a conflict
between thought and feeling, or, as I had put it, between what is conscious and what is re-
pressed.” (Standard Edition, vol. 22: p. 263) Where a conflict of this kind was not present and
repression was unnecessary, dreams could not be strange or senseless. There is an interesting
extrapolation that is important for our topic: “The man who dreamed in a way no different
from that in which he thought while awake was granted by Popper the very condition of
163
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Cowardice and Moral Courage

If we are turning the much-discussed Studies on Hysteria in the context of a
discussion on ‘Psychoanalysis and Morality’, it is because Freud, then, would
seem to have attributed a role to ‘cowardice’ beside the mechanism of defence.
It was not only that mechanisms themselves seemed to possess moral qualities,
but that to be endowed with “moral courage” or not could determined the
onset of hysteria. With respect to these qualities, there is an ambiguity as to
whether or not, and the extent to which falling ill was intentional and could
be avoided, because it would seem to depend on other factors than the ones
Freud was beginning to identify as pathological ones. How are we exactly to
situate the role of moral qualities in the onset of illness with the quantitative
factor of ‘summation’? The difference between normal and pathological
mechanisms for Freud was of a quantitative rather than qualitative nature, as
he put it, among other places, in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis40
and in the Studies on Hysteria,41 or in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), where
he wrote that “in the aetiology of the neuroses quantitative preconditions are
as important as qualitative ones”, because “there are threshold-values which
have to be crossed before the illness can become manifest”.42 That conception
sends us back to the principle of constancy, whereby the main function of
the psychical apparatus is to keep the level of energy as low as possible and
constant, by divesting itself of any accumulation or ‘summation’. In view of
the importance of the quantitative factor in the onset of hysteria and neurosis
in general,43 how do moral qualities such as moral courage or lack of it
contribute, if at all, to the ‘summation’ of condition from which pathological
mechanisms result? Are moral qualities to be evaluated in quantitative or
qualitative terms, by assessing of the extent to which a person possesses or not
moral courage? Or, are moral qualities a parallel series of conditions?
In order to explain away that moral qualities should appear at all in the
mechanisms of hysteria and of neurosis in general in the way we have outlined,
we can refer to the fact that Freud was resorting to “current psychological
internal harmony which, as a social reformer, he aimed at producing in the body politic. And
if Science informs us that such a man, wholly without evil and falseness and devoid of all
repressions, does not exist and could not survive, yet we may guess that, so far as an approxi-
mation to this ideal is possible, it had found its realisation in the person of Popper himself.”
(Standard Edition, vol. 22: pp. 223-24)
40
41
42
43
164
abstractions”, as well as to those of experimental psychology.44 We could also

recall that the term ‘moral’ belonged to the psychiatric and psychological
terminology in use before Freud, and which he was inheriting.45 Is it, however,
only a matter of register or terminology? Was he not suggesting that to possess
or not certain moral qualities contributed to turning normal mechanisms
into pathological ones beside other psychical processes such as repression,
even though this meant to solicit vexed notions of disposition, heredity and
of ‘proclivity’.46 Is the “moral character” a synonym for disposition when it
surfaces punctually in Freud’s case histories? Does the theory of the drives
and of psychical processes drive out the moral register and forms of reasoning
from psychoanalysis? At the level of the subject, is one feature of pathological
mechanisms that they deprive the patient of his power to think or to act in
moral terms?
Jean Laplanche has suggested that “la psychanalyse a vécu une grande partie
de son experience théorique et Clinique avec Freud – même l’essentiel du temps
de sa fondation – sans utiliser l’idée d’une instance morale.”47 Laplanche was
referring to ego-ideal the super-ego and the idea of moral conscience that
Freud begins to elaborate from 1914 onwards with the introduction of
narcissism. However, even though Freud did not provide a psychoanalytic
account of moral qualities, that does not mean that they are not involved
in the psychical processes he is beginning to map out. If there were such
moral components at stake, would they be distinct from the neuropathic
disposition, which is “already marked out before the onset of the illness by the
amount of the subject’s hereditary taint or the sum of his individual psychical
abnormalities”?48 Or, are they included in what would compose the “widespread
proclivity to acquire hysteria”?49 That is, would one fall ill to the measure of
one’s moral courage, cowardice, and so on? The sine qua none condition of
acquired hysteria might not be, then, only the fact that “an incompatibility
should develop between the ‘ego’ and some idea presented to it”, as Freud
already stated when he brings in the factor of disposition and speaks of the
44
45
See, for example, the concept of “moral insanity” in Freud’s letter to Fließ, where he reports
that Breuer has accused him of suffering from “moral insanity” (Freud, Lettres à Wilhelm Fließ
1887-1904, p. 227), in the midst of his discussion of “normal repression” (Freud, Lettres à
Wilhelm Fließ 1887-1904, p. 355) in the same letter where Freud famously said that the
repressed memory actually “stinks”.
46
47
Jean Laplanche, Problématiques I, L’angoisse. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006, p.
268.
48
49
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cause of neurosis (including hysteria) as the result of a ‘summation’.50 Rather,

it would be possible that what Freud conceived in terms of a conflict between
different ideas – an incompatible one against a dominant mass of ideas –
which involved the ego, excitations and affect, nevertheless remained as a
conflict between moral positions. The inclusion of moral courage as a factor
in the onset of hysteria at least suggests as much, and brings us back to Freud’s
early conception of morality as a source of repression.
Morality as an Agent of Repression

The idea that neurosis could be avoided depending on the degree of moral
courage that someone (or the mechanism) possesses sends us back to one
of Freud’s enigmatic remarks in the “Draft K” on Defence neurosis (Letter
to Wilhelm Fließ, January 1, 1896). Freud was concerned with the normal
tendency to defend against memories and thoughts that have once caused
unpleasure. The unpleasure that would be caused by the movements of the
psychical energy with which these memories or thoughts are invested must be
avoided by all means. What is at stake is the principle of constancy, which is
threatened by the memories that have the power to cause more unpleasure than
the event of which they are the memory. This occurs all the more powerfully
when puberty has set in between the event and its repetition as a memory.51
Why should the premature discharge of sexual stimulation subsequently
provoke unpleasure and trigger repression? Freud answers provisionally that
shame and morality would seem to constitute the “forces of repression”. They
would come from the fact that the genitals are in close proximity to organs
performing the excretory functions, first through the mediation of the sense
of smell, and then of that of sight, because the former reminds us of the latter,
especially as far as the male genitals are concerned.52
Freud has elaborated the idea of the primary repression as the basis of the
process of civilization, the “special process”,53 as early as in correspondence
with Fließ, even though he touched on the process of civilisation as such
mostly in later works. The renunciation of the olfactory sexual pleasure is one
of the first appearances of a thread that leads to the renunciation of the drives
and the too great demands that the latter makes on the human constitution (a
typical formulation from Freud’s extrapolation of his theory to the whole of
50
51
52
Standard Edition, vol. 7: p. 31. See ‘The Rat-Man’ and Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
53
166
society is found in Civilization and its Discontents (1930): “civilization is built

up upon a renunciation of instinct … it presupposes … the non-satisfaction
(by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts.”54
The thesis about the renunciation of the olfactory sexual pleasure is well
known, as well as the broader economic model of renunciation to which it leads.
What matters here, however, is the way in which the repression concomitant to
the painful renunciation of certain pleasures (and later of the drives), does not
necessarily trigger neuroses or perversions, but rather can trigger what Freud
called “mere immorality”.55 That remark allows us to relate the understated
element in Lucy R’s case about the amount of moral courage that would have
been necessary to avoid illness, as though there was an undercurrent of moral
concerns in Freud’s early thought. In this enigmatic remark, Freud seems to be
saying that pathology and immorality are never found together (or theorised
jointly?). There would be, then, the possibility of a “mere immorality” beside
perversions, because in being pathological, they could not be at the same time
immoral, as though the pathological character of a process prevented us from
being moral or immoral. Given that the pathological processes that Freud
uncovers are extendable to the whole of human kind, does the psychoanalytic
point of view altogether exclude the moral register?
What we discover by attempting to follow the vicissitudes of moral
sensibility and qualities is that morality might form a parallel sphere to the
domain of unconscious processes that Freud is mapping, and for which Freud’s
later theses on morality (and religion?) would not be applicable.
The Technique and Aims of the Cure

Freud stated that following Hyppolite Bernheim’s experiments in somnam
bulism, which had shown that patients could remember events having
occurred during somnambulism once they were awake, he assumed “that [his]
patients knew everything that was of any pathogenic significance and that it
was only a question of obliging them to communicate it.”56 The governess
seemed to have retained some control of her predicament; she displayed a
“strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at
the same time.”57 She thus displayed the contradictory knowledge that sends
us back to the constraints of the fundamental rule, whereby the patient
54
55
56
57
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must not only say what she knows but also what she does not know. That
contradictory knowledge is signposted by the patient’s exclamation: “I’ve
always known that, I could have told you that before.”58 There is an echo of
that contradictory knowledge in the idea that the dreamer “does know what
his dream means: only he does not know that he knows it and for that reason
thinks he does not know it.”59 That does not mean, however, that the patient
could carry out “self-analyses”, for the knowledge that is uncovered appears
to come from the outside. It cannot be the ego’s knowledge, because the ego’s
assertions are untrustworthy,60 given that, according to the ego’s report on
one’s illness, Freud wrote in Lecture XXIV of the Introductory Lectures (1915),
“it was active at every point and itself willed and created its symptoms.”61
Freud himself experienced the limits of self-analysis. He had famously written
to Fließ that he could only analyse himself “with the help of knowledge
obtained objectively (like an outsider)”. This is why he believed that “genuine
self-analysis [was] impossible; otherwise there would be no [neurotic] illness”
(Letter to Fließ, November 14, 1897).62
The analytic procedure raises a problem of knowledge, even though the
technique and aims of the cure have not always been presented in terms of
the patient’s gain in knowledge. Freud has spoke about the psychoanalytic
procedure in terms of the technical and conceptual changes.63 The pressure
technique that Freud used for treating Lucy R and Elisabeth von R. raised
questions of volition and intention in relation to the later form of the cure,
from which all physical elements have been set aside. Freud used hypnosis
for bringing about “the somnanbulic extension of memory”.64 Lucy R’s
could not be hypnotized, and Freud replaced hypnosis with ‘concentration’,
which consisted in asking the patient to lie down and to shut her eyes.65 He
then exerted pressure by holding her forehead between his hands, and the
patient was asked to say what came into her head when Freud would release
the pressure. The “cathartic treatment” was then a matter of making patients
transform their unconscious memories into conscious ones.66
58
59
60
61
62
63
See in particular, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914) (Standard Edi-
tion, vol. 12 : pp. 147-56)
64
65
66
168
Whatever technical changes may have been introduced in the analytic

procedure, Freud attached a moral quality to the idea of making somebody
conscious about the cause of her neurotic illness, as though moral qualities
were “operating unconsciously”. In ‘The Future Prospect of Psycho-Analysis’
(1910), the aim of the cure was put in terms of a “work of enlightenment”
against the “detrimental effects of neurosis”, or with the power to enlighten
the community.67 Even if neurosis could sometimes be ‘expedient’, it was
not the most desirable path to take, and society as a whole would benefit if
its members knew about the determinants and the forms of neurosis. In the
list of the most efficient means of tolerating the demands of civilisation, of
“fending off suffering”, moreover, was the heightening of “the yield of pleasure
from the sources of psychical and intellectual work”, that provides “finer and
higher” satisfactions.68
Although Freud recognised that the “flight into illness” was sometimes
desirable, he also said that it was an “an automatic process which cannot
prove adequate to meeting the demands of life, and in which the subject has
abandoned the use of his best and highest powers”. In saying ‘automatic’,
Freud anticipated on his elaboration of the resistance that the compulsion of
repetition offers to being cured. Rather than an automatic process, “it would
be preferable to go down in an honourable struggle with fate”.69 He did not
say exactly that to undertake a psychoanalytic cure would be to embark on
such a struggle. However, it would mean turning away from the categories of
neurotic illnesses and those employed for their treatment (even though we
might agree that repression is a ‘normal’ constitutive feature of the human
psyche). Only if we chose the “flight into illness”, would we leave the domain
of fate, events and circumstances, and move into the sphere of symptom
formations, resistances, transference, and instinctual processes.70 The idea that
the moral sphere is distinct from that of unconscious neurotic processes is
even more tangible in the last pages of the ‘Discussion’ of the ‘Analysis of a
67
68
69
70
The specificity of the moral sphere with respect to the processes and unconscious formations
with which psychoanalysis deals is manifest in Freud’s discussion of the differing characters
of involuntary ideas, according to the context in which they appear, here immoral and absurd
dreams. In the ‘Moral Sense in Dreams’, in the first chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud noted how in both case, involuntary ideas are bewildering. However, “involuntary
ideas in the moral sphere contradict our usual attitude of mind, whereas the others merely
strike us as strange” (Standard Edition, vol. 4: p. 71). Psychoanalysis would have developed
by pursuing the domain of the “strange” to a greater extent than the domain of “immorality”.
This sends us to the simile that Freud uses for characterising perversions in ‘Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905).
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Céline Surprenant
Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909), where Freud made explicit the aim of
analysis. It replaces, he wrote,
“the process of repression, which is an automatic and excessive one, by

a temperate and purposeful control on the part of the highest agencies
of the mind”. Is a “temperate and purposeful control on the part of the
highest agencies of the mind”, the description of moral courage, or of
moral strength? Everything would suggest that it is, because “in a word”,
Freud continued, “analysis replaces repression by condemnation.”71
Are we not in the midst of the displacement from one register—that of

neurotic illness, their treatment and their theory – to another – that of the
moral sphere?
Freud had also opposed fate and the cathartic treatment at the end of the
Studies on Hysteria, in response to the objection that the procedure cannot alter
circumstances and life events, and therefore might be of a limited expediency.
It was useless to deny that fate was more apt to modify circumstances.
However, if the scope of the cure had to be clarified, one would say that
all that one could hope to achieve was to transform “hysterical misery into
common unhappiness”.72 In the context of our discussion, we would say that
all psychoanalysis could hope to achieve was to recreate a situation in which
one’s suffering is called ‘unhappiness’ rather than ‘hysteria’ or ‘neurosis’.
There emerges, then, an opposition between, on the one hand, what is
the domain of the psychoanalytic procedure and its theoretical justification,
whereby the difficulties of life, moral dilemmas, social constraints are
‘translated’ or remodelled, or in any case accessible through the lenses of the
psychoanalytic aetiological, and mechanistic modes of explanation, and, on
the other, the non-psychoanalytic vocabulary of the “struggle with fate”, of
moral courage and cowardice, of ‘condemnation’ and ‘common unhappiness’.
We are here listing only some of the occurrences of what I would call “the
non-psychoanalytic outlook lodged within psychoanalysis”, of which the
quality of moral courage that makes its appearance in Lucy R’s case, but also
around the topic of a “flight into illness” are but some.73
Let us make a brief incursion, in conclusion, into one of the philosopher
Richard Rorty’s endorsements of Freud’s mechanist and positivist thinking.
In a response to papers collected in a special issue of New Literary History
71
72
73
170
on ‘Literature and Psychology’, Richard Rorty suggested that Freudian

descriptions might have rendered the novel of “secular social hope and secular
moral courage” obsolete, given that, as he put it, “love (and, therefore, courage
and cowardice, sacrifice and selfishness) looks different after one has read
Freud”.74 This makes modernist literature the different literature that emerges
after psychoanalysis. He was intervening in a debate among literary critics about
what to do with the positivist elements of the Freudian outlook, advocating,
against the call to ‘humanise’ or ‘hermeneuticize’ psychoanalysis, “to live with
its terminology rather than to translate that terminology into another, less
specific, loftier vocabulary”.75 Rorty was arguing against attempts to make
psychoanalysis continuous with literature and literary criticism by discarding
“the mechanisms, the dehumanizing elements in Freud’s theory”.76 Literature
in the debate was linked with the very notions of morality and rationality,
which, according to Rorty, “made possible the liberal secular culture within
which what we call ‘literature’ and “literary criticism” emerge”. To try and to
humanise Freud’s theory, Rorty suggested, was to risk setting aside its power
to displace “our attempts to think in moral terms”, that is, the way it has
transformed the subject of morality.77 Recent philosophers and psychoanalysts
too have pointed out the way in which psychoanalysis transforms our moral
thinking, notably by insisting on the force of the other in psychoanalysis, that
is, on the way in which the subject’s life is fundamentally interrupted by the
enigmatic other, “prior to the possibility of any continuity”.78 However, is
the displacement of our attempts to think in moral terms by psychoanalysis,
notably by analysing the force and mode of activity of something in me which
is yet not me, but which acts in me, a definitive one?
The occurrences of non-psychoanalytic categories in Freud’s discussions
show that the psychoanalytic understanding of moral dilemmas as one of the
factors in the onset of neurotic illness rigorously exclude a moral approach to
neurotic illness. Freud’s analysis of the ills brought about by the “suppression
of the instincts” for the whole of society is an elaboration on one of the factors
of neurotic illness.79 The extrapolation to the whole of society is meant to help
circumscribe the irreducibly damaging effects of civilization on the psyche,
according to Freud. Psychoanalysis provides an attempt to understand, or at
least to identify the nature and the extent of that constitutive state of affairs,
74
Rorty, ‘Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics’, p. 180.
75
76
77
78
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, pp. 52-54.
79
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Céline Surprenant
even if in mechanistic and positivist explanatory schemes. However, from

the psychoanalytic point of view, to be cured from neurosis at an individual
level and at the level of the whole of society, or to understand one’s neurosis
might consist in being able eventually to return to the moral register, and,
independently of the displacements that it has operated, to undertake “an
honourable struggle with fate”.80
80
aving argued that psychoanalysis makes us return to the moral register, the task remains of
H
determining more precisely the kind of morality that is at stake.
172
Part V
Law and Perversion
Sergio Benvenuto
1.
In Francophone countries, many persons – even if they are not analysts – have
a rather precise idea of what constitutes a perverse person, whom they would
say, more or less, is “someone who needs the Law in order to take enjoyment” –
a view undoubtedly owing to a certain popularisation of Lacanian thinking in
that culture. For them, a perverse person needs to assume a virtual prohibition
in order to exploit it for sexual pleasure, because he is above all someone who
perverts (side-tracks) the moral law, who uses it not to be good (that is, to
obey the Law) but to obtain sexual enjoyment.
For example, I had in treatment a man whose sexual pleasure required his
lover to walk on him in heels as if he were a carpet, or at the very least, to
imagine this scenario. This goes back to an originary scene when he was five
years old: his angered mother had stomped on a toy gun that he had used
to mildly hit his younger brother. But this patient was not just a pervert, he
was also an obsessive neurotic who continuously made choices as if wanting
to punish himself for something which not even he himself knew. His life
was conditioned by guilt feelings. Even sexually he needed to be punished,
although in this case being punished was the (practically only) path to genital
pleasure. Every punishment implies a moral Law, and it is only thanks to a
severe law – and a severe and angry woman – that he could derive enjoyment.
The Law dictated to him as a child that he must not eliminate his rival, his
younger brother. In his adult neurotic life he was persecuted by the Law that
punished him, while in his adult perverse life he reached orgasm thanks to
that very Law which punished him.
Sergio Benvenuto
Hence the outline:

Perversion Moral prohibition Type of pleasure
Sadism “Thou shalt not punish the innocent” I punish the innocent
Masochism “May the guilty be punished” I am punished even if
innocent
Exhibitionism “Thou shalt not show thy I display them
genitals to strangers”
Voyeurism “Thou shalt not gaze upon those engaging I gaze at them
in intercourse”
Fetishism “Woman should be desired in her enti- I desire a woman in
rety” her details
Transvestitism “Thou shalt not take the appearances of I take them
the other sex”
Zoophilia “Thou shalt not use animals sexually” I use them
Paedophilia “Thou shalt remain chaste with children” I engage in sexual
trade with children
2.
From this outline it might seem that perversions are simple transgressions
of a norm of sexual morality. But things are not so simple, for one reason
because moral norms often change over the course of history. More than any
other ‘disorder’ (using DSM terminology [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders]), the concept of perversion itself is tightly bound to the
history of ethics.
In today’s DSM dominated psychiatry, even if the classic perversions
have remained more or less unchanged for over a century – sadism and
masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism, fetishism, zoophilia, pedophilia,
transvestitism, necrophilia – the more neutral term paraphilia is used. In fact,
the term perversions, with its strong moral connotation, reflected a society
still dominated by religious morality, while paraphilia – literally “loves gone
wrong” – better reflect today’s forms of life dominated by medical morality.
Modern medicine is in its own way moralist: it uses for the most part a criteria
based on normality/abnormality, or on order/disorder, in place of one based
on the criteria of virtuous/vicious. The paraphilic does not love normally, not
because he makes up a statistical minority, but because his sexual desires and
behaviours do not fall within the ‘norm’, which is defined by medicine itself
as ‘order’.
176
My impression is that psychiatry today is abandoning perverse or paraphil

iac people to… whom? Judges and lawyers? Priests, rabbis? Psychoanalysts?
Certainly, the term ‘homosexual’ has exited medical discourse. In fact, the
term homosexuality itself was an invention of late nineteenth-century
medicine, and today is increasingly substituted by Gay and Lesbian, that is, by
terms proposed by homosexuals themselves. ‘Gay’ in English had at one time
referred to a libertine, and ‘Lesbian’ contains a poetic reference to Sappho – in
short, two non-medical, pre-scientific terms. For nineteenth-century sexology,
instead, it was essential to distinguish the perverted from the libertine, especially
because at that time “a libertine” could be convicted of a moral offence while
“a perverted individual” could take advantage of extenuating circumstances or
even impunity. Today, instead, both homosexuals and perverted hark back to
a libertine culture, that is, to a hedonistic dimension from which nineteenth-
century medicine wanted to remove them by making them ‘patients’.
This question of morality is essential to understand the deeper sense of
what we today conveniently define as ‘perversions’– even if from a legal and
penal point of view, the social responses to acts of perversion vary enormously
from one perversion to another.
Some say that “today we can really speak of perversions because of sexual
freedom, particularly that of women. While the concept of perversions was
rather confused 100 years ago, when homosexuality, fellatio and cunnilingus
were classified as perversions, today – they say – we have very clear ideas about
this issue, we know WHO is really a perverted one.” This naive thesis assumes
that the creators of the concept of ‘perversion’ did not know what it actually
was, while we – being enlightened and devoid of prejudices – do. But I don’t
believe that there exists a (eternal) perversion that in itself, disconnected from
customs and historical sexual morals, needs to be brought to light. In reality,
positivist medicine, today’s psychiatry of ‘paraphilia’, and psychoanalysis
all continue to give a substantially moral definition to perversions. In this
sense, nothing has fundamentally changed. Rather, what has changed is the
moral paradigm at the base not only of medical categorisation, but also of our
political and social institutions.
In the nineteenth-century, sexual morality was still dominated by the
criteria of “according to nature” versus “against nature”, and based on this,
masturbation, homosexuality and sodomisation of men and women, etc.,
were considered perversions. Today’s ethical paradigm is rather “do not take
pleasure in the other without his explicit will”, so that even the criteria for
perversion have changed. Thus it is not that today we really know what it
means to be perverted while 150 years ago we didn’t. The difference between
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Sergio Benvenuto
old psychiatrists and us lies in the fact that today we are convinced that
our ethics is the good one, so that certain people are considered perverted
in relation to this our “true ethics”. Yet the concept of “true perversion” (a
corollary of “true ethics”) is itself an historical ethnocentricity, an illusion.
3.
An analyst is summoned when there is something ego-dystonic to treat –
that is, an analyst is called upon to find a remedy to something we do not
like. Neuroses are ego-dystonic. Perversions instead are for the most part
ego-syntonic: they are a means to pleasure that the subject would not want
to renounce for anything in the world. Certainly, these means to pleasure
are uncomfortable and dangerous, above all when they involve punishable
offences. The perverse individual usually complains not about the impossibility
of enjoyment, but about the fact that others dislike his enjoyment. But as we
saw in the case of my masochist patient, perverted individuals enter analysis
because they also have an ego-dystonic side: in short, they do not just derive
pleasure thanks to their perversions, but in other ways also suffer for them.
Thus, perversion is not so much ego-dystonic as it is hetero-dystonic:
that is, it is in dystonia – even in its non aggressive forms of masochism and
fetishism – with what the other wishes. Even these non-criminal forms of
perversion are in contradiction with the ‘other’ in so far as masochism and
fetishism necessitate a woman accomplice. A woman might even be willing to
humiliate, walk on or beat a masochist, but she will certainly not be doing so
for her own pleasure, but to give pleasure to the masochist (in fact, often she
is a prostitute).
A neurotic will say to the analyst, “I would like to enjoy, but I can’t”, whereas
the truly perverted individual will complain, “I enjoy, but the other does not
enjoy my way of enjoying”. The psychotic, instead, can suffer enormously but
also enjoy (like in megalomanic or manic states), and what induces us to treat
him is the dyscrasia in the subject’s ways of behaving with respect to social
tolerability: the psychotic needs to be treated because he disturbs others, he
threatens the “public order”.1 Psychosis is, in short, socio-dystonic.
1
I n fact, psychotics today who do not disrupt ‘normal’ social functioning are no longer treated
(at least in many Western countries). For example, the ‘quiet’ delusions of many paranoiacs –
as long as they do not harm others – are now accepted by the modern Health System without
any need for treatment. In fact, anti-psychiatry won: psychotics now enjoy the right to be
delirious.
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Neurosis: ego-dystonia
Perversions: hetero-dystonia
Psychosis: socio-dystonia
The true essence of perversion is thus enucleated in an ethical discordance, in

wanting to use the other as subject in order to get pleasure. Not as object: as
subject. In fact, I prefer the term ‘perversion’ to ‘paraphilia’ precisely because
of its ethical connotation.
4.
To view perversion as a hetero-dystonic relation implies in effect a relation to
the Law which falls outside of traditional ways of judgment – for example,
those typical to certain Christian churches (whose concepts derive essentially
from Aristotle) which condemn perverse sexuality for the very same reasons
that homosexuality was: for going against nature (παρà φúσιν). Normal
sexuality, instead, would be according to nature (κατà φúσιν), leading
spontaneously to conception. This criterion of opposition between unnatural
(“against nature”) and natural (“according to nature”) still dominates official
Catholic morality (which is Aristotelian by way of Thomism), for which any
technology which prevents conception is morally condemned, and for which
perversions appear in some way as a technical derailing of ‘natural’ sexuality,
mainly as artifices which impede conception.
Yet in today’s post-Aristotelian era – where the opposition between “against
nature” and “according to nature” is obsolete – nothing can be counter-
nature because nothing falls outside of Nature. For today’s prevalent scientific
philosophy, everything that exists is natural. Perversions’ specificity thus does
not consist in their going against nature, but in their going against ethics –
precisely, in using the other as subject for one’s own pleasure.
The concept of splitting of the Ego, on which psychoanalysis constructed
its theory of perversions, should thus today be reinterpreted as a concept of
an ethical split: the perverse individual needs the subjectivity of the other,
and only this subjectivity of the other allows him to enjoy. The sadist needs
the other’s sufferance, the masochist the other’s anger and severity, the voyeur
and exhibitionist the other’s sexual pleasure (whether real or presumed), the
paedophile the child other’s eroticism, the fetishist the other’s narcissism,
the transvestite the other’s believing in a false sexual identity. Be it a specific,
concrete other or a virtual Other, every perversion in any case appeals to
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Sergio Benvenuto
a subjectivity, whether supposed or manifest, of the Other. But nothing is

conceded to this subjectivity of the Other: what matters is that this perverse
dependence on the Other leads to a solitary enjoyment which stands out
against the background of the Other’s pain or indifference.
5.
From its start, psychoanalysis addressed perversions, but not so much in
moral terms as in terms of a split of the Ego, Ichspaltung. In the history of
psychoanalysis, perversions assumed an enormous theoretical importance
precisely because Freud, reflecting on fetishism, elaborated the concept of
the splitting of the Ego, a consequence of the disavowal (Verleugnung) of
reality. The fetishist intellectually grasps that women lack a penis, yet on
another level – of archaic knowledge – continues to think they do (a kind of
“desiring knowledge”). The famous foot fetish would be nothing other than a
substitute penis whose presence renders the woman particularly desirable. In
this coexistence between two knowledges lies the split of the Ego.
Even if Freud did not state it explicitly, this mechanism of splitting is not
limited to the perverse: on a certain level, we are all split, to the degree there is
something perverse in all of us, just as we all have repressions (Verdrängungen)
without necessarily being neurotic. On a certain level we all disavow a shared
knowledge.
In which way does psychoanalysis extend the mechanism of disavowal to
all perversions, and while the process of disavowal is clear in fetishism, what
about in other perversions? Every perversion implies a sort of dual ‘knowledge’,
so to speak: on the one hand the perverse individual knows well the reality,
while on the other, the perverse act implies a different, unshared “knowledge
for desire” which seems to deny or negate the previous knowledge – as we saw
with the fetishist.
The sadist takes pleasure because he knows his victim is blameless, and
would not be deserving of such punishment even if she were; yet he treats
his victim as if she were to blame and deserved the worst punishment. As
for the masochist, he grasps fully that the other – whom he has put in the
role of punisher – is only an actor, that he is in short staging a scene; and yet
being the erotic subject, it is as if he believed himself to have really committed
some serious wrong for which he is punished. In sadism and masochism the
roles of guilt and innocence are situated on opposite sides of the split: on
the level of realistic knowledge, the innocence (of the other or of oneself )
180
is acknowledged, while on the level of “wish knowledge” for the purpose of

pleasure, the guilt (of the other or of oneself ) is affirmed.
The voyeur knows he is excluded from the sexual scene he peeps at (simply
having to hide excludes him from the scene), yet his pleasure derives precisely
from his feeling included in the sexual act that excludes him. The exhibitionist
instead knows that the other is not at all pleased by his genital display (which
the woman experiences for the most part as a form of aggression), yet he
takes for granted that the woman enjoys this pleasurable display. In visual
perversions, the relation between self-enjoyment and the others’ enjoyment is
split: on the one hand the perverse individual knows that someone does not
enjoy (himself as voyeur or the other as victim of the display), while on the
other he ‘knows’ that someone does (himself as peeper or the other as victim
of the display).
The paedophile accepts the common-held belief (upon which psychoanalysis
has cast some doubt) that children do not aspire to genital pleasure and are
instead horrified by adult sexuality. But from another angle he negates this
knowledge, convincing himself – at times even rationally and ideologically
– that the child enjoys these genital sexual games as would an adult. The
paedophile knows that the other – the child – does not enjoy like an adult, yet
behaves as if he believes the child enjoys like that of an adult.
Transvestitism involves the split between two kinds of knowledge and two
points of view, one’s own and that of the other: the subject sees and knows
himself as a man, while the other sees and knows him as a woman whom he
can desire as such. The transvestite knows he is not a woman, but enjoys the
fact that the other considers him one.
Perversion Knowledge necessary for enjoyment Denied knowledge

Fetishism The woman has a penis A woman does not have a
penis
Sadism The victim is guilty The victim is innocent
Masochism The torturer is furious with me The torturer is only my ac-
complice
Voyeurism I am included in the scene I am excluded from the scene
Exhibitionism The person who watches my sex The person who watches my
enjoys it sex is disgusted by it
Paedophilia The child sexually desires as an The child is horrified by adult
adult sexuality
Transvestitism The other knows me as woman I know I am a man
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Sergio Benvenuto
6.
What relation is there then between Freud’s originary approach – perversion
as the aftermath of Verleugnung – and my ethical approach? And before
taking up this relation, what is the psychoanalytic view on ethics or morality,
whatever one chooses to call it? In particular, what specific relation does ethics
have with Law on one side and desire on the other?
Now, in psychoanalytic doctrine, the Law that seems to oppose itself
to desire is itself an expression of desire. This is because the anthropologic
metaphysics from which Freud took his idea makes die Lust the essential
property of the human being, his fundamental truth. Die Lust signifies both
pleasure, enjoyment, ‘lust’, as well as desire, urge – an ambiguous term,
especially in Freud’s conception, for which desire is the contrary of pleasure, it
is pain and even anguish. I would thus translate die Lust as desire/enjoyment,
or even lust (in English). Which means that both desires, and the Law which
seems to contrast them, are Lust, forms of desire/enjoyment. But whose desire
is the Law?
Freud elaborated an anthropological myth, according to which the Law –
and thus human civilisation – were the fruit of the totemic meal: after having
murdered and eaten the Father of the primal Horde, the assassin brothers
decide to divide the women equally among themselves. By means of this
myth, Freud is evidently seeking to recount the origin of Law: how does it
happen that from the free dynamics of desire (embodied in the primal lawless
father) a Law emerges to seemingly limit desire and enjoyment?
Jacques Lacan furnished a more subtle response that, recalling in part
Hegel, proposed a theory of human desire that we will only touch briefly
here. As St. Paul recognised, something prohibited by the law becomes very
tempting.
“However, I wouldn’t have known sin, except through the law. For
I wouldn’t have known coveting, unless the law had said, “You shall
not covet.” But sin, finding occasion through the commandment,
produced in me all kinds of coveting. For apart from the law, sin is
dead. I was alive apart from the law once, but when the commandment
came, sin revived, and I died. […] for sin, finding occasion through
the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me!” (St. Paul,
Letter to the Romans (7, 7-12))
182
This implication between Law and desire forms the background of

Lacanian theory. In effect, only in appearance do we desire something
which then, in a second moment, the law will permit or prohibit. We
deeply desire something – particularly in our erotic life – because from
time to time it is either prescribed or alternately prohibited by this Law.
I write upper case L because we are not talking about the specific laws
of certain states or religions, but of a constitutive dimension of every
human subject and its desire: were it not for a Law, we would not desire
anything in a human – that is, complicated – way.
In Greek, ‘law’ was originally called themis, which signified more or less
imposition (from the gods, ancestors, etc.). For Lacan however, the imposed
Law expresses in its turn a desire, which is neither mine nor someone else’s, but
the Other’s. This Other is not anyone in particular, but a function thanks to
which I can say that I am something or something is mine. The two functions
of subjectivity and otherness are interconnected, like the two sides of a glove.
And for many religions, this Other who imposes the Law is God.
Take the commandment prohibiting the desire of someone else’s woman.
For Lacan, we desire women precisely thanks to this commandment,
which permeates us even if we are non-believers. But the last of the Ten
Commandments is first for being problematic, because how can a desire be
prohibited? Acts, yes, but desires? Anyway, while a desire cannot be prohibited,
it can nevertheless be prescribed precisely by prohibiting it.
The point is that the Ten Commandments were destined for a society in
which one could desire only the woman of another. In societies which are either
patriarchal or which exist within an imaginary patriarchy, like contemporary
Islam, the woman always belongs to someone, be it her father, brother, or
lastly, husband. In fact, in the Old Testament era, that commandment was an
impossible prescription, a “double bind”, a paradoxical command: you cannot
desire an other’s woman, and yet if you want a woman, you can only desire
an other’s woman! Human desire is generated by this unrealisable prescription
– for Lacan, an originary impasse of desire, which goes beyond Jewish and
Christian religions.
But whose desire does this double bind express? It is not enough that
my neighbour tells me “I desire that you not desire my woman”. JHWH
(the Other) must articulate His desire in such a way that you don’t desire
the women of others. For Lacan, we can call ourselves atheist all we want,
but unconsciously we are all believers in God, because our desire is always
impregnated with this Other’s desire, called Law. Our problem will always be
to extricate what each of us really desires from what the Other desires. “What
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Sergio Benvenuto
do I really want?” is the crucial question that torments us, and sometimes
leads us to a psychoanalyst.
Given that the Law thus expresses the desire of the Other, Law is the origin
of our desires. In other words, according to Lacan the structure of desire is
intrinsically perverse: every subjective desire is articulated as a transgression of
the Other’s desire, which has the sense of the Law. The perverse individual,
precisely because he needs the Law to enjoy, is the paradigm itself of the
desiring subject in general, in so far as every subject needs the Law in order to
be able to desire and eventually enjoy.
184
Outlawed by Nature?
A Critique of Some Current Psychiatric and
Psychoanalytic Theories of Sexual Perversion
Andreas De Block and Lode Lauwaert
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association organised a symposium

under the title ‘Should Homosexuality be in the APA Nomenclature?’ The
second edition of the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’
(DSM) had unambiguously qualified homosexuality as a mental disorder. But
throughout the 1960s, this view came under increasing attack from a variety
of theoreticians and lay people. Anti-psychiatrists and biological psychiatrists
joined forces with gay activists against the majority of (psychoanalytic)
psychiatrists, because they felt that labelling homosexuality a disease was more
a matter of ideology than of science.
The participants in the symposium had to come up with an answer to the
question of what distinguishes sexual variation from sexual disorder. A number
of proposed criteria or norms were discussed. Most participants to the APA-
symposium agreed that not all sexual variations were pathological. Moreover,
they also agreed on two criteria to make that distinction. In their view, a
sexual variation is only disordered when it is both unnatural and harmful.
However, no consensus was reached over what should count as unnatural and/
or harmful. Likewise, the experts that participated in the Symposium remained
divided in their opinion on whether homosexuality could be healthy. Socarides
and Bieber, two prominent psychoanalytic psychiatrists, argued that all the
available scientific evidence supported the view that was found in DSM II.
The other participants (Stoller, Marmor, Spitzer, etc.) dismissed that evidence
as irrelevant or flawed, and argued for the removal of homosexuality from the
APA nomenclature.1 In order to get out of this stalemate, the APA resorted to
the political solution of a vote. Eventually, 58% of the APA members decided
that homosexuality as such had to be deleted from the seventh printing of
the DSM-II.2
This whole episode illustrates how difficult it is to distinguish normal from
pathological behaviour, especially when the behaviour is negatively valued
1
. W. Socarides, ‘The sexual deviations and the diagnostic manual’, American Journal of Psy-
C
chotherapy, 32, 1978, pp. 414-426.
2
S. A. Kirk and H. Hutchins, The Selling of the DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry. New
York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992.
by society. This is probably nowhere more true than in the case of sexual
perversions. In this paper, we will first claim that, in general, sexual perversions
are difficult to differentiate from non-pathological sexual behaviours that are
legally or morally unacceptable. In the second section, we will sketch how this
problem pervades today’s DSM approach to the sexual perversions. In the
third section, we will analyse to what extent our critique of the DSM dealing
with paraphilias can be applied to psychoanalytic accounts of perversion.
Does psychoanalysis provide a solution or this problem? Or does it rather
aggravate the problem by conceptualising perversion as a condition that is
defined by the persons relation to the law?
19th Century psychiatry and early sexology

Modern sexology defined itself explicitly as a progressive science. Early
sexologists saw themselves not just as scientists, but also as activists against
sexual oppression. They believed that the successes of sexology had to be
measured both by scientific standards and by political standards. The battle
of the sexologists against the legal prohibition of homosexuality is a good case
in point. Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch and Henry Havelock Ellis, three
of the founding fathers of modern sexology, considered their advocacy for
homosexual rights and their pleas against the criminalisation of homosexuality
to be the natural outcomes of their scientific work.3 In other words, they did
not see their political activism as opposed to scientific neutrality, but rather as
the kind of activism that was necessitated by their ‘objective’ findings, given
that many of the laws against homosexuality were based on – or legitimated
by – claims that sexology has proven to be wrong.
Havelock Ellis, who was married to the openly lesbian Edith Ellis,
expanded this view to include other so-called sexual pathologies. He devoted a
supplementary volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex to a discussion of
fellatio, cunnilingus, coprophilia, sadism, masochism, frotteurism, necrophilia,
transvestitism, and undinism or urolagnia.4 According to Havelock Ellis,
these unusual or even bizarre sexual desires, behaviours and preferences were
3
. Matte, ‘International Sexual Reform and Sexology in Europe, 1897-1933’, Canadian
N
Bulletin of Medical History, 22, 2005, p. 257; but see J. Crouthamel, ‘Male sexuality and
psychological trauma: soldiers and sexual disorder in World War I and Weimar Germany’,
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17, 2008, pp. 60-84.
4
Havelock Ellis was an undinist himself. He considered the view of a woman urinating to be
the most erotic image there is (See, J. Weeks, Making Sexual History. Oxford: Polity Press,
2000).
186
Outlawed by Nature?
much more normal (in the medical sense) than most people thought. First,
he argued that the phenomena that were central to the pervert’s desire (e.g.
pain) were closely related to normal sexual desires, thereby implying that so-
called perverse individuals were much more normal than commonly thought.5
Second, he urged society to accept that “these things existed, and that they
were only harmful when another individual was hurt”.6
Although many psychiatrists were reluctant to embrace the view that
sexual perversions were not very harmful, a number of psychiatrists, including
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, joined the sexologists in their protest against
Paragraph 175, the provision in the German Criminal Code that made
homosexual acts a crime. According to Krafft-Ebing, medically abnormal
sexuality need not be morally repulsive or legally forbidden. Already in his
ground-breaking monograph Psychopathia sexualis (1886), Krafft-Ebing was
aware of the difficulties of distinguishing moral norms from medical norms. In
his view, one of the key tasks of psychiatry was to differentiate between disease
(sexual perversion) and vice (sexual perversity). Although overlaps between the
two do exist, there are sexual diseases that are not morally reprehensible (e.g.
homosexuality) and sexual vices that are not sexual perversions (e.g. adultery,
rape). Undoubtedly, Krafft-Ebing’s background as a forensic psychiatrist
played an important role in his emphasis on the distinction between vice
(crime) and disease. In his view, vices should be punished, whereas diseases
need treatment.7
Making a distinction between morally reprehensible vices and mental
disorders remained a central concern for psychiatry during the first half of the
twentieth century. At first sight, however, this concern is absent from the first
edition of the DSM (1952). In this edition, sexual deviation was catalogued
among the sociopathic personality disturbances, together with antisocial
and dissocial reaction, alcoholism and drug addiction. These sociopathic
personality disturbances were explicitly viewed as types of social deviance.
In the words of DSM I, “[i]ndividuals to be placed in this category are ill
primarily in terms of society and of conformity with the prevailing cultural
milieu, and not only in terms of personal discomfort and relations with other
individuals”.8 This definition seems to suggest that social deviance, including
5
I . Crozier, ‘Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexolo-
gical Discourses on Algophilia’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13, 2004, pp. 275-305.
6
J. Weeks, Making Sexual History, p. 37.
7
H. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Iden-
tity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
8
American Psychiatric Association [APA] (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual: mental
disorders. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, p. 38.
187
sexual deviance, is always a disease. However, we think that even DSM I tried
to make the important distinction between disease and vice. In our view, DSM
I is saying here that sexual deviation is not a disease at all, since paradigmatic
diseases tend to be defined without any reference to the prevailing cultural
norms. Our interpretation is lent credibility by the fact that the DSM’s
predecessor, the ‘Statistical Manual for the Use of Hospitals for Mental
Diseases’ (1918), places the sexual deviations in the “not insane” category.
According to the Statistical Manual, sexual perversion is one of the conditions
that lead to mistaken admissions. And during the preparation of the second
edition of the DSM, psychiatrists kept on discussing whether or not sexual
perversions should be in the APA nomenclature. In his introduction to DSM
II, Morton Kramer discusses a WHO-meeting that took place in 1963: “The
areas that still remained in disagreement were the affective disorders, neurotic
depressive reaction, [and] several of the personality disorders (paranoid,
antisocial reaction, and sexual deviation).”9 In the end, the disagreement
turned out to be insurmountable, and the architects of DSM II decided to
give the sexual deviations a place in the DSM among “certain non-psychotic
mental disorders”.
It seems that during the 1950s and 1960s, there was unease among
psychiatrists about the status of the sexual perversions (or sexual deviations).
Many of them clearly thought that the presence of these conditions in
psychiatric handbooks was explained by tradition, rather than by scientific
evidence. Moreover, discussions among psychiatrists showed that no consensus
could be reached over what could count as scientific evidence in these cases.
This situation led to the controversy over the place of homosexuality in
the DSM, a controversy ending with the removal of homosexuality from
the APA nomenclature. Ironically enough, the discussions that led to this
removal barely touched upon the status of the other sexual deviations. After
the decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM, it seemed that the
perversions that were not removed from the DSM remained in the diagnostic
manual for a good reason. It was as if it was now shown that these behaviours
and preferences were really disordered in a medically relevant way. In fact,
however, the opposite seems to be closer to the truth. When asked why the
other sexual deviations were still seen as mental disorders, Robert Spitzer,
chair of the task force of DSM III and one of the organisers of the 1973
symposium, answered: “I haven’t given much thought to [these problems] and
9
merican Psychiatric Association [APA] (1968). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental
A
disorders, second edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, p. xiii.
188
Outlawed by Nature?
perhaps that is because the voyeurs and the fetishists have not yet organized
themselves and forced us to do that.”10
The paraphilias in the DSM IV-TR.

The current edition of the DSM, DSM IV-TR, was published in 2000. It
contains a list of 8 sexual deviations or, as they are now called, paraphilias.
These paraphilias are: exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestic fetishism,
frotteurism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and paedophilia. The DSM IV-
TR also has a category for paraphilias “not otherwise specified”, which include
necrophilia, bestiality, and coprophilia. According to DSM IV-TR, a condition
is a paraphilia if two criteria are fulfilled. The first criterion read as follows:
“Paraphilias are recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges
or behaviors generally involving (1) nonhuman objects, (2) the suffering or
humiliation of oneself or one’s partner, or (3) children or other nonconsenting
persons that occur over a period of 6 months.” This first criterion is clearly
not a medical criterion. It just gives a very general description of those sexual
desires or urges that are called paraphilias in the DSM IV-TR. The second
criterion, however, is a medical criterion. It stipulates that “the fantasies,
sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment
in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” This second
criterion is the clinical significance criterion that was included in the DSM
after the controversy over homosexuality.
The two criteria were already present in DSM IV. The text revision of DSM
IV that was published in 2000 contained a small but important change with
regard to the application of these criteria. The editors of DSM-IV-TR, Michael
First and Allen Frances, relate how they were attacked after the publication
of DSM IV by conservative groups who “mistakenly worried that the change
[from DSM III-R to DSM IV] meant DSM-IV did not recognize pedophilia
as a mental disorder unless it caused distress.”11 First and Frances consider this
worry to be mistaken. Of course, it was a quite literal interpretation of what
DSM IV said, but, in their view, it must have been clear that paedophilia was a
mental disorder regardless of the distress it caused for the paedophile. In order to
10
uoted in R. Bayer, ‘Politics, Science, and the Problem of Psychiatric Nomenclature: a case
Q
study of the American Psychiatric Association referendum on homosexuality’, Scientific Con-
troversies: case-studies in the resolution and closure in science and technology. Edited by T. Engel-
hardt, and A. Caplan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 397.
11
M. First and A. Frances, ‘Issues for DSM-V: Unintended Consequences of Small Changes:
The Case of Paraphilias’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 2008, p. 1240.
189
avoid misinterpretations like these, they decided to return to the DSM-III-R’s

diagnostic criteria for paraphilia. For those paraphilias that involve non-
consenting victims, i.e., paedophilia, voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism,
and sexual sadism, it was required that the person acted on unusual sexual
urges or fantasies, or that the person experienced distress about these urges
or fantasies.12 For the remaining paraphilias (fetishism, sexual masochism
and fetishistic transvestism), the diagnosis is made if and only if the urges,
fantasies, or behaviours cause distress or impairment in functioning. In other
words, a number of paraphilias are considered to be diseases because they
lead to criminal and/or morally reprehensible behaviour. For the non-criminal
paraphilias, the distress- or clinical significance-criterion remains decisive.
In The American Journal of Psychiatry, Robert Spitzer published a letter to
the editor, co-authored with Russell Hilliard, in which he applauded the use
of a behavioural criterion for a number of paraphilias in DSM IV-TR. The
authors of this letter called it a “welcome change” that paedophiles, frotteurs,
exhibitionists and sadists could be considered ill only because they acted on
their fantasies.13 As soon as they make victims, they are not merely criminals,
they also become medically disordered.
In our view, the criteria for the diagnosis of paraphilia in DSM IV-TR are
based on moral, rather than on medical values. More specifically, we think that
liberal values, and especially the emphasis on individual autonomy in classical
liberalism, pervade the paraphilia-section of the latest edition of the DSM,
and that this holds both for the criminal and the non-criminal paraphilias.
This becomes clear as soon as one takes a closer, philosophically informed look
at the particular diagnostic criteria.
First, there is the distress-criterion that is decisive for the diagnoses of
fetishism, masochism, and fetishistic transvesticism. Since the publication of
DSM IV, this so-called clinical significance-criterion is included in almost
half of the categories. Often, it is seen as the psychic harm that is needed
to turn a mental condition into a mental disorder (or in Boorse’s terms: to
make the disease an illness). However, the architects of the DSM do not seem
to realise that distress resulting from a bizarre sexual preference often has a
different origin than the distress experienced by patients suffering from other,
non-sexual mental disorders. Of course, the DSM IV-TR claims that the
clinically significant distress must be ‘endogenous’ rather than ‘exogenous’.
12
merican Psychiatric Association [APA] (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental
A
disorders, fourth edition text revision. Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Association,
p. 566.
13
R. Hilliard and R. Spitzer, ‘Change in Criterion for Paraphilias in DSM-IV-TR’, American
Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 2002, p. 1249.
190
Outlawed by Nature?
But whereas stigmatisation might play some role in the distress of many
psychiatric patients, we believe that the distress experienced by transvestites,
fetishists, and masochists is more often than not sufficiently explained by this
stigmatisation and the guilt, embarrassment and self-loathing that come with
it.14 Using this clinical significance criterion for the diagnosis of paraphilias
reflects individualistic and liberal values. It is as if DSM IV-TR is saying that it
is up to the individual to decide whether or not his fantasies are egodystonic,
and he should not care about the opinions of others.
In the case of the other paraphilias (exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism,
fotteurism and paedophilia), the importance of (liberal) values is even more
striking. This is quite obvious because of what can be dubbed the “act on one’s
urges-criterion”, that conflates legal and moral criteria with medical ones. But
there are also more subtle moral elements involved in the diagnosis of these
paraphilias, as the following paragraphs show.
According to DSM IV-TR, sadism and frotteurism are mental disorders
if the person acts upon his urges, but only if he acts upon them with a non-
consenting person. Consensual sadism or consensual frotteurism is not a
mental disorder, unless, of course, it causes distress. The emphasis on consent
reflects a typically liberal notion of freedom, i.e. the idea that freedom is
primarily freedom from the other, (“my freedom ends where yours begins”),
as opposed to the communitarian idea that true freedom is freedom with the
other (“my freedom begins where yours begins”).
Likewise, paedophilia is considered to be a disorder if the paedophile acts
upon his urges, because in this case no true consent is possible. The liberal
origin of this claim is maybe less clear, but one has to take into account that
the freedom of the child is a problem within all liberal theories. All these
theories, including pretty extreme versions of libertarianism, try to come up
with a theory for why it is justifiable to force children to do what is in their
“own interests”. In other words, although all liberal theories stress the value
of freedom, they tend to contain arguments that attempt to legitimise the
restriction of children’s freedom.
Exhibitionism is diagnosed when the exposure of one’s genitals to an
unsuspecting stranger is the content of the sexual fantasies or behaviour,
whereas voyeurism involves the act of observing unsuspecting individuals
who are naked. The use of the term ‘unsuspecting’ is crucial here, because
it gives away that ‘privacy’ is the pivotal value here. In the liberal tradition,
14
S oble points out several other problems with the distress criterion. For instance, he correctly
notes that “once distress is a diagnostic criterion, the sexual nature of the acts becomes irrele-
vant: distressing fetishism and distressing psoriasis, for example, belong in their own category
of ‘egodystonic disorders’.” (Soble 2004, 55)
191
privacy is here implicitly conceived as a person’s right to control how she or

he appears to others.15 We own our body, but we also own the image of our
body, and whenever we lose control over how others see us, this is a potential
infringement of our rights.
Quite a number of philosophers and psychiatrists have raised similar
concerns regarding the diagnostic criteria for paraphilias in DSM IV-TR. Some
of these authors have argued for a complete removal of the paraphilias from
the DSM. Moser and Kleinplatz (2005), for example, argue that the paraphilia
section in the DSM is seriously flawed, and that the most appropriate remedy
for this problem is the removal of the entire category from the DSM.
“There are individuals now diagnosed with a paraphilia who seek

psychotherapy. We believe that other psychological characteristics
describe these individuals and their concerns more accurately than
their sexual interests do. It is not their sexual interests, but the manner
in which they are manifest that can be problematic at times and is a
more appropriate focus for therapy.”16
Elsewhere, Moser makes this point even more succinctly:
“Historically, we have been obsessed (and I am not using that term

lightly) with the sex of one’s sexual partners, their religion, their station
in life, their income, their fecundity, whether one’s parents were legally
married at the time of birth, whether one masturbates, etc. Now we
are obsessed with the desired age of one’s partner, but does that imply
a mental disorder? Again, I do not doubt that some individuals have
sexual preferences for certain aged partners. The question is why is this
important to enshrine into the DSM? Why is a preference for blonde
age-mates less important?”17
Of course, many anti-psychiatrists have used a quite similar argumentation

to attack psychiatry as a whole. In Thomas Szasz’ view, for example, mental
illness is a myth because mental illness is a moral category in medical disguise.
So, if we endorse the views of Moser, Soble and others with regard to the
15
O. Levin-Waldman, Reconceiving Liberalism: dilemmas of contemporary liberal public policy.
Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1996.
16
C. Moser and P. Kleinplatz, ‘DSM-IV-TR and the paraphilias: An argument for removal’,
Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 17, 2005, p. 107.
17
C. Moser, ‘When is an unusual sexual interest a disorder?’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38,
2009, p. 325.
192
Outlawed by Nature?
medicalisation of sexual desires and sexual activities, why don’t we just go one
step further in the anti-psychiatric direction, and criticise the psychiatric way
of thinking as such? Is there really a medically relevant difference between the
paraphilias and other conditions in the DSM?
Most probably, there are a number of so-called mental disorders, like
intermittent explosive disorder, for which an almost identical analysis can
be given. For some ‘disorders’, such analyses have already been convincingly
made. Christopher Lane’s study (2007) of how shyness was pathologised as
“social phobia” is a good case in point. But, in our view, study’s like Lane’s are
primarily successful because they assume that psychiatry should not be solely
about values. This assumption is different from the anti-psychiatrists view
that psychiatry is inevitably and exclusively about values. We are not denying
that values play a role whenever psychiatrists or other people distinguish
pathological from non-pathological conditions. In fact, there is almost a
consensus among philosophers of psychiatry that a condition can only be
a mental disorder if it is bad for the person: “It is agreed by all concerned
(…) that the notion of disorder in general, and mental disorder in particular,
implies an evaluation of the condition in question as being undesirable.”18
However, there is also a consensus that the concept of mental disorder is not
only about values. This is how Bengt Brülde summarises this view: “it is also
generally agreed that the concept of mental disorder is not a purely evaluative
concept. That is, the general idea is that the concept includes both an evaluative
component and a factual component.”19 Of course, all of this may entail that
psychiatry is somewhat different from the rest of medicine, but the (almost)
consensual view clearly also implies that the notion of mental illness can be
saved from the anti-psychiatrist critique. In fact, it provides a rather simple
criterion to distinguish real mental disorders from those conditions that are
only allegedly disordered. Conditions that are seen as mental disorders purely
because they are undesirable do not qualify as genuine disorders, and even less
so when those conditions are primarily undesirable from a social perspective
(as opposed to conditions that are primarily bad for the individual).
So the point of our critique is not that values play a role in the diagnosis
of paraphilias and in the pathologising of particular sexual desires. Values play
a role in all psychiatric diagnosis, and the judgment that a condition is a
mental disorder always seems to require a value judgment. The point is that
the pathologising of sexual desire is all about (societal) values. There are no
18
. Bolton, ‘Continuing Commentary: Alternatives to disorder’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and
D
Psychology, 7, 2000, p. 142.
19
B. Brülde, ‘Mental Disorder and Values’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 14, 2007, p.
93.
193
factual judgments involved here. The pathological behaviours are described in

moral terms and what these behaviours distinguish from healthy behaviours
is purely a moral factor.
To some extent, our critique is possible because psychiatric diagnosis
tends to require two different judgments whenever it considers a condition
to be pathological. First, there is the factual judgment that something is
not functioning the way it ought to function from a biological perspective.
Second, there is the value judgment that the dysfunctional condition is bad
for the individual or for the individual’s social environment. We have tried to
show how recent editions of the DSM diagnose sexual desires and behaviours
based on nothing but value judgments. However, in some psychoanalytic
accounts of perversion the facts are moralised and the values are objectified.
Since many psychoanalytic schools see perversion as a pathological position
to, or a pathological relation with, the law, perversion becomes even more
moralised than it is in today’s DSM. But the difference with DSM-like
approaches to the paraphilias, is that in psychoanalytic theories, this moral
problem is objectified, at least to some extent, because it becomes an objective
judgment about a relation to the law, rather than a legal or moral judgment
about the persons behaviour. In the following section, we will analyse whether
the psychoanalytic tradition can duck the critique we have levelled against the
DSM approach.
Psychoanalysis and the law

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) differs in some respects
from Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. For instance, unlike Krafft-Ebing,
Freud understands sexual sadism and masochism as operating in tandem:
masochism is the internalisation of primary, outwardly directed aggression.
Despite differences like these, Freud’s text strongly corresponds in many ways
to Krafft-Ebing’s study. For instance, Freud’s famous claim that perversions are
a radicalisation of impulses which occur in normal sexual life is already found
in Krafft-Ebing’s work, where biting and dependence in common forms of
eroticism and love are a less extreme expression of, respectively, sadism and
masochism. Furthermore, Freud’s distinction between perversions according
to the sexual goal and perversions according to the sexual object, is a reiteration
of Krafft-Ebing’s classification. The latter category, perversions according to
the sexual object, includes homosexuality, paedophilia and bestiality. Freud
divides the perversions according to sexual aim into two subcategories.
194
Outlawed by Nature?
The anatomical transgressions are perversions where sexual interest is not

restricted to the sex organs but spreads to other body parts, personality traits
and objects associated with the person. This category includes fetishism, anal
and oral sexuality. The second group consists of what Freud sees as fixations to
precursory sexual aims, and includes sadism.
In his earlier writings, Freud almost never specifies why perversions should
be seen as mental disorders. The reason is probably because he mainly treats
the perversions as the ‘normal’ infantile sources of the pathological states that
he focused on until 1914, namely the transference neuroses. The individual
can defend himself against these perverse urges, and these defences than lead
to the neurosis. Perversion itself, however, is rarely treated as something that
is the outcome of an interaction between a disposition, the environment and
defence mechanisms.
From 1915 onwards, Freud starts to change his conception of sexual
perversions as he further develops his theory, introducing new concepts such as
penis envy, death drive and the Id. However, the biggest changes to his theory
of perversions can be found in three texts that are devoted to fetishism.20 In
these short papers, Freud still claims that fixation has a central role in fetishism
but he now understands the genesis of this fixation in a different way. The
cause of the fixation, as Freud says, has no physiological origin but is rooted
in a trauma that has its origin in the infantile perception of the absence of a
penis in the woman. Upon seeing the female genitalia, the fetishist recognizes
the seriousness of the castration threat that was voiced on earlier occasions
by his father: the child realises he can lose his penis if he does not repress his
Oedipal desires. The fetishist does not deny the trauma, which would result in
neurosis. Rather, he focuses on what he has observed just before the traumatic
impression and this sexual fetish, the substitute for the penis, protects him
against castration anxiety. In short, Freud no longer understands perversion
primarily from the standpoint of sexual, polymorphic drives but rather as
coming from anxiety related to castration and the Oedipus complex. It results
from (and is to be understood as) a defence against the castration anxiety.
This means that in Freud’s later texts, perversion as a disease is understood
in relation to the law. Fixations to infantile perverse drives are not really
pathological, as Freud makes clear in his letter to the mother of a homosexual.21
In most cases, homosexuality is just a developmental fixation, but not a
genuine disorder. Sexual desire does become pathological whenever the sexual
20
Freud 1927, 1940a, 1940b
21
S. Freud (1935), ‘Anonymous (Letter to an American mother)’, The Letters of Sigmund Freud.
Edited by E. Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1960, pp. 423-424.
195
desire is a reaction to ward off – in a very specific way – the anxiety that is
caused by the confrontation with castration, a castration that is understood by
the perverse individual as a punishment for transgressing the law.
Several post-Freudian theoretical accounts of perversions elaborate
upon the core-ideas of Freud’s later fetishism texts. This is exemplified by
the first years of Lacan’s teaching and by “handbook versions” of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. For example, let us take the Lacanian approach of masochism.22
Usually, Lacanians pay attention to two aspects: first is the submission to a
most likely female master. The masochist presents himself as a passive object
that the other can manipulate as much as they wish. Although he seems to be
characterised by a submissive position, this dependence hides something else.
The masochist does not enjoy his submission, but the control he has over the
perverted scenario. He claims that the other person does not cease to torment
until the moment he is no longer able to torture. The moment the other
recoils at his horrifying deeds is what excites the masochist. Indeed, it means
that the other recognises his allegiance to the masochist’s law.
From a Lacanian perspective, both aspects of this relationship are
characteristic of a perverse structure. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis,
perversion results from a denial of the law. The seeds of perversion are sown
when the child is reduced to the object of the mother’s enjoyment while the
father, as a representative of the Oedipal law, is resolved to an impotent and
powerless man. As Lacan puts it: “The whole problem of the perversions
consists in conceiving how the child, in his relation to the mother, a relation
constituted in analysis not by his vital dependence on her, but by his dependence
on her love, that is to say, by the desire for her desire, identifies himself
with the imaginary object of this desire.”23 This indicates that the Lacanian
diagnosis understands perversion primarily as a transgression of the law: “it
means that the pervert not only refuses the other’s oedipal law (prohibition of
incest; obligation for exogamy), but also challenges, transgresses, and replaces
this law.”24 Of course, the law transgressed by the pervert is not the juridical
law but the ‘deeper’, anthropological law of incest prohibition. This means
that the Lacanian conception of perversion seems to neutralise the core of
our criticism in advance. Indeed, whereas we have criticised the narrow link
between perversion and social norms, Lacanianism holds that perversion
22
P. Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders. A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics.
Translated by S. Jottkandt. New York: Other Press, 2004.
23
J. Lacan, ‘On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis’, in Écrits, A
Selection, New York: Norton, 1977, pp. 197-198.
24
P. Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders. A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics,
p. 419.
196
Outlawed by Nature?
consists in the transgression of the law. According to Lacanian theory, it would

be absurd to think that perversions are not intimately linked to values and
their transgression, but it would be equally absurd to argue on that ground
against the idea that perversion is a mental disorder, since perversion is exactly
the mental disorder that is defined by a pathological transgression of the law.
Whereas the DSM IV-TR assumes that a description of the behaviours
and desires suffices to determine the pathological character of a sexual
preference, psychoanalysis claims that only a deeper, psychodynamic look at
the unconscious motives behind the preferences can warrant the judgment
that a preference is pathological. Psychoanalysis upholds (or restores) the
distinction between vice and pathology because of the role aetiology plays
in its diagnostic practice. Some pathologies might look like vices, but not all
sexual vices are pathologies, and not all perversions are vices. In the DSM IV-
TR, this distinction becomes blurred due to its a-theoretical character and its
subsequent emphasis on symptom-based diagnoses. Many other differences
between the two approaches follow from this very fundamental difference.
In psychoanalysis, for instance, one can be diagnosed as a perverse individual
even though one does not act upon one’s sexual urges. Furthermore, many
sexual desires that are normal or healthy according to the DSM (a preference
for same-sex sexual individuals, a preference for blonde women, a preference
for older women or older men) can be perverse in the psychoanalytic sense.
For psychoanalysis, the pathological nature of sexual desire is not determined
by its content, nor by its strength, even though it almost goes without saying
that both the strength and the content are usually thought to contain clues
with regard to the desire’s psychogenesis.
Conclusion
We started this contribution with an examination of how legal and moral
norms have influenced psychiatric thinking about sexual deviations. We
then argued that the current edition of the DSM inadequately addresses the
difference between perversions (paraphilias) and sexual vices. In part, this
can be explained by the DSM’s almost exclusive focus on symptom-based
diagnosis. Because such a symptom based approach to diagnosis is mostly
absent from psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis can uphold the difference between
perversion and vice/crime, even though psychoanalytic theory defines
perversion (and neurosis and psychosis) in terms of a certain relation or
reaction to the (Oedipal) law. Still, that is not to say that this Oedipal and legal
197
approach to perversion is without problems. For instance, many philosophers

have pointed out that the transgressive conception of perversions is mistaken.
In their view, even sadism, the perversion that seems difficult to understand
without reference to the transgression of the law, revolves around apathy, and
not around a supposed eagerness to transgress the law.25 This transgression is
only a possible side-effect of the sadists striving for apathy.
25
G. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty. Translated by J. McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1991
and P. Klossowski, Sade My Neighbour. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern
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- V. Vitali, ‘Corporate Art and Critical Theory: On Shirin Neshat’, Women: A Cultural
Review, 15(1), 2004, pp. 1–18.
- Joel Whitebook, ‘First Nature and Second Nature in Hegel and Psychoanalysis’,
Constellations, vol. 15, No 3, 2008, pp. 2-9.
- D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the
First Not-Me Possession’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 1953, pp.
89-97.
- D. W. Winnicott, ‘Aggression in relation to emotional development’, Collected Pa-
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- D. W. Winnicott, ‘Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of
certain opposites’, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
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- M.E. Woodruff, ‘Flesh Made Word: Cutting Back to the Mother’, Psychoanalytical
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- J. Woods, ‘Layers of Meaning in Self-Cutting’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 14A,
1988, pp. 51-60.
- J. Wyatt, ‘Jouissance and Desire in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher’, American
Imago, 62, 2005, pp. 453-482.
- A. Zahedi, ‘Contested Meaning of the Veil and Political Ideologies of Iranian Re-
gimes’, Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies 3(3), 2007, pp. 75–98.
- S. Zizek, ‘The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?’, Lecture in Cambridge
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207
Notes on the Contributors
Andreas De Block is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic

University Leuven. He has published articles and books on psychoanalysis,
philosophy of medicine, philosophy of biology, philosophy of psychiatry and
philosophical psychiatry.
Fethi Benslama is a psychoanalyst, Professor of Psychopathology and

Director of the department of Psychoanalysis Studies, and Humanities
Institute of Paris, University Paris-Diderot. He is member of the Tunisian
Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts. He is the author of several works
on psychoanalysis in Islam and Europe in the contemporary period, most
recently Soudain la revolution (2011) and Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of
Islam (2009).
Sergio Benvenuto, psychoanalyst and philosopher, is Senior Researcher

in Social Sciences at the Institute ISTC of the Italian Council for Scientific
Research (CNR) in Rome. He is editor-in-chief of the European Journal of
Psychoanalysis, which he founded in 1995. He is the author of many books
and articles in different languages, most recently: with A. Molino, In Freud’s
Tracks (2008); Perversionen. Sexualität, Ethik und Psychoanalyse (2009); La
gelosia (2011); Lo jettatore (2012); “The Idiot’s Tragedy” (2012).
Gohar Homayounpour is Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the

Freudian Group of Tehran. Lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran,
Iran. Her recent book Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran was published by MIT
Press in August 2012.
Felix de Mendelssohn is a psychoanalyst and group analyst in private

practice in Vienna and Berlin. He teaches at the Sigmund-Freud University
(SFU) in Vienna and is the author of numerous contributions to professional
journals. His two books (in German) The Psychoanalytic Subject – Essays in
Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, and The Contrary Motion of the Angels –
Psychoanalytic Essays on Art and Society were published in 2010.
Julia Kristeva is a French philosopher, psychoanalyst, literary critic,

essayist, sociologist, and, most recently, novelist. She is a Professor Emeritus
of the University Paris Diderot, France. Her extensive publications include
Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (1984); In the Beginning Was Love:
Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987); Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words (2001);
This Incredible Need to Believe (2009) and, with Jean Vanier, Leur regard perce
nos ombres (2011).
Lode Lauwaert is a PhD-candidate at the Institute of Philosophy, KU

Leuven, Belgium. He works on the reception of the literary novels of Marquis
de Sade in continental philosophy. His most recent articles are ‘Roland Barthes’
semiologische lezing van Sade. Sadisme als formalisme’ (2012) and ‘Gilles Deleuze
leest Sade en Sacher-Masoch. Over natuur en literatuur, kritiek en kliniek’ (2012).
Siamak Movahedi is Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts,

Boston. He is also Professor of Psychoanalysis, Training and Supervisory
Analyst and the Director of the Doctoral Program and Institute for the Study
of Psychoanalysis and Culture, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.
He is the author of numerous works in psychoanalysis, social psychology, and
sociology.
Wolfgang Müller-Funk is Professor for Cultural Studies at the

Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies,
University of Vienna, and is the research coordinator of his faculty. He has
published numerous books, research projects and articles on Cultural theory
and Modernism, most recently The Architecture of Modern Culture (2012),
Kulturtheorie (2010) and Komplex Österreich (2009).
Gilles Ribault teaches philosophy and passed his PhD in psychology and
psychoanalysis (2009, Paris VII) on Freud’s work (Le primat de l’autre dans
la pensée freudienne). He published ‘L’autre dans l’âme’ (2010) and ‘De la
mélancolie dans le genre? Freud lu par Judith Butler’ (2009).
Céline Surprenant is the author of Freud : A Guide for the Perplexed

(2008), Freud’s Mass Psychology : Questions of Scale (2003), as well as articles
on Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and others. She is currently Visiting Senior
Lecturer at the University of Sussex, and Fellow and Executive Member,
London Graduate School (Kingston University, London).
210
Notes on Contributors
Inge Scholz-Strasser is Chairwoman of the Sigmund Freud Foundation

and Director of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. She curated and
organised a number of exhibitions related to Freud, psychoanalysis and
contemporary art in the Sigmund Freud Museum and various other cultural
institutions. Among her publications are several books on Freud’s life and
20th century Vienna. She also edited Sigmund Freud. Wien IX, Berggasse 19 by
Edmund Engelman (Vienna, 1993).
Herman Westerink is Assistant Professor of Psychology of Religion,

Protestant Theological Faculty, University of Vienna, Austria. He is the
author of numerous books and articles, most recently A Dark Trace: Sigmund
Freud on the Sense of Guilt (2009) and The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian
Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought (2012).
Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and a practicing psychoanalyst. He is

the Director of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Studies Program and
Assistant Clinical Professor at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and
Surgeons. He has written extensively on psychoanalysis, philosophy and the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School, most recently Der gefesselte Odysseus:
Studien zur Kritischen Theorie und Psychoanalyse (2009). He is currently
finishing an intellectual biography of Freud for Cambridge University Press.
Moshe Zuckermann is Full Professor for History and Philosophy at the

Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv
University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, most recently
“Antisemit!” – Ein Vorwurf als Herrschaftsinstrument (2010) and Wider den
Zeitgeist. Aufsätze und Gespräche über Juden, Deutsche, den Nahostkonflikt und
Antisemitismus, vol.1 (2012).
211
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Leen De Bolle (ed.)
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Sigmund Freud on the Sence of Guilt,
Herman Westerink
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hardback, 320 p., English
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Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality

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Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality

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PSYCHOANALYSIS, MONOTHEISM AND MORALITY

FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 12

PHILIPPE VAN HAUTE, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)

TOMAS GEYSKENS, (Leuven, Belgium)

In collaboration with Daniela Finzi

ISBN 978 90 5867 935 2

Part I: The Forces of Monotheism 15

The Jewish Tradition in Sigmund Freud’s Work

Islam in Light of Psychoanalysis

Part II: Religion and its Critiques 61

Freud’s Conception of Religion within the Context of the Modernist

The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know, Today

Monotheism and the “Repudiation of Femininity”

Fort!/Da! Through the Chador: The Paradox of the Woman’s Invisibility

Part IV: Morality 133

The Two Sources of Morality in Freud’s Work

On Moral Responsibility: A Freudian Perspective

Pathology and Moral Courage in Freud’s Early Case Histories

Part V: Law and Perversion 173

Does Perversion Need the Law?

Outlawed by Nature? A Critique of Some Current Psychiatric and

Notes on the Contributors 209

platform dedicated to providing a discussion forum for experts and making

Translated by Christopher Barber

Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Herman Westerink

pluralism of polytheism by bashing monotheism as the dictatorship of one

to the steam-engine. Also psychoanalysis has modified our cultural system, as

Freud to reflect on religious sentiment (‘oceanic feeling’), Freud simply has to

specific pathology determine the agenda of most of his writings on religion

but in some parts in element 5 (power relation). Quite clearly, Freud is

Freud’s essay is also interesting with regard to narrative analysis. Freud is

“(...) a method such as ours – taking from material what strikes us as

There is an interesting ambivalence with regard to the texts that undergo

denied is still there, hidden somewhere, albeit altered in appearance

The distrust of psychoanalysis has to do with its discontent in fantasy. It is

Jahweh. But as in every free storytelling, Freud’s narrating process becomes

“Moses’ Jewish people were no more capable of tolerating so cerebral

“We are living in particularly remarkable times. We find to our surprise

I think that Freud is wrong with regard to German National Socialism,

Freud then summarises his hypotheses: Moses was a high-ranking Egyptian

Her reply is dated Göttingen, after mid-May 1935:

“But I’m babbling on without thinking – please excuse me!”

“It is like a miracle! I have experienced it a thousand times and it always

“It is interesting in this connection that these enlightened, open-minded

“I speak the German language and live in a Germanic culture. In my

He made a virtue out of necessity with this increasing discrimination by

When in 1902 the ‘Wednesday-Society’ was formed, as an antecedent of the

remained a Jew, but not because of loyalty to his people of origin. He

In the following passage Sadger makes comparisons with other positive

Poor Sadger was later murdered, at the age of 75, in Theresienstadt.

Which Jewishness? Which tradition?

this sense Freud might be comparable to Baruch Spinoza – a ‘heretical Jew’

More disrespectfully but in the same vein we read in Franz Kafka:

“It gives no pleasure to consort with psychoanalysis and I hold myself

The Kabbalah is the opposing, mystical current of Judaism, which begins

“Some aspects of the Zohar show great affinity to the psychoanalytic

“That is what Freud actually did in his clinical psychoanalytic practice

However Bakan’s book is itself such a collage of convolutions that he is easy

The attempts of the enlightened humanists to rescue Freud’s teachings

“I do not know if your verdict is just, which sees in psychoanalysis a

We hear an echo of this sentiment in the words of his daughter Anna at

“Psychoanalysis has often been criticized because its methods are

“Immediately after Titus’ destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, Rabbi