CHAPT ER

From Religious Fantasies of Omnipotence to Scientic Myths of Emancipation

Freud and the Dialectics of Psychohistory*
JOS BRUNNER

Introduction: Freuds Political Touch

Undoubtedly, the relevance of a psychoanalytic dimension in historical understanding correlates with the importance that is attributed to anxiety and fantasy in history. In circumstances in which historical agentsboth groups and individualsconduct themselves in what seems to observers and commentators to be a rational manner, the contribution of anxiety and fantasy to their conduct is usually taken to be negligible. Only when rational explanations are no longer considered sufcient will affects such as anxiety or unconscious fantasies play a major role in an historical analysis. For instance, those concerned with historical processes of domination and submission question neither the deeper motives that make people want to dominate othersthat is, exercise power over themnor the reasons of people who are ready to submit to the power of others. In conventional historical analysis, social relations and power structures tend to be the ultimate units of explanation, while for psychoanalysts they are seen as in need of interpretation and explanation.1 In contrast to historians, psychoanalysts seek to excavate the unconscious anxieties and desires that may compel some people to dominate others, as well as the unconscious anxieties and desires that may make these others not only yield to domination but sometimes even actively yearn for it, and last but not least, the fantasies that both sides attach to mechanisms
Notes for this section begin on page 182.

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of domination.2 As we see, the trajectories of these two approaches, the historical and the psychoanalytic, are opposed to one another. While conventional historians and political analysts reject inquiries into unconscious motivations of historical and social actors as unjustiable and unproductive for their purposes, psychoanalysts delving into psychohistory often tend to reduce historical events and developments to the personal and psychological level. These contradictory trajectories have often led to criticism, denigration, and condemnation of psychohistory and psychopolitics on the one hand, and to protracted attempts to justify psychohistorical and psychopolitical inquiries on the other.3 This essay seeks to elucidate the logic of Freuds inquiry into history and the processes of domination and emancipation by scrutinizing his writings on religion in general and his progressive three-stage theory of the development of humanity from animism through religion to science in particular. Of course, when one judges Freuds writings from our own contemporary vantage point, the shortcomings of his approach to animism, religion, science, domination, and historical developments are glaringly apparent, and there is no lack of dismissive titles under which one can place them, such as sexism, scientism, elitism, reductionism, ethnocentrism, etc., which will be mentioned below. But despite the biases, blind spots, and deciencies that are characteristic of Freuds analysis of religion in particular and his historical perspective in general, this essay is not designed to join the chorus of Freuds critics in relegating his analysis of religion to an archival history of ideas. Although this essay will address some of the serious problems that vitiate a Freudian psychohistory/psychopolitics, these do not form the core of its argument. Rather, this essay aims to recover the dialectical complexity of Freuds work in order to reveal that, while the surface trajectory of Freuds historical analysis leads from manifest, economic, and political layers of social relations to hidden, emotional, and unconscious strata of human existence, it always also carries an inverse logic in its depth, in which it continuously politicizes its subject matter by tracing desires, anxieties, and fantasies to multiple dynamics of domination, embedding the former in the latter. Thus, this essay shows that when Freud aimed to reveal religion as an Oedipal fantasy, he did not only seek to excavate its underlying unconscious desires and anxieties: by reading his analysis closely, one discovers that Freuds psychoanalysis of religion also provides a dialectical and power-oriented political theory of history. As will be shown, Freuds analysis is dialectical, both in the psychological insights it provides and in that it continually transcends itself, transgressing the boundaries of what is commonly taken to be psychology into the domain of politics. The notion of dialectics that informs this reading of Freud derives from the work of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who used it to denote processes in which phenomena and forces are subjected at once to a threefold transformation: they are not only abolished in their original form, but also transposed to a higher plane, where they are preserved. Thus, to call a process

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dialectical denotes that a transition takes place whereby something is simultaneously done away with, elevated, and maintained, where an afrmative moment is simultaneously preserved and transcended in its negation. Hegel used the German term Aufhebung to describe the result of dialectical processes, since its range of meanings include abolition, elevation, and preservation, which can hardly be said for the English notion sublation that tends to be used in translations of Hegel.4 In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel uses the term understanding (Verstand ) to designate a non-dialectical approach satised by xed notions, rm distinctions, and entities that are enduring and exist in themselves.5 Understanding, in the Hegelian sense of the term, is dominated by the category of identity, which refers to everything as identical to itself and determined in its specic nature. In these terms, then, one would say that psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis and thus not historical and political analysis, while history and political analysis, since they are history and political analysis, cannot be psychoanalysis. According to Hegel, this view of things is true, but only partially so. Though entities are identical, to come to grips with the totality of being, thinking must go beyond the stage of understanding (Verstand ) and become reason (Vernunft ), which captures the continuous and complex dialectical self-transformation, interdependence, and interrelation of things, events, and forms of thought. This perspective guides the reading of Freud presented in this essay, suggesting that by psychoanalyzing religion, which is a social, political, and historical force, Freud not only introduced references to unconscious psychological processes into the understanding of faith but also, due to the interpenetration of the subject and the object of an analysis, unwittingly but inevitably transformed psychoanalysis into a type of social, political, and historical analysis. What, then, was the vantage point from which Freud intended to analyze religion? In a letter to Oskar Pster, the Swiss pastor and lay analyst with whom he corresponded on psychoanalysis and faith, Freud described himself as a completely godless Jew.6 This much-quoted expressionwhich also provided the title one of Peter Gays books on Freudprovides an accurate and succinct description of the perspective from which Freud formulated his bellicose critique of religion.7 This critique can be found above all in ve texts that he published in the course of three and a half decades, starting in 191213 with Totem and Taboo, through The Future of an Illusion of 1927, Civilization and Its Discontents of 1930 and his lecture on The Question of a Weltanschauung of 1933, to Moses and Monotheism of 1939, the last of Freuds writings to be published in his lifetime.8 In response, a number of religious thinkers have seen it as their duty to come to the defense of religion. As a rule these authors have chosen one of two approaches: outraged by Freuds polemics, they have tried to protect humanity from what they regarded as a threat to society and morals, or, in a more conciliatory moodtypical of religious psychoanalysts, for instancethey

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tried to integrate Freuds stance into an enlightened form of faith.9 However, there also are a substantial number of commentators who have inquired into Freuds approach to religion from what I consider to be a more scholarly, that is, a social, historical, political, and/or philosophical outlook. These authors examined Freuds classication of religion as an obsessional neurosis on a world-historical scale. They stressed that Freuds outlook was androcentric and Eurocentric, since it regarded only men as historical actors and neglected other religious forms, such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. They pointed to Freuds atheist presuppositions as well as to his identication with Moses and his preference for Judaism over Christianity. They aimed to discover the intellectual ancestors of Freuds critique of religion by tracing it to Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer. They placed his approach to religion within the psychoanalytic theory of culture in general and depicted his view of religion as part of an ethics of renunciation. Finally, they discussed Freuds view of science as the antagonist of religion.10 In contrast, this essay is devoted to the postulate that Freuds analysis of religion, as well as his portrayal of the historical transition from animism through religion to science, and hence his conception of historical progress in general, are imbued with power-centered categories that endow his reading of history with a pervasively political touch that can be pictured, perhaps, as akin to the touch of King Midas of Pessinus, which turned everything that he laid his hands on into gold. However, in contrast to the mythical Greek king, who had asked Dionysus for this special gift, Freud probably neither was aware of his political touch nor would have wanted it. Moreover, while the legend tells us that Midass golden touch stemmed from greed and turned out to be a curse, Freuds political touch will be dealt with as an insightful and enriching dimension, adding a dialectical twist to his thinking.

Animism and the Dialectic of Total Control

When Freud dealt with taboos, animism, and magic in Totem and Taboo in 191213, he described them primarily as expressions of collective fantasies of human omnipotence in order to counter an unbearable fear provoked by the real powerlessness of what he considered to be primitive human beings. He introduced this approach by comparing taboos to the private laws of obsessional neurotics, since both were without manifest reason and, in his words, forcibly maintained by an irresistible fear.11 But even though he considered taboos to be similar to obsessional neurosis in their dynamics and form, Freud warned against going too far in carrying the comparison to the point of identity in every detail.12 He emphasized a crucial difference between the two in their scope: while he described neuroses as asocial structures, he stressed that the

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parallel sociological phenomenon belonged to the public realm and was a social institution and a cultural creation.13 Concomitantly Freud distinguished two types of desire underlying the two parallel structures: the desire driving neuroses aimed at sexual satisfaction, while that of taboos aimed at command or control. Similarly, he juxtaposed the private neurotic prohibitions on touching a desired object with the political taboo on dangerous contacts with rulers, which was designed to prevent forbidden acts of hostility or domination against them, explaining that whereas in the case of the neurosis the prohibition invariably relates to touching of a sexual kind In the case of taboo the prohibited touching is obviously not to be understood in an exclusively sexual sense but in the more general sense of attacking (Angreifens), of getting control, (Bemchtigung) and of asserting oneself (Geltendmachens der eigenen Person).14 In other words, Freud implied that in the public sphere desire aimed at power, and this wish for complete hegemony was controlled by the establishment of tabooswhich constituted the public counterpart to obsessive symptoms. Moreover, the notion of the omnipotence (Allmacht) of thoughtsa term coined by Freuds patient the Rat Man during his analysisappears prominently in Totem and Taboo. Like his own civilized patients, Freud argued, primitive people believed in their magic power to determine events by means of wishes, thoughts, and words. He portrayed animism as a theory of the universe that derived from the refusal to recognize the nitude and mortality of human beings, and from what he described as the unshakable condence in the possibility of controlling the world (Weltbeherrschung).15 That Freud considered animism a worldview based on a fantasy of control and domination is also evident from the way in which he referred to its applied form: magic. Freud explained that the principle governing magic is the principle of the omnipotence (Allmacht) of thoughts.16 People in early tribal societies, Freud argued, believed in the magical power of their thoughts, which has to serve the most varied purposesit must subject (unterwerfen) natural phenomena to the will of man, it must protect the individual from his enemies and from dangers and it must give him the power (Macht) to injure his enemies.17 For Freud, animism was thus rst and foremost a fantasy of human omnipotence. It was also the rst and most childish stage in Freuds grand scheme of the intellectual evolution of the species. According to Freud, fantasies of limitless power were a reaction to the early condition of humankind, in which it was exposed to nature without any means of understanding or defense against its forces. They could thus be seen as necessary illusions that made life bearable. They were attemptsalbeit illusionary onesto cope with anxiety and thus to overcome a traumatic situation. However, at this early stage of the cognitive, scientic, and technological development of humanity, no other means were available to reduce anxiety.

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Religion and the Dialectic of Absolute Domination

Freud regarded religion as characteristic of the second stage in the cognitive growth of humanity, describing it not as a permanent acquisition but a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.18 In other words, for Freud religion formed a transitional level in a developmental sequence that contained what he called the three great pictures of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientic.19 In The Future of an Illusion Freud characterized religion, like animism, as an attempt to relieve anxiety in the face of nature by attributing human features to natural forces and endowing them with human passions. In this fashion, Freud claimed, humans, who in actual fact were helpless, no longer felt completely exposed to the inexorable power of nature: We can apply the same methods against those violent supermen ( gewaltttigen bermenschen) outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so inuencing them, we may rob them of part of their power (Macht).20 Freud emphasized that the humanization of the natural elements derived from an attempt to gain a commandalbeit illusionary over them. As he put it: it is in fact natural to man to personify everything that [man] wants to understand in order later to control it (psychical mastering as a preparation for physical mastering). Of course, Freud strongly opposed such an anthropomorphic vision of nature. In his view, humanity had to learn that [o]bscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine mens fate; the system of rewards and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe (Weltherrschaft) seems not to exist. In opposition to the religious outlook, Freud advocated the objectication of nature. In this respect Freud was a typical representative of Enlightenment thought, aiming at the disenchantment of the world and the substitution of cozy illusions by instrumental knowledge. Science demanded the renunciation of feelings of closeness and belonging to nature, and replaced them with the severe acknowledgement of an unbridgeable distance between humans and nature. However, Freuds claim was not simply and generally that the religious frame of mind tended to humanize nature in an illusory fashion. His point was much more specic and focused on the way in which religious man attributed paternal features to natural forces:
When the growing individual nds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers ( fremde bermchte), he lends those powers the features belonging to the gure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness. The defense against childish helplessness (Hilosigkeit) is what lends its characteristic features to the adults reaction to the helplessness (Hilosig-

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keit) which he has to acknowledge a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.21

This process came most clearly to the fore in monotheist religions, for, as Freud stressed, [n]ow that God was a single person, mans relation to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the childs relation to his father.22 Already in Totem and Taboo Freud had placed the father-son relationship in the center of his genealogy of totemic religions, declaring the totem animal to be a father substitute.23 In fact, in Totem and Taboo Freud had not only for the rst time set religion in the middle of his three-stage developmental sequence of humanitys attempt to master nature; he had also provided a more explicitly political explanation for the emergence of religion with his famous tale of the primal horde, which he was to recapitulate and develop to its full extent toward the end of his life in Moses and Monotheism. Freuds famous story of the primal horde told of a revolt of a band of brothers who had lived under the sexually oppressive rule of an absolutist father/tyrant, rose up against him in order to commit incest, and killed and cannibalized him. However, as soon as they had committed parricide for the sake of incest, they imposed restrictive rules on themselves that denied all of them the authority of the father and the pleasures of incest. According to Freuds interpretation of totemic religions, out of remorse the sons symbolically reinstated the dead father in his position of authority as the superhuman totem animal, making him posthumously more powerful than he had ever been during his lifetime. At the same time, however, they also continued to reenact their crime in the form of rituals, such as totem meals, in which they symbolically continued to cannibalize their father. Rather than the continuous revolt against the father, however, Freud emphasized the deferred obedience (nachtrglichen Gehorsam) expressed in the fathers symbolic resurrection as totem animal.24 In Freuds view it embodied the unlimited power (Machtflle und Unbeschrnktheit) of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him.25 By submitting themselves to the totem animal the brothers not only concluded a covenant with their father after his death,26 but by exaggerating the power of the dead father into imaginary dimensions, they also posthumously extended the scope of paternal authority beyond human limits: The dead father became stronger than the living one had been.27 As a whole, then, Freuds discourse provided two genealogies of religion, both of which explained religionsas fantasies of absolute power, modeled on the gure of the father as he appeared to the childaccording to Freud, of course. In The Future of an Illusion Freud accounted for the need for such fantasies primarily by humans traumatic lack of power in the face of natures superior forces, which drove them to fantasize an invisible father who could both control these forces and be accessible to the pleas of humans. In Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism he depicted these fantasies above

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all as a response to the, in his eyes, no less traumatic loss of archaic political/ paternal authority. In Totem and Taboo he described totemic religions as replaying the political drama in which the power of an individual was overcome by a group, which, however, could not maintain a stable social order without subjecting itself to paternal authority. Then, in Moses and Monotheism, he presented later religious forms as reconstructions of past political regimes, that is, as Kingdoms in Heaven. At this nal stage of his theorizing Freud not only depicted the totem as a representation of the dead father but also explained that mother-goddesses later appeared in the wake of a short interlude of matriarchy, which he postulated as following the primal parricide. In Totem and Taboo Freud did not yet explain the emergence of mother-deities, but in Moses and Monotheism he argued that they emerged to compensate women for their loss of the real political power they had held temporarily after the murder of the primal father.28 In his view, polytheism, with its numerous, mutually restrictive male gods, symbolically recreated in turn the communal rule of the brothers that he thought had existed after a short matriarchal period.29 Finally, in Moses and Monotheism Freud also portrayed the world-empire of the Pharaohs as the determining cause of the emergence of the monotheist idea.30 As he explained: In Egypt monotheism grew up as a by-product of imperialism: God was a reection of the Pharaoh who was the absolute ruler of a great world-empire.31 Thus, while in Totem and Taboo Freud characterized the origins of the totem paradigmatically as the sons compensation for the loss of their protective father/ruler, that is, as stemming from anxiety and remorse, in Moses and Monotheism he described deities as a compensation for the loss of a political authority and as an eternalized reection of an authoritarian political structure that no longer existed in reality. In all these instances Freud deciphered the meaning of religious rituals and credos both as expressions of an unconscious desire for authority and dominationfor the sake of order and protectionand as disguised collective memories of past patterns of domination. These desires and memories of power structures that had disappeared from the real world led them to be aufgehoben, in the Hegelian triple meaning of the term, that is, abolished in their original earthly form, but at the same time also elevated to a higher, metaphysical level and eternalized in a Kingdom in Heaven. Although Freud did not elaborate on the mechanisms of transposition involved in the patterning of religious forms, in all these instances he clearly presented religion as a container of a desire for political and familial authority structures that were lost, of a many-faceted collective historical memory as well as a fantasy. When speaking of Freuds approach to religion, one has to be aware that he never referred to it either as being the disguised expression of a historical truth or a wish-fullling gment of imagination; rather, he inevitably bridged the gap between memory and fantasy by regarding religion as driven by the attempt to compensate for the memory of a traumatic loss through the

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fantastic reconstruction of what had been lost. In this respect Freuds discussion in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism parallels the account of The Future of an Illusion, where he emphasizes that the humanization of the forces of nature followed the pattern of infantile father-son relations, thus reviving the memory of a past hierarchical relationship as much as projecting a fantasy onto the natural world. Freud regarded the psychoanalytic debunking of God as an exalted father and of faith as deriving from infantile helplessness as the unique contribution that his science could make to the critique of religion, which had formed a current of European thought since the Enlightenment. As he explained, his aim was to show that religion, which humanity considered the highest, most precious, and most sublime thing that the human spirit has produced,32 was not based on divine revelation but had its roots in the wishful father-fantasies that stemmed from the helplessness of early childhood, both of the individual and of the species. With this supplement, Freud proclaimed, the modern, scientic critique of religion was nally complete; as he put it, his psychology of religion was to be [t]he last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung.33

A Dialectic of Emancipation
As long as Freud dealt with religion as a transitional stage in a developmental sequence, he did not pronounce it pathological. As he stated in The Future of an Illusion, he did not expect our wretched, ignorant, and downtrodden ancestors to solve the difcult riddles of the universe.34 In his view, in its early developmental stages humanity had no other choice but to produce religious illusions in order to escape anxiety. However, the advent of modernity, that is, of the scientic age, turned religion for Freud into a phenomenon that had to be superseded, for the possibility of scientic thought and practice indicated that humanity had reached powers of cognition and action that allowed and necessitated the transcendence of the limits that religious belief systems imposed on humans. His concern was that while religious fantasies could provide relief and consolation, the effect was that of all neurotic escapes: it prevented humanity from attaining maturity by maintaining unnecessary and harmful prohibitions, and by thwarting skepticism and curiosity:
Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly xing (gewaltsame Fixierung) them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.35

Again, in The Future of an Illusion: When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him

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and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.36 Freud also stated explicitly that he held religious education responsible for the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult;37 and like Marx, he compared religion to a narcotic.38 Freuds problem with religion was, then, its continued presence in modern society. Religion was not only a fantasy of power for him, but also a powerful fantasy, perpetuating powerlessness by limiting human thought and action. Freuds lecture on The Question of a Weltanschauung of 1933, in which he elaborated at great length on his scientic credo, also presented religion as a power that had to be fought by science. In his words, The struggle of the scientic spirit against the religious Weltanschauung is, as you know, not at an end: it is still going on to-day under our eyes.39 He argued that religion had no right to exclude itself from scientic scrutiny. What is in question, he claimed, is not in the least an invasion (bergriff ) of the eld of religion by the scientic spirit, but on the contrary an invasion (bergriff ) by religion of the sphere of scientic thought.40 In demanding a privileged position outside the bounds of science, religion attempted to impose limits on the domain of critical thought. This, Freud declared, was an invasion (bergriff ) which must be repulsed in the most general interest.41 The metaphoric mold of this passage is signicant. It shows that Freud regarded the very attempt to dene a realm of human thought and action as being located beyond the reach of science as an bergriff, a violation or infringement upon the jurisdiction of science. Indeed, time and again Freud stressed as a particular merit of psychoanalysis the fact that it left no realm of mental activity outside its scope. As he pointed out, even in phenomena such as dreams, slips of tongue, hysterical symptoms, or jokes, where hitherto nothing but the most freakish capriciousness has seemed to prevail, psycho-analytic research has introduced law, order and connection or has at least allowed us to suspect their presence where its work is still incomplete.42 At last, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud admitted that science not only defended its own territory but actively sought to enter into the terrain of religion; in Freuds words of 1927:
The scientic spirit generates a certain posture towards matters of this world; before matters of religion it stops for a while, hesitates, at last there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping; the more the treasures of our knowledge become accessible to people, the more defection from religious belief will spread, at rst only from its obsolete, offensive vestments, but then from its fundamental presuppositions as well.43

Common to all these passages is their juxtaposition of science and religion in terms of a power struggle and their presentation of the rule of science as inherently and necessarily absolutist, which cannot allow any room for religious claims. In Freuds eyes science could suffer no other realms of cognition, unless they were powerless and harmless, such as philosophy or art. As he stated un-

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equivocally: It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromise or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power (Macht) tries to take over part of it. From this political perspective, Freud considered religion to be important only as a mass delusion (Massenwahn), dealing only with what he called the religion of the common man (der gemeine Mann), which he proclaimed as the only religion which ought to bear that name.44 As he pointed out, he had no business with the gods of the philosophers, who had been robbed of their strength and were turned into vague abstractions which they [the philosophers] have created for themselves, so that what remained was nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. In this context Freud compared religion to art and philosophy, since he considered the latter two also as attempts to cope with feelings of powerlessness and thus motivated by wishes for power and authority that in turn led to illusionary constructions. He claimed that philosophy had retained animistic features, such as the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them, and he characterized philosophy as animism without magical actions.45 Similarly, art constituted for him a region half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and the wish-fullling world of the imagination a region in which, as it were, primitive mans strivings for omnipotence are still in full force.46 Thus, Freuds politicizing discourse presented the aim of the artist in creating an imaginary world as an attempt to transcend the limits of his social power and authority, in order to become the hero, the king, the creator, or the favorite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world.47 However, Freud held neither philosophy nor art to be worthy of a declaration of war, as he named it in The Future of an Illusion:
Of the three powers (Mchten) which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and benecent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by means of the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent But philosophy has no direct inuence on the great mass of mankind religion is an immense power (Macht) which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service.48

We see how Freuds discourse turns not only religion, but also art, philosophy, and science into conicting powers that establish their jurisdiction over certain realms of human experience and cognition. It is not difcult to discover, in this conictual vision of the relationship among realms of human thought and action, Freuds image of humans as power-seekers who make up in their fantasies for the power that they lack in reality. Of course, Freuds own

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analysis of religion epitomized the power-oriented approach, which he attributed to all human endeavors: it was to support science in its struggle for victory over religion, a victory that in turn was to increase the power of humanity over nature.

The Dialectic of the Scientic Worldview

Somewhat paradoxicallyor, perhaps, also dialecticallyFreud argued that in order to increase the power of humankind, science had to engender a more sobering knowledge about the nitude and limits of power of humanity. In his words, science no longer affords any room for human omnipotence, men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature. Echoing Bacons natura parendo vincitur (nature is conquered by obedience), Freud wrote of the discovery of scientic truth as a submission to the truth and emphasized that scientic maturitylike the completion of an analysisbrought not only a more active mode of life, but also amor fati and the recognition of ones limitations. Critics persist in describing as deeply religious anyone who admits to a sense of mans insignicance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction that seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further but humbly acquiesces in the small part that human beings play in the great worldsuch a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.49 Such passages stand in stark contrast to the demand for absolute jurisdiction, which, as we have seen, characterized Freuds project of scientic emancipation. Paradoxically, what was to be made absolute with the rule of science was the renunciation of fantasies of omnipotence. One may, possibly, put it as follows: for Freud, the absolute rule of science entailed an absolute elimination of fantasies of absolute power. Since Freud took the essence of the religious attitude to be the persistence of the wish for a remedy against lifes ills, rather than the renunciation of such a wish as childlike,50 his message was: Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into hostile life. We may call this education to reality.51 In a much-quoted passage from his Introductory Lectures of 191617, Freud portrayed psychoanalysis as part of the great subversive movement of modern science, designed to destroy the illusion that humanity formed the apex of the universe. According to Freud, this decentering endeavor had three heroes, starting with Copernicus, who taught that the earth was not the center of the cosmos, and continuing with Darwin, who displaced humans from the pinnacle of creation and turned them into descendants of animals. But, Freud added, human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove

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to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.52 In an article that he wrote at about the same time as he completed his Introductory Lectures, Freud elaborated in more detail on these three blows to human narcissism. He explained that the assumption that the earth was the center of the universe t in well with [mans] inclination to regard himself as the lord of the world.53 As always, Freud related the construction of an illusionary cosmology to conditions of command and domination. Similarly, he associated the attempt of humans to separate themselves from animals with the dominating position over his fellow creatures in the animal kingdom, which mankind thought itself to have acquired in the course of the development of civilization.54 Lastly, he accounted for the assumption that man was supreme within his own mind by the egos feeling that consciousness provides it with news of all the important occurrences in the minds working, and [that] the will, directed by these reports, carries out what the ego orders.55 Thus, in Freuds view science undermined not only illusions about the centrality and importance of humanity in the plan of the universe, but subverted the overvaluations of human agency that led into the errors concerning the position of our species in the universe. Moreover, Freuds discourse created an inextricable link between the renunciation of illusions of power and a real increase in power: on the one hand, control over reality could be achieved only by abandoning wishful fantasies; on the other hand, such fantasies could be abandoned only when humanity had enough power and knowledge at its disposal to be able to do without them. According to Freud, modernity could lead to emancipation from the dependence on deistic fantasies because modern thought provides in reality something of the magical power that humans had dreamed of since primeval times. As he put it: propped on technological contraptions, the modern individual could nally become a prosthetic God (Prothesengott).56 Furthermore:
At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of inuencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientic view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature. None the less some of the primitive belief in omnipotence still survives in mens faith in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of reality.57

This, then, is the contradictory relationship to power that Freud took to be characteristic of science: science was more than an instrument for the manipulation of nature; it also signied a new self-consciousness of humanity, representing a third, nal, and mature stage of dealing with powerlessness in Freuds evolutionary sequence. Since, in his view, science really could provide a way out of the terrors of human powerlessness and thus could provide real

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relief, it no longer needed to promise absolute power. Science could remain incomplete and take account of our dependence on the real external world. For this very reason, however, it drove people to act: By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone.58 Freuds project of scientic emancipation, too, followed a dialectical logic. On the one hand science could abolish the power of religion as a dominant social force. On the other hand it preserved elements from both religion and animism, but elevated them from the realm of the illusionary into reality. Thus in Freuds scheme of history science constituted an Aufhebung of the two pictures of the universe that preceded it, by both abolishing and preserving fantasies of domination and power by turning them into realityalbeit only partially precisely because and when they were abandoned. In other words, religion as a pathology of power could be cured by scienceand only by sciencebecause science could bring both about an increase in real power vis--vis nature and a renunciation of illusions of power.59

A Dialectic of Blindness and Vision

How did Freud assess the likeliness of humanity to actually reach the endpoint of this dialectical development to grow into a mature, scientic self-consciousness?60 In The Future of an Illusion of 1927 Freud was optimistic that ultimately science would carry the day, overcome the infantile disorder of religion, and usher in an age of reason in which the human race would free itself from the subjection to divine father images.61 In the age of science the decay of religion could not be stopped, he thought.62 Thus, all that psychoanalysis had to do at this stage was to fulll the function of a historical midwife and to facilitate the transition of humanity into a post-religious age, which would be based on the primacy of the intellect.63 As Freud suggested: Our behaviour should be modeled on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption.64 Even in 1933, the year in which Hitler came to power in Germany, Freud still declared in his lecture on The Question of a Weltanschauung:
Our best hope for the future is that intellectthe scientic spirit, reasonmay in process of time establish a dictatorship (Diktatur) in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give mans emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance (Herrschaft) of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions.65

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This passage reveals both Freuds political obtuseness and the limitations inherent in his emancipatory vision, which derived from his analogy of collective, historical processes with those typical of individual neurosis. While Freud sought the emancipation of humanity from the power of religion, he believed that only a small minority of people was capable of actually freeing itself from its infantilism and the comfort that illusionary father-deities could provide. For instance, in Civilization and Its Discontents he admitted that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this [religious] view of life.66 Undoubtedly, Freud held a truly universal emancipation to be neither possible nor necessary. Rather, in his eyes humanity had achieved scientic self-consciousness when the forces of the past were disarmed and a rational elitethe ego of humanity, so to speakhad gained dominance in the collective mind of humankind. For Freud, emancipation meant the rule of rational leaders, but never an egalitarian society without authority. While he hoped that scientists would remove priests from their position of social authority, he feared the perils that he associated with popular revolutions against all authority. Even in the optimistic Future of an Illusion, he warned of the dangers that he considered immanent in the decline of religion. Aware of the sociological role of religion as an efcient instrument of social control over the masses, he pointed out that its authority kept communities together, restrained aggression, and thus made human life in common possible. Therefore he was afraid that its demise could lead to a revolt of what he called the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed:
If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbor is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbor without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision.67

Despite such Dostoevsky-like expressions of fear and loathing, Freud never suggested abstaining from the battle against religion. On the contrary, he held suggestions to save and maintain religion because of its political function to be both dishonest and futile in an age of science. Only toward the end of the 1930s did Freud nally notice that humanity was on the verge of an abyss rather than ascending to a higher unity based on the rule of reason. In the prefatory note to Moses and Monotheism he noted with bewilderment that progress has allied itself with barbarism. In his eyes the Soviet Union was one example of such an alliance. Its regime attempted to improve living conditions, withdrew the opium of religion from the people, and granted them a reasonable amount of sexual liberty, but at the same time the Soviet regime also submitted them

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to the most cruel coercion and robbed them of any possibility of freedom of thought. Fascist Italy was Freuds other example of an alliance of progress and barbarism. There he deplored the violent means used to instill in people such positive qualities as orderliness and a sense of duty. Nazi Germany was different for Freud. In his view it proved that a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism can occur as well without being attached to any progressive ideas. On the whole, he admitted,
things have so turned out that to-day the conservative democracies have become the guardians of cultural advance and that it is precisely the institution of the Catholic Church which puts up a powerful defense against the spread of this danger [of barbarism] to civilizationthe Church which has hitherto been the relentless foe to freedom of thought and to advances toward the discovery of the truth!68

Without being able to theorize his historical experiences adequately, Freud abandoned the dialectical vision of the interrelationship of powerlessness and power, religion, science, and modernity that he had constructed on the basis of analogical reasoning and readings in classics of anthropology. The political events unfolding at the end of his life forced him to recognize that in constructing his grand vision he had neglected the crucial role of socioeconomic factors in the generation of collective anxieties and the destructive effects of political fantasies of omnipotence, which, alas, did not remain restricted to the realm of thought. This, then, is another instance of a dialectic in Freuds thinking: while he wrote on the origins and effects of powerlessness in history and on the way megalomaniac fantasies could emerge as compensation for fears and anxieties, he remained blind to the sources, impact, and intensity of those very fantasies in his own society and to the catastrophic collective pathology that developed as a result of it. While his discourse continuously politicized the development of humanity and moved the dialectics of reality and fantasy, as well as of power and powerlessness, into the center of his historical vision, he had turned away from the real political issues of the age, that is, from the real social and political conditions in which religion and science are embedded and with which they inevitably interact. Thus, in one sense Freuds analysis was pervasively political; in another sense, however, Freuds approach was never political enough.

A Dialectic of Science and Myth

A few years after Freud had expressed his consternation at the political developments in Europe, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment with the aim to explain why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.69 They followed Freud in some of their factual assumptions, though not in the critical evaluation of their consequences, and they, too, regarded the process of civilization as built on increasing renunciation. As they put it: The history of civiliza-

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tion is the history of the introversion of sacrice. In other words: the history of renunciation. Everyone who practices renunciation gives away more of his life than is given back to him: and more than the life he vindicates. Horkheimer and Adorno agreed with the canonical thinkers of the Enlightenment that only modern thinking could lead to a free society, but they were also concerned that the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.70 Thus, although they did not reject the Enlightenment project as a whole, Dialectic of Enlightenment was severely critical of the principles of modern scientic thought. First, Horkheimer and Adorno rejected any strict separation between myth and science. They stressed, rather, that myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology.71 They argued that Odysseus could be seen as an Enlightenment gure, resisting temptation and practicing renunciation. Second, they claimed that the only kind of thinking that is sufciently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.72 While myths such as that of Odysseus already realized aims that usually were attributed to modern thinking; in its attempt to overcome mythical thought, science inevitably turned itself into mythology. Third, Horkheimer and Adorno criticized modern scientic thought as engendering domination. In their view, when mythical thought was displaced by science, [m]en pay for the increase of the power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them insofar as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things insofar as he can make them.73 A theory that objectied nature, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained, also objectied humans; hence the scientic domination of nature inevitably produced the social domination of humans. Fourth and last, they explained the totalitarian tendency of science to appropriate all realms of life by an underlying anxiety:
[M]an imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown. That determines the course of demythologization, of enlightenment, which compounds the animate with the inanimate just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment is mythic fear (Angst) turned radical Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear (Angst).

Freuds scientic Weltanschauung displayed most of the problematic features that Horkheimer and Adorno postulated in their critical reections on the selfdestructive nature of the victory of modern science over myth. Freuds understanding of scientic emancipation built on a series of simplistic oppositions; it was tied to an elitist and authoritarian view of society; and while it aimed to reveal the anxieties that drove animism and religion, it remained blind to the anxieties that underlay its own scientic impulse. Moreover, it was precisely in his struggle against religion, that is, in the instance in which Freud presented himself as a knight in an armor shining with the sparkling light of rationalism and science, that his own thinking lapsed into myth.

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This is not an attempt to repeat the already well-rehearsed claim that Freuds faith in science was quasi-religious, as can be seen in passages where he praised our god Logos who, even though not a very almighty one, was described as the only one who could increase our power (Macht).74 Nor is this an occasion for taking up the often-voiced criticism that Freuds science, too, turned into a Church with its own orthodoxies, priesthood, sects, and heretics. This is undoubtedly true and has been widely documented, but it is not at issue here. Instead, the claim made here, following in the footsteps of Horkheimer and Adorno, is that Freuds attempt to provide an emancipatory scientic explanation of the origins and function of religion brought him to develop mythical categories of explanation. Moreover, in reecting upon this dialectic, I intend to examine a premise in Freuds thinking on religion that Horkheimer and Adornoas well as other members of the Frankfurt Schoolshared with Enlightenment thought, rather than one on which they differed. As an emancipatory project in the Enlightenment tradition, Freuds analysis of religion aims to base its politics on truth. That is to say, it seeks to facilitate the recollection of what lay forgotten in religious discourse in order to decipher the unconscious meaning of religious doctrines and rituals. Emancipatory projects of this kindincluding that of the Frankfurt Schoolare built on the assumption that they reveal a hitherto hidden truth and that their ability to expose this truth through means of interpretation and explanation constitutes part of their emancipatory power. Without this claim to truth and its liberating potential, movements aimed at social emancipation cannot assert that they lead to freedom rather than the substitution of one form of social oppression for another.75 True to this premise of Enlightenment thinking, Freud declared his endeavor to be directed at revealing what is true in religion (Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion)of course, in order to subvert its power.76 Linking power to truth, Freud assumed that since religion had power over humans, it had to contain at least a kernel of truth and was effective for precisely this reason. Freuds strong belief in the power of truth led him to argue, for instance, that just as a psychoanalytic interpretation could be effective only because it recovers a fragment of lost experience, so the delusion owes its convincing power to the element of historical truth which it inserts in the place of the rejected reality.77 Indeed, Freud often described the interpretive task performed in analysis as one where a grain of truth was freed from the layers and wrappings of misconceptions and deceptions that were characteristic of delusions, divesting them thereby of their power. Assuming that phylogeny was analogous to ontogeny, Freud applied this method to humanity as a whole, stating in Moses and Monotheism:
I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to usas the return of long since forgotten, important events in the primaeval history of the human family

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and that they have to thank precisely this origin for their compulsive character and that, accordingly, they are effective on human beings by force of the historical truth of their content.

Of course, this methodology raised a host of problems concerning the mechanism by which historical truth, or rather memory, could be assumed to be transmitted unconsciously across generations. Freud invoked the concept of a phylogenetic inheritance or archaic heritage that he said had preserved the memory of the primal murder and transmitted it by heredity across generations since the dawn of history. This highly problematic assumption relied on the doctrine of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which had been discredited for many years by the time he adopted it.78 Starting with Totem and Taboo, Freud also attributed to the human race a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual.79 According to Freud, this collective mind was universal and contained a number of primal fantasies that formed part of a store of unconscious phantasies of all neurotics and probably all human beings.80 Primal fantasies were supposed to be residues from the time of the primal horde and the primal murder. They originated from the prehistory of the primal family, when the jealous father actually robbed his son of his genitals if the latter became troublesome to him as a rival with a woman.81 Therefore Freud claimed unequivocally in Moses and Monotheism that men have always known (in this special way) that they once possessed a primal father and killed him. In the attempt to trace the historical truth underlying the power of religion as a collective delusion, Freuds science became increasingly entangled in a series of mythological claims and categories, such as (a) the assumption of transhistorical and transcultural inheritance of acquired characteristics; (b) the postulate of an original castrating father, who turned into the prototype of all fathers; (c) the conjecture that there actually occurred a momentous parricide committed for the sake of incest, which fullled the role of an Original Sin in Freuds theory of history; (d) the supposition of a collective unconscious where the memory of the primal crime and a universal feeling of guilt are preserved. Rather than tracing the hidden truth underlying religion, the construction of such hypotheses generated a political myth that is itself in need of interpretation.82 Thus, the very categories by means of which Freuds discourse sought to demote religion to the status of sciences inferior Other, undermined the postulated primacy of science over religion. While aiming to unmask religion, Freuds frame of reference constantly revealed as fallacious the hierarchical opposition that placed the scientic as enlightening and emancipating over and against religious superstitions and delusions. Possibly, Freud may have sensed some of the problems immanent in his approach. He adopted a rather ambivalent attitude toward the scientic status

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of his reconstruction of primeval events in Totem and Taboo, admitting that his hypotheses may seem fantastic and that the earliest state of society that he portrayed in his essay has never been an object of observation.83 In a footnote he even conceded that [t]he determination of the original state of things invariably remains a matter of construction.84 Almost a decade later, in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego he described as not unkind a critic who called Totem and Taboo a Kiplingesque Just-So Story.85 A few pages later Freud referred to his own depiction of the primal horde as a myth.86 Nevertheless, when he summarized the essential themes of Totem and Taboo in Moses and Monotheism, he asserted: There is nothing wholly fabricated in our construction, nothing which could not be supported on solid foundations.87

Conclusion: A Framework for a Dialogue

To recap: the rst three sections of this essay demonstrated the political character of Freuds interpretation of religion by showing that it was embedded in a political discourse from its very inception, for already the historical antecedents of religious rituals, practices, and belief systems, such as taboos, magic, and animism, appear in his writings as embodying fantasies ofand restrictions onabsolute power. The second section, turning on Freuds analysis of religion proper, argued that he not only traced religion to an exalted father fantasy, but that he thereby also referred to it as a fantasy of absolute power that served as a compensation and consolation for real powerlessness, as well as an encoded memory of past political deeds and structures of authority. In other words, Freud placed the genesis and social function of religion within an interplay of past and present power relations, describing in his writings on religion an eternal son, as it were, with all the gendered implications that such a vision carries. Humankind is depicted as a male, hegemonic, all-pervasive political entity, whose obsession with domination constitutes an illusionary remedy for anxieties stemming from insidious feelings of powerlessness. The third section examined the way in which Freud referred to religion as a social force with the power to structure social relations and to impose constraints on thought and action. While he regarded recourse to religious fantasies in earlier times as an inevitable consequence of the actual powerlessness of humans vis--vis natural forces, Freud declared the continuing existence of religion into the modern, scientic era to be pathological, since it prevented humankind from achieving the real power over nature that could be provided by science. In line with the political or politicizing thrust of his discourse, Freud construed science, too, as a social force. Seeing his own work as a contribution to the struggle of science against the power of religion, he advocated the exclusive jurisdiction of science over the whole spectrum of human cognition, including religion.

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Each of the following three sections considered a different dialectic inherent in the way in which Freud introduced science into this discourse as the only power that could overcome religion and emancipate humankind. The fourth section elaborated on Freuds advocacy of the absolute rule of science in the name of progress and enlightenment, juxtaposing it to his claim that science, progress, and enlightenment ought to bring about the renunciation of fantasies of absolute power. The fth section questioned the tendency of Freuds scientic analysis of religion to politicize apparently nonpolitical phenomena, such as animism, religion, and science, against the background of his evidently undiscerning attitude toward the actual political context in which he conducted his scientic analysis of religion. The sixth section maintained that Freuds endeavor to provide a scientic etiology of religion by revealing the historical truth underlying its phenomena impelled him to postulate a series of substituted mythical hypotheses of his own. However, as was stated in the beginning, the aim of this essay is not simply to lead to the conclusion that Freuds thought should be archived as a failed endeavor in interpreting history. Instead, this concluding section of the essay suggests that despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Freuds analysis of religion can still provide food for thought for those who wish to contribute to contemporary discourses on history, precisely because it continuously interweaves (at least) two trajectories: one leading from power structures in the outside world into the inner world of unconscious desires, anxieties, and fantasies, and the other embedding and tracing them in an interplay of power and powerlessness. Thus the conclusion of this chapter suggestsadmittedly somewhat apodicticallythat Freuds framework of analysis is not only of interest from the point of view of an intellectual historian, but may constitute a fruitful starting point for a dialogue between more traditional historians and psychoanalytically inclined or trained interpreters of history on how one is to approach the multiple and complex dynamics of power in history, their underlying psychological motivations, and their fantasies and pathologies. Although historians are right to approach psychoanalytic interpretations of history with much caution, when these are read for dialectical and sometimes perhaps even unintended politics, as has been done here with Freud, they may nd in them fruitful insights. Perhaps such insights can be developed in a dialogue between psychoanalysts and historians, in which the latter should take these four theses that can be derived from Freuds work on religion seriously, as it has been sketched, albeit roughly, in this essay: (a) There are social phenomena that can plausibly be described as collective pathologies. These phenomena can be dened in relation to their origins, purposes, and effects; that is to say, collective pathologies originate in collective anxieties and constitute responses to overwhelming emotions, which are evoked by perceptions of powerlessness. Such

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phenomena can be termed pathological when they are used to reduce anxiety by illusionary wish-fulllment while imposing restrictions on the eld of thought and action of the social actors involved and thereby preventing them from acquiring real social power. (b) Collective anxieties have to do with collective historical experiences and perceptions of powerlessness, whose role in the emergence of collective pathologies can be investigated by careful historical research. Peter Loewenberg has drawn attention to this eld of research, which has had to endure sad neglect in the Anglo-Saxon world of scholarship ever since Erich Fromms The Fear of Freedom, which was written during the Second World War.88 (c) Memories of past hierarchies of power and authority have an effect on present attitudes toward power. Memories and fantasies of this kind not only have power as their object; they are themselves powerful social forces, since they contribute to the legitimacy and entrenchment of patterns of domination and subjection, not the least self-inicted subjection. (d) Emancipatory projects must have as their goal both the empowerment of the powerless and the subversion of illusions of power. The two endeavors are interdependent: illusions of power, and especially of unlimited power, prevent the appropriation of real power, and only the presence of real power can allow social actors to give up on their illusions and provide the security that enables them to come to terms with their limits. Hence, any attempt to achieve one aim without the other is bound to fail. A dialogue between conventional historians, psychoanalysts, and psychohistorians is only possible if the latter, too, draw their lessons from Freuds writings on religion with a focus on their particular problems. Rather than spinning wild interpretations over hundreds of pages, providing comprehensive and self-contained (though reductionist and severely awed) monologues, they would be well advised to adopt a more modest, but also more critical and dialogical mode of interpretation, one that comes much closer to the traditional role of the analyst in the clinical setting. The role that psychoanalysts and psychohistorians can legitimately adopt in historical inquiry is perhaps akin to the role of the kibitzer and critic: looking over the shoulders of traditional historians, asking questions, offering possibilities, pointing to blind spots and criticizing unquestioned assumptions whenever the desires, anxieties, and fantasies of historical actors are ignored. In order to be credible and productive in such a dialogue, psychoanalytic kibitzers have to abandon a hubris that all too often characterizes their stance, a stance that derives from their claim to the exclusive possession of the key to the

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hidden, unconscious inner world of historical actors whom they will certainly never meet, and whose lives they can know about only through the writings of historians. Without direct access to the person or collective whose unconscious anxieties and fantasies they would discuss, there can be no opportunity to elicit associations and responses, to proceed step by step and to give carefully worded interpretations. While clinical analysts are in control of the analytic setting, and therefore are able to make more or less reasonable distinctions between what derives from unconscious fantasy and anxiety, and what is more or less an appropriate response to a given situation, those dealing with historical events and processes lack a comparable power over the behavior of the actors they wish to understand. Hence, psychoanalytic discourse becomes problematic when it goes too far in trying to turn large-scale historical processes into epiphenomena of psychology; that is, when they take too seriously Freuds preposterous claim that sociology is but applied psychology. This perspective transforms society into an empire of passion and portrays it almost exclusively as a realm where desires and fantasies, anxieties and hate are evoked, exchanged, transformed, and consumed; while processes in which material goods are produced and distributed are relegated to a secondary or negligible position. No believable contribution to historical enquiry can fail to take cognizance of the fact that large-scale social and cultural formations, such as class, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc., structure the way in which individuals satisfy their psychological needs and express their anxieties and desires. Therefore psychoanalytic interpretations involving manifestations of unconscious anxieties and fantasies must be made with an awareness of these sociological inuences. Thus, those who would be psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed kibitzers of history should acknowledge that they cannot provide a self-contained method for historical analysis, and hence the rst virtue of psychoanalystsor any who wish to make a convincing contribution to a dialogue with historiansshould be modesty. However, rather than limiting itself to providing a psychological supplement to other, nonpsychological approaches to domination (such as the Marxist one), a psychoanalytic perspective can also shed light on the origins and functions of the limitations and blind spots of the theory or method that it is supposed to extend. In other words, a psychoanalytic viewpoint can be most productive when it is also used reexively in order to question and subvert the framework within which it is supposed to be deployed. In addition, a psychoanalytic approach to history gains both soundness and fruitfulness by the multiplicitythough not obscurityof its application: i.e., to synthesize a number of levels, languages, or dimensions of analysis. As this essay has tried to show, Freudand perhaps other analysts as wellalways spoke more than one language and always looked at phenomena from more than one angle.

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Notes
* Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the international conference on Psychoanalysis and Historical Consciousness at the Zentrum fr interdisziplinre Forschung, Bielefeld, February 1995, and at the international workshop on Politics and Ethics: Dilemmas of Modernity, in Prague, May 1995. I am grateful to the participants of these two events for their comments and suggestions. In addition, this essay relies on arguments and material presented in pp. 156180 of Jos Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (Oxford 1995; New Brunswick 2001), as well as in two previously published German essays: Jos Brunner, Die Macht der Phantasie die Phantasie der Macht: Freud und die Politik der Religion, Psyche 50 (Special issue 9/10) (1996): 786816; Jos Brunner, Die Macht der Vergangenheit: Freud und die Religion, in Jrn Rsen and Jrgen Straub, eds., Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit: Psychoanalytische Zugnge zum Geschichtsbewusstsein (Frankfurt/ M. 1998), 82100. 1. For a classic denition of domination, see Max Weber, Domination by Economic Power and by Authority, in G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds., Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1978), vol. 2, 941948. For a comprehensive survey of theories of domination and concepts of power, see J. C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Ithaca 1987). 2. For a sophisticated feminist psychoanalytic approach to domination, see J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York 1988). 3. The literature on this topic is vast and highly controversial, with at least one historiographic book or major article appearing every year for the last four decades. See H. Meyerhoff, On Psychoanalysis as History, Psychoanalytic Review 49 (1962): 320; Kurt Eissler, Freud and the Psychoanalysis of History, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association 11 (1963): 675703; S. Kakar, The Logic of Psychohistory, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970): 187194; B. B. Wolman, ed., The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (New York 1971); J. Barzun, History: The Muse and Her Doctors, American Historical Review 77 (1972): 3664; P. L. Pomper, Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory, History and Theory 12 (1973): 367388; J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History (Chicago 1974); G. Izenberg, Psychohistory and Intellectual History, History and Theory 14 (1975): 139155; J.W. Anderson, The Methodology of Psychological Biography, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1981): 455475; L. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York 1982); P. Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford 1985); P. L. Pomper, The Structure of the Mind in History: Five Major Figures in Psychohistory (New York 1985); T. A. Kohut, Psychohistory as History, American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (1986): 336354. G. Cocks and T. L. Cosby, eds., Psycho/History: Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and History (New Haven 1987); H. Lawton, The Psychohistorians Handbook (New York 1988); P. Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History (Oxford 1995); K. Figlio, Historical Imagination/ Psychoanalytic Imagination, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 199221. 4. M. Forster, Hegels Dialectical Method, in F. C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge 1993), 130170; S. Warren, The Emergence of Dialectical Theory: Philosophy and Political Inquiry (Chicago 1984). 5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford 1977), paragraphs 5052, 8487. 6. Letter of 9 October 1918, in S. Freud and O. Pster, Psycho-Analysis and Faith:The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pster, ed. E. L. Freud and H. Meng (New York 1963), 64. 7. Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven 1987); see J. Brunner, The (Ir)relevance of Freuds Jewish Identity to the Origins of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 14 (1991): 655684. 8. References to Freuds writings are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London 195374). For a comprehensive survey of the development of Freuds discourse on religion, see E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York 1967), 349374. For a comprehensive bibliography of the psychoanalysis of religion, see B. Beit-Hallahmi, Psychoanalytic Studies of Religion: Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport 1996).

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9. For the latter approach, see H. Kng, Freud and the Problem of God (New Haven 1979); R. S. Lee, Freud and Christianity (s.l. 1948; Harmondsworth 1967); W. W. Meissner, Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (New Haven 1984); J. Scharfenberg, Sigmund Freud und seine Religionskritik als Herausforderung fr den christlichen Glauben (Gttingen 1968); P. Homans, Theology after Freud (Indianapolis 1970); P. C. Vitz, Sigmund Freuds Christian Unconscious (New York/ London 1988); G. Zilboorg, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New York 1962). 10. See J. B. Abramson, Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud (New York 1984), 6782; A. Grnbaum, Psychoanalysis and Theism, The Monist 70 (1987): 152192; R. Lehrer, Nietzsches Presence in Freuds Life and Thought (Albany 1995), 231256; P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven 1970), 230254; P. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (London 1965), 257299; P. Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York 1970), 125191; J. J. Di Censo, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London and New York 1999); P. E. Stepansky, Feuerbach and Jung as Religious CriticsWith a Note on Freuds Psychology of Religion, in P. E. Stepansky, ed., Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals (Hillsdale, NJ, 1986); J. Van Henrik, Freud on Femininity and Faith (Berkeley 1982), 69104, 143200. 11. For more details of Freuds comparison, see Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1912 13), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, 2628. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Ibid., 26, 71, 73. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Ibid., 91, 89. 16. Ibid., 85. 17. Ibid., 7879. In some instances Freud described magic as belonging to an even earlier stage of human development. In others he presented it simply as the technique of animism. Here I consider the two as related. For Freuds distinction between magic and animism, see ibid., 9192. 18. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, 168. 19. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 77. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 17. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 144. 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Ibid., 148. 26. Ibid., 144. 27. Ibid., 143. 28. Ibid., 149; Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 83. 29. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 8384. 30. Ibid., 85. 31. Ibid., 65. 32. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 170. 33. Ibid., 167. Already Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche had characterized religion as a psychic pathology or a religious neurosis from which humanity had to be freed; cf. M. W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (Cambridge 1977), 253; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Harmondsworth 1976), 58. 34. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 33. 35. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 8485. 36. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 48. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., 49.

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39. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 169. 40. Ibid., 170. 41. Ibid., 171. 42. Sigmund Freud, The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientic Interest (1913), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, 174. 43. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 38. 44. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 81, 74. 45. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 166. 46. Freud, The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientic Interest, 188. 47. Sigmund Freud, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, 224. 48. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 160161. 49. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 3233. 50. Ibid., 32. 51. Ibid., 49. 52. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (191617), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16, 285. 53. Sigmund Freud, A Difculty in the Path of Psycho-analysis (1917), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, 140. 54. Ibid., 140. 55. Ibid., 141. 56. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 91. 57. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 88 (original emphasis). 58. Ibid., 50. 59. Paul Ricoeur is thus both right and wrong to suggest that the history of religion [is] to be regarded as the history of a dispossession or renunciation of omnipotence. Freud and Philosophy, 238. 60. Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 164165. 61. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 53. 62. Ibid., 44. 63. Ibid., 53. 64. Ibid., 43. 65. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 171. 66. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 74. 67. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 39. 68. See Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 165. 69. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York 1988), xi. I am indebted to Anson Rabinbach for directing my attention to continuities and contradictions between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Freuds writings on religion. 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Ibid., xvi. 72. Ibid., 4. 73. Ibid., 9. 74. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 5455; see also Sigmund Freud, The Future Prospects of Psycho-analytic Therapy (1910), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11, 147148. 75. See C. Taylor, Foucault on Freedom and Truth, Political Theory 12 (1984): 152183. 76. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 122. 77. Sigmund Freud, Constructions in Analysis (1937), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 268269. 78. For the political undercurrents in Freuds Lamarckism, see the discussion in Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 161163, on which the presentation here relies. 79. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 157.

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80. Sigmund Freud, A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-analytic Theory of the Disease (1915), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 269. 81. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, 190, n. 1. 82. See Brunner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 156165; D. Caroll, Freud and the Myth of Origin, New Literary History 6 (1975): 513528;Y. Gabriel, Freud and Society (London 1983), 41; Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 208; E. V. Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (London 1993), 36. 83. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 141. 84. Ibid., 103, n. 1. 85. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 122. 86. Ibid., 140. 87. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 84. 88. Peter Loewenberg, Anxiety in History, Journal of Preventive Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 4 (1990); Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London 1960); E. Jacques, Social Systems as a Defence Against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety, in M. Klein, P. Heimann, and R. E. Money-Kyrle, eds., New Directions in Psycho-Analysis (London 1955); I. E. P. Menzies, The Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety (London 1977). More attention has been paid to the role of anxiety in history in French scholarship, albeit not from a psychoanalytic perspective. J. Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XIVXVIII sicles): Une Cit assige (Paris 1978); P. Diel, LOrigine et les formes de la peur, Problmes (AprilMay 1961); Lucien Fbvre, Pour lhistoire dun sentiment: le besoin de scurit, Annales 11, no. 2 (1956): 244248; C. Odier, LAngoisse et la pense magique (Neuchtel-Paris 1974); M. Oraison, Peur et religion, Problmes (AprilMay 1961); J. Palou, La peur dans lhistoire (Paris 1958). See also Peter Loewenberg, Fantasy and Reality in History.