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Fixated on God
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16387 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1989 |
2,772 Words |
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James Deese
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SIGMUND FREUD'S CHRISTIAN UNCONSCIOUS
Paul C. Vitz
New York: Guilford Press, 1988
287 pp., $19.95
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." The late Samuel Goldwyn in supposed to have said that Hamlet was great play, but it was too full of clichés. That particular cliché, in our age of Freud, has an easy and obvious interpretation. To our vulgar, Freudian way of thinking, it means that if we protest too much about something we are saying the opposite--that is, affirming our belief in that which we protest. Whether psychoanalysis would have us subscribe to so simplistic a view is another matter. Nevertheless, it is one of the ironies of our time that one of the most important books in recent years about Sigmund Freud would have such a thesis.
Modern times are strewn with examples of representative thinkers who protest too much about religion. Two familiar American examples are H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain. Mencken confessed to a lifelong unhealthy interest in religion. One of his books of which he was most proud is a Treatise on the Gods. It isn't really a very good book, though its theory about the origin of religions is a more plausible one than that given by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Twain grows into his obsession with religion. It is not evident in his early work, but it dominates his later books. The Mysterious Stranger, in both its "authentic" version and in the version bowdlerized by Albert Bigelow Paine, is his best book after Huckleberry Finn. It and Letters from the Earth are filled with a rage against God. The letters are written by Satan to Michael and Gabriel. They are at least as theological as The Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis, and they are written by a mind at the end of its tether.
It is no surprise to learn that, like Mencken and Twain, Freud was both an implacable enemy of religion and a creature hypnotized by it. This could hardly be news to someone who has read widely in the standard edition of Freud's works. But the extent and the power of the hold of religion over Freud can be grasped only by reading Vitz's detailed account of Freud's obsession. The supreme irony is that Vitz writes from the psychoanalytic perspective. Make no mistake about it, this is an essay in psychohistory, in the peculiar sense in which psychoanalytic writers use that word. I have been powerfully critical of psychohistories, including those by the master himself, Freud. Psychohistories range from the meretricious, as in Bruce Mazlish on Richard Nixon, to the eccentric, as in Freud and William Bullitt and Woodrow Wilson, to the serious, as in Erik Krikson on Martin Luther.
Having said that, I must confess to a certain degree of sorrow over Vitz's very psychoanalytic tendency to over-interpretation. In many places he would have made a much stronger case for his view of Freud by sticking to what is either fact or very plausible conjecture. But like many a lesser psychohistorian, Vitz is given to asking rhetorical questions about the psychoanalytic interpretation of the various actions and feelings he describes.
Freud's Catholic Nanny
Some of the bare details of Freud's early life may help us understand the nature and depth of Vitz's thesis. Freud spent approximately the
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