Women are Key to Modernity: A Tribute to Eli Sagan

Last year, the veteran psychohistorian and psychoanalytic anthropologist Eli Sagan suffered a stroke and is relearning language. I want to express gratitude for his profound study, Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil, which reminds us our species has a moral story to tell.

Written in the 1980s during a period of cultural anxiety following the second wave of feminism, this book argues morality is central to an individual’s psychic health and to our survival as a race. This, in turn, depends on the recognition of women’s equality.

Morality comes from the superego in Freud’s structural theory of the psyche, his last description of mindscape. The superego develops as an expression of internalized authority figures originally based on the parents and later reinforced by social representatives: teachers, police, and clergy. “When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves,” he wrote (Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1923, p. 32). Fear is the key emotion here. But

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what kind of moral guide arises from threat and intimidation?

Sagan shows how the concept of superego was distorted by the historical context of its author. In addition to incorporating the values of the parental figures, the superego is formed through the moral imperatives of an individual’s culture. There are varieties of patriarchal authority, but Victorian Europe gave us a specific one: pervasively sexist, punitive, often brutal, and armor-plated with defenses. In a primitive act of incorporation, the child swallows the values of society whole, unable to discern right from wrong.

In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck is torn between the internalized prejudice of his community that requires he turn over the runaway slave Jim, and his desire to protect his beloved friend from being sold down the river. Within a slave society, the superego legitimates slavery. This is only one of the insidious forms that tyranny takes.

In another startling example of toxic superego, Sagan cites interviews with Nazi medics, one of whom stated, “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind” (p. 11). Collective idealizations can be pathological. How can the superego that subsumes these categories be the moral instrument of the psyche?

Sagan identifies the source of Freud’s biased theory of morality in the repression of the pre-Oedipal mother, that sovereign object of the oral, anal, and early genital stages. Boys more than girls suffer from fear of engulfment by the mother he suggests, because the male child is vulnerable not only to losing his sense of self, but also his gender identity. What Sagan doesn’t say is Freud’s confusion about morality also arose from his feminized state as a Jewish male living during the height of anti-Semitism: the chief source of cultural anxiety regarding the Jew being the practice of circumcision, a symbolic substitute for castration. Degrading women defended again a brittle sense of manhood. Libido could only be male. Yet when one feels vulnerable, it’s not the time for making sound judgment or creating a balanced theory of morality.

What then makes a society advance? How does Western culture get past the anxiety that defends against progress and is so

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ferociously roused in its wake? A change in value systems always incites apprehension and collective emotional unrest. This is humankind’s great dilemma, the psychological and political problem addressed by this work: undressing a society’s defensive armor.

In the later part of his book, Sagan reconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of morality based on good nurturing. An authentic moral sense emerges not from threat, fear of punishment, or external demands. Rather, it is something natural from within. Traits such as kindness, compassion, and pity need not be whipped into being. They originate in the infant-caregiver relationship, in maternal nourishment of the child: it is not just milk received by the baby, but also sweetness. How often have you seen an infant trying to feed his/her mother? Eros is this desire to give back for the love one has received, an opportune repetition compulsion. We have an instinct for affection that leads us to identify with the nurturer. “Conscience” is what Sagan calls this affection, this feeling for others that becomes the essence of morality and source of social progress.

How does conscience judge differently than the superego? This is not a question Sagan answers directly, but he devotes several chapters to describing the rudimental elements of conscience, beginning with nurturing and identification. At some point, the maturing psyche questions parental authority and critically reviews familial values. Sagan invokes Edith Jacobson’s idea of “selective identification,” the ability to choose to be like the parents in some respects and unlike them in others. Capacities of “generalization” or “abstraction” come into play. Can one apply one’s familial experiences of tyranny and mutuality to the broader family of humankind?

Always, crucially, a sense of developing morality is fueled by the urge toward the ideal. But whose ideals are we talking about? The pre-Oedipal mother was historically patriarchy’s great object of idealization, powerful, all-consuming, both life-giving and death dealing—so much so that we had to banish her memory in the domestic sphere and enslave women in the social one. Men’s involvement in childrearing has been revolutionary in the modern era and alters these power dynamics, pushing us in the direction of mutuality. It shakes up our gender stereotypes, too, as I recently dis-

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covered when reading my seven and eight-year-old sons “My Princess Boy” and “William’s Doll.”

Within the drive theory with which Sagan is working, morality distills to the question: what do I do with my aggression? Is it funneled into sadistic action, propelling us towards death, or is it forged in honor of Eros? When we can mentalize or think about our own feelings and those of another we can begin to love.

While morality and its lines of development take various paths, Sagan gives us solid conceptual ground on which to think about how we build character.

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