My Life as Historian with Freud

Freud slowly, easily, inexorably, and of course, unconsciously, became the major influence on my thinking as it moved into historiography. While other thinkers have had their various and considerable impact on me, none has occupied so central a position. Others have affected me to the extent that they supported or filled out the Freudian structure.

If I remember correctly (despite Freud suggesting that I don’t), I got my first sense of him as social scientist when, by chance, I read his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, given from 1915 to 1917 at the University of Vienna. Reading the book was a purely intellectual experience of Freud. A great scientist constructed a great new science before my eyes. His particularly convincing method consisted of building vast conclusions about the human condition on the most ordinary facts: slips, misunderstandings, functional mistakes, and dreams. To his audience he disclaimed any attempt “to give you dogmatic lectures and to

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insist on your unqualified belief I do not wish to arouse conviction; l wish to stimulate thought and upset prejudices.” He insisted, “You should neither believe nor reject,” simply “allow what I tell you to work on you” In a world of gurus and pied pipers singing thought to sleep, he seduced me with the mundane and the modest, the completely comprehensible (as far as my comprehension went). I have found myself trying to write and tell history in the same way.

Since then I have read more Freud at odd moments when he fell into my hands or when I found an immediate use for him. I read Civilization and Its Discontents while attempting to enter intellectual history. I found it one of the supreme works of all thought. Freud asked the most important questions about human existence­-and answered them mercilessly. One essential aspect, al­though others have their importance, was its bleakness. He had been offering one of the best cures for humanity’s ills in psychoanalysis, and now, while he continued to practice it as committed healer, he honestly traced its limits. Freud was a great anti­utopian. He began with his title, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which can be more accurately translated as The Queasiness in Civilization or Civilization’s Sick Stomach

It was breathtaking to face up to the sense that civilization made humans sick by its inhibitions as laid upon the id. Freud had to articulate the “contention that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and re­turned to primitive conditions.” With this he summed up his knowledge of a wide range of private discontents deriving from conflicts between the individual’s need for self-assertion and the community’s need for social peace, or between freedom and order. His conclusions condensed out much of the essence of the classic Greek plays, Shakespeare’s work, and other great statements on the human condition.

I moved dⁱrectly, if unchronologically, from Freud to Nietzsche, reading in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: “Conscience is the instinctive cruelty which reverses itself after it cannot discharge itself outward” and “Morality as end-product, as a symptom, as disguise, as religious hypocrisy, as sickness, as sickness, inhibition, as poison”. Social Scientist and Philosopher, I thought, were telling the (same) truth, as were the great playwrights, poets, and novelists.

Such a truth is unbearable to many persons. I can see why huge efforts have been made to deny or soften Freud’s scientific statement as too cruel and blacken Nietzsche’s artful one as protofascist. Both, I think, were addressing the irreducible contradictions in all life. If that view is unqualifiedly bleak, it is also an efficient instrument to cut through society’s fictions. Without their denying the value of the progress of the human spirit through time and history, both thinkers suggested its limits to me: the need to be modest in our individual and collective ambitions.

Another characteristic of Freud and Nietzsche’s thought was the distance both spanned ­ from the individual to the civilization and back. If their cosmos remains humane, their magnitude of view does not trivialize the individual. There is a density of meaning in this doubled vision.

These are the parameters of my efforts to understand history. Freud has helped me grasp the suicidal complicity of the Weimar Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in his assassination and also his heroic phoniness; the constructive and destructive utopianism of Marx, Lenin, and Wilson; the nexus between familial and public politics of Marx and Lenin; the politics in Marxian and Keynesian economics; the idealism in American pragmatism; and, with the assistance of Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther, the father-son dynamics in John Neville and John Maynard Keynes. Others have questioned my understanding. Critics, for example, have found my interpretation of Rathenau unappreciative, of Keynes uncomprehending, and of Marx expressing anger. They have labeled my interpretations “charlatanry of the worst stripe” and self-deluding Machiavellianism. I found such comments exhilarating, although they did not necessarily confirm the validity of my evaluation.

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