Jane suggested that I write about Freud’s possible take on the Holocaust. Exemplary idea! So I came up with the title you see above. I have not come up with a story. The self-fantasy is that it would make an avant garde or modernistic short story but the reality is that I may lack the craft to do so. I tried to jot down some thoughts about the story to be, if that. I thought of his cases — Dora, the Wolfman; I thought of his colleagues, Adler, Rank, Jung, Brill, Abraham, Ferenci: the concepts of transference and counter-transference, the repetition compulsion, dream contents, dream distortion, condensation, overdetermination, symbolism and all the rest; I considered the books he wrote, especially Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism. All that he had done crossed my mind. As great as Darwin and Einstein, he entered the world of the unconscious like a conquistadore — he once compared his studies and his intent to that of the Spanish conquerors.
Freud lost his sisters to Auschwitz, I believe. And I tried to imagine what a mind like his might make of the railroad station he might have been dropped off at, facing Mengele and German dogs, and being selected. I imagined what it might be like for a sondercommando to remove his jaw prosthesis that smelled so terribly his favorite dogs would leave the room and his faithful Anna would remove it. Here is the kernel of a story that drives me to distraction because I am frozen at the very beginning What would Freud make of camp life? What would he make of mankind as he saw arbeit und frei? The opening word for the story that I cannot write at this point — not even an awkward rough draft — is “So!”
In that word may be the entire story. I wonder if I should just have the title of the story and then write “So!” from the mouth of Freud. A one word story. In that word and the exclamation point may be a summation of everying. “Why!” doesn’t do it for me. For there is no why in Auschwitz. Never was. “So”! comes after the act, not before it. “How” is irrelevant, just scheduling trains, building crematoria, organizing, ruling, digging trenches, using Zyklon B gas. And then my mind took flight: Suppose I just listed five names, to wit: Einstein, Faulkner, Proust, Joyce, Socrates; and imagine I gave each creative giant a one word comment or assessment ab0ut Auschwitz.
I give you Proust: “Remember!” Joyce: “Bloom!” Faulkner: “Past!” Einstein: “Time”! Socrates: “Unexamined”! Of course, I have failed here just as I have failed to get at Freud in Auschwitz. I may very well give up trying. But the idea of crawling behind Freud’s eyes and seeing the world and this horrific event in his mind’s eye intrigues me.
I don’t think the task is unimaginable but terrifically difficult to accomplish. The only way it can be accomplished, perhaps, is to turn it into a fantasy so that the impossible becomes the norm. And what can I attain with an atheistic and stoic Jew seeing the attempted eradication of his people? Here words should fail everyone. Kane said Rosebud on his death bed, summing up his life in the remarkable Freudian symbol of the sleigh so overdetermined by a multiplicity of meanings that Freud would have had a field day with it. I wonder what Freud’s last mental memory trace flashed in his mind after being given that final does of morphine, upon his request, from his family physician. — Was it nothing? Was it something irrelevant? Well, let me grandiosely try a few words that come to my mind as I try to creep into his last thoughts: Anna…Martin, his son…the death of his daughter…Breuer…Fleiss…his elementary school in Moravia…the cover of his The Interpretation of Dreams… or one of his favorite Greco-Roman statuettes that had strewn his office…Better yet, he remembers for a moment how he stood before Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome and first began to contemplate his essay about it which would create psychoanalytic art history.
Does Freud at the Auschwitz station raise his hands to the sky like a patriarchal prophet, this man who took only aspirin for his cancer pains, and declare to a god who does not exist and therefore cannot hear, that the choice will be his to make. Walking into the “showers” stripped of all clothes, his whitish beard, his cane gone, his prosthesis to become a sondercommando’s “find,” he stands stoically straight as best a man of his age can, and says to all those around him: “Work and love; that is all there is. I hope you have had at least one of these in your time. If not, I am with you now, a friend of mankind.”
“So’!
Should my story begin with “So”! and end with with the last paragraph. Is this enough for Freud in Auschwitz?”
I await your responses.
Anne Baxter in DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”: “Moses…Moses.”
I just finished Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for about the third or fourth time in my life. At times it is like cracking walnuts in your mouth; it is the kind of book that tells you how uninformed you are are about most things, including yourself; of course, that is the part of us we know the least. The skinny on the book is that considering it was written about 72 years ago –it was published in 1939, Freud having published sections earlier — is that the archaeological and sociological information Freud drew upon is no longer valid as good science. However, it is a fabulous psychoanalytic ride. Even with my background, there are paragraphs beyond my brainpan’s capacity to fathom, or else I am drawing very old and my cerebrum has puckered here and there. Instinctual renunciation, return of the repressed, latency, obsessional neurosis are but a few of the concepts Freud delves into with the hand of the master trying to express what is second nature to him but conceptually difficult to us mere students. It is a most challenging book but worth each page. You don’t read Freud, you examine each sentence as if part of the Talmud.
Essentially he writes in his last years in a comprehensive way about how behaviors in each of us can be applied to the species collectively. He applies his psychoanalytic processes to society at large and it is fascinating to observe how a significant amount of what he shares does seem applicable if not basically true. I am always injudicious with my “idol,” giving him a wide berth to do his thing, enjoying how he messes with our minds. I root for Siggy. I was trained in analytic psychotherapy but my personality was ill-equipped to deal with or master the Newtonian concepts of Freud, the 19th century model of how energy, drive (instinct), and cathexis (attachment) work. I moved more into an expressive and interpersonal way of dealing with clients; however, the training was in analytic thinking and that has proven very worthwhile. In fact, centuries hence Freud might be remembered more for his critique and observation(s) about mankind as a whole, and perhaps being honored more as a philosopher than a healer. Indeed, most of his cases were not successful. Like or dislike him, like Darwin, he will not go away. His Moses book guts religion, Judaism and Christianity, for what it is– illusion. Man needs his myths, his gods, for he is damaged in that way. Freud thought that a man or woman were not fully developed or matured until they had given up the obsessional neurosis of a god in the sky (see his The Future of an Illusion).
I am psychologically free in ways I can not even describe as an atheist. The believers of late smack their smarmy lips as they go on to prattle about how poor Christopher Hitchens will now see their reality. Garbage in, garbage out!
Buy it or don’t buy it, Freud occasionally stops to patiently inform the reader, urging him to go along for a while with his suppositions and hypotheticals and before you know it he has surrounded you with his wagons. He posits, to wit, that there were two Moses’ and that one was murdered by the early tribes under his control; he argues that this primordial deed was repressed, an unconscious act, for suppression is a conscious choice; that centuries later that which was denied returned, much as each of us for several years after age five or so experience a latency period which later erupts as we move into our adolescence. In short, sexual features and feelings are repressed and reemerge years later. So an analytic concept long verified by therapists with clients and over the decades is applied to an entire Jewish people’s traditional history. It works. And if it does not work, at least you begin to fathom an important analytic concept or two about each one of us. Freud’s ability to apply individual behavior to the species at large is most telling, instructive and makes you think in global terms.
In the last few weeks or months, I can not say, I have had reminiscences about the years before I was ten, places I played in, streets I rode my bike on, early childhood chums, neighborhoods I prowled about, very dim and early relationships with young people who came and went, flitted about me and then were gone — in one case, a young girl I played with and then I realized she had moved away. Some of these memories can not be confirmed by the person who experienced them. I am simply not sure they were events. I am sure that my level of awareness was dim as I could not survey all about me in ways that ended in conclusions or observations, as if I was some primordial sea creature swimming onto the beach, looking about, sensing, but not realizing or seeing in a profound way. I could not explain my world. I was in it but not fully aware. I mildly experienced who I was. I take that back. I did not experience myself. I only sensed, as if I was being jabbed by the needles of everyday occurrences. You understand, don’t you? Think back.
When Kane on his deathbed says “Rosebud,” I can grasp that so much better now at this age. The sled had so much meaning for him, condensed meaning — the time in which he enjoyed his sled, the time in which he is sold by his mother; his ineffective father and the capitalistic banker Thatcher, all conspiring to bring about a personal abandonment he would he feel all his life. In one of the most often misheard lines in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander mentions her mother and Kane responds in so many words, sotto voce, that he knows about mothers. I gag when I write that, for I remembr seeing the movie as a young child, all alone in the local theater, and I wonder today if I was not touched by my own feelings of being abandoned on levels I could not possibly articulate but that I felt. I must have incorporated the lonelinesss and the abandonment of Kane for there were such feelings, I hesitate here, in my own family, especially from my mother. In all my childhood my mother never read a fairy tale to me, any book at all. A puzzlement. Why? That is the rub, and the “enchantment” about the memory.
And so of late I am reflecting and trying to re-empathize with a host of significant memories, trying to string them on a necklace of affect and effect. I am imagining and reimagining the meanings they have for me, for it is an old cliche that as we near our end we turn back to our beginnings — what observation might Freud interject here! And so of late I have come up with a few sentences that might begin my very next book.
I was fucking abandoned when born. So what! And who cares? I am unfinished man…Dive Delve Descend.
And a happy Hanukah to my brethren.
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Tagged Freud, Moses and Monotheism