May 2002
We have seen how the First Exile, which was concomitant to the loss
of the Land and of the Temple, had strengthened the collective homosexual latent libido, and had triggered a retrenchment into
the archaic Mosaic monotheism.
It is not casual that the beginning of Zionism was also concomitant
to the beginning of psychoanalysis.
Link to First Part
After the return to the Land in the VI century B.C., Judaism was very
different from the one preceding the exile. However, it was also very different
from the one that will develop after the loss of the Second Temple and
the subsequent exile. During the Hellenistic period, the Jews remained
hard core monotheistic. However, in many other ways they were more similar to
their Gentile neighbors than they became in the two thousands years afterwards.
As long as they stayed on the Land, the heterosexual libido received a constant
reactivation through the work of the land (Mother Earth), and their nationalistic aspirations (Motherland).
The most extreme symptoms of heterosexual lust were repressed. The
Temple itself became the House of the Lord, and no more the center of fertility
cults and temple prostitution. A house remains a house, i.e. a maternal
symbol, but its dwellers were no more Astarte and Asherah, the sacred prostitutes,
but a unique God, whom it is prohibited even to see and to touch. On this
point, there were no concessions. The Promised Land remained the beloved
one, but her first - born fruits had to be brought to the Lord as a symbol
of restrain and renunciation. He became the sole owner of the female body:
"The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine" (Lev.
25:23). The Book of Leviticus, which, as proved by Wellhausen, has been composed
after the exile, states this point: the land belongs to the Lord.
As Freud pointed in Totem and Taboo: "They renounced its
fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free"
(1). It is very interesting that Freud used the word "fruit" in association
to the women, who had been the lusted prize of the brothers's horde. In "Symbolism in Dreams" (Introductory
Lectures on Psycho - Analysis, 1915-17), Freud states that in dream symbolism
"fruit" stands for the female body. And indeed the
fruits of the Land, namely the female body, had to be symbolically renounced
by being brought to the Lord.
The period of five centuries, between the end of the First Exile and
the beginning of the Second, had been a period of reckoning. There was a
renunciation to the most extreme expressions of heterosexual libido, and
a compromise with the Father was worked out, on the basis of a symbolic
renunciation to the ownership of the Land.
However, the lust for the maternal body was hardly successfully repressed.
Of all the peoples subjugated by the Roman Empire, the Jews were the ones
who fought more ferociously than any other for their Land and their independence,
even if they knew that they had no chance of success in their endeavor.
After the repression of the last rebellion against the Romans (135 A.D.),
the price of slaves collapsed in the Western world, because of the large
numbers of Jews who were offered on the market. So determined were the
Romans to eradicate the Jews from their land. The reason is that they had unconsciously
perceived the enormous charge of energies and lust bonding the Jews to
their land, and they understood that the only way to have
peace in Judea was to separate between her and her sons.
The more the Second Exile lasted, the more the Promised Land became
an abstract concept, sterilized from its sensuous connotation. Jerusalem
became Jerushalaim shel M'ala (the Heaven Jerusalem), in contrast
with the previous very earthly one. As the centuries elapsed, the sense of
guilt for the loss, which was perceived as having been caused by the lustful heterosexual drive,
fed on itself to the point that the Jews committed
not to try to regain their independence, but to wait for the days of the
Messiah, the only one who will be allowed to drive the children of Israel
to their land again, and to rebuild the Temple. Until then, the sacred spot
of the sanctuary is to be considered Taboo, forbidden from approaching,
on the grounds of the rationalization that the rites for purification have
been forgotten, and no one would ever be allowed to sacrifice
again, and even to tread on the sacred place.
The more the Jews were segregated and persecuted, the more they related
to their condition as a God - sent imposition. Trying to change the destiny
imposed by the divine will is to be considered blasphemous. The Rabbis
codified the prohibition of rebelling against the rule of the Gentiles.
Every active resistance against “'Ulam shel Goyim” (the Gentiles'
yoke) is to be considered as a rebellion against the will of God himself.
By the 19th century, the nation had reached an impasse, not only because
the external conditions were such as to prevent any aspiration of redemption,
freedom and independence, but also because it was the result of a self
imposed inhibition. The sense of guilt was the cement of the cohesion between
the brothers, under the yoke of the common rites of the religion of the
Father. At the collective national level, the heterosexual libido, the
lust for the Land and for the House, had been repressed to the point of
total denial. The Rabbis and their ruling became the doorkeepers of the
threshold of the Taboo: rebellion against the Father and incest.
However, as Freud taught us, no repression can hold for ever, and the
more the energies invested in it, the more the day of reckoning will be
explosive, as the boiling water compressed by the lid of an hermetically
closed pressure - pan will eventually explode.
The events of the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe, the Enlightenment,
and thereafter the nationalistic movements of liberation, found the Jews
in the Schtetel of Eastern Europe in a condition of exasperation, as the boiling water pressured
in the pan was mounting more and more.
The Emancipation, and the civil rights bestowed on the Jews in the West, were the first
crack in the wall that had so far contained the pressure. This was the
first chance in many centuries for questioning the rule of the Rabbis and
the sense of guilt that maintained the heterosexual libido in the repression.
Enlightenment, national movements of liberation, socialism, and revolution
were all a repetition of the rebellion of the Horde of the Brothers against
the authority of the Primal Father and his tyrannical rule. The stimulus
of powerful events which were taking place among the Gentiles, in their
midst the Jews were living, triggered a breach of the threshold
of the Taboo among them, too. As the physical walls of the ghetto came down,
the inner walls cracked, too.
It is not casual that all the first Zionists were atheists. The renewed
lust for the Promised Land had to be concomitant with the rebellion against
the rule of the Father. In Western Europe, the ideological foundation of
Zionism was laid by the first generation of Jews who were born outside
the walls of the ghetto, and who considered themselves as the antithesis
of their grand fathers. Jewish nationalism was a byproduct of the rebellion
to the tradition of the Fathers. In Eastern Europe, the new Socialist revolutionary
ideas triggered the same outcome. In the West, it was acted out by intellectuals,
like Hess, Herzl and Nordau, who had previously flirted with emancipation
and cosmopolitanism, and had been inflicted a narcissistic injury by the
rejection of the Gentile world, in which they had tried to be absorbed.
Being intellectuals and burgeois, they planned a liberal open society
where the Rabbis would be restricted to the synagogues, and prevented from
influencing public life. In the East, in contrast, where the masses of
Jews were destitute and still restricted to the Schtetl, and the
repression of the Law of the Father was still in full force, the rebellion
against past and tradition was even more violent. The Zionist pioneers
who came from Eastern Europe, and founded the first kibbutzim, codified
a religion of anti - religiosity as the instrument for the redemption of
the Land. Instead of being liberal and tolerant, like their Western counterpart,
they considered atheism, and total rejection of Jewish rites, as the key
to redemption. Atheism was not a personal choice, but part of the new religion
of the Land. At the physical contact with the Promised Land, and with the
work of the soil, the heterosexual energies, that had been repressed for
so many centuries, exploded. Homosexual libido, which had been the vector
of monotheism and the submission to the Law of the Father, was cast aside
in favor of a new religion of the earth and of the senses.
They reconnected to the Hebrew tradition preceding the First Exile, and not only to the one previous to the Second. They wanted to cease to be Jews,
and to return to be Hebrews. Now we can understand why, in the first Kibbutzim,
the pioneers ate pork meat in the very Day of Atonement, in defiance to
Jewish tradition and with ostensible pride. They wanted to eradicate any
memory of the yoke of the primal Father. If matrimony and the patriarchal
structure of the Jewish family, with its tradition and its rites, had become
during the centuries a household name for the Sacred, now they declared that
the family itself should be abolished. Not only they codified the sacredness
of promiscuity, and abolished marriage, but the children were taken very
early from their mothers to be raised collectively.
It was a new rite, which was to substitute the old one: the rites of
the Mother in defiance of the rites of the Father, like it had been in
Judah, before the First Exile. They
indeed produced a lot of social ideological rationalizations, and it might
seem that this was the product of the stimulus triggered by the revolutionary
ideas in Russia, but the collective unconscious was working its way to
a much more archaic past, to the sacred prostitution and the cult of the
Land of the ancient Hebrew cultivators. Even the idea of taking the children away
from mothers, as every ideology, had not flashed out of the blue.
It was a sublimated unconscious elaboration of the mnemonic traces of sacrifice
of children by the ancient Hebrews in the Valley of Bnei Hinom, on the
Western side of Jerusalem, which were performed as a rite to pagan deities
for the sake of military victory or a good harvest. Obviously, this time
no one was actually sacrificed, but the mental content was the same, because
taking the babies from their mothers was exactly what had been done in
Judah.
Every element points to the cult of Mother Earth.
The festivities of Pesah, Shavu'ot, and Succoth
in the kibbutzim were celebrated not as had been done in the last
2500 years, i.e., as the celebration of the deliverance from Egypt, the
feast of the Torah and the feast of the Booths, but as the feasts of the
cycles of Nature and, in those days, processions were organized in the fields
carrying the first born of the fruits of the earth, as it had been done
before the First Exile.
As we read in the Bible, Succoth had become the feast of the Booths
only after the return from the Babylonian exile (Nehemiah 8:13-18).
Before that, it had been the feast of figs and olives. Pesah had become
the feast of the Deliverance from Egypt only in the very last days of the
kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 23:21-23). Before that, it had been an
agricultural celebration.
Now, the Zionist pioneers, in their craving for casting aside the yoke of
the Law of the Father, reconnected to the mental heterosexual contents
of the Hebrews cultivators, as they were before Hebraism had become Judaism,
i.e., the religion of the Father.
We can say that Zionism was the product of a resurgence of heterosexual
libido, triggered by the events in 19th century Europe. At the same time,
we can understand why, at the beginning, orthodox Judaism was anti – Zionist.
The Rabbis stared with horror at the substitution of the cults of the Father
with the idolatry of the cults of the Mother.
There is a point, which has been overlooked, but it is charged with
significance. When Haim Weitzmann and the leaders of the Zionist movement
contacted the British, in the middle of World War I, they asked for the
help of His Majesty Government not for the establishment of a Jewish state,
but for a Home for the Jewish people. At the manifest level, it has
been rationalized, a posteriori, as if they did not want
to pressure in too an open way with a demand that could embarrass the British,
but it seems a rationalization. They could ask for an autonomy, or self-
rule. In diplomatic language, there are expressions much apter than
the word "Home", to describe a national aspiration. "Home" does not fit
diplomatic and official language. It is intimate and childish. But as such
it appears in the Balfour Declaration: "a Home for the Jewish people".
A Home, the symbol of the maternal body, was the word used in the first
official document legalizing Jewish national aspirations and, in this
way, it decodes the real mental contents.
The first Zionist Congress in Basel was organized in 1897, two years
before the publication of one of the most important of Freud's works:
The
Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud himself was not an active Zionist, but somehow the two movements
unfolded in a parallel way. Apparently, there is no connection between the
two. Zionism was founded as the national movement of redemption of the
Jewish people, and psychoanalysis was founded as a branch of the medical
profession, whose endeavor was the exploration of the human soul. Moreover,
Freud and his disciples were almost all Jews, and all of them were detached
from their Jewish roots, to the point that Freud himself, at the beginning
of his career, contemplated the possibility of baptism, with the only purpose
of detaching himself also in a formal way from his roots (2). Afterwards,
he changed his mind, and felt strongly connected to his Judaism, but it
was a long process, which culminated with the publication, at the end of
his life, of Moses and Monotheism.
The only connection seems to be that both Zionists and psychoanalysts
were the first generation of Jews born outside the walls of the ghetto,
and at the same time estranged from religiosity, in an outburst of rebellion
against the Law of the Father, and both wanted to severe their ties with
tradition. It was not out of affection for the Gentiles' ways, but out of intolerance
for a repressing Judaism. The repression was that of the heterosexual libido,
during centuries of ruling by the Rabbis intending to maintain it repressed. As
the first Zionists, the first psychoanalysts were not only atheists but also
anti - religious. Pubertal boys who live a stage of rebellion against their fathers feel not only defiant, but also mocking
towards their fathers' generation, and this wave of rebellious feelings is
concomitant with a resurgence of the heterosexual libido, which had been
repressed in the latency period.
This kind of mockery is present in Freud's words:
The neuroses on the one hand display striking and far – reaching
resemblance with the great social production of art, religion and philosophy,
but on the other hand they have the appearance of being caricatures of
them. One might venture the statement that hysteria is a caricature of
an artistic creation, the obsessional neurosis a caricature of religion,
and paranoiac delusions a caricature of a philosophical system (3).
The statement is correct, and it is a scientific one, but it is enlightening that it was made by recently emancipated Jews, who had severed their ties
with every tradition.
As the first Zionists unconsciously associated between the Promised
Land and the maternal body, so Freud unconsciously associated between psychoanalysis
and a woman. Speaking of his efforts in completing one of his more central
works, Totem and Taboo, he says: “With all that I feel as if I had
intended only to start a little liaison and then discovered that at my
time of life I have to marry a new wife” (4), meaning, psychoanalytical
research = a wife.
Furthermore, Totem and Taboo is pivotal to the understanding
of the Oedipus complex, which deals with lust for the mother and rebellion
against the father.
Moreover, he associated Totem and Taboo not only with the woman
(a wife), but also with Judaism, as he writes to Abraham:
I am working on the last section of the Totem which
comes at the right moment to deepen the gap [between him and Jung] by fathoms....I
have not written anything with so much conviction since Interpretation
of Dreams, so I can predict the fate of the essay...[it] would serve
to make a sharp distinction between us and all Aryan religiosity (5)
Namely, he was most convinced dealing with Totem and Taboo,
which he considered almost a Jewish affair, and that the Gentiles could
not understand and accept. Jones writes:
A fortnight later, however, there was quite another tone. As
so often happens after a great achievement, elation was replaced by doubt
and misgiving. With this change Freud's pugnacious attitude also softened
“Jung is crazy, but I don't really want a split; I should prefer him to
leave on his own accord. Perhaps my Totem work will hasten the break against
my will”. Ferenczi and I read together in Budapest and wrote to Freud in
high praise. We suggested he had in his imagination lived through the experience
he described in his book, that his elation represented the excitement of
killing and eating the father, and that those doubts were only the reaction.
When I saw him a few days later on a visit to Vienna and asked him why
the man who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams could now have such
doubts, he wisely replied: “then I described the wish to kill one's father,
and now I have been describing the actual killing: after all it is a big
step from a wish to a deed” (6).
Therefore, he associated himself, his aggressive drives towards his own
father, Judaism (supra), and his psychoanalytical achievements. Why Totem
and Taboo was so “Jewish” to provoke a split with Jung and other
Gentile psychoanalysts? After all, it was dealing with the pre – history
of all mankind, and not with a segment of Jewish history.
Freud unconsciously perceived that his discoveries and particularly
the Oedipus complex and Totem and Taboo, were the product of a new
upsurge of heterosexual libido, which was shared by him as by the rest
of the Jewish people. It had been triggered by the rebellion
against the tradition of the Fathers, while the Gentiles did not share
this new experience in a similar magnitude. In the Western world, the rebellion
against the Law of the Father had been a very old affair, back to the times
of Solon (VI century B.C.) and the pre – Socratic philosophers, the institution
of the
polis
and the democratic institutions of Classic Greece,
which came to substitute the ancient rites and the cohesiveness of the
clan of the brothers. Dodds has called this phase "the passage from a shame
to a guilt society" (7), implying that a tribal society, like the one in
pre- Classic Greece, had as priority the cohesiveness of the horde of the
brothers, where all are one, and if a member does not comply
he feels ashamed, while in polis society the moral questions are
up to the single, and if he does not comply with his own moral standards,
he feels guilty.
The internal psychic turmoil, caused by the passage from the former
structure of society to the latter, had found its own catharsis in Sophocles'
tragedy, which, not casually, dealt with Oedipus and its incestuous murderous
drives. Sophocles, as delegate of the group, had found his own catharsis
and that of his fellow countrymen in the tragedy Oedipus Rex, while
Freud had found his own catharsis and that of his Jewish fellow men in decoding
the Oedipus complex through the instrument of scientific observation, and
not casually he called it "The Oedipus Complex". He unconsciously perceived
that the tension, which had driven the Greeks into Sophocles' tragedy was
the same as the one which drove him into his own discoveries (8).
This is the reason why Zionism and psychoanalysis were concomitant.
They were the siblings, offspring of a newly discovered female body, after
the liberation from the pressure of the Law of the Father and its tyranny.
Links:
Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism
Pinocchio. The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
[email protected]
(1) “Totem and Taboo", in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogart Press, London 1955, 1957 and 1962,
vol. XIII, p.143.
(2) Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Edited
and Abridged in One Volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, Basic
Books, London 1961, p.112. Jones writes:
when Freud thought of joining the Protestant "Confession", so as to be able to marry without having the complicated Jewish ceremonies he hated so much, Breuer merely murmured, "Too complicated".In my opinion, Jewish rite of marriage is not that complicated. It is an obvious rationalization by Freud, who wanted only to express his rebellion towards the religion of the fathers.
[At p. 100, Jones writes:] All along he had comforted himself with the thought that in Germany, where he would marry, a civil cerimony was all that was necessary, so he was spared the painful dilemma of either changing his “Confession”, which he could never have seriously intended, or going through the complicated cerimonies of a Jewish wedding, which he abhorred”.