No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Return of Adam: Freud's Myth of the Fall
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Despite its loss of intellectual respectability in the nineteenth century, the myth of the fall still haunts modern religion and thought like an unquiet ghost. Discredited in its role as an historical account of human origins, it has retained its vitality as a ‘psychological’ myth, an inexhaustible metaphor for the brokeness and fragmentation of the human spirit. The myth of the fall surfaces in the twentieth century in the form of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who would not normally spring to mind as someone sympathetic to the myth. Freud is perhaps the most famous ‘demythologizer’ of religion. He traced all religion and myth, including the myth of original sin, back to non-spiritual psychological processes. But although he clearly wished to deconstruct all traditional myth, myth plays an indisputable role in his own psychological theories. Some of his psychological constructs, such as the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the concept of ‘narcissism’, are inspired by Greek myths. Others, like the theory of the death instinct, are founded on scientific speculations which clearly resemble myths. The myth of the primal horde in particular draws its rhetorical power from its similarity to the Biblical account of the fall. Both the Biblical account of the fall and the psychohistorical ‘myth’ of the primal horde attribute the conflicts and imperfections of the human condition in part to an inherited guilt, an inherited guilt which stems from a decisive and fateful historical event in the past.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993
References
1 Ricoeur, among others, has commented on the mythic character of Freud's theories: ‘…one does psychoanalysis a service, not by defending its scientific myth as science, but by interpreting it as myth’ (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 208Google Scholar. Hereafter: Freud. Norman O. Brown said the following of Freud's myth of primal horde: ‘Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth, an old, old story (Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 3.Google Scholar
2 Freud himself made the following observation about the theory of the instincts: ‘The theory of instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness.’ This statement is found in Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953 ff.), Vol. 22, 95Google Scholar. Hereafter cited by SE followed by volume and page numbers.
3 As Lewis, C. S. once said, ‘A great many of those who “debunk” traditional or (as they would say) “sentimental” values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process’ (The Abolition of Man (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), p. 22).Google Scholar
4 Ricoeur, Freud, pp. 38–9.
5 See Burnaby, John, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1960), p. 202.Google Scholar
6 SE 18, 135.
7 Freud's description of the tactics of therapy abounds with military metaphors: ‘The ego is weakened by the internal conflict (with the id and the super-ego) and we must go to its help. The position is like that in a civil war which has to be decided by the assistance of an ally from outside.… Our knowledge is to make up for (the patient's) ignorance and to give his ego back its mastery over lost provinces of his mental life’ (SE 23, 173).
8 The phenomenon of ‘demonic self-enclosure’ is given extensive examination in Soren Kierkegaard's profound psychological account of sin. See his analysis of demonism and ‘inclosing reserve’ in The Concept of Anxiety trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 123–35Google Scholar. See also Kierkegaard's, The Sickness unto Death, trans. V., Howard and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 63–7, 72–3, 108–10Google Scholar. The theme of demonic self-enclosure is also present in the novels of Dostoyevsky, as exemplified in the characters of Stavrogin in The Possessed and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. See Ward, Bruce, Dostoyevsky's Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 1986), pp. 139–44.Google Scholar
9 The comparison of Freud with Marx and Nietzsche was made by Ricoeur. See his Freud, pp. 32–3.
10 SE 17, 143.
11 SE 5, 613. Freud's italics. Quoted in: Rieff, Philip, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 68Google Scholar. Hereafter: Freud.
12 Philip Rieff, Freud, pp. 68–9.
13 SE 23, 196–7.
14 SE 18, 18.
15 SE 23, 258–9.
16 The title of the case study is ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,’ and can be found in SE 17, pp. 2–122.
17 SE 17, 51. For Freud's full discussion of the reality of the primal scene in the light of the Wolf Man's dream, see pp. 48–60 of the same work. See also p. 97, where he states: ‘I should be glad to know whether the primal scene in my patient's case was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not very important.’ In the prehistory of a neurosis, according to Freud, ‘a child catches hold of (a) phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors’ (Ibid.).
18 SE 20, 68.
19 See the final quotation in note 17.
20 See SE 23, 132–7.
21 SE 21, 145.
22 As Freud says, ‘the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d'être, is to defend us against nature’ (SE 21, 15). For Freud's description of the ‘terrors of nature’, see the passages which follow this sentence (SE 21, 15–16). See also Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, 86.
23 Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 32.Google Scholar
24 The Inquisitor says the following to the returned Christ, ‘In respecting (man) so greatly, you acted as though you ceased to feel any compassion for him, for you asked too much of him – you who have loved him more than yourself! Had you respected him less, you would have asked less of him, and that would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and base’ (Dostoyevsky, , The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Magarshack, David (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 300)Google Scholar. As his creator Ivan comments, the Grand Inquisitor ‘glories in the fact that he and his followers have at last vanquished freedom and have done so in order to make men happy’ (Ibid., p. 295). Cf. Freud's comments on the ‘masses’ as being ‘lazy and unintelligent’ and therefore in need of exceptional individuals, or ‘leaders’, to keep their instincts in check (SE 21, 7–8).