29. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 641-659

Myth: The Collective Unconscious (C.G. Jung)

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C.G. Jung: The Collective Unconscious and Archetypes

The most imaginative and influential of Freud's disciples (and, eventually in Jung's case, rivals), Jung posits not just an individual unconscious but a collective one, "which appears to us in dreams" and is "something like an unending stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into conscousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind."

Seated: Sigmund Freud,  G. Stanley Hall, C.G. Jung; standing: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi. Hall, the president of Clark University, extended the invitation to Freud and Jung to visit the university in 1909. It was Freud's only visit to the United States.

Writing about the collective unconscious in 1931, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung emphasized the split with Freud, who regards the unconscious as "of an exclusively personal nature." Jung allows for a personal unconscious, but regards it as "A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious." The collective unconscious is "a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is ... inborn." It is "a common psyche substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us."

C.G. Jung in 1910

The personal unconscious contains "the feeling-toned complexes" that "constitute the personal and private side of psychic life. The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes." The archetypes are intrinsically bound up with humankind's myths, which "are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul."

Primitive man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity that we should really have guessed long ago that myths refer to something psychic. His knowledge of nature is essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process. But the very fact that this process is unconscious gives us the reason why man has thought of everything except the psyche in his attempts to explain myths. He simply didn't know that the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and small.

Jung asserts that clinical work with patients reveals these recurring mythic patterns that "we can call 'motifs,' 'primordial images,' types or -- as I have named them -- archetypes." They manifest themselves in individuals as "unconscious processes whose existence and meaning can only be inferred, whereas the myth deals with traditional forms of incalculable age." The archetypes can be most clearly discerned in the religions of primitive man: "The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them." Like Malinowski, Jung rejects the idea that myths are created to "explain" natural phenomena, but he insists that they do indeed arise from what Malinowski dismissively calls "the dark pools of the sub-conscious, where at the bottom there lie the usual paraphernalia and symbols of psychoanalytic exegesis."

Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe's mythology is its living religion, whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe. But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche.

The problem with discussing archetypes is that they can't be directly apprehended: "The ultimate core of meaning may be circumscribed, but not described, for "the pre-conscious structure of the psyche ... was already in existence when there was as yet no unity of personality (even today the primitive is not securely possessed of it)." Myths "give an approximate description of an unconscious core of meaning. The ultimate meaning of this nucleus was never conscious and never will be." It "expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors."

Because of this "perpetual vexation of the intellect," Jung says, "the scientific intellect is always inclined to put on airs of enlightenment in the hope of banishing" the mythic element. "Whether its endeavours were called euhemerism [the explanation that the gods arose from the actions of human heroes], or Christian apologetics, or Enlightenment in the narrow sense, or Positivism, there was always a myth hiding behind it, in new and disconcerting garb, which then, following the ancient and venerable pattern, gave itself out as ultimate truth." The scientific attitude, in other words, has its own archetypal roots: Consider, for example, the Prometheus myth in which the bringer of light, i.e., truth, is punished for hubris. "In reality we can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, anymore than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide." Jung here asserts the organic nature of the collective unconscious. If we fail "to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, ... a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being ... which succumbs helplessly to all manner of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics." Jung probably has in mind here the political and ideological "epidemics" -- communism and fascism -- of the first half of the twentieth century.

The archetypes of the collective unconscious serve the same patterning function as "the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, without having any material existence of its own." Freud's unconscious was a repository of instincts, and the archetypes "correspond in every way to the instincts," whose existence "can no more be proved than the existence of the archetypes."


C.G. Jung:  The Psychological Function of Archetypes

In studying the unconscious we confront something very like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:

Although the existence of an instinctual pattern in human biology is probable, it seems very difficult to prove the existence of distinct types empirically. For the organ with which we might apprehend them -- consciousness -- is not only itself a transformation of the original instinctual image, but also its transformer.

But by indirections we can find directions out, and Jung asserts that he has done so through studying his patients, particularly the ones who express themselves through art. "And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form." He has come to discover "that there are certain collective unconscious conditions which act as regulators and stimulators of creative fantasy activity and call forth corresponding formations by availing themselves of the existing conscious material." Dreams, too, "behave in exactly the same way as active imagination, only the support of conscious content is lacking."

Jung's critics find his conclusions unscientific, particularly when he says that "the archetypes have, when they appear, a distinctly numinous character which can only be described as 'spiritual,' if 'magical' is too strong a word. Consequently this phenomenon is of the utmost significance for the psychology of religion." Where the angels of science fear to tread. "The archetype is pure, unvitiated nature, and it is nature that causes man to utter words and perform actions whose meaning is unconscious to him, so unconscious that he no longer gives it a thought." But consciousness also "struggles in a regular panic against being swallowed up in the primitivity and unconsciousness of sheer instinctuality.... The closer one comes to the instinct world, the more violent is the urge to shy away from it and to rescue the light of consciousness from the murks of the sultry abyss."


C.G. Jung: The Principal Archetypes

The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego. These are the shadow, the anima, and the animus.

And so we begin with excerpts from 1951 and 1954. The first of these, the shadow, is like the photo negative of the personality, "a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort." (George Lucas, of course, made it into "the dark side of the Force," and look what a predicament that put Luke Skywalker into.) But awareness of the shadow "is an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it, therefore, as a rule meets with considerable resistance."

One way of coping with a recognition of the shadow is by projection, in which "the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself."

But at least the shadow "is always of the same sex as the subject." If one is a man, one has to confront the anima; if a woman, the animus. They "are much further away from consciousness and in normal circumstances are seldom if ever recognized."

With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow -- so far as it nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.

And then there's the "mother imago." This is Jung's spin on the Oedipus complex, though without the killing-the-father part as an essential element. Like Freud, Jung's identification as male skews his psychological theorizing: that is, he takes maleness as normative, devoting most of his attention to it. The man wants "to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world," but he also wants to return to the protective, nurturing state of childhood and infancy -- to his mother.

The mother ... has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure. He has learned these lessons only too well, and remains true to his mother, perhaps causing her the deepest anxiety (when, in her honor, he turns out to be a homosexual, for example) and at the same time affords her an unconscious satisfaction of a mythological nature, for in the relationship now reigning between them, there is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son.

Okay, to back up to that theory that homosexuality is a way of honoring his mother. It was tossed off almost as if it were common wisdom, which in his day it pretty much was. And thus Jung only compounded the problems of therapists, not to mention gay men. (And where do lesbians fit in?) But let's leave it at that and proceed.

Because of the dominance of the mother imago, "Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man." In a word, he projects "this perilous image of Woman" onto the women in his life. "The projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima.... She is not an invention of the conscious mind, but a spontaneous projections of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother imago so dangerously powerful stem from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child."

The corresponding figure for women, the animus, Jung says, stems from the father as a figure of authority and order.

The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros. It is far from my intention to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition. I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman's consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos. In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident.

Like I said, for Jung, being male is normative. He goes on to explain that "in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man's consciousness, the animus gives woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge." Anima and animus "represent functions which filter the contents of the collective unconscious through to the conscious mind."

Returning to the mother archetype, Jung provides some specifics:

To this category belongs the goddess, and especially the Mother of God, the Virgin, and Sophia. Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype, as for instance the mother who reappears as the maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore; or the mother who is also the beloved, as in the Cybele-Attis myth. Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church, university, city or country, Heaven, Earth, the woods, the sea or any still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols.

Jung finds the archetype in concave and womb-shaped things, ranging from "the baptismal font" to "ovens and cooking vessels," and even "many animals, such as the cow, hare, and helpful animals in general." It's obvious that our reference to such things as "Freudian symbols" don't give Jung the credit he's due. He also adds some negatives to the list of mother archetypes, such as witches, dragons, graves, and mythical figures such as the goddesses of fate and Lilith. "There are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths." Jung even adds a reference in a footnote to Philip Wylie's once-famous attack on "momism" in Generation of Vipers. He isn't ready to condemn motherhood out of hand, but he observes:

I myself make it a rule to look first for the cause of infantile neuroses in the mother, as I know from experience that a child is much more likely to develop normally than neurotically, and that in the great majority of cases definite causes of disturbances can be found in the parents, especially in the mother. 

In the end, he says, "Our task is not ... to deny the archetype, but to dissolve the projections, in order to restore their content to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself."

27. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 581-613

The Unconscious: The Freudian Unconscious (Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann); Liberation of the Unconscious (D.H. Lawrence, Tristan Tzara, André Breton)

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Sigmund Freud: The Origins of Culture


In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud extended his theories of the unconscious from the individual to civilization itself, not without stretching a point or a few. Asserting that "we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual," he finds that sublimation of instinct both gives rise to civilization -- "it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life" -- and makes civilized humans more neurotic.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or other means?) of powerful instincts. This "cultural frustration" dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.

He posits that civilization arose because the constant "need for genital satisfaction" led to the cohabitation of males and females and thence to the family: “the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their interests, to remain with the stronger male.” Greater combinations of peoples eventually followed all “in the service of Eros.” So civilization demonstrates “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.”


Of course, the community has to find ways of dealing with aggression, so it causes it to be redirected into the individual. “Civilization ... obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency with him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” It reinforces the superego and with it the sense of guilt.


And when Freud says guilt, he immediately thinks of the Oedipus complex. He posits that “the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, the remorse for which “was the result of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but they loved him, too.”

Now, I think, we can at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has killed one's father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death.

It's the primordial Catch-22.


Civilization, then, can only thrive “through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate.... The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”



Thomas Mann: The Significance of Freud

Thomas Mann in 1937

This address, “Freud and the Future,” was delivered in Vienna in 1936 on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday. It lauds him as “a great scientist,” which is not a characterization that everyone would agree with today, but more particularly because of Freud's influence on “the world of creative literature,” which is still undeniable.

Mann observes that Freud “did not know Nietzsche” or Novalis, Kierkegaard, or Schopenhauer, but that he seems to have intuited their ideas and given them practical application:

By his unaided effort, without knowledge of any previous intuitive achievement, he had methodically to follow out the line of his own researches; the driving force of his activity was probably increased by this very freedom from special advantage.

Freud's theories, Mann observes, have “penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.” The particular connection between psychoanalysis and literature that Mann observes “consists first in a love of truth, in a sense of truth, a sensitiveness and receptivity for truth's sweet and bitter, which largely expresses itself in a psychological excitation, a clarity of vision, to such an extent that the conception of truth actually almost coincides with that of psychological perception and recognition.”

But what Mann finds most congenial in Freud is “an understanding of disease, a certain affinity with it, outweighed by fundamental health, and an understanding of its productive significance.” For Mann is all about “disease as an instrument of knowledge,” as any reader of The Magic Mountain surely knows.

Mann is also struck by the coherence of Freud's work with the thought of Schopenhauer, who also “preached the primacy of the instinct over mind and reason,” though “not in the anti-human spirit of the mind-hostile doctrines of today” (i.e, Nazism). He notes that in the New Introductory Essays in Psychoanalysis, Freud “describes the soul-world of the unconscious, the id, in language as strong, and at the same time as coolly intellectual, objective, and professional a tone, as Schopenhauer might have ued to describe his sinister kingdom of the will.”

Again, Mann touches on the political horrors of his day in his discussion of the id, which “can take the upper hand with the ego, with a whole mass-ego, thanks to a moral devastation which is produced by the worship of the unconscious, the glorification of its dynamic as the only life-promoting force, the systematic glorification of the primitive and irrational. For the unconscious, the id, is primitive and irrational, is pure dynamic. It knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” But he holds out hope “that the resolution of our great fear and our great hate, their conversion into a different relation to the unconscious ... may one day be due to the healing of this very science” -- i.e., psychoanalysis. “The free folk are the people of a future freed from fear and hate, and ripe for peace.”

D.H. Lawrence: A Non-Freudian Unconscious 

Freud had a dirty mind, Lawrence asserts in this excerpt from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), so Lawrence sets out to discover "the pristine unconscious in man." Freud's unconscious "is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own bastard spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity." Bad stuff happens when you hook your passions to the ideal instead of listening to the unconscious: 

This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.

In Freud, Lawrence claims, idealism and materialism, supposed philosophical opposites, unite: "the ideal becomes a mechanical principle," a kind of ghost in the machine. By identifying love as sex, Lawrence thinks, Freud sanctions all of its manifestations as physical: "incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no escape from logic."   

The "true unconscious," Lawrence asserts, "is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism." This life-motive begins "where the individual begins," at "the moment of conception." (Lawrence would almost certainly be a pro-lifer of some sort.)  

By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact soul would be a better word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul.

But not, he hastens to add, the soul as imagined by idealism, which has been reduced "that which a man conceives himself to be," so he returns to the word "unconscious."  

Lawrence's unconscious is not, unlike Freud's, susceptible to the reductionism of science, which would reduce the sun to "some theory of burning gases, some cause-and-effect nonsense." We apprehend the sun imaginatively, not scientifically: "And even if we do have a mental conception of the sun as a sphere of blazing gas -- which it certainly isn't -- we are just as far from knowing what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a matter of mental conception merely." 

Lawrence now goes off into his own psycho-physiological theories, which involve the solar plexus and the diaphragm and separate "planes" of the body. It's a personal myth that he compares to the concepts of the Greeks: "When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor." What he is aiming at is a theory of unification. "The individual psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an unthinkable process of calamity ensues unless there be a reconciliation."  


Tristan Tzara: Dadaism 

Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Tristan Tzara, 1923

Tzara's "Dada Manifesto" (1918) and "Lecture on Dada" (1922) rejects Freudian psychoanalysis as "a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie." This reaction against the normative is epitomized by Dada, which attacked what its proponents saw as the stultification of art. It aimed at liberation through mockery. If "everyone dances to his own boomboom," as Tzara proclaimed, then Dadaism was a way of freeing everyone from the lockstep of artistic conformity. "I am against systems," Tzara says, "the most acceptable system is on principle to have none at all." Dada would abolish logic, but have "absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity." 

Dada rejects "explanations": 

You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of a calm, level state of mind that makes everything equal and without importance.

And yes, Tzara recognizes that there is an element of Buddhist detachment to that attitude. 

Dadaism is anti-intellectual: "Intelligence is the triumph of sound education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its pleasures are innumerable." Dadaism sees itself as above all, life-affirming: "It is diversity that makes life interesting. There is no common basis in men's minds. The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us." Moreover, art is inferior to life: "Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Lie is far more interesting." 

Tzara rejects idealism:  

The Beautiful and True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.

The origins of Dada are in disgust, Tzara says. Disgust with the useless explanations of metaphysics, the pretentiousness of artists, "the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of money," and so on.  Dada is, in short, the first step toward postmodernism.


André Breton: Surrealism 

André Breton in 1924

Most often associated with Salvador Dalì, the great commercializer of surrealism, the movement has its intellectual roots in Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto," from which he quotes in these excerpts from What Is Surrealism? (1934). Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry, and during his reading of Freud had experimented with "automatic writing" as a means of gaining access to the unconscious mind. Surrealism then became a kind of portal to what Breton calls "the superior reality of certain forms of association" manifested in "the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought." 

Breton claims to find surrealist elements in Dante and Shakespeare and lists a number of precursors and contemporaries, including Jonathan Swift ("surrealist in malice"), Charles Baudelaire ("surrealist in morals"), Lewis Carroll ("surrealist in nonsense"), Georges Seurat ("surrealist in design") and Pablo Picasso ("surrealist in cubism").  Surrealism is not subject "to processes of filtering"; instead, surrealists are "content to be silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace," and therefore "we are perhaps serving a yet much noble cause." 

He gives Freud credit for awakening interest in and awareness of the processes of the unconscious, "an aspect of mental life -- to my belief by far the most important -- with which it was supposed that we no longer had any concern." Hence, "The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights." Freud's greatest achievement was that he gave scientific credibility and utility to the imaginative life and its reflection in art. 

The Manfesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach.

Surrealism is a way of "securing expression in all its purity and force." It places surreality on the same plane as reality, "neither superior not exterior to it." 

Breton acknowledges that Dadaism, as enunciated by Tzara, "although claiming until 1930 no connection with surrealism, is in perfect accord with" it. Indeed, surrealism, as Breton sees it, can claim kin to "several thought-movements." But unlike Tzara, Breton has "social action" in mind: "we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non of the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian Revolution." Surrealism, he says, "undertakes particularly the critical investigation of the notions of reality and unreality, of reason and unreason, of reflection and fimpulse, of knowing and 'fatal' ignorance, of utility and uselessness" -- it is consequently, like "Historical Materialism,' dialectical in nature.

I really cannot see, pace a few muddle-headed revolutionaries, why we should abstain from taking up the problems of love, of dreaming, of madness, of art and of religion, so long as we consider these problems from the same angle as they, and we too, consider Revolution.

But the "muddle-headed revolutionaries" succeeded in kicking Breton out of the Communist Party. 

Breton is most sanguine about the influence of surrealism on literature:

The hordes of words which were literally unleashed and to which Dada and surrealism deliberately opened their doors, ... will penetrate, at leisure, but certainly, the idiotic little towns of that literature which is still taught and, easily failing to distinguish between low and lofty quarterings, they will capture a fine number of turrets.... There is a pretence that it has not been noticed how much the logical mechanism of the sentence is proving more and more impotent by itself to give man the emotive shock which really gives some value to his life.

Surrealism, Breton says, is the "excessively prehensile tail" of Romanticism. 


He's not uncritical of some of the published pieces of surrealist "automatic writing":  "The presence of in these items of an evident pattern has ... greatly hampered the species of conversion we had hoped to bring about through them." Such writing has to be "as much as possible detracted from the will to express" and "lightened of ideas of responsibility." If so, "they allow of a general reclassification of lyrical values" and "offer a key to go on opening indefinitely that box of never-ending drawers which is called man." The aim is not "to produce works of art, but to light up the unrevealed and yet revealable part of our being in which all the beauty, all the love and all the virtue with which we scarcely credit ourselves are shining intensely." 


In short, surrealism will put an end to "the provoking insanities of 'realism'."

26. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 559-580

The Unconscious: The Freudian Unconscious (Sigmund Freud)

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Sigmund Freud: The Structure of the Unconscious

Of the great transformative modern thinkers, Darwin revolutionized biological science and Marx politics and economics, but Freud probably had the greatest impact on the way ordinary people think about themselves. Even though Freudian analysis, his theories of the way the mind works, and the validity of his claim to be a scientist are in some disrepute today, we no longer think about mental illness and sexuality and the fundamental needs and desires of human beings the way the nineteenth century did.

Sigmund Freud in 1921

In these excerpts from An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud presents the basics from which all the rest of his theories flow, starting with the premise that consciousness is actually a dynamic process in which the preconscious and the unconscious participate. He asserts that "consciousness is in general a very highly fugitive condition. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment." There is a transitional state between the unconscious that is "better described as 'capable of entering consciousness,' or as preconscious."

What is preconscious becomes conscious ... without any activity on our part; what is unconscious can, as a result of our efforts, be made conscious, though in the process we may have an impression that we are overcoming what are often very strong resistances.

Underlying everything in the human experience is the primitive force Freud calls the id, which "knows no values, no good and evil, no morality." The ego's role is to mediate between the external world and the id, which is what consciousness is for.

This relation to the external world is decisive for the ego. The ego has taken over the task of representing the external world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id, blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces, could not otherwise escape annihilation.

So the ego "interpolates between desire and action the procrastinating factor of thought, during which it makes uses of the residues of experience stored up in memory." It substitutes "the reality principle" for "the pleasure principle." Freud has created here a lovely little morality play, but not an original one. Schopenhauer made much the same observation when he spoke of the ways in which the individual has to modify the activity of the will, by teaching it "that it erred in the means it employed and can therefore bring it about that the end after which it strives ... shall be pursued on an entirely different path and in an entirely different object from what has hitherto been the case."

Freud's diagram of the relationship of id, ego, and superego. The area labeled "pcpt-cs" is the "perceptual-conscious system" -- the interface with the external world. Although this egg- or eyeball-shaped image was reproduced in Freud's work, he insisted that the area given over to the id should be represented as much larger, giving rise to some diagrams that present the theory as an iceberg, with only the tip poking into the area of consciousness and the vastness of the id under the surface deep into the unconscious.

What Freud adds to this process of modifying the will is the creation of the "superego" and his theory of repression, in which the ego is also forced to deal not only with the id and with the external world, but also with the behavioral norms imposed on it by the superego. The ego thus has "three harsh masters, and has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three." If it goes too far in one direction, allowing the id to fulfill its rampaging desires, the result is self-destruction: The id is like the mouse that attacks the tiger. If it goes too far in subservience to the superego, clamping down on the boiling kettle that is the id, repressing its desires instead of finding ways for it to let off steam, the result is explosion.

When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the external world, normal anxiety in face of the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the passions in the id. 

So this is the task of psychoanalysis: "to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organisation so that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall ego be."

Sigmund Freud: The Instincts

In these excerpts from the Outline and from Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud presents two primal instincts arising from the id: libido (which he sometimes calls Eros) and the death instinct. They are "the ultimate cause of all activity," he says, even though they are opposing force:

The aim of the first of these basic instinct is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus -- in short, to bind together; the aim of the second, on the contrary, is to undo connections and so to destroy things. We may suppose that the final aim of the destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state. For this reason we also call it the death instinct.... In biological functions the two basic instincts work against each other or combine with each other. Thus, the act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression having as its purpose the most intimate union.... A surplus of sexual aggressiveness will change a lover into a sexual murderer, while a sharp diminution in the aggressive factor will lead to shyness or impotence. 

Yes, that last sentence is the basis for innumerable disagreements with Freud, as well as many well-meaning misinterpretations. For he follows it up by asserting, "The holding back of aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness." The jury is still out on that one.

And then there's the distinction between sex and love: "It is only when someone is completely in love that the main quantity of libido is transferred on to the object and the object to some extent takes the place of ego." Freud seems to feel no compunction to define "love" here, which only muddies the statement. Elsewhere he ventures into more specifics, allowing that "love" takes many forms, some of which are seemingly non-sexual: "self love, ... love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. But he asserts that all of these "are an expression of the same instinctual impulses," and that "sexual union" is the primary expression of the impulses, whereas "in other circumstances they are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longing for proximity, and self-sacrifice)."

The key thing to remember here is that Freud is aiming for an acceptance of sex as a perfectly natural and acceptable function. "I cannot see any merit in being ashamed of sex." Even so, it's quite a leap to identify sexual intercourse and, say, love of one's country as manifestations of the same instinct.

The instincts, Freud argues, are essentially conservative: "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things." Freud was much influenced by the nineteenth-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel's theory, famously encapsulated in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- the idea that in the embryonic state, an organism reveals "the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung."

G.J. Romanes's 1892 copy of Ernst Haeckel's drawings of embryos

Haeckel's theory is generally rejected today, but Freud made much of it, arguing that "Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism's life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition." And the primary instinct of the organism, he argues, is "to return to the inanimate state." Life, Freud argues, wants to remain simple: "It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads."

Freud even argues that such contrary impulses as "self-preservation" and "self-assertion ... are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself.... What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death."

The sexual instincts arise from the production of the "germ-cells" (i.e., sperm and egg), which are themselves "earlier states of living substance." These instincts "watch over the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual."

They are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm.

Freud moves well beyond science here. He is riding a theory. Or is it riding him?

The evolution of species, then, is a kind of accidental thwarting of the conservatism of the death instinct: "There is unquestionably no universal instinct towards higher development observable in the animal or plant world, even though it is undeniable that development does in fact occur in that direction." As for human process, "What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.... The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free -- though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal."


Sigmund Freud: The Theory of Dreams

Freud starts with "the unsatisfied repressed impulses, which are ready to seize on any opportunity for expression." And one opportunity exists when consciousness falls asleep.

We can, indeed, have no doubt about this: the unconscious impulse is the real creator of the dream, it provides the psychic energy required for its formation. Just like any other instinctual impulse it can do no other than seek its own satisfaction, and our experience in dream-interpretation shows us, moreover, that this is the meaning of all dreaming. In every dream an instinctual wish is displayed as fulfilled.

Eventually, however, Freud has to deal with some substantial objections to this theory of dream as wish-fulfillment. For one thing: nightmares, particularly "the fact that people who have had severe shocks or who have gone through serious psychic traumas ... are continually being put back into the traumatic situation in dreams." And here Freud cops out: In these cases, the dream has failed, it is only "an attempted wish-fulfillment" in which the "dream-work, which endeavours to change the memory traces of the traumatic event into a wish-fulfillment, fails to operate."


Sigmund Freud: The Oedipus Complex

Probably the most famous Freudian theory of all, the Oedipus complex was discussed in the General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916).  In fact, Freud almost credits Sophocles with discovering psychoanalysis: "The Attic poet's work portrays the gradual discovery of the deed of Oedipus, long since accomplished, and brings it slowly to light by skilfully prolonged enquiry, constantly fed by new evidence; it has thus a certain resemblance to the course of a psycho-analysis." On the other hand, "it is an immoral play: it sets aside the individual's responsibility to social law, and displays divine forces ordaining the crime and rendering powerless the moral instincts of the human being which would guard him against the crime."

Freud credits the Oedipus complex with being "one of the most important sources of the sense of guilt which so often torments neurotic people." And in fact, referring to his 1913 Totem and Tabu, he suggests "that perhaps the sense of guilt of mankind as a whole, which is the ultimate source of religion and morality, was acquired in the beginnings of history through the Oedipus complex." Does Freud overemphasize the role of guilt here? Or has he so altered our concept of guilt that we now downplay its significance?

The central crime in the Oedipus story for Freud is not the murder of the father but the copulation with the mother, the incest, for he devotes the bulk of his attention to it:

The first choice of object in mankind is regularly an incestuous one, directed to the mother and sister of men, and the most stringent prohibitions are required to prevent the sustained infantile tendency from being carried into effect. 

We tend to forget how shocking the very idea of infantile sexuality was to Freud's earliest readers. All previous Western culture had seemed to proclaim the innocence of childhood until he began to explore the human instincts. But most of all, the idea that sexual instinct was "normal" even in children, unsettled the imagination:

since all men and not only neurotic persons have perverse, incestuous, and murderous dreams ... we may infer that those who are normal to-day have also made the passage through the perversions and the object-investments of the Oedipus complex; and that this is the path of normal development; only that neurotics show in a magnified and exaggerated form what we also find revealed in the dream-analyses of normal people. 

"Normal people?" I don't think I know any.