I am in South Beach Miami for a conference all week, so there can only be sporadic blogging. Recently I wrote about Erich Fromm's theory on how the contradictions of modern and post-modern society lead to a totalitarian threat: the Escape from Freedom. But it is important to remember that Fromm was only elaborating on the theory of society developed earlier by Freud. To mark the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth this week the New York Times Magazine published an interesting article by Mark Edmundson: Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge. Edmundson writes about Freud's basic pessimism concerning modern society and poltics in the context of the rise of Hitler. Here he even speculates about an encounter between Freud and Hitler:
It is possible that Hitler and Freud actually encountered each other. Hitler spent some of the unhappiest years of his life in Vienna, just before the beginning of World War I. He had come to the great city with hope of becoming a major artist, but he was rejected from art school, not once but twice. In short order, he ran out of money and was reduced to sleeping in doorways and even to begging from time to time. If Hitler and Freud had passed each other on the streets of Vienna, after Freud's return from his highly successful 1909 trip to America, Freud would have seen a street rat, a rank denizen of the mob. (Freud was no populist.) Hitler would have seen a Viennese burgher (he despised the upper middle class) and probably would have identified Freud as a Jew as well. Hitler would perhaps have drawn back in shame at his threadbare overcoat and his broken shoes. Though he might, if things were bad enough, have extended his hand to beg. Whether Freud gave or not (he could well have; he was generally good-hearted) would have made no difference; the encounter would still have left young Adolf seething.
Freud recognized that that totalitarianism and the rise of the strong leader was an outcome of modern mass society as an artificial resolution of the necessary conflict between the primal urges of libido of the id and from the severity of the superego:
Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values. By promulgating one code — one fundamental way of being — he wipes away the differences between different people, with different codes and different values, which are a source of anxiety to the psyche. Now we all love the fatherland, believe in the folk, blame the Jews, have a grand imperial destiny. The tyrant is also, in his way, permissive. Where the original superego has prohibited violence and theft and destruction, the new superego, the leader, allows for it, albeit under prescribed circumstances. Freud's major insistence as a theorist of group behavior is on the centrality of the leader and the dynamics of his relation to the group. In this he sees himself as pressing beyond the thinking of predecessors like the French writer Gustave Le Bon, who, to Freud's way of thinking, overemphasized the determining power of the group mind. To Freud, crowds on their own can be dangerous, but they only constitute a long-term brutal threat when a certain sort of figure takes over the superego slot in ways that are both prohibitive and permissive.
The piece is a good tribute to Freud and reminder of the dangers of fundamentailism in all of its guises. Good time as well to revist Freud's concept of Thanatos - the death drive which opposes the life force of Eros - as certain leaders reconsider the Nuclear Option.
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