# Freud’s Case Against “Bad Blood”

Speaker: Ken Gemes
Course: The Biology of Evil
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-freuds-case-against-bad-blood
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/ken-gemes-freuds-case-against-bad-blood/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoYNwrHof10

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

In this lecture, Ken Gemes examines Sigmund Freud's complex relationship with degeneration theory, the widely popular nineteenth-century framework that cast social and psychological deviance as signs of biological decline. Gemes argues that Freud ultimately rejected this Manichean worldview by universalizing the very traits degeneration theorists condemned. From the early trauma model and the seduction theory to the Oedipal complex and castration anxiety, Freud reframed perversion, neurosis, and homosexuality as features of ordinary human development rather than marks of hereditary corruption. The lecture traces Freud's intellectual biography from his work with Charcot and hysteria through his structural model of the mind, his controversial claims about women's moral development, and his late writings on anti-Semitism and religion. Gemes also explores Freud's essay on the uncanny and Julia Kristeva's related theory of hostility toward foreigners, drawing connections to Nietzsche's vision of health as a dynamic balance rather than the absence of illness.

## Introduction to Freud and Degeneration Theory

This is a lecture on Freud. Freud, again, is one of the heroes of this course, because in the end, we'll see that, deeply, he rejects the Manichean view that is central to degeneration theory. And interestingly enough, Freud was very aware of degeneration theory. He's writing at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century when degeneration was very, very popular. He was totally aware of it. He explicitly configured himself as rejecting it, but we'll see in very interesting ways how certain elements of degeneration theory nevertheless reappear in Freud.

Often when I'm teaching Freud, I often call him Fraud, Sigmund Fraud. Just a joke of mine. The reason I wanted to start with that is to say, look, Freud is not a genius. That's very clear. I find it super interesting. I don't believe a word of it. Now, let me explain by that.

Freud is what I call, and I come from a background in philosophy of science, of Bayesian confirmation theory, I call Freud epistemically infirm. What do I mean by that? Everything he says could be literally all true. I just don't see what the evidence is for it. I don't think it's been properly empirically tested. I'm not saying it's true. I'm not saying it's false. I'm saying it's utterly fascinating.

But remember, what we're looking at Freud is, is how he relates to degeneration theory so we can bracket whether his theories are really true or really false. I will say there are parts of his theories that I'm very, very sympathetic to, but we'll come to that later.

## Rejecting Degeneration Through Universalism

As I said, very briefly, Freud and his followers explicitly see him as rejecting degeneration theory, and this is a quote from a Freudian, Spiegel, he said, "Freud's introduction of psychoanalysis was intimately involved with a refutation of degenerationism." So yes, Spiegel is right, that Freud took himself as rejecting degeneration theory. Why is he rejecting degeneration theory? It's because he's telling a developmental story. When he's telling the story of illness, he says, "It's not that illness was something that one is inherited in one's blood or whatever, that one is, it's been passed down from generation to generation," as degenerationists thought.

He tells a development story. He says, "Look, the child develops in a certain way." There's this famous Oedipal stage, which we'll come to later, and it's how the child navigates the Oedipal that determines to what extent they're neurotic, psychotic or whatever. So in Freud's mind, he's saying, "Oh, those degenerationists, it's all inheritance from them, whereas I'm telling a developmental story. I can't be a degenerationist."

But the first thing to observe is, that's not quite right, because Morel, the founder of modern degeneration theory didn't always say it was hereditary. He said it can be factors in the environment, pollution, alcoholism, that leads one to be degenerate. He did say then that degeneration in this Lamarckian fashion was passed onto the next generation. It's also his non-commitment to degeneration theory is clouded by his talk about inherited dispositions. Freud often talks about inherited dispositions, and that sounds a lot like degeneration, and again, it sounds a lot like Morel.

And finally, we'll see that Freud tells a very interesting developmental story of woman, and also he tells an interesting, it's not a major story, but about the perseverance of the Jews, that is their survival over centuries, this problem of how did the Jews survive, which kind of recapitulates certain claims made by degenerationists about Jews and women. Basically, in a certain sense, Freud kind of gives a picture of Jews and women as atavistic, at least in terms of their moral development.

So where are his major deviations from degeneration theory? First of all, and this is, again, why Freud thought, "I'm not a degenerationist," because the degenerationists thought, "Well, there's us healthy norms and there are those degenerates," but Freud is a universalist. Freud is telling a picture about every human being. Every human being goes through the Oedipal.

And when he's talking about, for instance, hysterics, he says, "Part of the reason why I want to examine the hysteric, or the neurotic, is because they are a window into ourselves." Freud is implicitly saying the neurotic is like us, only more so. That is, the neurotic is a window into us. He makes clearer the elements that constitute us, because in him, or her, they're more visible.

Also, Freud, you can see basically, and I agree with him on this, that he's basically rejecting a Manichean account of illness, that illness is the result of pure pathogens, in favor of what I call the relational model, that he thinks illness basically arises of an imbalance of various constitutive forces of the human psyche.

I'm going to do... I know some of you will have no background in Freud at all, so I will do a little story about Freud's history. He was born on May 6th in 1856 in Fribourg, which is now part of Czechia. His family went to Vienna in 1860, where he would've been exposed a lot to the ideas of the philosopher Nietzsche and also Schopenhauer.

## Biographical Background and Early Career

Freud always denied that he knew anything about Nietzsche because he realized how much he overlapped with Nietzsche. There's an extremely boring turgid literature, which I would tell everyone to avoid, about how Freud stole from Nietzsche. That's a stupid base literature. Really what's interesting is to see how each genius' ideas can be seen as a development and how one genius' ideas can be used to illuminate another, but that's a sidebar.

He had medical studies between 1873 and '81 where he worked with a professor of comparative anatomy, Karl Kraus, and then with Ernest Broca, who was a professor of physiology and histology. I'm mentioning this to say he had a background in science, and he originally wanted to be a researcher in science. And in fact, he had to leave Broca's laboratory in 1882, which was a serious laboratory of histology, because Broca had to tell him, "Look, I've got two assistants and they're first off to get jobs. You've got no place here."

So then he joined a psychiatric department by a Professor Minot in 1883. In 1885, he got a traveling grant to visit this very famous French psychiatrist called Charcot.

## Charcot, Hypnosis, and Physical Symptoms

Charcot was very interested in the notion of hypnotism, and what's really important about Charcot is Charcot had the idea that you could treat certain things that seem to be physical, like paralysis, by hypnosis. Why is that important? Why is that important? Because it's treating it not as a physical pathology, but as a mental pathology. By changing your ideas, by changing your mind through hypnosis, we can alleviate these serious, serious physical symptoms.

And there were cases where he could actually produce, for instance, paralysis through hypnotic suggestion, so that cemented the idea that mental ideas can be the cause of physical symptoms. And it also demonstrated that non-conscious ideas, because the hypnotized person is not conscious, can have physical effects.

Charcot himself used diagnoses of degeneration to explain certain paralysis in certain points. In fact, he thought degeneration was the basis of hysteria, and in fact, hysteria was a form of degeneration.

## Studies in Hysteria and the Trauma Model

Freud then wrote some papers on hysteria following Charcot. They were very poorly received. And then in 1893, he produced this very important paper called *The Preliminary Communication*, where he says psychotherapy cures the hysterical symptoms by bringing the trauma to consciousness and discharging it through effects. He was actually using and developing the work of Charcot by trying to put patients under hypnosis, and then he claimed under hypnosis you could get them to recall previous events, and when they recalled the previous events, really what we today call a trauma, it would discharge the emotions associated with the trauma and then the symptoms would disappear.

In fact, in 1895, he published his first really important publication, he co-published it with this senior doctor who he was working with, Breuer, called *Studies in Hysteria*. And there he very famously said, "Hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences." So he'd have a patient like Anna O., his history of his patients is really funny and complicated. Her actual name is Bertha Pappenheim, and she later on became a famous suffragette, a campaigner for women's rights, and when she wrote about Freud's sessions, she said, "It was nothing like he said." It's kind of important, or interesting anyhow.

So she had various really strange symptoms. For one of her symptoms was a hydrophobia. That is, she'd claim she was thirsty, but then you'd give her a glass of water and she absolutely couldn't drink it. Well, creates a tension, and if, as a base in, I'd say, she can't drink water and she's thirsty, well they, if she can't drink water then she can't be thirsty, and if she's thirsty, it can't be, it shouldn't be that she can't drink water. They don't sit well together.

And he tells a story about why these symptoms appear, and what he says is basically there was some trauma that happened earlier on so that the notion of water becomes what he calls negatively cathected, that is has negative emotions attached to it. So what he recalls is he gets Anna O. under hypnosis to recall this event where one day she was a little girl and she was with her governess, and governess in Vienna at that time is a big figure of authority, and the governess was drinking a glass of water, but she also shared it with her little lapdog, and Anna O. was absolutely revolted by this and so she was revolted but she wasn't in a position, think about Nietzsche and ressentiment, she wasn't in a position to express her revulsion, so she repressed it. So then whenever she was presented with a glass of water, it unconsciously brought back this feeling of revulsion of the lapdog drinking the water, and hence, she couldn't drink the water.

So here was his model. His model was, as I said, hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. That is that she had a mini-trauma as he'll later on call it, as a child seeing this lapdog, and she didn't even remember the incident of the lapdog, but that made water negatively cathected. So even when she was thirsty and was given, and asked for a glass of water, she couldn't drink it. And when you think about it, seeing a lapdog drink water, how traumatic could that really be? So later on, he claims that actually there was a bigger trauma behind all of these traumas.

## The Seduction Theory and Its Abandonment

Basically the trauma was out of what we today would call sexual abuse. He says these people with these symptoms had had some kind of sexual abuse, usually at the hands of a male family member, remember his patients were nearly all female, and that was a real trauma. And you can think about it, that we can understand as being deeply traumatic, and he says what happened with these mini traumas, like saying the lapdog, is the energy that was repressed with this big trauma of actually being sexually abused gets redirected in a particular way by the mini trauma. So that is why merely recalling the lapdog doesn't really get rid of all symptoms. It just means that symptom goes, but a new symptom's for. Of course, the underlying trauma was there.

So he had this seduction theory. But after a while, he couldn't believe that just every patient he met had suffered sexual abuse. And so at a certain point, he wrote this letter to Wilhelm Fliess where he acknowledged that the seduction theory was unlikely. "I can't believe that every one of my patients had had sexual abuse." So what he started saying is, he started thinking, "Actually, I don't believe these seductions actually occurred." And he wrote this in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess saying, "I don't think there were actual seductions. What really were there were fantasies of seductions." So the actual trauma comes from the patient fantasizing that their father, their uncle, or whatever had had sex with them. And he famously says, "What counts is not physical reality, but psychical reality." And this is a very, very important move.

One of the reasons I wanted to mention the letter to Fliess is, earlier I mentioned that Freud had written about Weininger. Well, Fliess was the one. Otto Weininger of fame of the book *Sex and Character*, and it was in a letter to Fliess, I think it was where Freud said Weininger was brilliant but sexually deranged. And the thing is, Fliess was the one who thought he came up with the idea of the fundamental bisexuality of all people, which very influenced Freud, and that is exactly what Weininger published in his book. And Fliess was mad as hell at Freud because he thought Freud had leaked his idea to Weininger.

Anyhow, what's important in this movement from what, what is important is not actual physical reality. There were no seductions. Freud will admit to some child abuse, but it's not that all these patients had actual physical sexual abuse. Rather, they had fantasy, is the whole theory becomes a hell of a lot more untestable. If you're claiming there are actual seductions that have led to these symptoms, yeah, it might be hard to find, but it's something that's happening out there in the external world. But if you're now claiming actually it's childhood fantasies of being seduced, how do you produce that? So Freud with this move goes from the empirical testable to the less testable.

What Freud is going to go on to say in his series, he's going to say that we actually all go through what he called the Oedipal. The Oedipal is this development where originally we want the mother all to ourselves. The mother is a giver of nourishment. And we're very possessive as a child, but we see the father as a threat. And we are threatened by this father in a certain way.

## The Oedipal Complex and Psychosexual Development

And he says that is the beginning of a certain kind of trauma. That is the initial trauma, the fear of the father. And that becomes the basis of really of hysteria and neurotic symptoms.

I now want to go on to Freud on degeneration theory. In his first book, the one I mentioned before, *Studies in Hysteria* in 1894, Freud wrote about a case called Frau Emmi, and notes that phobias and abulias, which he means inhibitions of the will, quote, "Are regarded by the French school of psychiatrists as stigma of neurotic degeneracy. But in our case, they seem to have been adequately determined by traumatic experience." So now he's trying to make himself separate from the degenerate school. He's saying the French people who were influenced by Morell of degeneration theory, they think these symptoms are the result of an inherently weak nature basically. But I'm saying they're determined by individual's development, that the trauma of the Oedipal is behind it.

## Degeneration Theory in Freud's Early Writings

He says, "In carrying out this work, we must, of course, keep free from theoretical prejudice that we are dealing with abnormal brains of degenerates and unbalanced persons." So in studies of hysteria, he's configuring himself as a rejector of the notion of degeneracy. But it's interesting, even in some of his earlier works, for instance, the essay, The Hereditary and the Etiology of the Neurosis, a paper from 1896, just one year after *Studies in Hysteria*, he says, and I'll quote, it's a long quote, "In the pathogenesis of the major neurosis then, hereditary fulfills the role of a precondition, powerful in every case, and even indispensable in most cases. It could not do without the collaboration of the specific causes, but the importance of hereditary disposition is proved by the fact that the same specific causes acting on healthy individuals produce no manifest pathological effect, whereas in a predisposed person, their action causes the neurosis to come to light, whose development will be proportionate in intensity, and extent to the degree of hereditary precondition."

So what's going on here? Freud says every one of us go through the Oedipal. Every one of us as a very little child wants mommy to ourselves. Every one of us sees daddy as this threatening rival for mom's affection. But many of us go through all that and we don't develop neuroses. But other people do.

And what he's doing in this passage, he says, "Well, why do other people not handle this situation well? It's because they have a predisposition." That's pure degeneration theory. So while in his mind he's an enemy of degeneration theory, you see an enemy of degeneration theory, you see elements of it reappearing where he's saying certain people have a predisposition of weakness which determines their bad handling of the Oedipal situation.

## Women as Polymorphously Perverse

And I'm going to highlight something else, but I think those of you who have been through this course will see this and see the echoes of Lombroso here. "It is an instructive fact that under the influence of seduction, children can become polymorphously perverse. In this respect, children behave in the same manner as an average, uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists." So again, like the degeneration, Freud is configuring the woman as a child.

I'll continue with the quotation. "Under the ordinary conditions, she may remain sexually normal, but if she is led on by a clever seducer, she will find every kind of perversion to her taste and will retain them as part of her sexual activities. Prostitutes exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile disposition, and considering the immense number of women who are prostitutes and who might be supposed to have an aptitude for prostitution without having become engaged in it, it becomes impossible not to recognize that the same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic."

So what's so interesting about this passage is he starts off echoing the degenerationist, saying the women are prone to polymorphous perversion, that they are like children, but then in the end he says that they are a window to all of us, that these perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic. So there he's going against the degenerationist. It's his universalism. He says the degenerates are not different in kind from us, they're different in degree, and the degenerates are a window into us. And he himself clocked this fact, that his universalism means he can't really be a degenerationist.

## Castration Anxiety and Homosexuality Explained

I said before, the Oedipal complex is basically this idea that Oedipus famously marries his mother. He doesn't mean to, but he unknowingly marries his mother and kills his father. But what Freud means by saying things, he thinks that's the desire of every child. And he uses the story of how one navigates the Oedipal to explain various psychoses and various hysterias.

Just to give you an example, I'm not saying I believe this at all, I'm just trying to get you the idea, is he says, look, there's a little child, he wants the mother all to himself, and there's the father, and the father is a big threatening figure. He's much stronger. He can't beat Dad. And he's scared of the father because he knows he's got these aggressive tendencies to the father. If he expresses it, father is a big guy, the big dick in the house, if you'll excuse the expression, who can do a lot of damage to little dick. By the way, this is all said in a male voice, which will become really important in a moment.

And so this is, for example, one of his explanations of homosexuality. He explains and he says, "Look, the child is scared of the father," and he's thinking, he's in a kind of the Victorian age where masturbation was often seen as a very bad thing, and often the child could be threatened, if you masturbate, we'll cut it off. And Freud says, of course, the child originally doesn't take this seriously. The threat might be from his mom, from the dad, from the governess, et cetera. But at some stage, all done in a male voice, the little male child sees a female. "Shit, they've really lost their penis." He doesn't think of the female as anatomically different. He thinks that that person has really lost a penis.

And that brings what he calls castration anxiety. And so what Freud says is, that castration anxiety can be handled in various ways, that you're so scared of the threat of castration that you don't just renounce your mother, you renounce all women. So that's one of his explanations, not saying I believe this for a second, I'm just retailing you the theory, for how men become homosexual. They renounced, under the threat of castration, they renounced all women.

## Introjection, the Super-Ego, and the Mind's Structure

Here's another expression, and this is a very, very important notion. Freud has introduced the notion of what we call introjection. What is introjection? Well, what Freud says is the child, having a very primitive mind, if it has a threat, it tries to domesticate the threat not as being by something outside there, but by bringing it inside as if it's inside me, I might have more control of it. It's a very primitive way of thinking, but the child has a primitive mind. So what Freud says is under the threat of severe castration anxiety, the child introjects the father. That is he makes the father part of himself, and this is what Freud calls a superego.

There's this model that Freud has of the mind, it's called the topological model. Freud says, "Originally, we have this thing called id, which is just a whole series of desires, of drives." Mainly he thinks of it as sexual drives. But at some point, we can't just be the agents of our drives because our drives are just pushing us to do things, oblivious of the reality around us. So part of that gets hived off into what he calls the ego. These are also called the reality principle.

So here are my drives, it's later on he calls it the id. These are the deep drives I'm born with. Aggressive drive, sexual drives. He emphasizes a hell of a lot the sexual drives. And then part of it gets hived off the ego. The ego is a reality principle. Like I've got this drive to possess my mother for myself. That comes from the id. But I've got an ego that tells me it's a reality principle, it's to deal with my perception of the world. It tells me, that guy there, my dad, he's a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than me, so I need to control this desire of myself.

But you'll notice, that control I'm talking about is what we call prudential. The ego is telling you, "Don't act on this." Not because it's wrong for you to have these desires, it's because if you act on these desires, it's not gonna have the outcome you want. You're not gonna get mum to yourself. Your dad is gonna do this, that, and the other to you. Hell, he might even castrate you. Think about Greek mythology with Zeus and Cronus and castration stories. Also very relevant to Freud who was very well-versed in mythology.

But what I want you to see is, the ego is prudential. It sees reality and then it stops you acting on the id because it says, "This is not the prudent thing to do." But then he says the primitive child's mind, in trying to deal with the father, does this strange thing where it introjects it. It brings the father into itself. And there, it's a totally different logic. Then the logic becomes really what Nietzsche would call early, called early a moralic acid.

By what that means is, you don't just say, "I'm not gonna act on these desires because it would be imprudent for me to say. I am wrong to have these desires in the first place." This is what Freud calls the super-ego. And it's your super-ego, which is really the internalization of your parental figures, that tells you, "It is wrong for me to have these desires in the first place." And so there's this, for Freud, the super-ego is the foundation of all our morality.

## Women's Moral Development and the Weaker Super-Ego

Crucial point for us. And Freud is explicit about this. He wrote an essay which a hell of a lot of people in Freud never, ever read. People know about Freud and his alleged misogyny, where Freud says actually the little girl becomes jealous of her brother's penis and penis envy and all that. But those who've gone about Freud's alleged misogyny often don't read this essay, and this essay is much more important than penis envy, a very debatable notion.

There are two essays, female sexuality, but the main one I really want to quote from is "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes." I'll read from it and then analyze it. "I cannot evade the notion, though I hesitate to give it expression, that for women, the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in man. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so personal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in man. Character traits, which critics of every epoch..." Let's think of all the degenerationists we've mentioned. "Character traits, which critics of every epoch have brought up against woman, that they show less of a sense of justice than man, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced by the judgments, by feelings of affection and hostility. All these would be amply accounted for by the modification of the formation of their super-ego, which we have inferred above. We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force on us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth."

So what is going on here? Think about the story I just told about the Oedipal. What gets you to introject your father, to have this voice telling you, "It's wrong for me to do this, it's wrong for me to do this," this moral, disapproving voice. It's your fear of the castrating father. How strong is the fear of a castrating father going to be on a female? To put it bluntly, she's got nothing to lose.

So Freud's point here is that females don't have such strong castration fears as boys, for an obvious reason. And because they don't have such castration fear, they don't fully introject the father, or they introject the parents, and it's the introjection of the father in particular, the parents, that leads to the super-ego, and the super-ego for Freud is the basis of our feelings of morals. It's the one that gives us moral prohibition.

So what's going on here? Freud is giving a developmental account that leads to the same conclusion as the degenerationist, that women are incapable of fully entering the world of morality. And in that sense, it's a recapitulation of one of their most basic notions.

## Moses and Monotheism: Freud on the Jews

I'm now going to say something very, very briefly about Freud on the Jews. Basically, the point I want you to clock is, remember we said, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? Well, Freud is giving an ontogenetic story of why women don't get to be fully moral. He says in their development, they get stuck at a certain stage. They don't fully form a super ego in their resolution of the Oedipal, and so they can't fully enter the world of morality. In some sense, they're atavistic.

Well, he tells the same story of Jews. His main work on the Jews is an essay from 1939 called *Moses and Monotheism*. And it's interesting. Listen, this was written in 1939 when horrible events are happening in Germany. Hitler was already in power. And remember, Freud himself was a Jew and he kind of apologized for writing this book.

And what he claims there is, the first thing we have to clock is he says there was only one creative Jewish genius, and that was Moses. And guess what? According to Freud, he got this from a book called Sellin, which is now in disrepute, but then it was hot stuff. Actually, even then, there were people who were criticizing it. He said, actually, Moses was in fact an Egyptian. So he takes away from the Jews, he says only one great creative Jew, and guess what? Not even a Jew. He was an Egyptian. So that's his first insult to the Jewish people.

He also makes a claim that he says Moses was an Egyptian, he's not a Jew, and in fact that there was an earlier Moses before Moses, and the Jews killed that Moses, but then they covered up the memory of it. Why that is important is he wants to say it's kind of, for him, a killing of a primal father. And he wants to say at least the Christians have made this further step than the Jews. The Jews, in talking about the killing of Christ, are really adverting to this killing of the primal father. It's what he calls a screen memory, whereas the Jews, in denying Christ, have not made this further step.

Anyhow, resonating with his claim that females, for the child's mind psychologically represent the castrated, he actually claims that anti-Semitism actually stems because we associate the Jew with the castrated. So he's giving an account of anti-Semitism. He says furthermore, this is in *Moses and Monotheism*, he says, "Further, among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression," we're coming to the uncanny next, "which is to explain, no doubt, by its recalling the dreaded castration." But, you see, he sees an affinity between Jews and women. Jews do not have a full, full penis, so they represent the castrated for him.

For Freud, anti-Semitism and misogyny have a common basis in that it is a projection of males' castration anxieties. Remember before I talked about introjection? You've got the external father who's very fearful. You're a little child, you can't deal with it, so you somehow bring the father into you and you make his voice your own voice. That's a superego.

## Projection Explains Anti-Semitism and Misogyny

Well, Freud also has this wonderful notion of projection. He says if you've got a particular fear, something, a part of yourself you don't like, you want to isolate it over there, so you project it onto others. Freud uses projection as an account of misogyny and anti-Semitism. He says there are parts of us we don't like, like we don't like this fear of castration, so we then project it over there to those Jews who are castrated and those women who were castrated in that they never had a penis.

So he claims actually there was this killing of the original father, the father who preceded Moses, but that has been covered up. This is the part of Freud that is really, really doubtful. And a lot of his own followers told him, "Don't publish this stuff." He said we have a primal repressed memory of the killing of the original Moses, the original father.

And he actually says he realizes that this is not sanctioned by modern evolutionary theory, and he says in *Moses and Monotheism*, "My position, no doubt, is made more difficult by the present attitude of biological science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters by succeeding generations. I must, however, in all modesty, confess that nevertheless, I cannot do without this factor in biological evolution." What he claims is there was this original killing of the Ur-Moses, and somehow that memory has been passed on from generation to generation.

And so at the end of the essay, he configures the Jews as atavistic because they deny this memory. He says, "A special inquiry would be called for to discover why it has been impossible for the Jews to join in this forward step which was implied, in spite of all of its distortions, by the admission of having murdered God." Because the Christians admit that God in the form of Jesus was killed. And for Freud, that's just a screen memory of the original killing of the original Moses. "In a certain sense, they have, in that way, taken a tragic load of guilt upon themselves. They've been made to pay a heavy penance for it."

So basically, what Freud is saying is the Jews are atavistic. Christianity represents a progress. And I think it's a deep point about Freud. Freud doesn't say this explicitly, but it's implicit there. For Freud, the deepest way to remember something is to repress and forget it, because if you remember it, you, in some sense, release it. Remember his theory of abreaction.

But the Jews, by being so deeply repressive, they don't in any way acknowledge the killing of the totem father through the killing of Jesus. They have the deepest form of deep memory that comes through repression.

There's a very well-known book called *The Language of Psychoanalysis* by Laplanche and Pontalis, which tries to explain all these terms like introjection, oedipal complex, projection, and here I'll give you what they say about introjection. "This is the process revealed by analytic investigation. In fantasy, the subject transposes objects and their inherent qualities from the outside to the inside of himself."

Well, the opposite of introjection is Freud's notion of projection, and I will read again from the same book, *The Language of Psychoanalysis*. "In the properly psychoanalytic sense, projection is the operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, or even objects which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing."

## Schreber, Introjection, and Projection

Projection is the reverse of introjection, where introjection involves taking a threatening external object, for instance, the father. Projection involves expelling a threatening internal object. I'll give you one example. Freud tells a story of this incredible judge called Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote this unbelievably good book, fascinating book called *Memoirs of My Nervous Illness*. Schreber was actually alive around when Freud was. Freud never met him. He could have met him, but he gave a psychoanalytic description of Schreber.

It's just a great case. You should read Freud's Schreber case, but even better, you should read Schreber himself. It's just riotous. Actually, I'll read you some from Schreber, some of the stuff that Schreber says in his *Memoirs of My Nervous Illness*. "The phrase Prince of Hell was probably meant to convey the uncanny power inimical to God that could develop from moral decay among mankind, or the general spread of nervous over-excitation and the consequence of over-civilization." If you've been doing this course, you'll see that Schreber was obviously influenced by degeneration theory, but the reason I want to mention Schreber is, Schreber has a wonderful case in Freud's analysis of both introjection and projection.

Schreber was this judge. He was senate president, like a high court judge in Germany, and apparently one day, and he writes this in his *Memoirs of My Nervous Illness*. He one day writes, he says, he wakes up in the morning: "I woke up in the morning once, and I thought, after all, wouldn't it be nice to be a female submitting to the act of copulation?" But then he represses this thought because that's a very inappropriate thought for a judge to have. Anyhow, Freud's analysis of the case is that Schreber is actually a repressed homosexual. Why? Because Schreber actually had a very strong oedipal relation with his father, and he was so scared of his father that he introjected his father, which made him renounce all female objects.

Remember, that was Freud's account of one of the geneses of homosexuality, that if you handle the oedipal relation in an extreme way, you don't just give up your mum, you give up all women because that's a province of your father. So extreme introjection of the father can lead to homosexuality. But then the thing is, Schreber got these absolutely psychotic ideas. He had this idea that God is sending these rays and making his body more voluptuous. He felt he was developing breasts. He said, "Sometimes I developed breasts, and then they would disappear overnight."

It's really crazy and fun stuff. He says God was, he said, "God was actually turning him into a female, so that God could then copulate with him and produce a new race." It's completely crazy stuff, and Schreber ended up in an asylum in a very, the case is just absolutely fascinating. But for our purposes, what I want you to get out of Schreber is, it's a two-step according to Freud. First, there's introjection of the father, but then, "I'm a senate president. I can't be desiring to have sex with males."

So then he projects it onto God, "It's not me who desires to be a female. It's God who desires me to be a female." There's parts of him he cannot accept, his desire to have sex with men, so he projects it onto God. A part of you that you cannot accept, he said, "It's not really my desire. It's God's desire," that is called projection. It's a nice little two-step. Schreber was a total paranoid. At the end of this essay, if there's time, I'll read to you from Schreber. Now, there's a Freudian,

## Kristeva's Theory of Hostility to Foreigners

A post-Freudian scholar, Julia Kristeva, she's a very mixed figure for me. Some of what she writes is really interesting and suggestive, and some of it I find very, very implausible. But she wrote a book called *Strangers to Ourselves*. Now, if you've been clocking everything that's been going on, you'll know that was borrowed from Freud, sorry, that was borrowed from Nietzsche, who said of his readers that you are strangers to yourselves, a very important notion to Nietzsche, that is, you think you know who you are. You think you've got this Christian morality. "You think you're separate from the Jews," says Nietzsche, but you actually, in your Christian morality are just a Jew only thrice more.

Well, she has this book, *Strangers to Ourselves*, and she extends it, and this is what she says. She says, because she uses the notion, she's very interested in Freudian notions of interjection and projection, "In the fascinated rejection that the foreigner arouses in us, there is a share of uncanny estrangement in the sense of depersonalization" that Freud discovered in it, "which takes up again our infantile desires and fears of the other," the other of death, the other of woman, the other of uncontrollable drives and desires. "The foreigner is within us, and when we flee from our struggles against the foreigner, we are infighting our unconscious, that improper facet of our impossible own and proper."

So what Kristeva basically is giving a projectivist account of anti-Semitism. In fact, a projectivist account of hostility to foreigners. She says, "Look, there are certain elements we might find in ourselves," like Schreber's desire for homosexual sex. It could be for us all kinds of sexual desires, et cetera. And we deal with it by projecting it onto others. Like we say, "Oh, if you've got some perverse desires," she might think, "Oh, all those foreigners, they're sexually perverse." It's a very common move. So she actually wants to claim a projective theory of hostility towards foreigners.

But the projective elements can be various. For instance, the projective elements can be our sexuality if it appears strange to us. Maybe we have some kind of perversions and we find that unacceptable. And the development of Kristeva's theory is that these projections, and we project it onto other figures. We project it onto Jews or we project it onto women. Basically, what Kristeva wants to say is we have a whole lot of hidden desires, desires we hide from ourselves, that is the desires of the unconscious.

And our super ego doesn't want to acknowledge these desires even because they would be seen as immoral. So we deal with them by projecting them onto others, and then our hostility towards ourselves, the parts of self that are driving us to do things, is projected onto other. So this is meant to explain why so many of the misogynistic and antisemitism tropes, we've seen deal with questions of language, how Jews misuse language, how they are indirect, also said of women, how they manipulate us. How can Jews or women actually have language at all? Jews only have debased jargon. Women are just like parrots. And we've said a lot talking about Jews as parrots.

Well, suppose we have an inchoate sense that we have desires that we are not fully conscious of, that we don't really understand what they mean. For a vivid example, consider a shoe fetishist who finds himself engaged in all kinds of various sexual activity which they don't really understand. Maybe I'll digress and explain Freud's account of how one becomes a fetishist. Remember I talked about castration anxiety? Well, here's Freud's account of fetishism. He says, "What happens is that," I'm not endorsing, I'm just explaining.

Here's his account of a fetishist. The young boy, it's done in a male voice, has this castration anxiety. He's being threatened. "If you play with that thing, I'll cut it off," said by his governess, his father, his mother, whoever. It doesn't really matter. And at one point, he sees a female. He said, "Shit, castration really exists. It could really, that wasn't an empty threat. It could really happen."

And he says sometimes the kid is so anxious, he's so in denial that he actually doesn't want to admit that there is anyone without a penis. So he finds an alternative object which he treats as a substitute penis. So maybe the last thing he saw before he saw the little girl, his sister, or his mother's vagina is her underwear or a shoe. And he becomes fixated on that as a replacement for the penis. Again, I'm not endorsing, I'm just explaining. So the fetishist finds a replacement object for the missing penis, and then becomes obsessed and gets sexually excited by that object, the shoe, the underwear, whatever.

The reason I told you that story is because what I want you to see is here the fetishist is speaking a language that he doesn't even understand. The fetishist, can you imagine this fetishist finding himself, maybe he can only ejaculate if a shoe is involved or women's underwear are involved or whatever. He's speaking a secret language which Freud maybe can decode but he can't. Well, that's a very, very threatening thing. You've got desires which really force you to do all kinds of stuff and you don't even understand them.

Well, what Kristeva adds using the Freudian notion of projection is we ourselves speak a language which we don't really understand, and so we have this hostility to parts of ourselves, and we find a way of projecting that hostility to others. No, the foreignness isn't really in me. It's in those people. It's that group over there, that nation, women, whatever. So she's got this projective theory of hostility to foreigners, which can also be used for hostility to Jews, for hostility to women.

Immorality, sexual perversion, subterfuge, manipulation, indirectness, concealment of meaning, difficulties of interpretation, perversions of language, these may be elements that we kind of incoherently realize are part of our own nature, that we are speaking a language which we don't understand. Remember how Luther was in a very earlier lecture, how upset he was about the Jews having knowing the secret meaning of the scriptures, and then he became scatologically mad and said all this craziness about them? So we deal with these feelings by projecting them onto others.

## Freud's Essay on the Uncanny

So both of this kind of projective analysis configures the Jew as something uncanny, because the basic notion of uncanny we'll be dealing with is something that's familiar but very strange. So women, well, they're familiar to us, they're all around us, but they become something strange because they now become the site of all these projected desires of ours which we project onto them. And the Jew is uncanny, well, he's circumcised which is uncanny, because the Jew is familiar, but he's got this strangeness. Well, the strangeness is he surreptitiously and unconsciously reminds us of our castration anxiety.

Now the funny thing about the uncanny, whose basic formulation, it has to be reformulated, is the uncanny is something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The uncanny, the essay, Freud's essay, *The Uncanny* is itself an example of the uncanny. Why is it an example of the uncanny? It's because it has this kind of, he never gets to the point. He seems like he's getting there and then he doesn't get there, and it's kind of stuttering. Stuttering, Freud says, is a kind of form of the uncanny. He has multiple attempts trying to come to say what he wants to say.

I'll give you another example of how it's uncanny. Freud himself claims not to have experienced the uncanny. He's talking about something which he's not really personally familiar, but then it's contradicted when later on in the essay he talks about reading a story which produced in him certain uncanny feelings. So the essay stutters and contradicts itself in a way, and all of that turns out to be exemplification of the certain uncanny elements. As we get on, you'll see how that's uncanny.

So Freud says firstly we should look at its history. We should look at its meaning, looking at dictionaries to get the historical development of the notion of the uncanny, and that's what happens in section one of the essay. And then he says, "First we'll look at these historical cases, we'll see what dictionaries say, and then we'll look at cases that arouse this feeling of uncanny, some things both familiar and strange at the same time." That's the emphasis of part two. And then he says in the introduction, his first preliminary result, "The uncanny is that class of frightening thing that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar."

Considering the uses of dictionaries, he says enigmatically, "We first turn to other languages, but the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new. Perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign." So there, that is the notion that Chris Daver runs, that we ourselves are speaking a foreign language. How can that be? I speak English. English is not a foreign language to me, but he says what he means is, we know that there's, in our mind, an unconscious which has a whole series of desires that aren't really deliberately available to us. They affect how we act. Think of the fetishist, the guy who finds himself doing all kinds of weird things with shoes. He doesn't really know what it means. So he speaks a language that is foreign to himself.

This strange and seemingly nonsensical aside about ourselves speaking a language that is foreign, Freud doesn't even explain it at all. So it raises the question, how can a language be foreign? Well, presumably he has in mind the notion that it's a language of our desires, since those desires are often not conscious and often they have hidden meanings.

He goes to Sanders' German dictionary where the German word, and this is actually really important, the German word for the uncanny, for the uncanny, it's a wonderful word. It's the word heimlich. Our word uncanny doesn't carry the same resonance. Heim is the German word for home. The word unheimlich includes the word heim. So unheimlich is a German word for uncanny, but it contains the notion of home.

And think about it, remember I said one characterization of the uncanny is that which is familiar and unfamiliar. But for Freud, home is something that is both familiar and safe, it's meant to be the world of, we consciously see it of the world of our protective nurturing parents. But home is also something very, very unfamiliar and strange, because it's the site of that Oedipal trauma that we went through that we have covered up and repressed and forgotten about. So heim is, in German you'd say zweideutig. You'd say in English ambiguous. It has two meanings. It's a meaning of that which is comfortable, it's where I'm safe, but it's also the site of my original trauma, where I went through the Oedipal.

Freud reports another meaning from the dictionary. This is again the word heimlich. He deals first with heimlich in

## Doubles, Automata, and Uncanny Opposites

In order to get to unheimlich, "heimlich" is that which is concealed, kept from sight so that others do not get to know it. The dictionary that he looks at goes on to say, "Note especially the negative, unheimlich, eerie, weird, and arousing gruesome fear. The uncanny is a name for ev-," and he's quoting Schelling, the philosopher, "The uncanny is a name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." Freud actually says heimlich, a word which we can't really, homely, maybe you'd say homely in English, has two meanings, what is familiar and agreeable and what is concealed and kept out of sight.

He concludes the first section, "The heimlich, let's call it homely, is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich." That is the word for uncanny. "Unheimlich is in some way or another a subspecies of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it alongside of Schelling's definition of the unheimlich as that which ought to be covered." Of course something that is itself its opposite, that itself is an uncanny notion.

For a good sense of this, I like to think of time travel books or movies where a character turns out to be its own parents. A film I can absolutely recommend, you should all go and see it, is the film *Predestination*. It's a great movie which involves someone going back in time and being both their parents in this case. There's something uncanny about that. Or consider movies such as *The Matrix* where there's an uncanny play between reality and its opposite, appearance, et cetera. Or films that elide the distinction between dreams and reality. All of those involve something and its opposite. "I think I'm in the real world, but the real world turns out to be a world of appearance."

Franz Kafka has a wonderful story called *The Burrow*, and the burrow is narrated by this rather very proud mole. He's made this very intricate burrow and it's got all these tunnels and it's got special keeps where he keeps food in case of it, and so if enemies come, he can go into the burrow. The burrow is basically a labyrinth and he says, "My enemies will become lost in the labyrinth, they'll never be able to get out and get destroyed." But then he suddenly reverses on himself, "What if me, in a panic, when I think there's an enemy there, run into the labyrinth and I get lost and maybe the burrow will be my own destruction?" So there's something uncanny about something that turns into its opposite.

I should re-mention, there's one last thing I'll re-mention, because it's got a lot to do with the themes of this course. Kafka writes a wonderful story called *The Report of the Academy*, and it's about this captured ape and this ape is captured by these people, the German people, and he figures out, "I've gotta get these captors on my side." So he actually learns to talk proper German, so his captors will teach him with a certain amount of decency. But really what Kafka is getting at, and a lot of readers of the story don't realize it, is because Kafka himself was a Jew, he's talking about the role of Jews in German society, because the Jews were seen as not speaking properly German, this just aping German, as Wagner made, as we saw earlier. And so he's saying, "We Jews are like apes, captured in German society and we have to convince them that we can speak German properly." So he's really reporting his own situation as a speaker and the situation of the Jews in the German-speaking world.

Let's go back to Freud. Freud is again stuttering and trying desperately to explain what the uncanny is and he goes to work by a theorist called Jentsch. Jentsch has taken a very good instance, meaning incidence of the account in canny, uncanny, "doubts whether an appropriate animate being is really alive, or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be an animate," and he refers to this connection to the impression made by wax figures ingeniously constructed as automata. "To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits and of manifestations of insanity because these excite in the spectator an impression of automatic mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity." So he's saying the idea of a doll or a puppet on a string is uncanny to us, it's uncanny to us because we see it, it's different, but we have a sense it's familiar. Maybe we're being pulled by forces we don't... Maybe we're really puppets on a string.

So, in conclusion, projection is an important notion presumably explaining some of the vitriol or it can be used to explain some of the vitriol of degeneration theory.

## Health as Balance: Freud Meets Nietzsche

That if we really believe that Freud's mechanism of projection works, we can think frightening and disturbing elements within oneself, fear about our own nature are projected onto a target group and then demonized. They're treated as foreign and locatable in something outside of us so we can feel some sense of control. So it's a convenient fantasy. And Freud configures both the Jew and the woman as uncanny and the uncanniness of the Jew and woman suggests a secret familiarity. In the degenerationalist literature they're often identified, Jews and women, with this hyper-perverse sexuality, with materiality, with lots of individuation. So it suggests that we, configured as males, are projecting our secret desires, our fears, onto them.

And Nietzsche specifically, with Jews, takes advantage of this uncanniness by telling his German audience that, "You Christians, who think you're different from the Jews, you are the Jews. We are strangers to ourselves." A message that Nietzsche says, "We do not have ears for." He says this in *The Genealogy of Morals*. He said, "Someone who actually reads my *Genealogy of Morals* and appreciate it, at the end they will say, 'What did I just hear now? What does that really mean? Moreover, who am I?'" So that tells you that Nietzsche is using uncanny displacement, making Jews stand for Christians or saying Christians are Jews, to make the uncanniness of our situation available to ourselves so that we can realize we are strangers to ourselves.

So recapitulating, Freud has a view of health that has resonance with that of Nietzsche. They both think that sickness comes from an imbalance between various elements. Freud says to be dominated entirely by the id, which I would argue he implicitly genders it as feminine, but that's a deep issue. If you're completely dominated by the id, then you lose sight of reality. That's what a psychotic does. A psychotic has a very poor reality principle. To be dominated by the ego, the super-ego, that is to be neurotic.

The super-ego is akin to what Nietzsche, for instance, calls the Apollonian. The Dionysian is akin to what Freud calls the id. Both of them want a balance between. Freud wants a balance between the ego, super-ego and id. Nietzsche wants a balance between, at least in *Birth and Tragedy*, Apollonian and Dionysian. The point for our case is they see health as a balance between the demands of these elements of us. Health is not a matter of finding some external contagion and isolating and eliminating it.

I want to end with that case of Schreber. I want to give some quotations from Schreber because I want to convince you to go to this book, *Reminiscences of my Mental Illness*, because it's such a riot. This is my absolute favorite quotation from Schreber because it's so utterly true. He says, "God doesn't know how to treat a living human being because he was accustomed to dealing only with corpses." It's a crazy idea, but there's something obviously true there. For me, that's a really great example of the uncanny.