The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (12 page)

Psychoanalysis had been launched, famously, with
The Interpretation of Dreams
in 1900 and had had a mixed reception, frowned upon by the orthodox medical profession but securing a small, devoted and gradually expanding circle of followers that widened further when Freud and his disciple Carl Jung visited the United States in 1909. The dominant idea of
Dreams
was that, as one observer put it, in sleep the sentry guarding our unconscious is, as it were, off duty; and ideas and emotions that are normally kept buried are let loose, albeit in symbolic and disguised form.

By 1912, when the International Association of Psychoanalysis had surmounted its early problems and the first defections, the journal
Imago
came into existence. Founded by Hanns Sachs, a close friend of Freud and an early psychoanalyst, the journal was to be edited jointly by Freud himself and Otto Rank, a young Viennese psychoanalyst much influenced by Ibsen and Nietzsche. The name, Ronald Clark tells us, was taken from the title of a work by Carl Spitteler, a Swiss poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1919, in which the unconscious is shown both as affecting conscious action and stimulating the creative powers. But, significantly, the word “imago” also means the final form of an insect after metamorphosis, and the journal was intended to deal not just with any medical aspects of psychoanalysis but also with its transformation into a discipline that could confront also the non-medical possibilities that had emerged from them.
21

In the first issue, Freud stressed the need to extend the scope of psychoanalytic research to fields such as language, customs, religion and the law, mythology, aesthetics, literature, the history of art, and philology; folklore, criminology and moral theory were also to be included. And the journal’s ambitions grew still further with time—in the early thirties, Freud was writing that psychoanalysis could “become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilization and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.”

Imago
published the first of four essays representing Freud’s applica
tion of psychoanalysis to social and anthropological problems, and outlined nothing less than his view of how human society originated, in particular from where the religious beliefs of early man derive.
22
Totem and Taboo
was published in book form in 1913, though Freud had begun to air his views on religion a few years earlier. In 1907, he began his paper “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” as follows: “I am certainly not the first person to have been struck by the resemblance between what are called obsessive actions in sufferers from nervous afflictions and the observances by means of which believers give expression to their piety.” To him, he said, the resemblance seemed more than superficial, “so that an insight into the origin of neurotic ceremonial may embolden us to draw inferences by analogy about the psychological processes of religious life.”

All the same, Freud was careful at that point to stress the differences as much as the similarities between neurosis and religious practice, concluding that “obsessional neurosis presents a travesty, half-comic and half-tragic, of a private religion.” At the same time, he went on to say that, just as many patients were unaware of the unconscious reasons for carrying out their obsessional actions, many religious people were unaware of the motives that impelled them to religious practices. He drew a further parallel in saying that both obsessional neurotics and the pious are motivated by an unconscious sense of guilt, and this sense of guilt “has its source in certain early mental events, but it is constantly being revived by renewed temptations which arise whenever there is a contemporary provocation.”
23

Religion, like obsessional neurosis, he said, was based on a suppression of instinct. In the neurotic, the instinct suppressed was invariably sexual, and though that wasn’t quite so true of religion, that instinct was “usually not without a sexual component.” “Perhaps because of the admixture of sexual components, perhaps because of some general characteristics of the instincts, the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backsliding into sin is more common among pious people than among neurotics and . . . give[s] rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterparts in obsessional neurosis.” And he concluded: “In view of these similarities and analogies one might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the forma
tion of a religion, and to describe neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis.”
24

Although he had begun by trying to sugarcoat the pill he was administering, by the end of his paper Freud had concluded with a message that was bound to be as unpopular as it was controversial: that, in effect, religion was the manifestation of a form of—emotionally equivalent to—mental illness. In the following years he widened the attack. In 1910, in “Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” he went so far as to link secularization with an increase in neurosis. “You cannot exaggerate the intensity of man’s inner resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in the neuroses since the power of religion has waned may give you some indication of it.” As he was to say later, “Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of neurotic illness.”
25

Freud’s theory of faith was rooted in his theory of psychology. For him, the anxiety we feel as infants over our helplessness “is the fundamental feeling which impels a person toward religious faith.” As he put it in a paper on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910, “Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child’s long-drawn-out helplessness and need of help.” Freud discovered (if we set aside the criticisms for a moment) the profound effect of childhood experiences on adult emotional life, and he went on to argue that “many people are unable to surmount the fear of loss of [parental] love; they never become sufficiently independent of other people’s love and in this respect carry on their behavior as infants.” Freud thought that an efficacious religion “helps the believer master the regressive anxiety that is stirred up by developmental danger-situations when they recur in adult life and become traumas.” “The roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother.”
26

Social factors, unique to modernity, have reinforced this dependency. Childhood was extended by the abolition of child labor, while work could call fathers away from home for long periods. In addition, the breakdown of the extended family has tended to isolate the mother-child relationship. All this increases the dependency of the pre-oedipal child on the mother. Many find in religion what they once had in childhood.

Freud went on to say that religion actually contributes to the resolution of the Oedipus complex, thereby protecting believers from neurosis: this is why secularization has been such a painful process for so many people. The religious are unaware of the psychological origins of their religious loyalties. Religion, being in part a substitute for the parents, radiates love and security to the believer—without, however, the anxiety that is usually aroused by intense libidinal ties to the parents. Thus religion helps keep the lid on erotic and aggressive instincts, thereby benefiting society.

So far, Freud had equated religious feelings and behavior with neurotic behavior and symptoms, and had rooted religion in the psychodynamics of family life, in what has been called from the child’s viewpoint “the two-parent family love triangle.” Essentially, this subsumed religion as a subset phenomenon of psychology. In
Totem and Taboo
, which he began in the spring of 1911, Freud widened his horizons and sought the anthropological origins of religion in an evolutionary context. He surrounded himself, he told friends, with some “thick books” that he wasn’t really interested in, “since I already know the results.” He wrote his own book in the Tyrol, well aware of the reception it was likely to provoke—it was “the most daring enterprise I have ever ventured,” he told one friend, an attempt to “smuggle psychoanalysis into ethnopsychology,” as he told another.
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The book consisted of four essays: “The Horror of Incest,” “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,” “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought” and “The Return of Totemism in Childhood.” The fourth, which contains the nub of the argument, is of interest here. Freud’s hypothesis took as its starting point Darwin’s “primal horde,” by which Darwin meant little more than a small self-supporting group under the control of “the father,” who exercised absolute rule over other males in the group, retaining all the women for his own “use.” Freud argued that eventually the young men revolted, then murdered and consumed the father; and in atonement they forbade the slaughter of a totem animal (which substituted for the father). However, in order to prevent a recurrence of the original crime, under which ran rivalry for the women, marriage within the group was forbidden, as was killing. For Freud this neatly explained the only two crimes with which, he held, primitive society concerned itself—murder and incest.

From our perspective it doesn’t matter—for now, at least—that the anthropology on which Freud based his theories has been superseded, shown by more recent studies to have been off base by some distance, just as Bergson’s ideas about the evolution of the eye have been superseded. At the time, Freud’s attempts to marry psychology, anthropology and social institutions such as religion and art were seen as advances in the
synthesis
of knowledge, such a synthesis being itself regarded as evidence of advance. And Freud’s psycho-anthropological theories invited the view that religion was a natural phenomenon, that there was nothing “transcendental” about it, that it was to be understood ultimately in anthropological terms. Moreover, since Freud drew attention to the similarities between neurosis and religious practice, it followed that religion was to be regarded, not exactly as a pathological aspect of society (since he acknowledged that some people were helped by it), but certainly as
subordinate
to psychology as a way for humankind to understand itself.
28

The spread of psychoanalysis “beyond the couch,” as it were, as presaged in the first editorial of
Imago
and confirmed by
Totem and Taboo
, marked what we may call “the first psychological turn” of the modern era. By offering an explanation for religion, by reconceiving it in psychological terms, and by offering a technology—psychoanalysis—as a way to investigate, understand and resolve unconscious conflicts and pathologies, Freud offered a refuge for people who felt homeless after they had lost their faith.

Peter Gay has examined the early relationship between religion and psychoanalysis in
A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis
(1987), where he concludes that a believer could never have founded psychoanalysis, that it needed someone prepared to be iconoclastic, someone who viewed religion as a phenomenon to be studied, “rather than a promise to be prayed for or a supreme reality to worship.”
29
He shows convincingly that Freud resisted all attempts to draw parallels between religion and psychoanalysis. But Gay also makes clear that part of the appeal of psychoanalysis for many, in the early days as later, was the apparent fact that it was deterministic (in terms of the oedipal situation, above all) and yet provided later behavior with characteristics of “purpose,” “intention,” “aim.” Whether Freud liked it or not (and he stressed
that psychoanalysis was a science, based on “controlled experience” and susceptible to criticism), these other elements—individual variation and a deterministic teleology—gave it the elements of a substitute faith.

The unconscious—vague, in a sense mystical—became the secular equivalent of the soul. Throughout the twentieth century, as we shall repeatedly see, more and more people entered psychotherapy with what seemed at times religious zeal. And, as the years passed, they sought psychotherapy less and less as a treatment for neurosis and more for a sense of meaning in their lives. This is why Freud became the towering figure that he did—Auden’s “climate of opinion”—despite the legions of his critics.

4

Heaven: Not a Location but a Direction

“B
etween 1880 and 1930 one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world was enacted in Europe and America.” This is Robert Hughes in
The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change
. In explanation he added that, in the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers (and grandmothers, too, of course), “the visual arts had a kind of social importance they can no longer claim today.” This was not, he thought, a matter for self-congratulation, and he went on to list what has been lost: “Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”
1

THE MECHANICAL PARADISE

For Europeans in general, not just for the French, the master image, the structure that “seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together,” was the Eiffel Tower. The focal point of the Paris World’s Fair in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution, it was aptly described as the “cathedral of the machine age.”
2
One of the main celebrants of what Hughes called “the mechanical paradise” was Fernand Léger, whose work he saw as “a sustained confession of modernist hope”—hope, remember, being
one of the American pragmatists’ chief ingredients of modern living. Léger’s aim was to make images of the machine age that would transcend barriers of class and education, and be “clear, definite, pragmatic.” One of his greatest paintings,
Three Women
, has as its underlying theme the idea of society-as-a-machine: the composition is geometrically simplified—the women’s bodies, the surrounding furniture, the black cat on the sofa, are all formed of tubes and cones and barrels—even the waves in the women’s hair are metallic. For Léger, society-as-a-machine was a form of salvation, in that it could bring harmony and an end to cosmic loneliness after the death of God: “[W]e are offered a metaphor of human relationships working as smoothly as a clock, all passion sublimated, with the binding energy of desire transformed into rhythms of shape.”
3

This idea, that at the turn of the twentieth century art could be important in a way that is no longer possible (and we shall be exploring why this is so), is only half the picture. The other half, from the viewpoint of this book at least, may be found in the work of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, of whom it has been well said that “the unit of meaning in his plays is the immediate crisis in the individual soul.”
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The crucial word here is “immediate.” Strindberg went through life “afraid and hurrying” and ridden with guilt, forever reaching out for what it is not in the power of life to grant, his “metaphysical hunger” causing him at one point or another to occupy every position between believer and atheist and back again.

If we are to fully appreciate the cultural world that existed in the wake of Nietzsche’s pronouncements, then we have to allow for these two factors: that at the time art—drama, poetry, painting, the novel—held real promise for making a difference and showing the way forward; and second, that many were convinced the crisis was new, immediate and fundamental, that civilized life was on the edge of an abyss, an abyss that we may not feel as sharply now. The predicament was summed up by H. G. Wells, who, in
The Outline of History
(1920), described history as “a race between education and catastrophe.”

•   •   •

The dominant artistic vehicle of the middle decades of the nineteenth century was the novel, while poetry, drama and the short story were relatively neglected. All three re-emerged in the 1880s and ’90s, coinciding neatly with
Nietzsche’s interventions. This chapter is concerned with drama, which, like painting, possessed an urgency then that it does not quite have now.
5

“The most important event in the history of modern drama,” Kenneth Muir tells us, “was Ibsen’s abandonment of verse after
Peer Gynt
in order to write prose plays about contemporary problems.”
6
In fact, it could be argued that although Ibsen did indeed tackle a number of social problems that disfigured the late nineteenth century, all of which he claimed he had “lived through,” and that are still with us—the role of women in society (
A Doll’s House
), the conflict across the generation gap (
The Master Builder
), the clash between individual liberty and institutionalized authority (
Rosmersholm
), the menace of pollution in a world of material and commercial values (
An Enemy of the People
)—in all of his later plays the dominant theme is the protagonist’s search for a moral order
within
him- or herself, to counter the “cosmic emptiness” and the chaos around him or her.
7

For this Ibsen there is no order and no God—except insofar as his characters conceive of him. “Ibsen’s centrality to the moral intelligence of the late nineteenth century is derived from Hegel, nothing less than the redemption of man’s alienation from himself and from nature by rediscovering ‘the total human spirit within the conditions of the Present.’”
8
His later plays are inevitably dramas of “spiritual distress,” describing his characters’ search for consolation in the shadow of death and their attempts to manufacture some form of Paradise in the here and now. “Redemption from cosmic nothingness, from meaninglessness—this is the nature of the Romantic quest which Ibsen’s people share with those of Byron and Stendhal.”
9

For many years, Ibsen’s work was known only in Scandinavia; in the 1890s, however, by which time he was already into his sixties, he suddenly came to the attention of all Europe with the release of
Ghosts
. From then on a new Ibsen play was an international event. “Never before had a dramatic author so dominated the European theatre or so monopolized public debate.”
10

FLASHES OF SPIRITUAL VALUE

Hardly any of the main characters in Ibsen’s later plays fail to conduct themselves on the basis of a
deus absconditus
(a hidden God) or lead lives
that are not governed by that awareness. These characters are either pagan acolytes of Dionysus or self-declared apostates, defrocked priests or freethinkers; they are atheist rebels or agnostics. In
Hedda Gabler
, Hedda dreams of being a free spirit, “irradiated by the orgiastic religion of ancient Greece,” living like a deity herself, albeit surrounded by the paraphernalia of a bourgeois existence. In
The Master Builder
, Bygmester Solness brandishes his clenched fist at a deity who allows the pointless deaths of young children, so that Solness abandons himself to a new religion of secular humanism. And in
Little Eyolf
, Alfred Allmers, “the self-styled atheist,” first devotes himself to a “tremendous existential undertaking,” a huge book called
Human Responsibility
. “In many ways,” says Errol Durbach, “Allmer’s predicament seems the paradigm of the romantic dilemma in Ibsen’s drama, which, to state in its simplest and crudest terms, is to be trapped between a traumatic sense of existence as process, change and death in a world devoid of consistent value, and a longing for a lost world of static hierarchies where death has no dominion. And in order to resolve this dilemma, the atheist/agnostic/apostate will fashion out of the raw material of existence his analogue of that lost Eden—a symbolic Paradise which promises eternal life, and which he seeks to possess, not as
metaphor
but as
fact.
”
11

Five of the later plays,
Hedda Gabler
,
The Master Builder
,
Little Eyolf
,
John Gabriel Borkman
and
When We Dead Awaken
, hang together in that their overall theme is a search for a dimension of human existence that is “forever exempt from the laws of change.”
12
This is highlighted and countered in the plays not just by the lurking presence of death (often in the form of terminal illness—syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer) but also in the fact that those who die are the last of their line: this is not just death, but extinction.
13
In a famous article, “Symbols of Eternity: The Victorian Escape from Time,” Jerome Buckley grouped Ibsen with Coleridge, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Pater and William Morris in their attempts to “fashion worlds of artifice beyond the reach of change.” We see these “symbols of eternity” in Ibsen in, for example, the paradise/kingdom of Orangia/Appelsinia in
The Master Builder
, in Hedda’s ancient Greek paganism, in Borkman’s mine, in Allmer’s search for the unchanging dimension of human responsibility in his great book.

What Ibsen’s plays explore are the pain and the tragedy almost inevitably involved in trying to create something of lasting value amid the flux and ceaseless flow of change, the experimental nature of life and reality. That said, his work is guardedly optimistic in its attempt to provide constructive responses to our new predicament, outlined by Nietzsche. “[His work] celebrates joy in the jaws of death, sees in the law of change not decay but continuous transformation of the self, that re-establishes value in an empty world by accepting responsibility for one’s actions and decisions, and that creates meaning in the void where none existed.”
14

Hedda Gabler
poses the problem. Hedda has a complex inner life and longs to be “more” than she is—her bourgeois surroundings do not fulfill her and she aches for a classical world, a culture of higher purposes, of beauty and timeless myth, where she can feel “upward momentum.” She becomes a “virtuoso of the eccentric,” which helps maintain her feeling of being among the spiritually elect. It is her aim in the play to redeem Løvborg from his wife, who has changed him from being a bohemian into a respectable and abstemious academic. But when he dies in an unseemly scuffle with a prostitute, an ugly accident in a brothel, she realizes that the only way out for her, the only way to impose order—and yes, beauty—on her predicament, is to assert herself by means of her own death in a manner denied Løvborg.

The other later plays are not so uncompromisingly bleak. Salvation, for Ibsen, is not to be achieved in any teleological sense, or by directing ourselves to any God-given “final cause,” but by ethical actions whereby our ideals are reconciled with “workable human realities”; life is small, and has its ordinary elements—oh, yes—but we must search for dignity where we can find it among those small, mundane lineaments, knowing that the most we can hope for is “flashes of spiritual value” and that they compose life’s larger purposes.

If this view of flashes of spiritual value overlaps with Santayana’s philosophy, Ibsen’s idea about “cosmologies of two” overlaps with D. H. Lawrence (considered later) when he says, “We lack peace because we are not whole. And we are not whole because we have known only a tithe of the vital relationships we might have had. We live in an age which believes in stripping away the relationships. Strip them away, like an onion, till you come to
pure, or blank, nothingness. Emptiness. That is where most men have come now: to a knowledge of their complete emptiness. They wanted so badly to be ‘themselves’ that they became nothing at all: or next to nothing.”

In
Little Eyolf
, Ibsen gives us an early view of, and an answer to, Lawrence’s predicament of isolated individualism. After Eyolf, the crippled and thus half-unwanted son, is drowned, lured into the sea by the Rat-Wife, Alfred and his wife, Rita, resolve to do more for the poor children in their area. To help these children in a way they never helped their own infirm and less-than-perfect child brings them together in a way they have not been together before. The value they now see in their lives—to help the children—is an absolute value, in
this
world, the small world that is theirs, that surrounds them. What they are resolved to do may seem unremarkable, may not have the worldwide “significance” that Alfred’s book
Human Responsibility
might have had, was intended to have had, but it is capable of realization, it is a workable ideal. It may not feel like salvation in a cosmic sense, an otherworldly sense, nor will it confer immortality on Alfred and Rita. But it allows them to take part in something of value—helping others—that in itself can be regarded as immortal.

And finally, it rescues their marriage, no small thing in Ibsen’s eyes, and that is because Ibsen has them change. “Why, oh, why,” says Alfred, “do we want one another to be always the same, fixed, like a menu card that is never changed . . . life—it keeps renewing itself. Let us hold fast to it, my dear.—We come to the end of it only too soon.” Life
is
change, says Ibsen, echoing the American pragmatists and Henri Bergson, in their different ways.

When We Dead Awaken
overlaps with Yeats to an extent. The sculptor Rubek is bored with his wife and at an impasse in his creative life. The fortuitous appearance of a model he once used for his work promises both a revitalized erotic life—desire—and to unlock his creative energies. But this recalls the “impossible alternatives” in Yeats’s poem “The Choice”:

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion . . .

Rubek cannot reconcile these competing forces any better than anyone else can. The central conceit in
When We Dead Awaken
is a quartet—two men and two women—which forms and re-forms in a series of alliances, continually seeking, via these re-alignments, some solution to the individuals’ inability to maintain relationships, while leaving them lonely, incomplete, empty and in despair.
15
With Yeats, Ibsen is forcing us to choose and reminding us that the “absolute” reassurance of art is not life, or not all of life, that it is not in and of itself completion or wholeness.