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PARTISAN REVIEW
not Socratics but skeptics, and our problem to adjust not to the dying
animal that will be sloughed off to free some eternal spirit, but
to the dying animal that becomes putrid meat and nothing else, we
might do well to eschew the easy consolations of religion and turn
to whatever grimmer satisfactions exist in Freud's stubbornly ma–
terialist view. Here we can find not only an Original Sin-the Freud–
ian myth of the expulsion from the Eden of the womb added to the
Darwinian myth of the origin of death- in which the modem mind
can believe, but some terrestrial hopes for redemption and the
good life.
In terms of Greek tragedy, the Oedipus complex is another
phrasing of
hybris
(of King Oedipus' own
hybris,
in fact), the child's
swollen pride that he is a fitter mate for his mother than the tall
stranger. Libido, the blind energy of sexual impulses, is equivalent
to the ancient Greek "wild Ate," the daughter of Zeus and Strife,
the wrath or madness that seizes the hero and moves him to senseless
violence, destruction, or self-destruction. Sublimation is the small
moment, the reintroduction of possibility, the birth of art and all
human culture out of filth. Sublimation allows St. Francis to create
a life of goodness out of an impulse to bestiality, or Bach to compose
for an organ that is not the one with which psychoanalysis is pre–
occupied. Even the curative procedure of analysis itself, the trans–
ference, is a scapegoat mechanism, and Freud in his whole life and
work is a sacrificial figure, almost a Dying God, even without the
benefit of such probably apocryphal anecdotes as the one of Freud
dashing out of his office shouting, "Why must I listen to such
swinishness!"
If
the human condition is ultimately animal, even swinish, man
is nevertheless capable of moral action and sometimes of a life of
sacrificial good, as Freud himself was. In terms of Ruth BenediCt's
somewhat oversimple dichotomy between shame cultures and guilt
cultures, the Freudian neuroses are our own guilty or introjected
equivalents for the public shame of wrongdoing in Attic tragedy, and
they motivate an internal symbolic action like the redemptive ritual
on the stage. For Freud, the choice is a newer dialectic statement of
the old dualism, truly "beyond the pleasure principle": destroy others
or turn the destruction inward. The ancient Zoroastrian divinities
Ormuzd
and.
Ahriman
that
Mani
brought
inttJ
Christianity
are
still
