'ARTISAN REVIEW
15
gift of monotheism, only to be eventually rejected and murdered by
his
"chosen people," his symbolic sons.
As
Philip Rieff has pointed out, the model here
is
that of "a
certain event, or events, necessarily in remote rather than near
his–
tory - indeed, at the beginning - become[ing] detenninative of all
that must follow." Rieff suggests that Freud was influenced by cer–
tain
facets of Judeo-Christian millennial thought and of German
historicism, according to which one crucial Event detennines and ex–
plains all subsequent, and even previous, history. The principle is
that of
Kairos,
of the "decisive moment," as opposed to that of
Chronos,
the more orderly sequence of qualitatively identical units
of "mathematical time." Freud's historical Event can be said to be
a mythical one - the primeval murder of the father, as allegedly
reenacted in the Jews' murder of Moses. But it is also individual–
psychological, in the sense of being a product of the Oedipus com–
plex, which
is
seen as the ultimate source of these decisive occur–
rences. Indeed one could view Freud's overall historical method as
a kind of apologia for the Oedipal Event.
Now there are powerful insights in the two books expressed
around this prehistorical encounter, insights that center upon the
psychological significance of the perceived historical past for both
present and future, and for the movement of history itself. And
I shall soon suggest ways in which this model has nourished more
recent psychohistorical approaches. But since the model
is
a mythic
one which transcends history as such, it can be profoundly mislead–
ing
when used to explain specific historical events. (I have in mind
particularly a current vogue among psychoanalytic and psychoana–
lytically-minded observers of looking at recent student rebellions as
little more than a repetition of the primeval rebellion of enraged
sons against their fathers, as a rebellion explained by - and reduci–
ble to - the Oedipus complex. The explanation happens to be con–
genial to those in authority, the symbolic [or as I prefer, formative]
fathers involved. But it totally neglects the larger historical currents
that so forcibly intrude upon the psyches of young and old alike,
and therefore misrepresents both the individual-psychological and
the group processes at play.) For within Freud's prehistoric para–
digm
there
is
bequeathed to us an iron mold of psychological repe–
tition (or "repetition-compulsion") enveloping indiscriminately the
