Freud as a Philosopher of History

1 MARTIN KLÜNERS Freud as a philosopher of history1 (published in: The Journal of Psychohistory 42 (1), 2014, pp. 55-71) “Philosophie de l’histoire“, “philosophy of history“ Voltaire called the script which he used as a kind of introduction to his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations in 17652. He gave name to a project which dominated European, especially German philosophy within the following three generations and was virulent in politics even till the end of the 20th century, till the Fall of Communism – the ideology that for decades had the function of substituting for religion for a quarter of the world’s population and that referred to the work of probably the most influential philosopher of history, the work of Karl Marx. In a wider sense, one can call “philosophy of history“ also the many theories since the 19th century which considered themselves critics of the traditional philosophy of history, but equally pose questions about techniques to write and understand history, about the sense or non-sense of history, about the aim or aimlessness of history – as there are e.g. historism, philosophy of life, analytical philosophy etc. Despite the great diversity of the many different approaches in a period of more than two hundred years, there are five main themes which theories of philosophers of history from different times treat again and again: (1) Voltaire himself gave already advises what philosophically enlighted historians should do with history: “In all nations“, he wrote, history was “distorted by fables, until finally philosophy enlightened Man“3. Historians should therefore untangle the deformed history by using their critical intellect. A hundred years later the protagonists of German historism, Droysen and Dilthey, created the perhaps most important theories of historians’ duties: Droysen interpreted Man as a being with two qualities – an acting subject on the one hand, a subject of historical cognition on the other hand. Man can understand the reasons why people do or do not do certain things. So for Droysen the duty of the historian is the reconstruction of 1 This article gives an outline of the main results of my PhD thesis that has been published in 2013 (Klüners, Martin. 2013. Geschichtsphilosophie und Psychoanalyse. Göttingen: V & R unipress). I tried to use original English texts or translations wherever possible. 2 Angehrn, Emil. 1991. Geschichtsphilosophie. (Grundkurs Philosophie, 15). Stuttgart [et al.]: Kohlhammer, p. 69. One year before, in 1764, Voltaire used the expression “philosophie de l’histoire“ for the first time in a recension of Hume’s Complete History of England (Nagl-Docekal, Herta (editor). 1996. Der Sinn des Historischen. Geschichtsphilosophische Debatten. (Fischer-Taschenbücher, 12776). Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, p. 7). 3 Voltaire, François-Marie. 1963. Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII. Edited by René Pomeau. Vol. 2. Paris: Garnier, p. 800. 2 the intention of human action4. Dilthey advanced Droysen’s theory and called his science of “[t]he rule-guided understanding of permanently fixed manifestations of life“, of “exegesis or interpretation“, hermeneutics5: Historians should, among other things, reproduce coherences of memory6. Still at the end of the 20th century – after the so-called linguistic turn – thinkers continue to formulate imperatives for the historian’s work from a narrative point of view. Paul Ricoeur wrote an analysis of Time and Narrative7 in three volumes that Hayden White called “the most important synthesis of literary and historical theory produced“ in the 20th century8. (2) Voltaire’s main aim – as of most philosophers of history in the 18th century – was to show how Man was not the object of God’s disposal, but made history himself, that he could understand the sense of history by his intellectual potency and that there had been a continuous progress in the unfolding of intellectual capacities, of “reason“ or “enlightenment“. This pattern returns, in different forms, in the main works of the philosophy of history, from Voltaire to Condorcet, Schelling and Hegel. Even Weber’s analysis of rationalisation is a kind of sociological philosophy of history that examines the progress of enlightenment in occidental history. In its negation the pattern of growing enlightenment leads to the pessimistic Dialectic of enlightenment9 of Horkheimer and Adorno. One could call it the main pattern, the centre of occidental philosophy of history; it is identical with the optimism of the age of enlightenment and, after having provoked its own negation in failed and bloody revolutions, with the delusion of this optimism (see also 5). (3) For some of the thinkers the ascent of enlightenment did not take place in a simple and linear development, but in a dialectic process. Fichte and especially Hegel created virtuoso dialectic systems by which still Marx was influenced. 4 Rohbeck, Johannes. 2004. Geschichtsphilosophie zur Einführung. (Zur Einführung, 302). Hamburg: Junius, p. 77. See also Droysen, Johann G. 1977. Historik. Edited by Peter Leyh. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog, p. 424. 5 Dilthey, Wilhelm. 2002. The formation of the historical world in the human sciences. Edited, with an introduction, by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 237-238. 6 At nearly the same time Nietzsche saw history as a kind of life’s servant whose value resulted only in its meaning for life. Preoccupation with history should, according to Nietzsche, not be exaggerated as it might prevent the individuum – that, by concerning itself with that what was, remained mentally in the past – from life. (Untimely Meditations II, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, chapter 3) 7 Ricoeur, Paul, 1984-88 (1983-85). Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit). 3 vols. translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 8 White, Hayden. 1987. The content of the form. Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore, Md [et al.]: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 170. 9 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 3 (4) According to Arnold Gehlen it was also Fichte who invented the motif of Entfremdung, alienation, by defining liberty as regaining control over lost products of one’s own acting10. Especially for Karl Marx Entfremdung became one of the most important figures of his materialistic theory, as history for him was the history of growing alienation, caused by the contradiction between the means of production and the relations of production. (5) After revolutions had ended in terror or failure, the ideas of enlightenment, especially that Man made his own history, lost more and more their persuasive power. Already the late Schelling began to doubt the might of historical reason which he had himself celebrated in his youth11. In the course of the 19th century the conviction prevailed that human reason was unconscious and that one could not predict the aftermath of human acts – history had shown that human acts often resulted in effects totally different from those predicted or projected. Especially this theme – in German often described as “Kontingenz“ (contingency) of history12 – is the reason why philosophy of history, which had been the paradigmatic philosophical discipline from the mid of the 18th to that of the 19th century, generally forfeited its former importance and began to provoke essential critique which in some cases led to the complete refusal not only of the idea of growing enlightenment, but of any try to understand the sense of history, especially after the experience of two world wars, genocide and totalitarism in the 20th century. Philosophy of history in late 20th century seems to exist only in what German philosopher Odo Marquard (born 1928) called “Schwundstufen“13 – shrinkage levels. Despite this crisis of philosophy of history and the many critiques that occur since the 19th century a renaissance of this concept can be observed in an increasingly globalized world which needs new kinds of bestowal of significance. Great works of universal history like those of Weber, Toynbee and others that do not share the classical motifs of philosophy of history, like increasing enlightenment and liberty 14, have shown what a serious, scientific philosophy of history based on empirically gained data might look like. Apart from this, there has been an epistemological debate on formal aspects and, as a result, a slight rehabilitation of 10 Gehlen, Arnold. 1952/53. Über die Geburt der Freiheit aus der Entfremdung. In: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 40, pp. 338-353 (here: pp. 338-339). 11 Kittsteiner, Heinz D. 2004. Wir werden gelebt – Über Analogien zwischen dem Unbewußten in der Geschichte und im „Ich“. In: Zuckermann, Moshe (editor), 2004: Geschichte und Psychoanalyse. (Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 32). Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 56-84 (here: p. 66). 12 Angehrn 1991, p. 123. 13 Marquard, Odo. 1982. Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie. (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 394). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 25. 14 Angehrn 1991, p. 162. 4 philosophy of history since Arthur C. Danto demonstrated the explaining functions of narrating sentences in his Analytical philosophy of history15. So many of the questions posed by philosophers of history are still relevant today, and furthermore the critique caused by delusions is evidence for the importance of the ideas of philosophy of history for its critics, as one gets disappointed only by things in that one believes or at least would like to believe in. Also and especially the unintentional consequences of human acts are a scientific problem that does not lose its fascination nor its eminent interest. I would like to show why another Schwundstufe of philosophy of history – psychoanalysis16 – has the best answers to nearly all of these questions: Psychoanalysis itself is, in the words of the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a “historical science“ as it gains the basis for its diagnoses and therapy from the individual history of the patient17. Although Freud had very little to do with philosophy and philosophers of history, there are some important connecting lines between those and the science he founded18. HISTORIANS’ DUTIES When already Voltaire describes history – or better the image of history up to his time – as a biased, warped thing (and one would like to add: biased and warped by memory) and also as “ramas de [...] folies“19, the solution he postulates for this problem as mentioned above, manifests analogies to the psychoanalytic working-through. The historian is, so to say in the psychoanalytic usage, a kind of representative of the secondary process. Voltaire can be seen here as an early precursor of Paul Ricoeur who in his connection of literary and historical theory compares the composition of the plot to the psychoanalytic situation. Ricoeur calls the composition of the plot “mimesis“ and divides it into prefiguration, configuration and refiguration, or mimesis I, II and III20. The prefiguration or mimesis I is identical with the 15 Danto, Arthur C. 1965. Analytical philosophy of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also Rohbeck 2004, 105. 16 Psychoanalysis may be called a Schwundstufe of philosophy of history because according to Marquard psychoanalysis is a “disenchanted“ form of German “Naturphilosophie“ – “Naturphilosophie“ itself yet is a Schwundstufe of philosophy of history (Marquard 1982, pp. 91 and 103. See also Marquard, Odo. 1987. Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse. (Schriftenreihe zur philosophischen Praxis, 3). Köln: Dinter, p. 4). 17 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1971. Geschichte und Psychoanalyse. (Pocket, 25). Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, p. 19. 18 It is true that Freud took several philosophy courses with Professor Brentano at the University of Vienna from 1874 till 1876, that he read Ludwig Feuerbach and that he also visited the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten (reading society of German students) where he probably had his first contact with the thoughts of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But, soon after that, he lost interest in philosophy as an academic subject and concentrated on his study of medicine (see Klüners 2013, pp. 187-190). 19 Voltaire 1963, p. 804. 20 See the first volume of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. 5 reader’s ability to recognize acting by its structure characteristics; it is pre-narrative. The configuration (mimesis II) mediates between mimesis I and III, between the prior understanding and the final understanding of refiguration in which the reader compares the read story with his own life story. Ricoeur defines the history of the individual’s life as based on untold stories; in order to get its narrative identity, these untold, repressed stories have to be told, using the fragments passed down by memory – similar to what Dilthey called the reproduction of coherences of memory one hundred years before. This working-through can be used not only for the reconstruction of the individual’s story, but also for that of groups and society21. Between the work of the historian and that of the psychoanalyst there is a fundamental affinity. Nietzsche in contrast saw the necessity of a “critical“ history which should have the force to “break“ and to clear away the past to make life possible 22. To the suffering individual liberation from history could be, according to Nietzsche, a boon. One could be curious about how Nietzsche would have argued if he had got to know Freud’s theory and therapy. He might have realized and even appreciated that not “liberation“ from history – something that simply is not possible – but a better understanding and, in the best case, a reconciliation with history is the aim of psychoanalytic working-through. Not liberation from “history“, but from its distortion can cure the sufferer – while the liberation that Nietzsche postulated rather reminds of what the psychoanalysis calls repression and in fact is the opposite of a successful healing. Another boundary line between historical theory and psychoanalysis consists in what Droysen considered the historian’s main duty: The reconstruction of the intention of human action is a kind of psychology. But as this intention meant by Droysen limits itself to conscious intention, it can give no real answer to the question why human acting so often has other consequences than those consciously intended. Psychoanalysis in this point is the “better“ historism as it takes account of the unconscious23. The integration of the unconscious allows also to examine the meaning of the wish in history, both the wish of the acting individuals or groups, of those who “make“ history, as the wish of those who write history: One of the greatest problems of philosophical historiography is the dialectic of (unrealistic) wish and resulting delusion (in a certain way, totalitarism is a sort of restraint to make come true an obsessive wish). The examination of what philosophers of history wanted to see in history and why they wanted to 21 See the third volume of Time and Narrative. See above (Untimely Meditations II, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, chapter 3). 23 It should be mentioned that the last important theorist of German historism, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), also took account of the unconscious which at his time had become an important category in cultural science (see below, chapter Contingency). 22 6 see it would be an illuminating project and might be the basis for the historian’s or historiograph’s own self-reflection24. RATIONALISATION [this term and its meaning have been explained on p. 2, “Schwundstufe” on p. 3] At the end of the 18th century there are two philosophers who write important works that are typical examples of the above-named idea of the continuous progress of human reason: Condorcet, obviously not really impressed by the contemporary violent and inhuman aspects of the French revolution that should bring him to death little afterwards, is the author of a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind in which he maps out the necessarity of progress of reason, a progress that besides is irreversible. In its untroubled optimism Condorcet’s work is considered the classical example of the idea of progress in the age of enlightenment25. In Germany, widely unchallenged by revolutionary action, the young Schelling writes at nearly the same time a chronology of the self-fulfillment of reason: Pursuant to it, the first stadium in human history was the direct and unadulterated condition of sense perception – paradise; the second stadium was that of the fall of mankind, in which logos destroyed the unity of life in the sense perception; in the third stadium efforts to undo the fall of mankind and the redemption of the world by the aid of reason lead into a new paradise on a higher level. Human history therefore is a “history of liberating human reason from the dull stadium of the sense perception to the reflected existence of the unity of reason“26. This is very similar to what Freud nearly 150 years later calls The Progress in Spirituality in his analysis of Moses and Monotheism: One of the, according to Freud, most important “precepts of Mosaic religion“, “the prohibition against making an image of God“, “signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its 24 For the importance of psychoanalysis as basis for the historian’s self-reflection see Straub, Jürgen. 1998. Psychoanalyse, Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine Einführung in systematischer Absicht. In: Rüsen, Jörn and Straub, Jürgen (editors). 1998. Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit. Psychoanalytische Zugänge zum Geschichtsbewußtsein. (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1403). Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 12-32 (here: pp. 30-31). An English translation of this article can be found at Rüsen, Jörn and Straub, Jürgen (editors). 2010. Dark traces of the past. Psychoanalysis and historical thinking. New York [et al.]: Berghahn Books. 25 Angehrn 1991, p. 72. 26 Baumgartner, Hans M. 1996. Philosophie der Geschichte nach dem Ende der Geschichtsphilosophie. Bemerkungen zum gegenwärtigen Stand des geschichtsphilosophischen Denkens. In: Nagl-Docekal, Herta (editor). 1996. Der Sinn des Historischen. Geschichtsphilosophische Debatten. (Fischer-Taschenbücher, 12776). Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, pp. 151-172 (here: p. 154). My translation. Also Fichte wrote that the order of the world and so equally that of natural processes is rational. Where reason cannot yet be effective by the aid of liberty, it is effective as natural law, as “dark instinct“ (Fichte, Johann G. 1845. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 7: Zur Politik, Moral und Philosophie der Geschichte. Edited by Immanuel H. Fichte. Leipzig: Mayer und Mueller, pp. 8-9). 7 psychologically necessary consequences“27. Progress in spirituality from the psychoanalytic point of view is instinctual renunciation and its origins are assigned to a certain historic period, the development of Mosaic monotheism, an assignment that is not far from Max Weber’s definition of the origins of occidental rationalisation: The “disenchantment of the world“ began, according to Weber, with both Hellenistic scientific thought and ancient Jewish prophecy and led finally to the innerworldly asceticism of Protestantism (innerworldly asceticism itself can be seen as a sort of sublimation and would therefore also be related to the various modalities of instinctual renunciation)28. The self-fulfillment of reason as described by Schelling is a figure which became very important to the philosophy of another exponent of German idealism whose work is regarded as the climax of philosophy of history: Hegel interprets world history as history of reason, reason rules the world29. But “reason“ for Hegel does not necessarily mean consciousness. Reason in fact uses human passions for its self-fulfillment: “This maybe called the cunning of reason — that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty, and suffers loss.“30 The aim of reason though is its “Bei-sich-selber-Sein“ as absolute spirit – which one could however identify as consciousness31. The optimistic view of a cunning of reason, a heritage of the age of enlightenment, may alienate today’s readers of Hegel’s philosophy like of all of the optimistic theories written in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but the supposition that there has been a historic increase of knowledge and an increasing rationalisation is common sense still in the present time. I would like to connect the idea of increasing rationalisation or consciousness with that of the cultural or historic ego, a term that is no original invention of psychoanalysis, but appears already in the scripts of Schelling32. Increasing consciousness might be the expression of an extension of the ego as already Schelling defined it in this way33. The historic ego tends to its own extension, but the ego is not always the sovereign of this process – it does not only set the passions to work for itself, but is just as well set by the passions to 27 Freud, Sigmund. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. Translated from the German by Katherine Jones. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 178-179. 28 Weber, Max. 1920. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. 1: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Tübingen: Mohr, pp. 94-95. 29 “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.“ (Hegel, Georg W. F. 2001. The Philosophy of history. With prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree. Translated by John Sibree. Kitchener: Batoche Books, p. 22) 30 Ibid., p. 47. Odo Marquard pulls together the idea of cunning of reason and psychoanalytic sublimation: Marquard 1987, p. 237. 31 Albeit it is not the intention of this article to give a definition of the controversial and disputed Hegelian vocabulary. 32 Marquard 1987, p. 16. 33 Münchener Vorlesungen (1827), according to Marquard 1987, p. 16. 8 work for them. It is a highly ambivalent occurrence, and the comprehension of ego and passions as antagonists that often fight against each other allows to see the ambivalence of rationalisation or enlightenment – which was a favourite theme of many 20th century thinkers, formulated most consequently in the Dialectic of enlightenment of Horkheimer and Adorno. They flipped Hegel’s optimistic teleology of the self-fulfillment of reason and wrote a negative teleology of reason, a history of the decline of enlightenment from emancipation to governance. But as a negative teleology is not less tendentious than a positive one, there has to be a more realistic and less ideological solution to explain the ambivalence of emancipation: emancipation is fundamentally oedipal. Oedipus aspires to emancipation from parental, or, in the patriarchal society more virulent, fatherly dominance. This struggle for independence however is not always successful as patriarchal dominance includes the introjection of dominance structures into the son’s psyche. So fatherly dominance in fact does not get abolished, but substituted by another dominance, the dominance of the son. If the history of the emancipatory process can be interpreted as an oedipal individuation, the ambivalence of this dynamic psychological process is the cause for the ambivalence of enlightenment. This ambivalence results from the relationship of father and son – the father has the function of a role model for the son, but in truth is seen also as an enemy to fight against. These hostile feelings of the son against the father evoke a deep sense of guilt that has to be rationalised. So “rationalisation“ is not only a term for the rational attainment of an aim and the increasing assertion of this principle in history, but does also have an important psychopathological aspect as the psychoanalytic use of this term already suggests: Introduced in 1908 by Ernest Jones into the psychoanalytic vocabulary, rationalisation describes, as is generally known, the ambition to find coherent, “rational“ reasons for non-identified real motives of acting, sentiments, thoughts etc. which is supported by ideologies, morality, religions, political convictions – so by what Weber called ideas – as the activity of the superego enforces the ego’s mechanisms of defence34. The assumption that ideologies, morality, religions, political convictions could reciprocally be formed by rationalisation would offer the possibility to psycho-analyse the historically powerful ideas themselves, to analyse further the irrationality of rationalisation and its unconscious real motives – finally to find an answer to the question why history so often yields other developments than those consciously intended. 34 For the characteristics of rationalisation see Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. 1988. The language of psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. With an introduction by Daniel Lagache. London: Karnac, pp. 375-376. 9 DIALECTIC Already for the thinkers of German idealism rationalisation took place in a dialectic process. I would like to focus on the parallels between Hegel’s and Freud’s dialectic as Paul Ricoeur analysed them in his Essay on Interpretation35. Ricoeur seeks “to find in Freud an inverted image of Hegel“36 by comparing their respective dialectics: Freud links, in the words of Ricoeur, “a thematized archeology of the unconscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becoming conscious“, while “Hegel links an explicit teleology of mind or spirit to an implicit archeology of life and desire“37. Hegel does not develop a phenomenology of the consciousness, but of spirit, so spirit is more than consciousness. Between “the Hegelian dialectic of reduplicated consciousness“ and “the process of consciousness that develops in the analytic relation there is a remarkable structural homology“, “[t]he entire analytic relation can be reinterpreted as a dialectic of consciousness, rising from life to self-consciousness, from the satisfaction of desire to the recognition of the other consciousness“38. The relation between the analyst and the patient reminds, according to Ricoeur, of the Hegelian relation between master and slave, and between analyst and patient there also proceeds a kind of “struggle for recognition“. The Hegelian terms of “satisfaction“ and “recognition“ are of so great importance for psychoanalysis that “we can say that all the dramas psychoanalysis discovers are located on the path that leads from ‘satisfaction‘ to ‘recognition‘“39. Freud’s thought is, like that of Hegel, fundamentally dialectic, especially in the second topography: “The second topography is the dialectic properly so-called in and through which arise the various instinctual dichotomies and the opposed pairs of instinctual vicissitudes [...]. The question of the superego lies at the origin of the dialectical situation [...]. Furthermore, the series of pairs, ego-id, ego-superego, ego-world, which constitute these dependent relations, are all presented, as in the Hegelian dialectic, as master-slave relationships that must be overcome.“40 As Freud comprehends this topography constitutive for world history, the relationship of human nature, cultural development and religion – which he sees as the 35 I do not treat the materialistic inversion of Hegelian dialectic here as Marx will be discussed in the next chapter about alienation. 36 Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 461. 37 Ibid. 38 Ricoeur 1970, p. 474. 39 Ibid. 40 Ricoeur 1970, p. 477. 10 mirroring of the dynamic conflicts between ego, id and superego41 – this dialectic is the base of a potential synthesis of Hegelian philosophy of history and psychoanalytic cultural theory. ALIENATION Karl Marx upended Hegelian idealistic dialectic and interpreted the idea mentioned above, tracing originally back to Fichte, that alienation is losing control over products of one’s own acting, in a materialist way: Labour is not only the quality that distinguishes man from animal, it is also the reason for the transformation of human nature and for human Entfremdung (alienation), the central term of Marxist theory. The dual character of labour – as it determines human relationship to nature and equally is a social phenomenon – causes the alienation not only of the individual, but also of his social situation. History is the history of increasing alienation and will end in the self-destruction of capitalism, control over history will finally be regained in the revolution of the proletariat42. In the past, there have been many attempts to link Marxism with psychoanalysis such as those of the Critical Theory or Existentialism43,[also Reich, Fromm, and mcuh of what came to be called the Freudian Left] and it is probably the idea of alienation and the offer of solutions to undo it that makes the psychoanalysis so attractive for Marxist thinkers. Also, Freud was very sceptical about Marxist theory, especially its method of explaining alienation only by materialistic criteria and the reduction of human history into a socio-economic process44. Especially in Über eine Weltanschauung45 Freud criticizes the complete absence of psychological arguments in the Marxist theory, the similarity of Marxism and religion as producers of illusions, the intolerance of the “practical Marxism“ – Bolshevism – against critics which reminds Freud of the former intolerance of the Church etc. Freud compares the expectance of a future paradise on earth to Jewish messianism – more than a decade before Löwith does the same in Meaning in History46. Furthermore, for Freud the transformation of human nature within few generations as intended by Marxism is deeply unrealistic. 41 Freud, Sigmund. 1935. Postscript. An Autobiographical Study (1925). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925-1926): An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 71-74. 42 Rohbeck 2004, pp. 66-67. See also Angehrn 1991, pp. 105-119. 43 Marquard 1987, p. 18. 44 Freud precedes the critic by Löwith (Löwith, Karl. 1957. Meaning in history. The theological implications of the philosophy of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 33). Löwith’s work was first published in 1949. 45 Freud, Sigmund. 1932. The Question of a Weltanschauung. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis and other works, XXXV. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 158-182. 46 Löwith 1957, p. 42. 11 If one follows the consideration of the German historian Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner who argued that Marx’s term of Naturwüchsigkeit is a synonym for the unconscious and communism nothing else than the abolishment of the unconscious history47, psychoanalysis for Marxist thinkers would have the function of supplementing a political-economic theory psychologically, of a psychological method to abolish the unconscious. But at the same time the differences of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory get clearer: Psychoanalysis does not have the aim to “abolish“ the unconscious, but only to transform alienated parts of the ego, to get them back from the id. And also the discrepancy between the comprehensions of the consciousness illuminate the general contrast of Marxism and psychoanalysis: The psychoanalytic definition and interpretation of the consciousness is much more complex than the philosophical one as according to it the consciousness is influenced by many other factors than the material or social being48. Despite all these disagreements there might be an at least indirect parallel in the connection of alienation and labour, central for the Marxist theory, but described in another context also by Freud in a letter to Romain Rolland in 193649. Alienation as Freud understands it exists in two forms: either a part of reality seems to be alien or a part of the ego. Alienation is a special kind of defence and wants to deny elements coming from the outside world or from the inner world of the ego. In the concrete case which he tries to explain to his friend Rolland a guilt feeling causes a disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. This guilt feeling is evoked by the encounter with the sphere of Greek antiquity – which for Freud is a symbol of having surpassed the father by having, in contrast to him, learned Greek at school and had a higher, humanistic education. Surpassing the father though is analogous to violating an interdiction. So “labour“ in the broader sense and a resulting guilt feeling were the reasons for alienation. Interpreted psychoanalytically, also historic alienation could result from the labour and the sense of guilt of the son who surpasses the father – i. e. the preceding generation(s) – in the course of the progress of civilization. Already Nietzsche wrote that the guilt of the living individuals vis-à-vis their ancestors increases with every success50. CONTINGENCY 47 Kittsteiner 2004, p. 75. A good summary of the psychoanalytic term of consciousness can be found at Laplanche/Pontalis 1988, pp. 84-88. 49 Freud, Sigmund. 1936. A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 237-248. 50 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral. (dtv, 2225). Munich: dtv, pp. 327-328. 48 12 After the questions concerning the historians’ duties, the process of rationalisation, the dialectic and the alienation in history, the last and in the present time perhaps most important problem of philosophy of history regards the unintended consequences of human action. Yet Droysen suggested that historical facts are not based on the conscious acts of volition of few individuals, but on the interaction of many, that they are the result of a correlation of action51. In Droysen’s time another concept became more and more important and was popular already before the rise of the psychoanalysis: Schelling had introduced the unconscious into the philosophical discourse (although Leibniz had had similar ideas hundred years earlier), but especially Eduard von Hartmann’s book The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) was very successful in the second half of the 19th century52. Freud claimed later that only hypnotism – which he considered the forerunner of psychoanalysis – had made the theoretical and abstract term an object of scientific experiment53. However, the unconscious finally found its way not only into psychology, but also the historic theory. Ernst Troeltsch describes as the major problem of the historical research the tension between the common and the particular, between society and individuals, between objective and subjective spirit54. To resolve this problem he proposes the unconscious as “fundamental“ term of history55. His definition of the unconscious is close to that of psychology; Troeltsch though does not refer to Freud or other depth psychologists. But he even suggests categories equivalent to what psychoanalysis calls “preconscious“56. Both the unconscious and the preconscious are operant not only in the individual, but also in society. Troeltsch anticipates to a certain extent the considerations about the supra-individual unconscious of psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm and Mario Erdheim57. Fromm supposed a “filter“ consisting of language, logic and morals that decides which experiences are allowed to get conscious and which have to remain unconscious for the functioning of society. The whole cultural apparatus serves to uphold the supra-individual unconsciousness58. A change of the status quo makes possible that unconscious experiences 51 Rohbeck 2004, p. 90. Gödde, Günter. 1999. Traditionslinien des „Unbewußten“. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud. Tübingen: Ed. Diskord, pp. 25-28. 53 Freud, Sigmund. 1924. A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 189-210. 54 Troeltsch, Ernst. 1922. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3: Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Erstes (einziges) Buch: Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie. Tübingen: Mohr, p. 44. 55 Troeltsch 1922, p. 46. 56 Troeltsch uses the term “halbbewußt“ instead of “vorbewußt“ (ibid., p. 46). 57 For the psychoanalysts’ theories of the supra-individual unconscious see Tessar, Hans. 2008. Die Produktion gesellschaftlicher Unbewusstheit. Eine neue Anthropologie, Sprachphilosophie, Erkenntnistheorie und Gesellschaftsphilosophie. Hamburg: Diplomica. 58 Fromm, Erich. 1990. Die Entdeckung des gesellschaftlichen Unbewußten. Zur Neubestimmung der Psychoanalyse. Edited by Rainer Funk. (Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, 3). Weinheim: Beltz, p. 81. 52 13 may come to consciousness because they lose their dangerousness within social change59. Mario Erdheim defines the supra-individual unconscious as the attributes of a society that do not get reflected in a sufficient way and therefore cause unexpected developments. At the same time they are responsible for cultural change. The central problem of philosophy of history is the lack of regard for unconscious factors in history60. Also deeply influenced by psychoanalytic thought, but with a thematic key aspect that reminds rather of Droysen’s argument named above, the sociological theory of Norbert Elias tries to resolve the problem of contingency by examining the process of human interaction: the analysis of “figurations“ – networks of interdependent humans – allows to reconstruct the structures of human action which seems at first undesigned, but in reality is the result of interdependent individual acts. The larger the figuration, the more intensive is also the enforcement to control the affects, the might of the superego61. Due to figurational sociology the traditional confrontation of “individual“ and “society“ as antagonists loses its importance and seems more and more to be an artificial construct. Elias does not only give an answer to the old philosophic question why human acts often have unintended consequences, he also demonstrates how Freudian topography, how the theory of supergo, ego and id and sociological theory can be synthesized. With this approach there might be also a way to research the mechanisms by which historic ideas take effect on individuals and society. Weber’s sociology of religion was in fact a reformulated philosophy of history, an examination of the influence of the spirit and the ideas and their indirect, unconscious consequences. CONCLUSION After having described what I consider the five main aspects of philosophy of history and their connecting lines with psychoanalysis, I would like to bring four of them – rationalisation, dialectic, alienation and contingency – together in a short hypothetical reconstruction of their supposed original coherence as in my opinion they are all different parts of one great socio-psychological problem. 59 Fromm 1990, pp. 90-91. Tessar, Hans. 2008. Die Produktion gesellschaftlicher Unbewusstheit. Eine neue Anthropologie, Sprachphilosophie, Erkenntnistheorie und Gesellschaftsphilosophie. Hamburg: Diplomica, pp. 65-69. See e.g. Erdheim, Mario. 1982. Die gesellschaftliche Produktion von Unbewußtheit. Eine Einführung in den ethnopsychoanalytischen Prozeß. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. 61 Lilienthal, Markus. 2001c. Norbert Elias: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (1937‒39). In: Gamm, Gerhard/Hetzel, Andreas/Lilienthal, Markus, 2001: Interpretationen. Hauptwerke der Sozialphilosophie. (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 18114). Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 134‒147 (here: pp. 136 and 145) and Elias, Norbert. 1969. The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell and, published in 1982, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization. 60 14 Alienation for a long time was the object of philosophic speculation that could not be sufficiently realistic because the relatively small knowledge about prehistoric societies did not allow secure assertions based on facts. But cultural anthropology has made great progress since the 19th century, and what we know today about human prehistory enables us to prove philosophic terms by comparing their meaning to certain pre- and protohistoric phenomena. For 99% of his history Man lived as hunter and gatherer with very few cultural changes. The “big bang“ of cultural development, of an immense change of the mode of life took place only in what is called Neolithisation today: sedentariness, farming, use of domesticated animals, new forms of labour, the growth of human societies and the increasing number of wars62 had deep impacts on Man’s relation to nature, to his conspecifics and cannot be thought of without the greatest psychological consequences63. We have to imagine the alienation starting here also as a psychic alienation, particularly because of the increase of violent conflicts and ergo of aggressiveness in neolithic societies. Guilt feeling is, interpreted structurally, also a special form of aggressiveness – an aggressiveness directed not to the exterior, but to the psychic interior64. I would like to suggest that the increase in external aggressiveness – as in wars, but under growing pressure also in family conflicts – leads to an increase in internal aggressiveness as well, an increase in the guilt feeling. The ego becomes weakened by the id and later by the superego, a development caused by transgenerational traumatic experiences. The ego tends, as mentioned above, therefore to its own extension – enlightenment, rationalisation, progress in spirituality can all be seen as materializations of the ego-extension. The increase in violent conflicts, in wars, provokes equally another relationship of fathers and sons: cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris believes that the sexually determined hostility between fathers and sons – the oedipus complex – is not the origin, but the result of the increase in violent conflicts and in new ideals of virility in more and more militant societies65. But not only war – also labour could be, as mentioned above, responsible for the hostility between fathers and sons, especially in patriarchal societies, and may also be the origin of guilt feelings that have to be rationalised. However, the intensification of oedipal conflicts probably has caused the will of the sons to liberate themselves from their fathers’ suppression, 62 Harris, Marvin. 1989. Kulturanthropologie. Ein Lehrbuch. Translated by Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus, p. 214 (translation based on: Harris, Marvin. 1987. Cultural anthropology. Second edition. New York [et al.] : Harper & Row). 63 DeMause regards a change of children’s education as the real reason for cultural change (DeMause, Lloyd. 1989. Grundlagen der Psychohistorie. Psychohistorische Schriften. Edited by Aurel Ende. Translated by Aurel Ende, Eva Lohner-Horn and Peter Orban. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 285). 64 Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Civilization and its discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, pp. 57-146. London: Hogarth Press, chapter VII. 65 Harris 1989, p. 356. 15 the will of emancipation. But as they had internalised dominance structures themselves, their emancipation had to remain a very ambivalent thing. Not only the exterior conflicts though were master-slave relationships, but also the interior conflicts. Freud was right to regard the dynamic conflicts of ego, superego and id as the foundation of human history. The advantage of psychoanalytic “philosophy of history“ over the traditional philosophy of history is based on the fact that it takes into consideration the unconscious aspects of human acting, on the holistic character of the concept of human nature – and at the same this concept is also responsible for the advantage of psychoanalytic anthropology over philosophic anthropology. A more realistic image of both Man as social and natural being and his history is made possible by psychoanalytic theory. 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