Freud, My Neighbor

Civilization and Its Discontents has been the traditional prooftext for reflections on the ethics of psychoanalysis, which have usually located Freud's contribution to the history and theory of ethics in Civilization's genealogy of morals, with its powerful Nietzschean critique of the dynamics of guilt, repression, and father-Angst. Yet it is also in Civilization that Freud encounters the face of the neighbor, as he comes up against and fiercely repudiates the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” In this essay I argue that the figure of the neighbor instantiates an interpretive paradigm and textual complex distinct from the genealogical initiatives for which Civilization has been rightly praised. Three features distinguish the physiognomy of the neighbor in psychoanalysis. First, the neighbor comes into Freud's texts from the secular vicissitudes of biblical hermeneutics rather than from philosophy or psychology—that is, from Jerusalem, rather than from Athens or Rome. Second, the relation to the neighbor is social rather than familial; the neighbor instantiates both the barest minimum of political association and the impossibility of the actualization or fulfillment of such a relationship. Third, there can be no genealogy of the neighbor, since genealogy is founded, by definition, on familial ties of inheritance and consanguinity, whereas neighbor-hood entails relations of nearness and contiguity that are necessarily arbitrary, accidental, and transient.

In his encounter with the injunction to neighbor-love in its Christian and secular disseminations, Freud speaks from the position of the Jew, excluded from the New Dispensations, without, however, articulating a specifically Jewish origin, meaning, or destiny for the commandment. Indeed, such a meaning only exists in Freud's text as a remainder of the Christian-secular dialectic that takes Judaism as its cancelled ground. It is this remainder that Lacan isolates by linking the discussion of