You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This dictum, first enunciated by the philosopher George Santayana, is the theme of Immanuel Velikovsky's book, Mankind in Amnesia. In this posthumous work Velikovsky, psychoanalyst and scientist, draws upon Freud's insights as underpinnings for his theme. When an individual, says Freud, experiences an event, a thought, or a feeling too fearsome
to tolerate, he gets rid of it by repressing its memory into the unconscious. The repressed, however, is never quiescent. This unruly resident of the unconscious finds derivative ways to emerge into daylight, whether through emotional or somatic symptoms, or through the blind repetition in a new guise of the original experience that led to the repression. Freud called this phenomenon the repetition compulsion. Giving the theory of repression a global cast, Freud further postulated that present day man suffers from unconscious guilt feelings, not only as a result of his personal experiences, but also for acts committed and guilt feelings experienced by primeval man in the remote past. The fearsome act, the memory of which the caveman pushed into his unconscious, was patricide, the killing of the father by his sons so that they might possess the women of the tribe. Freud postulated a racial unconscious which is imprinted with the guilt feelings of our primeval forebears and which continues its enduring presence in the individual unconscious even to this day. Every son, says Freud, is destined to go through the Oedipus complex and to experience the guilt feelings engendered by his unconscious wish to do away with his father and possess his mother, as well as the guilt feelings harking back phylogenetically to primeval man and universally experienced through the ages.
“If we consider mankind as a whole,” Velikovsky quotes Freud, “and substitute it for a single individual, we discover that it too has developed delusions which are inaccessible to logical criticism an