I spoke about misogyny in psychoanalysis at the Site conference in 2023, but there's always so much more to say. It's the gift that keeps on giving. There's a paragraph from Civilization and its Discontents that I'd wanted to read out last year but time was tight so I thought maybe it was a good one for today. It's a little long and I know it can be hard to listen to these dense clusters of ideas, so perhaps I could say a bit about it, then read it, then say a bit more about it, and then maybe even re-read it because it's quite a rollercoaster of a paragraph.
It comes in the middle of chapter IV where, amongst other things, Freud's revisiting and building on ideas from Totem and Taboo, which I guess might not be considered Freud's wisest move – it's a bit like the woman who swallowed the spider to eat the fly. In building on his earlier ideas you could say he institutes a sequence of comic wrongness. We start with the idea of a brutal, chaotic pre-history where one alpha male made group or family life difficult for everyone else, and where the weaker men got together to kill him, thereby making human co-existence a little less worse. So-called ‘civilisation’ is thereby instituted by a pact between men, which women have to keep out of the way of in case they fuck it up by causing the men to start competing and fighting all over again. This new set-up is still frustrating and unsatisfying in many ways, but at least it's more equally frustrating and unsatisfying across the board.
In Civilization and its Discontents Freud is trying to dig deep in order to explain all sorts of contemporary phenomena around the overall theme of, ‘Why is life so … hnph?’ There are also questions like, ‘Why do men seem to like sex more than women (in Vienna in 1929)?’ But in answering some of these questions he seems to be extrapolating backwards, trying to provide explanatory histories for ideas that don't necessarily stand up in the present, so are unlikely to be reliable signposts to what went on before. Do women really only put up with sex in order to protect their ‘helpless young’? Or do they have to pretend not to be interested in sex in
order to support the myth of monogamy? Or perhaps they lose interest in sex thanks to their limiting domestic conditions, which are designed to protect private property and inheritance – in other words to provide men with psychic defences against death (aka castration) – and so on. As Levi-Strauss puts it in Elementary Structures of Kinship, where he's explicitly criticising Freud, ‘[A] myth is invented to explain the facts, in other words, one behaves like the sick man instead of diagnosing him’ (Levi-Strauss 2016: 492).
In Freud's mess of extrapolations from speculations that attempt to explain fictions, we get this extraordinary paragraph:
Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence – those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by their claims of love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the work of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. [Do you need a break yet? There's more …] Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.
Too right she does. That really was a lot to get through. In autumn 2023 I gave an online talk for the Freud Museum with Clare Farrell, the climate activist. I was trying to keep the conversation loosely psychoanalytic by introducing Freudian ideas from time to time. The problem was that they
were mostly slightly at odds with what Clare was saying. I kept finding myself saying ‘I love Freud but …’ and then outlining the concept. Each time it happened the numbers of people online would drop. I had the idea that you can only say it three times, and then you're out. But I think it's OK to say it after this paragraph. Or at least the ‘but’ is OK, but some might question the ‘I love Freud’ part.
Anyhow, it's quite a paragraph, as you can see, and of course we could submit it to close textual analysis, but we'd probably all be here forever – it's not a task you can accomplish in seven minutes. So perhaps instead Freud's words can hang there like a dust cloud while I speak a little more. Firstly, it looks like we're seeing a classic example of Freud's capacity to radically question everything, except the things he doesn't notice or care about. And without going too far down the psycho-biographic route, there might be things he especially doesn't notice in the writing of this essay because it's so underpinned by his falling out with Jung. He's upset about mysticism and oceanic feelings and wives who stop you going on trips with your male best friends, and your male best friends thinking sex isn't so important really, and wanting to live up in the roseate light, and so on. But maybe one of the really big things he misses is how problems between men and women, nature and culture, secularisation and spirituality are announcing themselves together in his essay, although the conclusions he comes to, or the assumptions he works from (which in Freud's case might be very densely knotted together) are far from inevitable or hard coded or anything more than a phantasy or myth – or are indeed part of the sickness rather than any kind of diagnosis.
This business of ‘adopting a hostile attitude’ towards civilisation is an idea that can take many forms and it's funny to see Freud's kind of ‘oh well’ attitude towards it. ‘You can see why the poor dears don't like it that much, but at least it lets them stay near their children. We're marginalising them for their own good, and for the good of the species. ‘ But it doesn't seem particularly of interest to him to consider that there might be radically different ways of setting up societies. And of course it's not just women who get sidelined by the wonderful project he calls ‘civilisation’, but also the people he so blithely calls ‘savages’, which basically means anyone
who's not embedded in the project of industrial modernity. And if that's a bit unfair on Freud, of course there are the halfway-between people who have some kind of sophisticated culture but still believe in childish, animistic or otherwise oceanic silliness. Maybe their politics and their religion are linked, the fools. Here, women, ‘savages’ and religious or spiritual types are all on the outside of modern civilised men's brilliant efforts to keep everyone safe. In short, the essay is a treasure map telling us where to look for the roots of both contemporary identity politics and geopolitical fuckery. And that's perhaps also why it's actually so much fun to read.
It's particularly illuminating to study it critically now, when modern men's brilliant efforts at keeping everyone safe, fed and housed have culminated in a serious existential threat to life on Earth. And there's another quite extraordinary quote from chapter II of the essay that can really help in thinking about the unconscious mechanisms behind the climate emergency. It's in the section where Freud's talking about the choice between attempting to greedily satisfy all one's drives, or to turn one's back on material or relational satisfactions. If both of these extremes sound unappealing then there's the wonderful third option of working to create a better world for everyone. And this is how Freud describes it:
There is, indeed, another and better path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all.
Brutal. So nature is a feminine menace that needs to be dominated by violent force. And it needs to be scientific violence because that's the most efficient. If you leave control and domination up to those religious idiots you'll never get anything done.
When you read it a certain way, Civilization and its Discontents is a kind of soft justification for the domination of women, the global majority
and the non-human world. There's a recent book called The States of the Earth, An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization, by Mohamed Amer Meziane (2024). He overlaps the idea of the Anthropocene with the idea of the Secularocene, in other words the disenchanted, colonised, industrialised world that supports capitalist patriarchy, fossil fuel extraction, industrial farming, environmental racism, and the whole technocratic system that makes life a misery and then offers you patented anti-depressants. He takes the heat of the missionaries and turns it onto the much broader system of state-supported colonial extractionism.
I'm going to stop there before I start ranting – although maybe I'm too late! I really do love Freud but …