The murder of the father

The question of parricide as a founding event runs through the whole of Freud’s work (from Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), published in 1900, to Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Moses and Monotheism), published in 1939).

Freud and parricide

In “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” written in 1928, Freud writes: “the killing of the father is, according to a well-known view, the principal and primal crime both of humanity and of the individual”¹. This sentence concentrates a line of reflection that had begun almost thirty years earlier.

As early as The Interpretation of Dreams², he evokes the tyranny of fathers in archaic myths and legends, even infanticides, and their obverse, parricide. Murderous impulses against the father are part of the psychic life of neurotics but also of everyone. Freud develops the myth of Oedipus at length. He stresses, in a note added in a later edition and alluding to Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo), written in 1913, that “the Oedipus complex, first pointed out in this book, has since taken on an importance, hitherto unsuspected, for the understanding of the history of humanity and of the development of religion and morality.”

With Totem and Taboo³, the question of parricide becomes very closely interwoven with that of filiation and of transmission across the generations. In this work, to which he would refer repeatedly thereafter, Freud anchors the subject in the lineage of the generations and inscribes it within the history of the human species. With the notion of primary identification, as he develops it in Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id)⁴, he makes identification with the “father of personal prehistory” a founding and constitutive element of the psyche and of the earliest moments of psychic life. The birth of the ego-ideal would be tied “to the first and most important identification of the individual: identification with the father of personal prehistory.” This identification is not the result of an object-cathexis; “it is a direct, immediate identification, earlier than any object-cathexis.” Later object-choices, in particular Oedipal ones, would find their outcome in identifications “that come to reinforce the primary identification.” Beyond the myth of “Totem and Taboo,” what interests us is the way Freud conceives the inscription of the transgenerational within the psyche. He articulates it with the “father of personal prehistory,” an unthinkable father, a founding ancestor, killed by his sons, and he makes it a structural element of archaic psychic functioning, prior even to “any object-cathexis.”

The content of the myth of “Totem and Taboo” is just as important. What would be inscribed would be linked to parricide and would constitute a rupture in the processes of filiation and a re-founding. There would also be an impossible reparation of the parricidal act that functions as an origin. The taboos that surround the dead and the chiefs, as described in Totem and Taboo, as well as the creation of totems, are its mark. To create a totem, to practice the cult of deified ancestors, is indeed to seize hold of the father by transforming him into a fixed object of cult, and this at the cost of an impossible reparation, since such a cult presupposes an endless perpetuation from which one could escape only through rupture with the community, heresy, or atheism.

The myth of Totem and Taboo also includes, with the cannibalistic meal, a process of incorporation of the dead. This incorporation, taken up again in Trauer und Melancholie (Mourning and Melancholia)⁵, is at the origin of melancholia, but also of mania if one follows the thread of K. Abraham’s work on mourning⁶, work that was contested by Freud. The notion of incorporation is also at the origin of the “secret vault” and of the “crypt,” which can be transmitted from generation to generation, if one takes up the concepts of Abraham and Torok⁷. The myth of Totem and Taboo, and the concept of primary identification as Freud hypothesizes it in The Ego and the Id, would perhaps make of an impossible original mourning transmitted from generation to generation, and of identification with a father phantasmatically incorporated by the generations that preceded us, a structural element of the psyche. Under these conditions there would perhaps be, fastened and anchored in the intergenerational, an inescapable “rock,” articulated around parricide and impossible mourning, against which the subject and every analysis would come up. This “rock,” which has to do with something originary, would be different from the guilt transmitted from generation to generation that Freud articulates with the murder of the father of the primal horde and that “would be at the origin of the two fundamental taboos of totemism” (exogamy and the prohibition of incest on the one hand, and the prohibition of putting the totem to death and its sacralization on the other). These two taboos coincide with “the two repressed desires of the Oedipus complex”⁸.

The myth of Totem and Taboo runs through Freud’s work. Throughout it, it is articulated with the Oedipus complex. Freud’s second founding myth, Moses and Monotheism⁹, written at the end of his life, contains elements close to those of Totem and Taboo. The originary act is here the equivalent of a parricide, since Moses, founder of the Jewish people and of its religion, is said to have been murdered by that people. In both cases, a parricide is at the origin of a process of civilization and stands as an originary act. There is also in this text a rupture, an impossible mourning, and guilt, transmitted from generation to generation. The re-founding that follows the murder of Moses is partly at an impasse. Its reparation appears impossible. The parricide made possible the founding of monotheism, but it was also repressed from generation to generation. For Freud, the sacrifice of Jesus is an attempt to expiate this parricide, finally acknowledged and no longer repressed. It allows for a new rupture and a re-founding: Christianity.

What Freud describes in the myths of Totem and Taboo and of Moses and Monotheism sketches a possible reading of family history and of the history of civilizations, groups, and institutions. The processes of filiation, individual or collective, are inevitably marked by an originary parricide, by moments of founding, real or mythical, by continuity, by ruptures and re-foundings, by acts of revolt or by real or symbolic murders, by mournings as well as by foundings or re-foundings at an impasse, and by the repetition of parricide. “The murder of Moses constituted a repetition” of the murder of the father of the primal horde, “as did also the murder of Christ”¹⁰. Parricide is inescapable. Speaking of the Christian religion, Freud writes: “It is worth noting the way in which the new religion solved the problem of ambivalence with regard to the relations between father and son. To be sure, the principal fact in it was reconciliation with God the Father and the expiation of the crime perpetrated against him; but, on the other hand, an inverse sentiment also manifested itself, in that the Son, by taking upon himself the whole weight of sin, had himself become God alongside, or rather in place of, his Father. Sprung from a religion of the Father, Christianity became the religion of the Son and could not avoid eliminating the Father.”¹¹.

When the father is spoken of, what has been retained from Freud’s work has been, far more, the notion of the “Oedipus complex.” And yet the myth of Totem and Taboo constitutes, from 1913 on, the thread of a reflection on the father, but also on the transgenerational, phylogenesis, religion, civilization, and crowds, a reflection that would continue until Freud’s death. This reflection is sometimes detailed, sometimes summed up in a single sentence, as in Abriss der Psychoanalyse (An Outline of Psychoanalysis) (written in 1938 and published in 1940), where he writes: “Nor must we forget the phylogenetic influences which, present somewhere in the id, in a form we do not yet know, act more strongly upon the ego in earliest childhood than at any other period.” Here there is a final attempt, shortly before his death and during his period of exile in flight from Nazism, to “localize” the phylogenetic (and the ancestral murder of the father) within the psychic apparatus, and an acknowledgment of his ignorance as to its precise impact and form.

The place of Totem and Taboo for Freud

Freud considered his elaborations around the myth of “Totem and Taboo” to be very important. The book is an act meant to make possible the separation from Jung. “In the quarrel with Zurich it will come at the right moment; it will separate us as an acid does from salt,” he writes to Ferenczi¹². He also writes to Abraham: “The thing… should serve to bring about a clean break with everything that is Aryan-religious.”¹³. The correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi¹⁴ makes it possible to follow the conception of the book and Freud’s states of mind. Preoccupied by “the mystery of tragic guilt” (May 21, 1911), the elaboration of this work sometimes gives him the feeling of having wished merely “to enter into a small liaison and discovered, at my age, that I must marry a new wife” (November 30, 1911). He is convinced of the importance of what he is writing: “I am now writing on the Totem, with the feeling that this will be my ‘Greatest,’ my ‘Best,’ and perhaps my last good (work). Inner certainties tell me that I am right” (May 4, 1913). Four days later he writes: “we hold the truth; I am as sure of it as I was fifteen years ago.” Five days after that he affirms that this work is, for him, foundational: “Since The Interpretation of Dreams, I have never worked on anything with so much assurance and exaltation.” Totem and Taboo is also the occasion for Freud to inscribe his Jewishness and his questioning of it within his psychoanalytic elaborations. In the preface to the Hebrew edition, in 1930, he writes: “No reader of this book will find it easy to put himself in the author’s place and to feel what he feels — he who does not understand the holy tongue, who is completely detached from the religion of his fathers… who cannot share nationalist ideals and who has yet never disowned belonging to his people, who feels his Jewish nature and would not wish to change it. If he were asked: but what then is still Jewish in you, now that you have renounced all this heritage? — he would answer: still a great deal, and probably the essential thing. At this moment, however, he would be incapable of formulating it in clear terms. But surely one day it will be accessible to scientific understanding.” In hoping that his feeling of Jewishness might one day become “accessible to scientific understanding,” is he anticipating Moses and Monotheism? Or is he alluding to the development of psychoanalysis, which concerns the very content of Totem and Taboo as much as his own subjective position and its contradictions? Why did Freud, who was Jewish, feel the need to look toward the totem and not toward the Bible? This preface also shows that the question of identity, rarely worked through by Freud, remains enigmatic for him (he recognizes himself as Jewish, but he does not know what that is). By articulating, in this preface, the content of Totem and Taboo with the question of his identity and his Jewishness, Freud is perhaps telling us that what would be the heart of identity would be the recognition that one is sprung from a parricide, all other identities taking on meaning only in relation to this primordial definition. This preface also perhaps prefigures what Freud will develop in Moses and Monotheism: the repetition, in Judaism and in Christianity, of parricide. In affirming that Moses was Egyptian by origin, Freud is perhaps seeking to soften the import of the inescapable parricide. It is a cruel and tyrannical father who is killed in Totem and Taboo, a stranger sprung from the enemy people in Moses and Monotheism. Or perhaps he is affirming that the founder is, by definition, external to the group he founds.

Parricide and civilization

Totem and Taboo was published in 1913, a year before the First World War; Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents)¹⁵ in 1929, a few years before the advent of Nazism and two years after the elimination of Trotsky by Stalin. In 1913, Freud makes of parricide a founding act of the process of civilization, on account of the guilt it engenders. This process takes concrete form in the prohibition of incest and the appearance of exogamy, the birth of fraternity (“the clan of brothers took the place of the father-horde, and the brothers guarantee one another’s lives”), then in morality and the advent of new fathers less terrible than the omnipotent originary father. The differences between these and the originary father are, moreover, great enough to “ensure the permanence of the religious need”¹⁶. In 1929, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud articulates the guilt transmitted from generation to generation with the inevitable confrontation between Eros and Thanatos. Parricide, at the origin of a part of the individual’s sense of guilt, would intervene in the constitution of the superego. There would be two origins of the sense of guilt: anxiety before authority (and thus the father or his substitute in reality) and anxiety before the superego. Freud writes: “We cannot abandon our conception of the origin of the sense of guilt as arising from the Oedipus complex and acquired at the murder of the father by the brothers banded together against him.” The sense of guilt is inevitable. It originates in the murder of the primal father and it encounters “the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death” that exists in every individual. In the prolongation of the reflections in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego)¹⁷, for Freud civilization is linked first of all to “an internal erotic impulse aiming to unite human beings into a mass held together by tight bonds.” It must therefore reinforce ever more the sense of guilt in order to maintain itself. This sense of guilt is a fragile support that could one day become unbearable to human beings. Anticipating the catastrophes of the Second World War, or thinking of the First, Freud writes in the last paragraph of this text: “Men of today have carried so far their mastery of the forces of nature that, with its help, it has become easy for them to exterminate one another down to the last man.”

Conclusion

In his Klinisches Tagebuch (Clinical Diary)¹⁸, written in 1932, shortly before his death, Ferenczi, who was for a long time Freud’s “spiritual son,” seeking to understand the interpersonal stakes of his rupture with Freud, writes of him: “The anxious idea, perhaps very strong in the unconscious, that the father must die when the son grows up, explains his fear [the one experienced by Freud] of allowing any one of the sons to become independent. At the same time, it shows us that Freud, as a son, really wanted to kill his father. Instead of acknowledging this, he established the theory of the parricidal Oedipus…”¹⁹. Was it thus that one of the foremost and “guiding” theories of psychoanalysis came to be born?

Notes