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Jewish tradition of a false Messiah (though Bakan does not introduce this idea).
One other important characteristic of early psychoanalysis seems relevant here. In 1913, Freud established a special committee of loyal followers of his thought. This inner sanctum, at its start, consisted of Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, and Hanns Sachs. This committee’s existence and actions were to be “strictly secret.” Each member, to signify his membership, was given an antique Greek intaglio to be mounted on a gold ring. Roazen comments that these rings “marked the recipients as specially chosen bearers of his [Freud’s] message.”173 Sachs, a lawyer by training, soon became an important training analyst, one who devoted himself to analyzing future psychoanalysts. Roazen notes that Sachs wrote about his training period in a way that shows his view of psychoanalysis as a religion, not as a science: Religions have always demanded a trial period, a novitiate, of those among their devotees who desired to give their entire life into the service of the supermundane and the supernatural, those, in other words, who were to become monks or priests…. It can be seen that analysis needs something corresponding to the novitiate of the Church.174 The possibility that important aspects of Freud’s thought represent a systematic critique of and rival to Christianity requires that we now take up a major new topic. Jesus as the Anti-OedipusThe central concept in Freud’s work, aside from the unconscious, is the now well-known Oedipus complex. In the case of male personality development, the essential features of this complex are the following: Roughly during the age period from three to six, the boy develops a craving for power, hatred of his father, and a strong sexual desire for his mother. At the same time, the boy develops an intense fear of the father and a desire to supplant him. The hatred is based on the boy’s knowledge that the father, with his greater size and strength, stands in the way of his desire. The child’s fear of the father may explicitly be a fear of castration by the father, but more typically it has a less specific character. The son does not really kill the father, of course, but patricide is assumed to be a common preoccupation of his fantasies and dreams. The “resolution” of the complex is supposed to occur in part through the boy’s recognition that he cannot replace his father, and in part through the fear of castration (which eventually leads the boy to identify with the father, the aggressor, and to repress the original frightening components of the complex). |