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since the sacrifice was accompanied by a total renunciation of the women on whose account the rebellion against the father was started. But at that point the inexorable psychological law of ambivalence stepped in. The very deed in which the son offered the greatest possible atonement to the father brought him at the same time to the attainment of his wishes against the father. He himself became God, beside, or more correctly, in place of, the father. A son-religion displaced the father-religion. As a sign of this substitution the ancient totem-meal was revived in the form of communion, in which the company of brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the son—no longer the father—obtained sanctity thereby and identified themselves with him. [Emphasis added in all cases except the last.]181
In the exposition above, an orthodox Christian would agree with Freud, except when he arrived at his final inaccurate conclusion that Jesus replaced the Father—that Christianity is a “son-religion.” Freud appears not to have understood that in Christianity the Son does not replace the Father: “I and the Father are one.”182 Setting aside Freud’s curious interpretation of Jesus as replacing the Father, we can certainly see that he probably did understand much of the essential message of Christianity when he wrote (and this is, after all, a rather astonishing quotation): “He [Christ] sacrificed his own life and so redeemed the company of brothers from original sin [emphasis added].”183 This concept of Jesus as the Anti-Oedipus is a rich one, with ramifications that go deeply into the psychology of atheism.184 In this book, however, I can only bring out, briefly, the connections between this theme and Freud’s identification with the Anti-Christ. Specifically, to the extent that Freud identified with and championed Oedipal man, he also identified with and championed the Anti-Christ, for just as Jesus is the Anti-Oedipus, Oedipus is the Anti-Christ. (Swales, in particular, makes a systematic case that Freud identified with Oedipus.185) But insofar as Freud understood Oedipal motivation to be a natural and unfortunate fact that had to be reluctantly accepted, to that extent Freud can be viewed as a brilliant psychologist of fallen human nature, who showed us, with Oedipus, that the Anti-Christ is Everyman. In this sense Freud has provided, in the Oedipus complex, a profound modern interpretation and analysis of the ancient concept of original sin. ConclusionThe exact nature of Freud’s relations with the Devil still remains uncertain, and perhaps must always remain so; the same is true of his identification with the Anti-Christ. In any case, there is much evidence that Freud’s personality (or unconscious ego) was to some degree “split,” and that an important part of him was involved in a neurotic fantasy pact with the Devil. |