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I am inclined to think, however, that whatever Freud’s diabolical identification may have been, his substantially stronger affinities were with God in Heaven. In this respect, it must be emphasized that Goethe’s Faust, after all, ends with the salvation of Faust; The Temptation of St. Anthony concludes with the ongoing hope of salvation; Paradise Lost implies Paradise Regained; Virgil’s Aeneid ends with the founding of Rome; and Dante’s Inferno is the first part of a journey that ends in Paradise.
The question of Freud’s ultimate allegiance is, of course, a very central one. This book argues that Freud’s early traumatic experiences, later amplified by cocaine, determined (along with his temperament and abilities) those emotions, problems, and pathologies that would preoccupy him as an adult. Although I assume this degree of psychological determinism, I also assume that Freud’s attitude toward his pathological past was open to a free choice. In this respect, it should be emphasized that Freud chose to wrestle directly with his past, intellectually and emotionally, and not to deny or repress it. Where does he choose to stand with respect to the basic moral issues of good and evil, God and the Devil? Here I am unable to decide what Freud’s final psychological commitment was; indeed, such a judgment is always difficult. (And, of course, any ultimate moral judgment about Freud, or anyone else, is outside the proper sphere of human evaluation.) But, as noted above, my estimate is that in his more fundamental aspects Freud chose the side of the angels. The curious state of the entire question of Freud’s Christian unconscious is captured in his own words: “Do you not know that I am the Devil? All my life I have had to play the Devil, in order that others would be able to build the most beautiful cathedral with the materials that I produced [emphasis added].”186 Freud never lost his memory of Notre Dame, with its “entirely new idea of perfection.” And though the cathedral to which he referred remains to be built, I believe Freud would consider that he had done his part. |