Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

64
William Shakespeare
sons before assuming positions as repressive fathers. But ultimately
the relationship with the parent enters Freud’s claimed domain of the
symbolic: “Whether one has killed one’s father or has abstained from
doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty
in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict
due to ambivalence” (132). Freud’s attribution of guilt to preexisting
ambivalence may produce a circular argument, 16 but at least it accords
with his concept of the dichotomous mind. Internal warfare (“with
himself at war”) is bound to produce repercussions, the dominant side
punishing the weaker. The central movement in the establishment of
this myth, from the nascent consciousness of a primal ancestor to a
shaping historical event, cannot be (and has not been) accounted for
so easily.
Freud’s general task in Totem and Taboo—extending his analysis
of the individual psyche to society and culture—bears a decided
similarity to the attempted analogy between the human mind and
Rome at the start of Civilization and Its Discontents. For although
he aims explicitly to compare the psyche with the physical structure
of Rome—the Palatine, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, the Coliseum,
the Pantheon—these sites have meaning, have history, only
as the record of human group activity; they signify not as isolated
architectural examples, but as imposing remains of a past society. The
necessity of establishing the cultural validity of his work outside its
analytic utility for individuals was a central challenge facing Freud.
What then determines the self-acknowledged success of his “audacious”
attempt to connect the individual with the group in Totem and
Taboo, but his proclaimed failure with the related analogy in Civilization
and Its Discontents? 17 Totem and Taboo exhibits a curious slippage
from the claim of general correspondence between savage and modern
behaviors to establishing the neurotic as the point of contact. Thus,
at the beginning, “we can recognize in [savages’] psychic life a wellpreserved,
early stage of our own development” (3). 18 By late in the
second chapter, however, implicating primitive man as more ambivalent
than “civilised human beings,” Freud requires a principle of differentiation,
and finds it in the stigma of neurosis. It is “neurotics who
are compelled to reproduce this conflict” of ambivalence; they retain
an “atavistic remnant . . . of an archaic constitution” (88). 19 “Neuroses,”
moreover, unlike savage behaviors, are asocial formations; they seek to
accomplish by private means what arose in society through collective