Killing Father Freud

The intellectual career of Philip Rieff, who died last year at the age of 83, was one of the instructive dramas of the age. In 1959, Rieff published his first and best-known book, "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist," which established him as one of the preeminent Freudians at a time when Freud still looked like the century's great lawgiver. He went on to edit a 10-volume edition of Freud's works. But by 1966, Rieff's next book, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," started to question the effects of Freudian psychology on modern man. In studying Freud's critics and successors, such as Jung and Reich, Rieff began to wonder whether the Freudian ethic of self-mastery was not a license for mere self-absorption, designed to produce "virtuosi of the self."

"The Triumph of the Therapeutic" was followed in 1973 by "Fellow Teachers," a polemic on the state of the university that reached a smaller audience. Then came the great silence. For more than three decades, as Rieff taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, he did not write another book. His developing quarrel with Freud was frozen in place, and his wider reputation faded. Today, younger readers are far more likely to have heard of Rieff's former wife, Susan Sontag, or his son, David Rieff.

Finally, in the year of his death, came the explosive peripateia that cast his whole career in a new light. "My Life Among the Deathworks" (Virginia, 213 pages, $34.95) announced as the first volume of a series called "Sacred Order / Social Order," amounted to a wholesale retraction of Rieff's admiration for Freud, the intellectual allegiance that had defined his career. Now Freud appeared to him as a commander in the army of chaos, a prophet of the relativism and narcissism that had destroyed Western culture in the 20th century. At one point Rieff even associated Freud with Marx and Hitler as "ravishers of truth," thanks to whom "sacred order became a discardable reality." At best, he considered Freud one of "the great negational theorists and artists" of the century, along with Joyce and Duchamp. Psychoanalysis, instead of being a science of living, now looked to Rieff like a "deathwork," dedicated to murdering, or euthanizing, the Western tradition.

"My Life Among the Deathworks" is a monumental palinode, designed to unwrite the book that made Rieff's name. Yet reading Rieff's "Freud" today, in the light of what came after, it is possible to see that even in 1959 his admiration for Freud was an unstable compound. The book is full of the most strongly worded praise for the man himself: "For humanists in science, and for scientists of the human," Rieff writes, "Freud should be the model." For Rieff, Freud was still what he was for W.H. Auden, when the poet wrote "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" in 1939: "one rational voice," who was able "to remember / like the old and be honest like children."

But as he goes on to tease out the ethical and social implications of Freud's theory of mind, Rieff often leaves the reader wondering just why the author of that theory deserves our esteem, or even our trust. In the book's last chapter, "The Emergence of Psychological Man," the reader is startled to learn that Freud, the great rationalist, healer, and stoic, is in fact the sponsor of an epidemic of selfishness. "Such careful and detailed concentration on the self as Freud encourages," Rieff writes, "may more often produce pedants of the inner life than virtuosi of the outer one." Finally, all Rieff can bring himself to say in praise of Freudianism is that, "in default of other cures, egotism suits the age." Like it or not, we are all egotists now.

This line of critique, expanded and systematized in "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," left Rieff in a position of acute cognitive dissonance. Freud, he continued to maintain, was a culture hero, but Freud's works actually have a tendency to destroy culture. The "therapeutic," which is Rieff's term for the "ideal cultural type" produced by a psychoanalytically informed society, has no interest in moral aspiration or social concern; instead, he turns inward, content to be a technician of his own well-being. Quietly, without building any barricades, Freudianism had effected a revolution greater than any known to history: "A calm and profoundly reasonable revolt of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the salvation of self through identification with the purposes of community."

Try as he might to write about this "revolt" in neutral, sociological terms, Rieff could not help viewing it with alarm. In particular, his darkening view of "the therapeutic" left his admiration for Freud deeply vulnerable. At first, Rieff attempted to save the appearances by clinging to a distinction between Freud the thinker and Freud the system builder. "The exemplary cast of Freud's mind and character," Rieff writes in "Triumph," "is more enduring than the particulars of his doctrine. In culture it is always the example that survives; the person is the immortal idea."

The paralysis that overtook his intellectual life, starting in the early 1970s, shows how little comfort he could derive from such a compromise. If writer's block is a neurotic symptom, in fact, Rieff's trouble could be diagnosed in classically Freudian terms: unable to face his need to kill his intellectual father, he repressed it so deeply that he simply couldn't write. Not until he was about to die did he publish "My Life Among the Deathworks," a book that, based on internal evidence, seems to have been written largely in the late 1980s. Only then he could commit the thought-murder he was clearly fantasizing about as early as the 1950s.

Yet while "Deathworks" rains blows on Freud and his achievements — "Freud's great essay on civilization and its discontents," Rieff writes, "is itself a manner of imperiling civilization" — it is also a deeply uneasy and at times repulsive book. Most obviously, Rieff's prose, once clear and urbane, has become knotted and jargon-ridden, full of odd technical coinages. More disturbing is the way Rieff, as though in penance for his former services to the therapeutic, turns himself into a violent reactionary, praying for a new sacred authority to put a stop to the excesses of liberal reason.

The most striking symptom of this inhumane turn is Rieff's bizarre obsession with homosexuality. At one point, he actually compares the gay liberation movement with the Nazi brownshirts of Ernst Roehm. (A psychoanalyst might also find something to say about Rieff's decision to dedicate this book, in which he calls bisexuality "a perversion and rebellion against reality," to the famously bisexual Sontag.) Finally, Rieff seems to believe, like Naptha in "The Magic Mountain," that the only solution to modern dilemmas is the rebirth of theocracy. He glories in a savage rhetoric of culture war reminiscent of Weimar Germany: "I trust that this work will not be for tourists," he writes, "but rather for those who sense their own conscription into the wars that characterize the present condition of our cultural life."

How did Rieff get from "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" to "My Life Among the Deathworks," from the apprehensions of 1966 to the anathemas of 2006? It is now possible to give a sort of answer to that question, with the posthumous publication of "Charisma" (Pantheon, 273 pages, $26.95). This volume represents the remains of a major study that Rieff was working on in the early 1970s, and which he eventually abandoned, commenting that "there was no constituency for the book." It was edited under his supervision, near the end of his life, by Daniel Frank and Aaron Manson, and seems to contain a mixture of finished chapters, drafts, and lecture notes. Inevitably, the resulting book is not an easy read. It is very repetitive, hammering points and phrases home with a lecturer's persistence, and it leaves some important avenues unexplored. Had he been able to finish "Charisma," Rieff would no doubt have made it more consecutive in argument and more graceful in style.

Even in its current state, however, "Charisma" sheds light on the way Rieff's thought developed after "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." That book was devoted to Freud and his successors; "Charisma" takes on another modern German mandarin, the sociologist Max Weber. In particular, Rieff sets out to challenge Weber's influential definition of charisma. For Weber, charisma was a lawless, frightening, yet intensely seductive power possessed by rare individuals, such as great warriors and prophets.

But charisma, an illogical and inexplicable gift, burned too hot to be made the fuel of a lasting social order. As a result, Weber held, charisma had to be banked like a fire, if it was to continue to give heat. Inevitably, the charisma belonging to the founder of a state or religion is cooled, rationalized, and made routine by his followers and successors. The routinization of charisma explained how a radical figure like Jesus could be the founder of a massive institution like the Catholic Church. Through Paul and his successors, the charismatic founding was disciplined and structured, and so preserved.

The problem with this model, according to Rieff, is that it imagines charisma as an essentially lawless, transgressive quality. For Weber, charisma is an amoral gift, like strength or good looks. As a result, following a charismatic leader means casting off morality, substituting personal loyalty for principled discipline. Rieff's central argument is that this way of conceiving of charisma, though it may describe the herd following of a totalitarian leader, is exactly the opposite of the way Jewish and Christian charismatics operated. For Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, Rieff maintains, charisma was itself deeply lawful — not an exception to the rule, but the expression of new and more binding rules. "The chief purpose of the charismatic," Rieff writes, "has been to liberate his disciples from the outwardness of obedience and shackle them precisely to the truth of his message, as he himself has been shackled to it."

In Rieff's hands, this seemingly technical dispute brilliantly evolves into a series of reflections on the way modern intellectuals imagine power, law, and faith. Weber's model partakes of what Rieff calls "the mystique of the break" — the modern obsession with moments of transgression and rupture that promise total liberation. Genuine religion, however, and perhaps all genuine culture, depends on "interdicts" and "remissions": A system of prohibitions and pardons that make it possible for men to structure their world and live together in peace. By fostering contempt for interdicts and remissions, Weber — and by extension, the modern rational worldview — endangers the basis of human society. If we are addicted to irrational, law-breaking charisma, we will never experience the disciplined, law-giving charisma offered by Moses and Jesus.

Given the power and implications of this idea, it is a shame that Rieff was never able to bring "Charisma" to completion. His failure to do so tempts another, possibly impertinent, Freudian speculation. In essence, "Charisma" is an attempt to substitute a killable father-figure, Weber, for the one Rieff was unable to kill, Freud. For Rieff's case against Weberian charisma is, at bottom, the same as his case against Freud's theory of the mind.

For both of these secularizing geniuses, the unreason of religion could not be the source of a binding ethics. Yet reason unaided was no more capable of binding itself. The modern, suspicious mind could see through all its own imperatives, reducing them to illusions and neuroses. What remained was the selfish apathy of the therapeutic, but this apathy itself, Rieff saw, could instantly transform into its opposite, as the masses rushed to worship any demagogue who promised to supply the charismatic authority religion had lost. Only the sacred order in which we no longer believe, Rieff felt, could protect us from ourselves.

"Charisma," even in its unfinished state, is a more subtle and convincing statement of this case than "My Life Among the Deathworks." The former has the advantage of indirection, where the latter is all too frontal in its attack, and so can't avoid sounding cranky and opinionated. If there is a central objection to be raised to Rieff's indictment, however, it is that he has not really advanced the critique of nihilism one inch beyond where Nietzsche left it, more than 100 years ago.

Already in the 1880s, Nietzsche considered that mankind had killed God, and had nothing to put in His place. This was the burden of his famous parable of the madman, who asks: "What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?" Rieff finally succumbed to the dizziness of that spiritual vertigo, and like the Israelites in the desert, asked for the great chain of being to be reattached. He refused to believe that we could live without it, that meaning created could offer the same sustenance as meaning bestowed. Rieff's late works are really a lengthy paraphrase of Heidegger's famous cry of despair: "Only a god can save us." He would not countenance the alternative, which is that we must save ourselves.

akirsch@nysun.com