But the main reason that we must not dismiss Freud’s theory as absurd lies in its consonance with biological ideas then current. Science has since abandoned the biological linchpins of Freud’s theory, and most commentators don’t know what these concepts entailed or that they ever even existed. Freud’s theory therefore strikes us as a crazy speculation that makes absolutely no sense according to modern ideas of evolution. Well, Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy is bold, wildly beyond data, speculative in the extreme, idiosyncratic—and wrong. But Freud’s speculation does become comprehensible once one recognizes the two formerly respectable biological theories underpinning the argument.
The first theory, of course, is recapitulation itself, as discussed throughout this essay. Recapitulation must provide the primary warrant for Freud’s fantasy, for recapitulation allowed Freud to interpret a normal feature of childhood (or a neurosis interpreted as fixation to some childhood stage) as necessarily representing an adult phase of our evolutionary past. But recapitulation does not suffice, for one also needs a mechanism to convert the experiences of adults into the heredity of their offspring. Conventional Darwinism could not provide such a mechanism in this case—and Freud understood that his fantasy demanded allegiance to a different version of heredity.
Freud’s fantasy requires the passage to modern heredity of events that affected our ancestors only tens of thousands of years ago at most. But such events—anxiety at approaching ice sheets, castration of sons and murder of fathers—have no hereditary impact. However traumatic, such events do not affect the eggs and sperm of parents, and therefore cannot pass into heredity under Mendelian and Darwinian rules.
Freud, therefore, held firmly to his second biological linchpin—the Lamarckian idea, then already unfashionable but still advocated by some prominent biologists, that acquired characters will be inherited. Under Lamarckism, all theoretical problems for Freud’s mechanism disappear. Any important and adaptive behavior developed by adult ancestors can pass directly into the heredity of offspring—and quickly. A primal parricide that occurred just ten or twenty thousand years ago may well be encoded as the Oedipal complex of modern children.
I credit Freud for his firm allegiance to the logic of his argument. Unlike Ferenczi, who concocted an untenable melange of symbolism and causality in Thalassa (the placenta, for example, as a newly evolved adaptation of mammals, cannot, therefore, enclose a phyletic vestige of the primeval ocean). However, Freud’s theory obeyed a rigidly consistent biological logic rooted in two notions since discredited—recapitulation and Lamarckian inheritance.
Freud understood that his theory depended upon the validity of Lamarckian inheritance. He wrote in the Phylogenetic Fantasy, “One can justifiably claim that the inherited dispositions are residues of the acquisition of our ancestors.” He also recognized that Lamarckism had been falling from fashion since the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900. In their collaboration, Freud and Ferenczi dwelt increasingly upon the necessary role of Lamarckism in psychoanalysis. They planned a joint book on the subject, and Freud dug in with enthusiasm, reading Lamarck’s works in late 1916 and writing a paper on the subject (unfortunately never published and apparently not preserved) that he sent to Ferenczi in early 1917. But the project never came to fruition, as the privations of World War I made research and communication increasingly difficult. When Ferenczi nudged Freud one last time in 1918, Freud responded, “Not disposed to work . . . too much interested in the end of the world drama.”
Illogic remains slippery and vacuous (Thalassa can never be proved or rejected; so the idea has simply been forgotten). But in a logical argument, one must live or die by the validity of required premises. Lamarckism has been firmly rejected, and Freud’s evolutionary theory of neurosis falls with the validation of Mendel. Freud himself chronicled with great remorse the slippage of Lamarckism from respectability. In Moses and Monotheism, he continued to recognize his need for Lamarckism while acknowledging the usual view of its failure:
This state of affairs is made more difficult, it is true, by the present attitude of biological science, which rejects the idea of acquired qualities being transmitted to descendants. I admit, in all modesty, that in spite of this I cannot picture biological development proceeding without taking this factor into account.
Since most commentators have not grasped the logic of Freud’s theory because they have not recognized the roles of Lamarckism and recapitulation, they fall into a dilemma, particularly if they generally favor Freud. Without these two biological linchpins of recapitulation and Lamarckism, Freud’s fantasy sounds crazy. Could Freud really mean that these events of recent history somehow entered the inheritance of modern children and the fixated behavior of neurotics? Consequently, a muted or kindly tradition has arisen for viewing Freud’s claims as merely symbolic. He didn’t really mean that exiled sons actually killed their father and that Oedipal complexes truly reenacted a specific event of our past. Freud’s words should therefore be regarded sympathetically as colorful imagery providing insight into the psychological meaning of neurosis. Daniel Goleman, reporting on the discovery of A Phylogenetic Fantasy (in The New York Times, 10 February 1987), writes:
In the manuscript, according to many scholars, Freud appeared to be turning to a literary mechanism he would use often in the explication of his ideas; he put forward a story that might or might not be grounded in reality but whose mythological content revealed what he saw as basic human conflicts.
I strongly reject this “kindly” tradition of watering down Freud’s well-formulated mechanism to myth or metaphor. In fact, I don’t view this tradition as kindly at all, for in order to make Freud appear cogent in an inappropriate context of modern ideas, such interpretations sacrifice the sharp logic and consistency of Freud’s actual argument. Freud’s writing gives no indication that he intended his phylogenetic speculation as anything but a potentially true account of actual events. If Freud had meant these ideas only as metaphor, then why did he work out such consistency with biological theory based on Lamarckism and recapitulation? And why did he yearn so strongly for Lamarckism after its popularity had faded?
Freud recognized his fantasy as speculation, of course, but he meant every word as potential reality. In fact, the end of Totem and Taboo features an incisive discussion of this very subject, with a firm denial of any metaphorical intent. Freud writes:
It is not accurate to say that obsessional neurotics, weighed down under the burden of an excessive morality, are defending themselves only against psychical reality and are punishing themselves for impulses which were merely felt. Historical reality has a share in the matter as well.
Freud’s closing line then reiterates this argument with a literary fillip. He quotes the famous parody of the first line of John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), as spoken by Faust in Part 1 of Goethe’s drama: Im Anfang war die Tat (In the beginning was the Deed).
Finally, in explicating Freud’s belief in the reality of his story, and in recognizing the firm logic of his argument, I do not defend his method of speculation devoid of any actual evidence in the historical or archaeological record. I believe that such purely speculative reconstructions of history do more harm than good because they give the study of history a bad name. These speculative reveries often lead students of the “hard” experimental sciences to dismiss the investigation of history as a “soft” enterprise unworthy of the name science. But history, pursued in other ways, includes all the care and rigor of physics or chemistry at its best. I also deplore the overly adaptationist premise that any evolved feature not making sense in our present life must have arisen long ago for a good reason rooted in past conditions now altered. In our tough, complex, and partly random world, many features just don’t make functional sense, period. We need not view schizophrenia, paranoia, and depression as postglacial adaptations gone awry: perhaps these illnesses are immediate pathologies, with remediable medical causes, pure and simple.
Freud, of course,
recognized the speculative character of his theory. He called his work a phylogenetic “fantasy,” and he ultimately abandoned any thought of publication, perhaps because he regarded the work as too outré and unsupported. He even referred playfully to the speculative character of his manuscript, begging that readers “be patient if once in a while criticism retreats in the face of fantasy and unconfirmed things are presented, merely because they are stimulating and open up distant vistas.” He then wrote to Ferenczi that scientific creativity must be defined as a “succession of daringly playful fantasy and relentlessly realistic criticism.” Perhaps the phase of relentless criticism intruded before Freud dared to publish his phylogenetic fantasy.
We are therefore left with a paradoxical, and at least mildly disturbing, thought. Freud’s theory ranks as a wild speculation, based upon false biology and rooted in no direct data at all about phylogenetic history. Yet the manuscript has been published and analyzed with painstaking care more than half a century later. Hundreds of unknown visionaries develop equally farfetched but interesting and coherent speculations every day—but we ignore them or, at best, laugh at such crazy ideas. Rewrite the Phylogenetic Fantasy to remove the literary hand of Freud’s masterly prose, put Joe Blow’s name on the title page, and no one will pay the slightest attention. We live in a world of privilege, and only great thinkers win a public right to fail greatly.
IV
Essays in the Paleontology of Ideas
9
The Jew and the Jewstone
THE HUMAN MIND MAY LOVE TO CONTEMPLATE EXEMplary universes of abstract grandeur and idealized perfection, but we can extract equal pleasure from a tiny embodiment of some great thought, or some defining event of a lifetime, in a humble but concrete object that we can hold in our hands and rotate before our eyes. We cherish such explicit reminders—keepsakes, souvenirs, or mementos in our descriptions—for their salience as markers of distinctive moments in our unique trajectory through the general adventure of human life.
For this reason, I have never been able to understand the outright purchase, from catalogs or store shelves, of distinctive items that (I would think) can only have meaning as mementos of particular, preciously individual experiences. I do, for example, cherish a few baseballs signed by personal heroes, but only because they intersected my own life in a meaningful way—the pop foul off DiMaggio’s bat that my father caught in 1950 as I sat next to him, and that the great man signed and returned after I mailed him the relic along with a gushing fan letter; the ball signed by Hank Aaron, and presented to me after a talk I gave at Atlanta’s Spelman College, as I, nearly speechless for once, could only thank my hosts for the equivalent of an item inscribed by God himself. But what could a ball signed by a Ted Williams or a Pete Rose mean, when ordered from a catalog by anyone willing to fork over a specified sum?
I take special delight in the particular category of things long known and admired in large abstraction, but then seen for the first time in the form of a humble but concrete object. I don’t refer to first views of the grand things themselves—the obvious and anticipated thrill of initial contact with the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon—but rather to the sublime surprise of finding my father’s card of honorable discharge from the navy after hearing his war stories for so many years, or of seeing my grandfather’s name entered on a ship’s manifest for his arrival at Ellis Island in 1901 (see essay 1).
As a scholar, most of my thrills in this category arise as unexpected encounters in actual print, in an old book read by real people, of the founding version for stories or concepts once learned in a classroom or textbook, and stored as an important memory implanted by others but never validated by original sources. I get a special jolt when I first see (as my grandmother would have said) in shvartz—that is, “in black” ink or printed type—something that had long intrigued my mind, but had never stood right before my eyes in its concrete and original form.
The tale of this essay begins with such an experience of transfer from vague abstraction to factual immediacy. I do not remember where I first heard the story—perhaps in a guest lecture from a distinguished visiting luminary, or as a casual comment from a professor in an undergraduate class at Antioch College? I do not even know whether the tale represents a standard example, well known to all historians of early science,9 or an original insight from one teacher’s personal research. But I do remember the story itself, and the striking epitome thus provided for the revolutionary character (at its codification in the seventeenth century) of the explanatory system now called “science.”
The story cited a memorable example to show how respected styles of former explanation became risible and “mystical” in the light of new views about causality and the nature of the material world. The essence of the difference between “prescientific” and scientific explanations, my unremembered source stated, could be epitomized in a popular “prescientific” remedy for the healing of wounds inflicted by swords or other weapons. The prescribed salve must be applied to the wound itself—where, by modern sensibilities, the potion might well work as advertised, since early pharmacists and herbalists had, by experience, discovered many useful remedies, even if we now dismiss their theories about modes of action. But, this particular recipe then required that the salve be applied to the weapon that inflicted the wound as well—for healing required a sympathetic treatment, a rebalancing, a “putting right” of both the injurer and the injuree.
The nub of the revolutionary difference between “prescientific” and scientific explanation, my anonymous source continued, lies beautifully exposed in this microcosm—for the Western world’s transition to modernity may virtually be defined by the realization that although some material property of the salve may heal the wound by direct contact, the formerly sensible practice of treating the weapon in a similar way must now be scorned as utter nonsense and absurd mysticism.
This tale about treating the weapon as well as the wound has rattled around my head for twenty years or more, with no documentation beyond a dimly remembered lecture. Then, a few months ago, I bought a copy of Johann Schröder’s Pharmacopoeia medicochymica (1677 edition of a work first printed in Ulm in 1641), perhaps the most widely used handbook of drugs and other curative remedies from the seventeenth century. And in this copy, published right in the midst of the ferment provoked by Newton’s generation at the birth of modern science, I found the formula for the salve that must be applied to weapons as well as wounds—in shvartz on page 303, and named Unguentum Sympatheticum Crollii, or Croll’s sympathetic ointment (an unguent is an ointment or salve, and we shall learn more about Mr. Croll a bit later).
The formula for this concoction may raise modern hairs and hackles. We must begin, Schröder tells us, with adip. veteris aprugn., or the fat of an old boar, mixed with bear fat as well. Boil them both in red wine; pour the resulting mixture into cold water and collect the fat that accumulates at the top. Then add a motley assortment of pulverized worms; the brain of a boar (presumably from the same creature that supplied the initial fat); some sandalwood; haematite (a rock containing iron); mumia, or the dust from a corpse; and, to top it all off, usneae e cranio hominis interempti, or scrapings from the skull of a man who has been killed.
Schröder then appends a series of notes with permitted variation, including a most welcome statement (to modern sensibilities): sunt qui omittunt usneam et mumiam (some people omit the corpse dust and cranial scrapings). But another note then warns us that the cranial scrapings, if included, must be gathered while the moon waxes (that is, during its increase from a thin crescent to a full circle), and under a good astrological sign, preferably with Venus in conjunction (that is, within the reigning zodiacal constellation), but certainly not Mars or Saturn.
Under the next heading, Usus (use), Schröder first tells us that this ointment will cure all wounds, unless the nerves or arteries have been severed. The next line—ungatur telum, quo vulnus inflictum (the weapon that inflicted the wound is to be anointed)—then advan
ces the argument that so impressed me as a succinct example of the dramatically different account of nature and causality, so soon to be superseded by the rise of modern science.
Schröder’s description ends with a set of instructions for proper use of the ointment. We learn that the relevant part must be wrapped in linen, and kept out of the wind in a place neither too hot nor too cold, ne damnum inferatur Patienti (so that no damage shall be inflicted upon the patient). Moreover, no dust may fall upon the part, alioquin Patiens mire affligeretur (for otherwise the patient will be sorely injured). However, the relevant part, in each case, describes the care and handling of the weapon, not the wound! The two final items on the list also refer exclusively to the anointed weapon: if the wound was inflicted by the point of a sword, then the ointment must be applied from the hilt downward toward the tip; if the weapon cannot be found, a stick of wood, dipped in the victim’s blood, may suffice.
In a final paragraph, Schröder offers his only statement about why such a procedure might enjoy success. The cure occurs because the same balsamic (comforting) spirit inheres in both the patient and the blood of his wound—and both must be fortified by the ointment. The weapon, I presume, must be treated because some of the patient’s blood still remains (or perhaps merely because the weapon drew the patient’s blood, and must therefore be cleansed along with the patient himself, in order to bring both parts of this drama back into harmony).
Oswald Croll (1560–1609), the inventor of this ointment, followed the theories of Paracelsus (1493–1541) in proposing external sources of disease, in opposition to the old Galenic theory of humors. In this major debate of pre-modern medicine, the externalists believed that “outside” forces or agents entered the human body to cause illness, and that healing substances from the three worldly kingdoms (animal, vegetable, and mineral, but primarily vegetable, as plants provided most drugs and potions) could rid the body of these invaders. The humoral theory, on the other hand, viewed disease as an imbalance among the body’s four basic principles: blood (the sanguine, or wet-hot humor), phlegm (the wet-cold humor), choler (dry-hot), and melancholy (dry-cold). Treatment must therefore be directed not toward the expulsion of foreign elements, but to the restoration of internal balance among the humors (bloodletting, for example, when the sanguine humor rises too high; sweating, purging, and vomiting as other devices for setting the humors back into order).