I Have Landed (25 page)

The connection with Ferenczi reinforces the importance of recapitulation as a centerpiece of Freud's psychological theory. Freud had been deeply hurt by the estrangement and opposition of his leading associates, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. But Ferenczi remained loyal, and Freud strengthened both personal and intellectual ties with him during this time of stress. “You are now really the only one who still works beside me,” Freud wrote to Ferenczi on July 31, 1915. In preparing the metapsychological papers, Freud's interchange with Ferenczi became so intense that these works might almost be viewed as a joint effort. The twelfth paper, the phylogenetic fantasy, survived only because Freud sent a draft to Ferenczi for his criticism. Ferenczi had received the most extensive biological training of all Freud's associates, and no one else in the history of psychoanalysis maintained so strong a commitment to recapitulation. When Freud sent his phylogenetic fantasy to Ferenczi on July 12, 1915, he ended his letter by stating, “Your priority in all this is evident.”

Ferenczi wrote a remarkable work titled
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality
(1924), perhaps best known today in mild ridicule for claiming that much of human psychology records our unrecognized yearning to return to the comforting confines of the womb, “where there is no such painful disharmony between ego and environment that characterizes existence in the external world.” By his own admission, Ferenczi wrote
Thalassa
“as an adherent of Haeckel's recapitulation theory.”

Ferenczi viewed sexual intercourse as an act of reversion toward a phyletic past in the tranquillity of a timeless ocean—a “thalassal regressive trend . . . striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval time.” He interpreted the weariness of postcoital repose as symbolic of oceanic tranquillity. He also viewed the penis as a symbolic fish, so to speak, reaching toward the womb of the primeval ocean. Moreover, he pointed out, the fetus that arises from this union passes its embryonic life in an amniotic fluid, thus recalling the aquatic environment of our ancestors.

Ferenczi tried to locate even earlier events in our modern psychic lives. He also likened the repose following coitus to a striving further back toward the ultimate tranquillity of a Precambrian world before the origin of life. Ferenczi viewed the full sequence of a human life—from the coitus of parents to the final death of their offspring—as a recapitulation of the gigantic tableau of our entire evolutionary past (Freud would not proceed nearly this far into such a realm of conflating possible symbol with reality). Coitus, in the repose that strives for death, represents the early earth before life, while impregnation recapitulates the dawn of life. The fetus, in the womb of its symbolic ocean, then passes through all ancestral stages from the primal amoeba to a fully formed human. Birth recapitulates the colonization of land by reptiles and amphibians, while the period of latency, following youthful sexuality and before full maturation, repeats the torpor induced by ice ages.

With this recollection of human life during the ice ages, we can connect Ferenczi's thoughts with Freud's phylogenetic fantasy—for Freud, eschewing Ferenczi's overblown, if colorful, inferences about an earlier past, begins with the glacial epoch in trying to reconstruct human history from current psychic life. The basis for Freud's theory lay in his attempt to classify neuroses according to their order of appearance during human growth.

Theories inevitably impose themselves upon our perceptions; no exclusive, objective, or obvious way exists for describing nature. Why should we classify neuroses primarily by their
time
of appearance? Neuroses might be described and ordered in a hundred other ways (by social effect, by common actions or structure, by emotional impacts upon the psyche, by chemical changes that might cause or accompany them). Freud's decision stemmed directly from his
commitment to an evolutionary explanation of neurosis—a scheme, moreover, that Freud chose to base upon the theory of recapitulation. In this view, sequential events of human history set the neuroses—for neurotic people become fixated at a stage of growth that normal people transcend. Since each stage of growth recapitulates a past episode in our evolutionary history, each neurosis fixates on a particular prehistoric stage in our ancestry. These behaviors may have been appropriate and adaptive then, but they now produce neuroses in our vastly different modern world. Therefore, if neuroses can be ordered by time of appearance, we will obtain a guide to their evolutionary meaning (and causation) as a series of major events in our phyletic history. Freud wrote to Ferenczi on July 12,1915, “What are now neuroses were once phases of human conditions.” In the
Phylogenetic Fantasy
, Freud asserts that “the neuroses must also bear witness to the history of the mental development of mankind.”

Freud begins by acknowledging that his own theory of psychosexual stages, combined with Ferenczi's speculations, may capture some truly distant aspects of phylogeny by their appearance in the development of very young children. For the phylogenetic fantasy, however, he confines himself to more definite (and less symbolic) parts of history that lie recorded in two sets of neuroses developing later in growth—the transference neuroses and the narcissistic neuroses of his terminology. As the centerpiece of the phylogenetic fantasy, Freud orders these neuroses in six successive stages: the three transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis), followed by the three narcissistic neuroses (dementia praecox [schizophrenia], paranoia, and melancholia-mania [depression]).

Freud interprets the transference neuroses as recapitulations of behaviors that we developed to cope with difficulties of human life during the ice ages: “The temptation is very great to recognize in the three dispositions to anxiety
hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis regressions to phases that the whole human race had to go through at some time from the beginning to the end of the Ice Age, so that at that time all human beings were the way only some of them are today.” Anxiety hysteria represents our first reaction to these difficult times: “Mankind, under the influence of the privations that the encroaching Ice Age imposed upon it, has become generally anxious. The hitherto predominantly friendly outside word, which bestowed every satisfaction, transformed itself into a mass of threatening perils.”

In these parlous times, large populations could not be supported, and limits to procreation became necessary. In a process adaptive for the time, humans learned to redirect their libidinal urges to other objects, and thereby to limit reproduction. The same behavior today, expressed as a phyletic memory, has become inappropriate and therefore represents the second neurosis—conversion hysteria: “It became a social obligation to limit reproduction. Perverse satisfactions that did not lead to the propagation of children avoided this prohibition. . . . The whole situation obviously corresponds to the conditions of conversion hysteria.”

The third neurosis, obsession, records our mastery over these difficult conditions of the Ice Age. We needed to devote enormous resources of energy and thought to ordering our lives and overcoming the hostilities of the environment. This same intensely directed energy may now be expressed neurotically in obsessions to follow rules and to focus on meaningless details. This behavior, once so necessary, now “leaves as compulsion, only the impulses that have been displaced to trivialities.”

Freud then locates the narcissistic neuroses of later life in the subsequent, postglacial events of human history that he had already identified in
Totem and Taboo
. Schizophrenia records the father's revenge as he castrates his challenging sons:

(In
Totem and Taboo
, Freud had only charged the father with expelling his sons from the clan; now he opts for the harsher punishment of castration. Commentators have attributed this change to Freud's own anger at his “sons”
Adler and Jung for their break with his theories, and their foundation of rival schools. By castration, Freud could preclude the possibility of their future success. I am not much attracted to psychoanalytic speculations of this genre. Freud was, of course, not unaware that a charge of castration posed difficulty for his evolutionary explanation—for the mutilated sons could leave no offspring to remember the event in heredity. Freud speculates that younger sons were spared, thanks to the mother's intercession; these sons lived to reproduce but were psychically scarred by the fate that had befallen their brothers.)

The next neurosis, paranoia, records the struggle of exiled sons against the homosexual inclinations that must inevitably arise within their bonded and exiled group: “It is very possible that the long-sought hereditary disposition of homosexuality can be glimpsed in the inheritance of this phase of the human condition. . . . Paranoia tries to ward off homosexuality, which was the basis for the organization of brothers, and in so doing must drive the victim out of society and destroy his social sublimations.”

The last neurosis of depression then records the murder of the father by his triumphant sons. The extreme swings in mood of the manic-depressive record both the exultation and the guilt of parricide: “Triumph over his death, then mourning over the fact they all still revered him as a model.”

From our current standpoint, these speculations seem so farfetched that we may be tempted simply to dismiss them as absurd, even though they emanate from such a distinguished source. Freud's claims are, to be sure, quite wrong, based on knowledge gained in the past half-century. (In particular, Freud's theory is fatally and falsely Eurocentric. Human evolution was not shaped near the ice sheets of northern Europe, but in Africa. We can also cite no reason for supposing that European Neanderthals, who were probably not our ancestors in any case, suffered unduly during glacial times with their abundant game for hunting. Finally, we can offer not a shred of evidence that human social organizations once matched Freud's notion of a domineering father who castrated his sons and drove them away—an awfully precarious way to assure one's Darwinian patrimony.)

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.”