ABSTRACT
With three important texts of the immediate post-war era—Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “The Uncanny,” and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—Freud took on the role of a Nietzschean “physician of culture.” The key theoretical innovation of Beyond, the introduction of a “death instinct,” was not the culmination of Freud’s “progressive biologizing,” but a philosophical innovation serving social and moral ends: a mythical assault on the “benevolent illusion” of progressive development; the cultivation of a Stoic acceptance of death; and a fundamental alteration in Freud’s understanding of culture. “The Uncanny” was not a minor “excursion” to a remote area of aesthetics, but Freud’s major assault on the idea of the “holy” and the phenomenon of “charisma.” And Group Psychology was not, as Sulloway argues, simply part of Freud’s effort “to clarify his most basic unsolved problems in the theory of psychoneuroses,” but Freud’s desperate effort to inoculate the age against what he feared most—charismatic religious and political revivals—by attributing their appeal to infantile and primitive sources, and to the “magnificent festival of the ego” that they offer, i.e., a release from failed cultural ideals, from a conscience one cannot meet, and from a self one cannot love.
