A Dark Trace

Front matter

D A Dark Trace q Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt

Í HERMAN WESTERINK

C LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter 2 Dark traces 2.2 Your guilt isn’t the same as mine

2.3 The dead kill

2.4 “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all” 2.5 The dark trace of an old guilt

2.6 “My ‘ought’ set before me”

2.7 Primary and secondary processes

Chapter 3 Repressed desires

3.2 Formation and utilization of sexuality 3.3 Weaknesses in the system

3.4 Attack and defence

3.5 Dominated by guilt

3.6 Cultural morality

3.7 Hostility toward the father

Chapter 4 Applied psychoanalysis 87

4.1 Introduction 87 4.3 A single principle 98 4.4 The prohibition behind the imperative 102 4.5 Ambivalent feelings 105 4.6 Projection 112 4.7 Conscience 115 4.8 Systems of thought 117 4.9 An ancient guilt 122 Chapter 5 In the depths 139 5.1 Introduction 139 5.2 The depth surfaces 142 5.3 The downfall of self-reproach 147 5.4 “The youth sees himself as an idol” 150 5.5 Self-regard 153 5.6 Feelings of hate 156 5.7 When erotism and sense of guilt go hand in hand 157 5.8 The sense of guilt must be set at rest 162 5.9 “Becoming is impossible without destruction” 167 Chapter 6 Analyses of the ego 175 6.1 Introduction 175 6.2 “The Sphinx of ancient legend” 176 6.3 “A psychological crowd” 178 6.4 Emotional bonds 180 6.5 Identification: from Oedipus complex to sense of guilt 182 6.6 “The only pre-psychoanalytic thinker” 187 6.7 Towards an unconscious sense of guilt 195 6.8 The Oedipus complex and the superego 197 6.9 Unconscious sense of guilt 201 6.10 The problem of masochism 203 6.11 Conclusion 206

VI

Chapter 7 Anxiety and helplessness 207

7.1 Introduction 207 7.2 Birth and the feeling of guilt 208 7.3 Castration anxiety and the sense of guilt 212 7.4 Helpless and dissatisfied 217 7.5 Illusion and science 219 7.6 Dogma and compulsion 221 7.7 Critique 222 7.8 The apologetics of a godless Jew 224 7.9 Considerations 227 Chapter 8 Synthesis and a new debate 229 8.1 Introduction 229 8.2 “The man of fate” 230 8.3 An instinctual character 231 8.4 La sensation religieuse 233 8.5 Impossible happiness 236 8.6 Hostility to civilization 242 8.7 Loving thy neighbour 245 8.8 Schiller and Goethe: The Philosophers 246 8.9 Struggle 251 8.10 Anxiety and the sense of guilt once again 254 8.11 Drive renunciation 256 8.12 Discontents 258 8.13 A new debate 261 8.14 Considerations 274 Chapter 9 Great men 275 9.1 Introduction 275 9.2 Moses the Egyptian 276 9.3 Akhenaton and monotheism 279 9.4 The Kadesh compromise 282 9.5 What is a great man? 284 9.6 St Paul 289 9.7 The sense of guilt and the return of the repressed 293 9.8 Assessments 295 Concluding considerations 297 Literature 303 Index 315

VII

Introduction

“Psychoanalysis has never claimed to provide a complete theory of human mentality in general.”' Freud wrote these words in 1914, shortly after his break with Jung. It is indeed true that he never concerned himself with developing an all-embracing system, but rather moved from the analysis of patients to areas of special attention: repression, dreams, the unconscious, sexuality and resistance. Sense of guilt also constituted an area of interest in his work. In his search for an explanation for and the origins of sense of guilt it appears that he did not attempt to construct a definitive theory here either. Despite returning repeatedly to this topic, Freud never wrote a systematic article about this feeling.” When touching upon sense of guilt, which he did often, he mapped it and indicated its connections to other psychic phenomena and with culture. His point of departure was the individual, and this is striking, not so much against the background of his interests and patient analyses, but because of the dominant tendencies in psychology and philosophy, inasmuch as these dealt with theorizing about man and mind. In the nineteenth century, science (and hence psychology, inasmuch as one may call it a science) tended towards system development which explained “everything”. Psyche, 1846, by Carl Gustav Carus, Philosophie des Unbewußten [Philosophy of the Unconscious], 1869, by Eduard von Hartmann, and also Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie [Folk-Psychology], 1905-1920, are good examples of this. Accordingly Hartmann wrote in the introduction to his book that he saw it as his task to realize a synthesis of the great philosophical systems into a monistic unity.’ This romantic tradition of great systems built around an unambiguous principle did not fail to have its effect on psychoanalysis. Jung, Adler and later Rank, too, are in essence psychoanalysts who express this tradition of system construction and monism. Freud repeatedly distanced himself from these tendencies, not only because there is always an individual case to disprove any system, but also because he believed humans are fundamentally in conflict, because every analytic insight achieved appears also to cloak something else, and because the therapist is never in a position objectively to plumb the deepest emotional depths. Nevertheless, he is in a certain way very much in the tradition of the great theorists. Whether one considers Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Frazer’s The Golden Bough or Breasted’s The Dawn of Conscience, these are all comprehensive works which resonate in Freud’s work. Put another way, although he was certainly interested in “everything”, he did not explain it all by reducing it to a single principle. It

! S. Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, SE XIV, p.50.

? “Sigmund Freud never actually wrote a book dedicated entirely to guilt, but the various comments he made on the subject throughout his work make him the true initiator of the study of the sense of guilt and certainly the first person to approach the question systematically.” R. Speziale-Bagliacca, Guilt. Revenge, Remorse and Responsibility after Freud, Brunner-Routledge, Hove/New York, 2004, p.1.

> E. von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten. Versuch einer Weltanschauung, Carl Duncker’s Verlag, Berlin, 1869, pp.1-4.

IX would be better to say that he placed the unique individual before a background of changing and varied cultures and religions.

Freud does not describe systems but areas of attention. With the exception of The Interpretation of Dreams there is not one book which exhaustively explores a single phenomenon. This is why Freud preferred to speak about “fundaments”, “types”, “speculations”, “fantastic hypotheses” and “nuclear complexes” and used words like “fragment”, “project”, “outline”, “formulations”, “observations”, “notes” or “further remarks” in the titles of some of his works. He preferred to direct his attention to the victims (neurotics) of modern culture, to the decisive (small) events which changed history and the great men who were able to influence history.

My study on sense of guilt in Freud’s work is not intended to construct or reconstruct a conclusive theory. I am concerned in the first place with describing sense of guilt as an area of attention. My thesis is that sense of guilt is not a secondary theme which appears primarily in Freud’s later work but that in fact it plays a fundamental role in his earlier psychoanalytic work.’ It is via the analysis of sense of guilt that he came to understand the importance of repressed wishes and desires. It is via the analysis of sense of guilt that he discovered the Oedipus complex and the meaning of the ambivalence of love and hate. It appears to be an affect omnipresent in the tension between passions, desires and repressed feelings on the one hand and a censuring, accusatory morality on the other. Freud was not only able to research the nature and meaning of that repression via sense of guilt, but was also able to inquire after the origin of morality in both its individual and cultural guises.

In this study I map the attention Freud paid to sense of guilt and sketch the development of his thought on this issue and the meaning it has for other central topics in his oeuvre. This is not an exhaustive technical analysis, nor is it a clinical debate with Freud. Instead I shall emphasize Freud’s debates. We shall see that the great debates he had with students (Jung, Rank, Klein) were debates in which sense of guilt played a prominent role. His thinking about sense of guilt can largely be described by means of these debates. I shall also emphasize the important influences on Freud’s thinking and his use of others’ writings. These choices clearly demonstrate the importance of our field of inquiry. It is precisely this approach — Freud in debate — which enables us to perceive his thoughts on sense of guilt more clearly than we would were we to limit ourselves to his oeuvre alone. I believe this approach provides clarification of or corrections to many contributions to Freud studies which limit themselves to technical analyses of his work.

* In much literature on Freud sense of guilt is only treated in the context of the Oedipus complex which only became a central topic in Freud’s writings from Totem and Taboo onwards, and especially in the 1920s and 1930s. An example of can be found in Grinberg’s study on guilt and depression, one of the few studies that explicitly concerns sense of guilt in Freudian (and Kleinian) thought. His study starts of with an exegesis of Totem and Taboo; earlier writings on sense of guilt are hardly elaborated upon. L. Grinberg, Guilt and Depression, Karnac Books, New York/London, 1992.

X

Introduction

Why write a book on Freud’s thoughts on sense of guilt? The most obvious reason is this: there is no recent study of sense of guilt in Freud’s work. In the past it has been mainly theologians who have addressed this issue in his work, but this never really led to a comprehensive, descriptive study. The psychoanalytic literature also lacks a study of this kind. It is thus high time that this subject was examined in detail.

The second reason has to do with my own research to date. In my dissertation on the formation of conscience in early seventeenth-century orthodox Calvinism guilt was a prominent topic. It was clear that Puritanism time and time again emphasized people’s sin or guilt. Sinfulness as guilt was something to be understood in order to consequently be avoided by focusing on redemption and salvation. In this way guilt not only has a fundamental, but also an enigmatic character. The determination of sin and guilt was thus different than in the Roman Catholic tradition where sins and feelings of guilt were differentiated much more clearly into many (major and minor) violations, and ideas were consequently judged and handled in a different way. A study of the various forms of guilt and how they are handled became more and more urgent.

There is another good reason to take sense of guilt as a subject for investigation. As we shall see, Freud conducted various debates during his life in which sense of guilt played a role. The debate with the London School (Klein and others) at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s is of particular interest here. That debate is, after all, also the beginning of what is now known as the Anglo-Saxon tradition. One might say that the French psychoanalytic school, following Jacques Lacan, built upon Freud’s position in that debate. Recent years have seen the French tradition gain ground in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world. This has naturally led to discussions and misunderstandings. It is thus good to focus once again on the debate between Freud and the London School, not to demonstrate Freud’s points (right or wrong), but principally in order to show where the agreements and differences in perception lie and the background against which they arose.

This book is entitled 4 Dark Trace. Sigmund Freud on the Sense of Guilt. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites Oedipus Rex when he writes that the tragedy tells the story of Oedipus’ quest for the cause of Thebe’s suffering: he follows die dunkle Spur der alten Schuld, he reads the dark trace of an ancient guilt, in order to eventually discover that the search leads to his own acts (and desires). Freud occasionally spoke thereafter about the search for the origins of sense of guilt as tracking a “dark trace”. I am following that trace, which begins with Freud’s intuition of an oppressive morality at loggerheads with the passions, a tension which manifests itself in self-reproach. Cutting across self-analyses, case histories and cultural studies, the dark trace ends in the history of the Jewish religion. Fundamental to this work are Freud’s texts, as they appeared in the Standard Edition. The use of the Standard Edition instead of the original German texts (Gesammelte Werke) causes some technical problems. Most importantly, the

XI distinction between Schuldbewußtsein and Schuldgefühl is erased as both words are translated with “sense of guilt”. Only occasionally, James Strachey translates these words explicitly as “consciousness of guilt” and “feeling of guilt”. His reason for translating both Schuldbewußtsein and Schuldgefühl as “sense of guilt” is that “they are synonyms apart from their literal meaning”.° Although our study will show that Schuldbewußtsein and Schuldgefühl are to be related with specific theoretical developments and reformulations Strachey’s choice can be defended. There is indeed no clear theoretical distinction between Schuldbewußtsein and Schuldgefühl. Hence, because of the necessary references to the Standard Edition I will refer to both terms as “sense of guilt”. When required I will indicate whether we are dealing with “consciousness of guilt” or “feeling of guilt”. Other technical problems will be addressed in footnotes.

This book is the revised English version of a study originally written in Dutch.° I would like to express my gratitude to those who contributed significantly to the original manuscript and the final English text. I thank Patrick Vandermeersch and my former colleagues and friends in Groningen for their kind support and inspiring suggestions, and Susanne Heine and my colleagues and friends in Vienna for their critical reviews which enabled me to improve the manuscript. I thank Philippe van Haute for his generous support and advice. I am grateful to Julia Harvey, Lis Thomas and Karin Krikkink for their help.

> S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE XXI, p.135. ° H. Westerink, Het schuldgevoel bij Freud. Een duister spoor, Uitgeverij Boom, Amsterdam, 2005.

XII

Chapter 1 Carmen and other representations

The first time sense of guilt is explicitly mentioned in Freud’s work is during a short discussion of a case in The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.' He discusses the case of a girl who suffered from obsessional self-reproaches. Whenever she read in the newspapers about forgery she thought she had made the counterfeit money; if she heard about a murder somewhere, she thought she had committed it. She was aware of the absurdity of these kinds of thoughts, but “this sense of guilt gained such an ascendancy over her that her powers of criticism were stifled”.? The girl was completely confused by her compulsion and repeatedly criticized herself.

Freud investigated the sources of her sense of guilt and discovered them quickly: she had been excited by a chance feeling of sensuality and permitted herself to be persuaded by a girlfriend to try masturbation, conscious that this act was “wrong”. She practised masturbation for years, a practice always accompanied by “violent, but, as usual, ineffective self-reproaches”.*At a certain moment in time an “excess” of self-reproach was the cause of an increase in the compulsion to reproach herself to the extent that a psychosis arose.

This short and simple case takes us directly to the core of Freud’s thinking and work at this time. He had patients and listened to their complaints and he learned to see these complaints as symptoms which often had a mental cause. He discovered that relief from and even cure of some complaints was possible when its source was revealed. He learned to listen to the stories of the circumstances in which the complaints arose. He noticed quickly that patients were reluctant to talk about these circumstances and he consequently concluded that they felt compelled to keep the circumstances and sources of the complaints secret, so secret that they themselves had forgotten them. He identified the repression of incompatible thoughts as the source of his patients’ complaints. And he discovered that these thoughts were usually of a sexual nature. It is in this period that Freud made his most ground-breaking discoveries: a new form of therapy as the basis for innovative theoretical formulations. He learned to pay attention to consciousness of guilt and self-reproaches, because they could lead the way to the origin of the complaint.

! S. Freud, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, SE III, pp.55-56. Compare S. Freud, Obsessions and Phobias: Their Psychical Mechanism and Their Aetiology, SE II, p.76.

? S. Freud, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, p.55.

3 Idem.

Although this brief case history leads us straight to the heart of Freud’s work, from the 1890s there is more to it than that. One feels in this case history that he is not only speaking of sense of guilt (consciousness of guilt) but also nearly about guilt. It appears he believed that the source of sense of guilt lay in one’s own guilt, for he speaks here about its origin as “wrong”. He also refers to an “excess” which can exacerbate the complaints. These terms (wrong and excess) are not normal psychoanalytic or medical parlance. Consciousness of guilt also appears to have everything to do with what is taken to be morally acceptable, with that which is judged to be wrong and excessive. Indeed, this played a central role in Freud’s thinking at this time. As we shall see, repression is always connected with the morally unacceptable part of a particular (sexual) idea. This primarily says a lot about the patients who came to him; but at least as important is the fact that he nonetheless did not speak about “one’s own guilt” in connection with the girl’s complaints. He already appreciated that the individual sense of guilt went beyond his patients’ backgrounds to the (unconscious) psychic processes an individual can only comprehend with the greatest of difficulty.

Further discussion of consciousness of guilt must now also take into account (sexual) morality during the second half of the nineteenth century. In order to make this subject manageable, I shall employ a Freudian method and let Freud speak for himself about the circumstances in which his ideas arose. By letting him speak for himself, we shall have no trouble tracking the role sense of guilt played in his thinking.

1.2 “Our bugles sounding the Retreat”

The Vienna in which Sigmund Freud* grew up was a city which offered great opportunities to develop oneself, a quickly changing city with an explosively growing population and a completely renovated, modernized city centre. It had a bourgeois, liberal culture with (since the collapse of the stock market in 1873) a growing anti-Semitic undercurrent.’

It was in this Vienna that Freud studied medicine. Completing his studies in 1881, he then worked for six years (1876-1882) in Ernst Brücke’s lab as an assistant and was engaged in all kinds of research including into the male genitals

4 For the biographical data see E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volumes 1-3, Basic Books, New York, 1959; P. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, Norton & Company, New York, London, 1988; A. Meyhöfer, Eine Wissenschaft des Träumens. Sigmund Freud und seine Zeit, btb-Verlag, Munich, 2007.

> P. Gay, Freud, pp.15-21.

° Gay mentions Freud’s most important motives for studying medicine: the desire to cure diseases, the discovering of scientific truths, and the fascination for “the riddles of mind and of culture”. Idem, pp.26-27.

of eels.’ It was Brücke who advised Freud to work at Vienna’s General Hospital. First under Hermann Nothnagel, later under Theodor Meynert he studied the human nervous system, specializing in brain anatomy, a promising field but not well-developed at that time.’ Although he became a private teacher in 1885°, Freud opted to remain in academic research and went to study with Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) in Paris.'°

Freud thus grew up in liberal Vienna and would remain a liberal his entire life.'' This choice was undoubtedly influenced by the anti-Semitism which was constantly in the background and which he occasionally experienced personally. He wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays in 1883, for example, about the events which took place in the third-class compartment of a train.'” When he opened a small window for some ventilation, he was abused by his fellow passengers as a “dirty Jew”, by which he understood that Christian brotherly love did not include him. In his account to his fiancée he proudly tells how he behaved like a gentleman, in contrast to those who attacked him whom he designated “a mob, plebeians and unbelievers”.

The chasm between ordinary people and the middle class, the class to which Freud considered himself to belong, was huge. A letter to Martha about attending a performance of the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet in 1883 is revealing here. Carmen premiered in Paris in 1875 to much excitement. The average Parisian was not accustomed to such intensity and ferocity in characters or music. Freud felt this and wrote that the mob was able to live spontaneously and free, whereas “we” deprive ourselves. In order to keep our integrity and to spare our health, “we” try to control our enjoyment and drives. This habit, Freud writes, of repressing natural drives gives us the quality of refinement. “We” are more concerned with

TP. Gay, Freud, pp.32-37. Gay mentions that Freud admired “Master Briicke”, and that he found satisfaction in his work. In Briicke’s lab he also met Josef Breuer, who would become a friend and a founding father of psychoanalysis, as we will see.

$ Freud held no great esteem of Nothnagel. Hence after half a year he transferred to the department of “the great Meynert”. It is in this period under Meynert that Freud wrote his technical paper On Coca (1884), a text on the properties of the then little-known drug cocaine. P. Gay, Freud, pp.42-43.

° “Tt was a position that provided prestige but no salary.” Idem, p.41.

10 On his motivation to go to Paris Freud later writes: “In the distance there shone the great name of Charcot”. S. Freud, An Autobiographical Study, SE XX, p.11; P. Gay, Freud, p.46.

"' Phillip Rieff has argued that Freud’s thinking is typically liberal, for example in his rejection of Marxism or any political ideology that promises a socially perfect state. Ph. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Doubleday, New York, 1961, pp.270-273.

12 S, Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, E.L. Freud (ed.), Basic Books, New York, 1960, pp.78-79.

avoiding suffering, than creating pleasure. He extended these thoughts in order to conclude that “the common folk judge, believe, hope and work differently than “we”: there must be something like a ”psychology of the common man”.'*

With a little good will— Freud spoke of “psychology” — Carmen can be considered a kind of short case history. He put his finger on a central theme of the opera, expressed in Don José’s dilemma in the second act duet. When Carmen dances seductively for him he hears “the bugles sounding the Retreat” to the barracks." José represents a choice: on the one hand is the world of law, duty and obedience and on the other the passionate, tempestuous and dangerously unconventional Carmen, the gypsies and bull fighters. He chooses Carmen and her world, chooses love over the law and therewith chooses his own downfall.'° Freud analyses and compares what he sees and hears with himself, with the world in which he lives. He compares the relations between characters with his relationship with Martha Bernays and he reaches the conclusion that there are different psychologies. The common folk judge, believe, hope and work differently than the middle class. He is doubly critical. The less developed people offer little by way of example for him. While he also muses here somewhat sadly on the disadvantages of the bourgeoisie, it is clear that he could not feel at home elsewhere. Freud feels at home in this world, a world in which he calls the repression of the passions “refinement”. The culture to which he claims allegiance recognizes a refined morality. Given its connection with the lower classes, the world of the passions lies principally outside culture.

B As early as here we can detect the first outline of what Freud will later name the (unpleasure or)

pleasure principle. We should notice here that this principle is not a discovery made by Freud, but an almost omnipresent principle in his intellectual environment. In general the influence of Kant’s philosophy (Neo-Kantianism) and Schopenhauer’s, Darwin’s evolutionism and Mill’s utilitarianism seem important inspirations in late nineteenth century intellectual climate. As to Freud, the influence of physiologists such as Gustav Fechner and especially Theodor Meynert should not be underestimated. E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1, pp.370-393; Ph. Rieff, The Mind of the Moralist, pp.355-359; G. Gödde, Traditionslinien des “Unbewußten”. Schopenhauer — Nietzsche — Freud, Edition Discord, Tübingen, 1999, pp.193-195.

Interestingly the concepts of pleasure and unpleasure also played an important role in a study of Jacob Bernays, an uncle of Freud’s fiancée Martha, on Aristotle’s theory on tragedy. In this study Bernays stressed the idea that Greek tragedy was about the staging of catharsis: passionate feelings evoking unpleasure were staged in such a way that viewers could identify. The tragedy tended towards catharsis, that is, a release of emotions resulting in relief and thus in pleasure. This process could best be compared, according to Bernays, with a physician bringing relief in the life of a patient. J. Bernays, Zwei Abhandlungen tiber die aristotelische Theorie des Drama, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1968, pp.1-112 (originally 1857). The comparison between catharsis in tragedy and in cure is striking: Josef Breuer (see further) would develop a cathartic method (abreaction of affects) in psychotherapy after the treatment of Anna O. It is certain that Breuer was inspired by Bernays’ study on Aristotle and tragedy.

14 S. Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, pp.50-51.

15 G. Bizet, Carmen, A. Gheorghiu, R. Alagna, Th. Hampson, et al., M. Plasson, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, EMI, 2003.

16 Carmen was one of Freud’s favourite operas. (The others being Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Magic Flute, and Wagner’s Meistersinger.) Gay has noticed that of Freud’s favourite operas Carmen is the only one where vice triumphs over virtue. P. Gay, Freud, p.169.

We shall remain briefly with the Carmen case, for there is another important element: Freud’s observation that “we” are busier avoiding suffering than creating pleasure. It is an idea which he repeats many times in his early psychoanalytic work, supported by his practical experience as a therapist. The defence against unacceptable ideas is always central, not the pursuit of pleasure. It is an idea which reveals much of Freud’s moral outlook. Three years earlier, in 1880, he had been asked to translate a part of the collected works of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill into German. Specifically, he worked on The Subjection of Women in which Mill takes a stand for women’s rights. He does this against the background of his liberal ideas regarding the rights of individuals, the development of people and an ethic which one might call utilitarianism of happiness, an ethic which emphasizes the pursuit of happiness.'’ In short, the basis for his ethics lies in a psychological position: humans seek what makes them happy. The psychological observation by Freud regarding Carmen can be seen as casting doubt on Mill’s position, and indeed he also expressed criticism of Mill. Three months after the Carmen letter he wrote to Martha about Mill and made clear to her that normal relations between men and women should not be encroached on too much."

It may appear that Freud’s bemoaning of the middle classes’ limitations on itself and its avoidance of suffering rather than the pursuit of happiness is a kind of self-criticism, but when Martha appeared to conclude that women should claim more rights for themselves, he jumped forward to champion the traditional relationship between the genders.'? These ideas regarding refinement, integrity and normal family relationships place Freud in the middle of the liberal, bourgeois culture of his day.

Much has been written about the Victorian age as a time of extreme prudery and moral virtue: the nineteenth century as the century of middle-class refinement.”

17 In the final pages of The Subjection of Women, Mill makes perfectly clear that women suffer and are unhappy because of a lack of equal rights between the sexes: the “requisite of an enjoyable life is very imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of mankind” which creates “the great amount of unhappiness” and “the feeling of a wasted life”. Hence Mill’s plea for a “perfect equality” between the sexes in order to overcome a major hindrance to human improvement. J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, in On Liberty. With The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp.119-217.

18 On Mill Freud writes Mill totally ignored the fact that “humanity is divided between men and women, and that this difference is the most important one”. S. Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, pp.75-76. Gay concludes on Freud’s letter about Mill that it is a “faultlessly conservative manifesto”. P. Gay, Freud, p.39.

9 S, Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, pp.75-76.

2° A standard work on Victorian morality is P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volumes I-V, Norton, New York, London, 1984-1998. A classic on fin-de-siécle Vienna is C. Schorske, Fin-de-siécle Vienna. Politics and Culture, Vintage, New York, 1981. A more compact analysis of Habsburg Vienna is presented in A. Janik, S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein 5 Vienna, Touchstone, New York, 1973, chapter 2. A beautiful depiction of middle-class morality in Vienna can also be found in an autobiographical work by Stefan Zweig: S. Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Fischer, Frankfurt, 1987, chapter 3. A more recent study on fin-de-siécle Vienna is S. Beller (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford, 2001.