Should We Psychoanalyze the Mystics of the Axial Age?
Assessing Bard’s and Söderqvist’s Lacanian screed in “Process and Event”
What the heck is psychoanalysis? Is it science, pseudoscience, a cult, a philosophy, an art form?
Perhaps no academic school of thought has taken more heated criticism than Freudianism, apart from Nazi or Soviet pseudosciences. Sigmund Freud’s theory of how the mind forms itself through psychosexual stages in childhood has been denounced by myriad indignant critics, and Freudians like Jacques Lacan have been called “charlatans” and “cult leaders.”
Freud promoted his work as scientific, exploiting the positivistic prestige that science enjoyed at the time. But his theory is more like a philosophical, literary, or theological metaphor, and Freudians don’t support their models in the scientific manner, with experiments. They present their clinical observations as evidence for their theoretical constructs, but those observations are always open to interpretation since they’re not experimentally corroborated.
You can find a psychiatrist or a therapist to say anything you like about a person’s mental condition. It’s not that this theorist would be lying, but psychoanalytic theory makes no falsifiable predictions, so it operates more like a theology that’s consistent with all possible mental or behavioural patterns. You just use the open-ended metaphor or creed to emphasize whatever you like at the time. The psychoanalyst’s interpretation, then, is just an opinion, not a scientific finding.
Freudian pseudoscience
Just think of Freud’s “theory” of how the “ego” is formed in childhood, as the child passes through oral, anal, phallic, and other stages of personal association. The child expends available libidinal energy, potentially getting lost in immature stages of growth. This is supposed to account for neuroses, for mental disorders caused by past anxiety or trauma that’s been repressed, and that the psychoanalyst brings to light to enable the patient to cope with his or her malformed identity.
How could any of that be scientifically tested? Perhaps a psychoanalyst or “talk therapist” can help a patient feel better, but that wouldn’t entail that the therapist’s theories are true. The Catholic Church has employed talk therapy for centuries, calling it “confession.” Yet the lay Christian’s deference to a priest’s mystique doesn’t mean Christian theology is reality-based.
Indeed, the unconscious is rather godlike in being invisible. Freud thought the unconscious reveals itself in dreams and slips of the tongue. And indeed, there may be levels of mental processing and degrees of consciousness. But science, philosophy, and art would approach this subject in different ways. A pseudoscientist would merge those approaches and allege that the hodgepodge is strictly scientific. And that’s what Freud himself seems to have done.
Freud’s talk of the child’s so-called sexual, pleasure-seeking drive looks like a Hitlerian “big lie,” as in an allegation so outrageous and unspeakable, that the denial of the allegation becomes too burdensome to our faith in humanity, so we end up giving the audacious speaker the benefit of the doubt and going along with the outrage. Paradoxically, the more preposterous the statement, the more folks are sometimes willing to accept it because the alternative might require that we recognize the speaker as a sheer psychopath. And most of us would rather not confront a monster or entertain the thought that some deranged individuals are free to flourish in polite society.
None of which should be so surprising because psychiatrists are prone to being narcissistic rather than strictly selfless and altruistic. To be sure, medical doctors help heal the sick, and psychiatrists mitigate serious mental illnesses, albeit often only by treating the symptoms with drugs that have deleterious side effects. But the more aid doctors render, and the more they hold patients’ life and happiness in their hands, the more the doctors’ self-image is liable to be inflated.
Lacan’s literary Freudianism
As hyperbolic as this may nevertheless sound, there’s a well-documented case of charlatanry in the psychoanalytic field, namely that of Jacques Lacan. Lacan merged Freudianism with poststructural philosophy, adding for good measure mathematical topology to his theoretical confections. For his troubles, he and his followers were booted from the International Psychoanalytic Association, which freed him to set up alternative psychoanalytic institutions to promote his ideas.
Lacan contended that the unconscious is structured like a language, and he took this structure as license to engage in wordplay to enthrall his fans and patients.
He modified Freud’s childhood stages of personal development, emphasizing the “mirror” stage, which introduces an element of alienation in each person as the child must contrast the solidity or completeness of her image in the mirror, with her lack of mastery over her body’s movements.
But Lacan adopts Freud’s emphasis on sexuality with his analysis of the phallus as a cultural signifier in the battle between the sexes. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan said, “The phallus is the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire.” For Lacan, this signifier symbolically castrates the subject as he or she identifies with abstractions in the Oedipal stage of development, and this castrated (symbolically oriented) self is just the domesticated one.
Critics have savaged Lacan’s work for being pseudoscientific and a paradigmatic case of “fashionable nonsense.” Lacan himself has been accused of having run a cult, as a childlike tyrant. The French writer Michel Onfray said Lacan’s writings consist of bouts of “incantatory glossolalia” and needless neologisms. Noam Chomsky called Lacan an “amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan.”
In short, Lacanian psychoanalysis looks like a thoroughgoing example of French literary decadence. His writings and practices are best thought of as forms of sophisticated entertainments for cynical intellectuals. The fact that he preyed on devotees and mentally unwell patients only lends a sinister dimension to his performance art.
Psychoanalyzing “Gnostics” from the Axial Age
To see this literary application of Freudian psychology in action, let’s look at the screed against Gnosticism and the Axial Age, in Alexander Bard’s and Jan Söderqvist’s book Process and Event.
Like Lacan, they freely invent unnecessary technical terms, defining them in a 41-page glossary at the back of their book.
And they adopt a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to history, positing, for instance, something called “phallic intrusion,” which is what happens, they say, when the child “for the first time is tempted away from the mamilla and discovers the seductive phallus as the object that the mother is attracted by, but that the child cannot give the mother, which generates envy in the child, something that in turn initiates the child’s voyage towards yearning for adultification and generates an imitating and eroticizing of phallus.”
Whereas the Axial Age is often welcomed as having been a progressive series of moral reforms of many of the world’s religions and philosophies in the middle of the first millennium BCE, Bard and Söderqvist (BS) reject individualistic morality as a wrongheaded departure from our natural state of employing what they call the tribal “sociont.” The sociont, they say, is the set of inclinations and behaviours that are encoded in our genes, or that reassure or empower us because of how we’re adapted to thrive in our formative, nomadic lifestyle that prevailed in the Stone Age.
“Individualism versus collectivism,” they say,
was never more than the false dichotomy of the capitalist paradigm. The individual and the collective are actually completely dependent on each other as concepts, two sides of the same capitalist coin, and none of them — and certainly no artificial antagonism either — reflects Man and his prerequisites. What does reflect Man, however, is the concept tribopoeisis and the idea of the tribal singularity as Man’s origin and only reasonable identity. We were never either individuals or a collective, we were always tribal and only tribal creatures. And everything we need, as single dividuals, is an archetypology that tells us where on the tribal map each of us belong.
Applying this perspective to the results of Gnosticism and the Axial Age, they say the problem is that whereas we have the opportunity to stimulate the “outer circuit” (the “male-dominated half of the sociont”), “to contribute maximally to the progress of the entire sociont, the intellectual arena has been captured by a bizarre set of Gnostic and unworldly theories that mindlessly identify with the woman, the child and above all the narcissistic pillar-saint. Matrichal myths such as pacificism, vegetarianism and reincarnation have gradually become all the rage.”
Moreover, they say,
Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Platonism are all products of the Axial Age. In varying degrees — and for better or worse — they place the woman, the child and the pillar-saint at the center of things. The problem is that the authentic phallus is lacking in all such models, wherefore it all tends to develop into a Gnosticism that becomes entrenched in the presexual or the asexual. It is about a figure of thought that aggressively opposes the phallus itself, which in turn leads to ideologies that consistently are driven by the Peter Pan syndrome, the eagerness to acquire all the advantages of the adult phallus, without having to affirm the phallic energy and ambition.
BS’s tirade against Gnostic dualism goes on for many pages:
The truth is of course that only a person who deep down accepts and genuinely loves both their body and what we call our soul can be true and authentic…[Yet] the Gnostic delusion generates the false dialectics of body and soul as the mortidinal will-to-destruction, the boyish longing for perfection, infinity and immortality. When the boundary-setting phallic gaze is lacking, this boyishness detests every form of antagonic challenge. The yearning for perfection, infinity and immortality is of course nothing other than infantile hatred that is directed toward all forms of developing obstacles. We get the boy with the mother, but without the father, a boy who therefore dreams completely unrealistic dreams of what it means to be a man, a boy who claims that he already is a man despite only being a boy, and who never has his megalomanic statements scrutinized. During the Axial Age this obsession explodes in the form of sundry sects and cults, built around various pillar-saints who in different ways regard themselves as dispatched by both higher and lower gods to bring justice on Earth.
The results were “imbecile world religions that erased the powerful engineers of the Bronze Age from the history books in order to celebrate the Gnostic quackery of the Axial Age.” How, they ask rhetorically, “could the lazy wishful thinking that virginity equals wisdom result in anything else?”
“Gnostic delusion is exactly this,” they say,
a delusion that arises out of pure hubris. What we can play around with is our experiences, our more or less strong and accurate memories of these experiences…But there is no beautiful gnosis for any beautiful souls to attain other than the narratological triad logos-mythos-pathos. Believing something else signals human delusions of grandeur…The dualism that Gnosticism launches is thus nothing other than a symptom of the unprocessed trauma that arises at the separation from matrix and mamilla [womb and mother’s breast]. But a reasonable response to these inevitable breakups is of course not to long back in order to undo them, but instead to affirm freedom via these fundamental separations in order to then be able to enter new, adult and forward-looking covenants…
Gnosticism, though,
is the infantile fantasy of being able to go from child to God without having to pass through adult life in general and sexuality in particular — an eternally frozen childhood with a shimmer of nostalgic magic about it…The dream of perfection, infinity and immortality — and thereby also immutability — is never dreamed by an adult male, but only by a little boy who frenetically clings to his childhood and refuses to grow up, and who therefore dreams of a life without the adult body with its demanding forces and equally demanding responsibility. Above all the separation between religion and sexuality leads to metaphysical dualism.
As for how this relates to the modern situation, the authors contend that “Individualism’s misguided history starts and ends with Gnosticism’s dualist separation of soul and body, which is converted to the dividual’s separation of soul and body, which results in the alienated individual. Gnosticism offers no tools to handle the child’s separation from mamilla. Therefore the child compulsively repeats this trauma through insisting on the separation between the soul and the body throughout life, throughout history, all the way into eternity.”
The epistemic status of psychoanalytic ravings
This rant raises two questions for me. First, what’s the epistemic nature of any such psychoanalytic account of the Axial Age’s thought leaders? What kind of statements are BS’s supposed to be? And second, how fair is this analysis to Gnosticism and to the ancient religious foreshadowing of individualism and modern alienation?
Whereas Freud insisted that his psychology should be taken as scientific, there’s no chance this talk of phalluses and mamillas amounts to empirically established knowledge. Indeed, in so far as Freudianism is a testable hypothesis, psychologists have moved on to cognitive science. As is obvious from BS’s tone, their analysis comes across more as resentment arising out of the depths of the manosphere, or as macho bullying and posturing. In short, this isn’t so much a plausible explanation as an indulgence in name-calling.
The search for knowledge would require that we separate the positing of causes from their evaluation, in which case we’d note that no value judgments follow whatsoever from a genuine psychological or historical explanation of behaviour.
Just for the sake of argument, for instance, suppose there were Freudian stages of maturation we all go through, and the “pillar-saints” of the Axial Age got stuck in a boyish stage of asexuality. Would that developmental fact imply that the boyish stage is bad or that it’s worse than the adult sexual one? Not on anything remotely like strict scientific grounds.
Careful Darwinians are neutral in their functional explanations since what looks like a useless mutation might end up being environmentally selected. And indeed, if we think memetically about culture (as BS do in their other book Syntheism), the Gnostic’s metaphysical dualism was successful simply because it spread. Darwinians are concerned only with that quantitative fact, with how useful certain genes or memes are in solving certain problems. A meme spreads because it’s useful, and our feelings about that pattern are irrelevant to the pattern’s empirical explanation.
BS’s deference to the “sociont,” then, or to our evolutionary function is a glaring case of the naturalistic fallacy. This isn’t Darwinism, it’s social Darwinism, the scary kind of pseudoscientific prejudice that the Nazis made infamous. This notion of “the tribal singularity as Man’s origin and only reasonable identity” is an egregious mix-up of facts and values.
Yes, before civilizations there were roving human tribes in the Paleolithic era— although Graeber’s and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything complicates the picture, as I discuss elsewhere. But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that we evolved to live in nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers. Does that mean we ought to return to wholly tribal lifestyles, or that Stone Age life was better than modern life?
No, because natural selection isn’t concerned with what’s good for organisms. The natural “selection” process is mindless and amoral. All that matters to biological evolution is the behavioural pattern that works within an environment, enabling that pattern to spread by the reproduction of genes (or perhaps memes). When the environment changes, the behaviour usually changes, too, lest the species perish for being “unfit.” And all species are eventually extinguished because the planet has altered drastically over the eons.
BS’s value judgments, then, are obviously unscientific. We can call them “philosophical,” but these authors emphasize rhetorical inventiveness rather than logical argumentation, which is to say that they’re firmly on the literary, “Continental” side of Western philosophy’s internal division.
BS incorporate the rhetorical inventions of many fellow travellers, such as Hegel, Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek, Peter Sloterdijk, and Quentin Meillassoux, and their lengthy glossary shows that they argue largely by assertion and stipulation. The culturally charged “phallus” and the “mamilla” exist as signifiers in their narrative not because BS show that the concepts apply to reality but just because these authors control their narrative as though it were a free-flowing diatribe. This means the “philosophy” in question is closer to fiction than to nonfiction.
In fact, in Syntheism, BS say that “Every paradigm is accompanied by its own narrative, its own production of truth, circling around an essential starting point for its metaphysics. Each and every one of these narratives in turn contains three components: a cosmology, a romance and a linear history of the formative events in the past of the new paradigm, determined after the fact.”
That’s supposed to apply to BS’s worldview, too, although they maintain that “What is metahistorically radically new in the case of syntheism — the metaphysics of the Internet age — is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.”
But if contingency is sacred to BS, why are they so indignant towards rival worldviews like the Gnostic’s? If it’s all just stories, as the Continentalist’s literary approach to philosophy dictates, philosophical judgments are mainly aesthetic. Yet BS aren’t condemning Gnostic texts for failing just on artistic grounds. They’re bullying those counterculturalists for being unmanly.
Again, masculinity and femininity may have some roots in natural selection, but the normality of those traits isn’t the same as any ideal merit. And BS’s failure to appreciate that difference is a failure of logic, not just a matter of aesthetic taste.
Or take sexuality itself. Does the fact that most humans have sex add to our value as a species?
Well, don’t most animals sexually reproduce? And don’t we hunt, eat, or enslave most animals? If we respect sexually active animals so little that we readily run the small ones over in our cars, why should we respect ourselves more for our animalistic traits? Don’t insects also have sex, and don’t we swat them to death without showing any remorse? So why should we deem the departure from this biological norm to be an automatic cultural failure?
Naturally, the failure to mate makes for a failure in evolutionary terms, meaning this animal will be dysfunctional or abnormal. But that “failure” or “unfitness” is value-neutral, on strictly biological grounds. BS are concerned with developing a religion and a metaphysics for the Internet Age, and those are cultural matters that call for religious and philosophical justifications. The social Darwinian ploy itself fails, then, since it runs up against the naturalistic or the genetic fallacy. Sexuality is natural and normal, not thereby good in any cultural respect.
Indeed, the environmentalist case can be made that macho patriarchal values are self-destructive, that while hypermasculinity has built empires and fueled progress in science and technology, this entire imperialistic stance towards the wilderness is unsustainable without the countercultural insights that BS dismiss as childish and cowardly. Immaturity relative to a process of self-destruction can be mature according to the principles of a bigger-picture project. That was the upshot of Gnostic dualism and of the Axial Age’s moral reforms.
Alienation, personhood, and the Axial Age
Let’s return to how the environment changes, which forces species to adapt or to die out. What anthropologists call “behavioural modernity” was our ancestors’ facility with symbols which freed their anomalous minds to be the first known terrestrial beings to master cognitive and cultural niches, and this modernity sprang to life some tens of thousands of years ago. We became proficient at using tools, and not just stone ones but languages, cultures, and worldviews.
Those tools changed our environment, forcing us to adapt. Hence, we left the hunter-gatherer’s tribal lifestyle behind for a civilized one. Indeed, we outlawed many tribal behaviours, or we came to regard them as savage and undignified. We strive to be people rather than animals, and people live in symbiosis with culture, now with the raw wilderness. Civilized cultures, in turn, are quite unnatural, as in abnormal for animals and not what nature required from us in the Stone Age. Civilization is only five or six thousand years old, so in the evolutionary timeline this kind of society is as anomalous as personhood.
Here, then, we see more clearly the roles played by Gnosticism and the Axial Age. Behavioural modernity, or the creation of cultures and artificial environments with linguistic symbols and technologies is itself unnatural, in that this kind of artificial behaviour wasn’t adapted to the nomadic, tribal life that prevailed hundreds of thousands of years ago in the African wilderness. As we slowly left behind that “Eden” for a new world of our making, we became alienated from nature.
Contrary to BS’s screed, then, capitalism is far from the only source of individuality or of alienation. Life is estranged from nonlife, even if many living things lack the concepts to appreciate their abhorrence of death and their anti-entropic uniqueness in the universe. And self-aware primates (encultured people) are estranged from animals. Consciousness, reason, autonomy, imagination, social laws — all of these are inherently alienating since they distinguish us from everything else on the planet and promote us to godlike status in the Anthropocene.
The Axial Age was just a period of explicit reflection on those anthropological facts. The roots of modern individualism are in that ancient period of self-glorification since the mystics and philosophers of the first millennium BCE equated human nature with the divine, celebrating the evident anomaly of our ability to create a new world (the artificial society that supplants the wilderness). Either that, or the ancient naturalistic humanists in Greece, India, and China were pragmatic in celebrating our ability to conquer nature with reason rather than with theistic or mystical religion.
Hans Jonas pointed to this existential side of Gnosticism in his 1958 book The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity. The Gnostic’s “alien,” transcendent God is foreign to nature because that deity stands for us, and in our civilizational (rather than just tribal) capacities we’re palpably alien to nature too.
Our existential condition as behaviourally modern people, then, is to wrestle with alienation. In so far as early humans were blissfully content in their tribal lives as hunter-gatherers — and that Edenic notion is probably an oversimplification — they weren’t yet behaviourally modern, meaning that their behaviour was largely genetically determined rather than culturally chosen. They’d have lived rather like bands of clever chimpanzees for much of the Stone Age.
The ability to think in rigorous symbolic terms was an act of self-creation that withdrew humans from nature, animality, and therefore evolved tribalism. Personhood itself entails alienation, and the Axial Age thinkers put that existential fact front and center in various cultures around the world.
That’s not to say “pillar-saints” are morally blameless or that there aren’t pathologies of asexuality that afflict religions such as Catholicism. But there are plenty of downsides of normal sexuality, too, so that’s a wash. A macho male can dismiss the monk’s virginity as a case of arrested development, or of naïve boyishness. But the monk can dismiss the mature, sexually active folks, in turn, for acting like automated animals that have neglected their potential to transcend evolutionary norms, to participate in an emergent world full of art and ideas and artificial roles.
To be sure, Gnostic dualism gives us some dangerous cults that have been based on the ravings of charlatans and charismatic predators. But human sexuality gives us the battle between the sexes, the persecution of homosexuals, patriarchy, rape, the burqa, and the toxic forms of both masculinity (such as authoritarian politics) and femininity (“wokeness” or self-defeating hyper-tolerance).
Who, then, has the better take on Gnosticism? It’s not strictly a question of fact since there are evaluations at play. If we’re upfront about the fictions and rhetorical displays that express our values, and we’re self-aware enough to be humbled by our existential condition, we might admire something like BS’s screed for its creative audacities.
Their psychoanalytic personal attacks would be so many stylings of a largely fictional narrative since what links philosophy to reality, rather, is philosophy’s integration of science. That kind of philosophy would mean incorporating not outdated, obfuscatory Freudianism, but cognitive science and the latter’s appreciation of emergent properties, such as those of the individual person’s mind.
Historically, cults have formed around charismatic radicals, as they formed around Freud, Jung, Lacan, and Jordan Peterson, and while some of those cults or fan clubs renew the mainstream noble lies as the radicals’ insights are incorporated, others fade away. That question of popularity is only another Darwinian matter, and many species may have been great in certain respects but long forgotten all the same.
Personally, as I discuss elsewhere, I agree with some of BS’s conclusions here and there in their work, but as I’ve read more deeply into it, the differences in our reasoning and in our methods of presenting our cases are striking. It’s like looking at an image of yourself in a funhouse mirror.
Paradigms and tribes indeed.
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