DEFINITION AND TRADITION

We do not know what literature was composed in first-millennium Babylonia; we know only what literary works were kept in royal and private libraries of that period. Some works may merely have found a repository there; others were very much in use, on religious occasions, to be recited or to serve as guides for ritual and magic performances. Still others were copied again and again, and the scholarly literature was extensively commented upon.

At the outset it has to be stated that the word ‘literature’ is here used in a broad sense, to include not only belles-lettres but also the standardized works of various experts – in divination, magic, ritual, and linguistic scholarship. That is to say, we will be considering that body of texts that has been termed by Oppenheim the ‘stream of tradition’.

The material to be considered is that kept at the royal library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, to which may be added such provincial libraries as Sultantepe, and, at the very end of the era of cuneiform writing altogether, the libraries of scholars in southern Babylonia, mostly from Uruk, dating to the Seleucid period, which to a large measure duplicate the texts from Nineveh and thus can serve to illustrate the literature of the period in question, 747–539B.C.

TIGLATH-PILESER III AND THE ASSYRIAN THREAT

In the first half of the eighth century B.C. the independent kingdoms of Israel and Judah enjoyed a period of prosperity which had not been known since the time of Solomon in the tenth century. A new situation began to develop, however, with the accession of Tiglath-pileser III to the throne of Assyria in 744 B.C. At that time Uzziah (767–740) was still in power in Judah, while Menahem (752–742), the founder of the fifth dynasty of Israelite kings since the death of Solomon, was ruling in Samaria. Very little is said about Menahem in the Old Testament. He seems to have been violent and ruthless (II Ki. 15:16); when there was a threat from the power of Assyria he was quick to collect treasure from the wealthy men of Israel in order to pay substantial tribute in silver (II Ki. 15:19–20). This passage names ‘Pul, King of Assyria’ as the recipient of the tribute, Pul being another name for Tiglath-pileser III, as stated in I Chron. 5 : 26, and indeed in his annals the latter boasts that he received tribute from ‘Menahem the Samarian’. The date at which Menahem paid this tribute is uncertain.

During the eighteen years of his reign Tiglath-pileser established the power of Assyria in the west, but while his own inscriptions supply a considerable amount of information about his conquests, they have been preserved in such a form as to make it very difficult to assign the military activities narrated in them to exact years in his reign.

Adolf Griinbaum's provocative book, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, was quickly accorded an impressive reception. His earlier critical pieces on the subject caused a stir among their audiences, audiences that included philosophers, psychoanalysts, and other interested persons. As was expected, some of the pieces were incorporated in the book; indeed, because of them, its appearance had been anticipated with feelings that ranged from glee to dismay. Neither of those extreme feelings, however, has obtruded on the respectful tone of most of the book's wide notice. There are several reasons for that tone. Among them is Griinbaum's familiarity with important phases of Freud's work, especially those leading up to the public inception of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the century. Griinbaum's book also displays an acquaintance with a variety of Freud's later writings and with post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments. In addition it furnishes a compendium of the criticisms Freud's thought has evoked. Also, for interesting but disproportionate measure, a third of the book indicts hermeneutic construals of Freud, notably those of Habermas and Ricoeur. Finally, but surely not least, Griinbaum brings to those topics and related ones a rare discursive and polemical tirelessness.

How can the insights into individual psychology gained through the techniques of psychoanalysis illuminate the cultural, collective life of people in society? Freud returned to this question throughout his career in a series of works sometimes referred to as the “cultural books” ; these include Totem and Taboo (1912-13); Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a); and Moses and Monotheism (1939a). In this essay, I give an exposition of these works in which I stress their unity, their evolution as psychoanalytic theory itself developed, and what I take to be their central argument. I also intend to show how vital aspects to this central argument may, despite the many difficulties these books present to the contemporary student of society and culture, contribute in powerful ways to our understanding of human social existence.

Before turning to the cultural books themselves, however, I want to begin by drawing attention to the fact that Freud was, from the first, concerned with ordinary cultural life. Of the book-length projects to which he applied himself as soon as he had completed the self-analysis which played so crucial a role in his intellectual development, three were nonclinical accounts of normal phenomena in which are visible the workings of unconscious thought processes, namely, dreams (1900a), slips of the tongue (1901b), and jokes (1905c). The effect of these works is to undermine the very distinction between normal and neurotic and to show that something other than rational, secondary process thought is a normal and essential aspect of all human life.

The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud's dynamic developmental theory. In the evolvement of psychoanalytic theory, this complex is associated with the entire range of feelings the child may experience in relation to his parents and interactions he or she may have with them. The love and hate of the Oedipus complex, the conflict, and the way in which the complex is resolved become at certain points the basis for the understanding not only of child development, personality trends, and psychopathology, but also of broader phenomena, such as the development of social institutions, religion, and morality.

Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex emerge gradually; they change, the terminology is changed, the scope of what is to be considered oedipal is constricted and expanded. These developments and vicissitudes were influenced by a variety of factors. Freud's attempts to conceptualize intrapsychic material emerging from analyses of some of his patients, as well as from his self-analysis, his attempt to deal with opposing theories and their proponents, and the interaction of the oedipal complex with other focal theoretical issues, are among the major influential factors.

In the first section an outline of the basic stages in the evolution of Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex is presented. In the second section we present some conjectures about events in Freud's personal and professional life that influenced the course of development of his ideas on the Oedipus complex.

Freud in the last phase of his work gave increasing attention to questions about civilization, about its roots in and effects on human psychology. He was particularly interested in whether civilization on the whole helped or hindered human beings in their search for happiness, and he dealt with this question in two well-known books, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, the first of which he wrote in 1927 and the second in 1930. This essay is a study of differences between the views that he expressed in these two books. The differences indicate a shift in his outlook, and the essay represents an attempt to understand the reasons behind this shift.

The Future of an Illusion ends in optimism. Briefly, Freud's hopeful conclusion was this: Just as healthy individuals overcome their childish ways as they mature, as reason comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives, so too healthy societies should overcome their primitive practices as they mature, as science comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives. Three years later, when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud's optimism had dimmed. He ended the work on a somber note. No one, Freud observed, in this age of great technological advances can be confident that the struggle between life-giving and life-destroying forces that shapes civilization will not have a ruinous outcome. No doubt the rise of the Nazis and the Fascists during the intervening years partly explains this shift in his outlook. But his further reflections on the nature of civilization help to explain it as well.

Freud opens his ingenious and revealing essay on the Moses of Michelangelo with a disclaimer. He had, he said, no more than a layman's or amateur's knowledge of art: neither in his attitude to art nor in the way in which he experienced its attractions was he a connoisseur. He goes on:

And then, as if for a moment conscious that he might appear to be imposing his own personal peculiarities, a quirk of his own temperament, upon a subject with its own code, with its own imperatives, he hastens to concede what he calls "the apparently paradoxical fact" that "precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding." Before these works we feel admiration, awe-and bewilderment. "Possibly," Freud goes on with that irony which he permitted himself in talking of established ways of thinking