The Mycelium
Somehow Freud managed to create a mental space not just for creative thinking but for a sense of transcendent morality. By this I mean a morality that is not based on the received beliefs or material interests of any particular cultural group, but looks to all cultures as potential sources of inspiration and values.
The reason for Freud's ability in this regard - his 'mad genius' one might say - are many and various. It also had consequences for his work. Psychoanalysis is premised on the recognition that we were all once children - and unformed, malleable, human children - before acquiring the cultural differences that separate us. In one of the greatest thoughts that has ever occured to the mind of man, Freud united the space and time of our tragic species in the concept of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipal concept links each cultural group to every other and each individual to a common humanity. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he introduced the metaphor of the 'mycelium' to describe the dense knot of associations in a dream that reach down to this phylogenetic 'unknown'. The mycelium is the network of subterranean fibres that connect a group of mushrooms. Above ground we see separate organisms, but below ground we see evidence of a single being.
The concept of the Oedipus complex, reaching back as it does to prehistory, is the key concept of the psychological unity of a single human species, described at its most simple in his 'Psychoanalysis and religious origins'. It undermines all notions of racial or cultural psychology. In the knowledge of its tragic inevitability, a knowledge which Freud hoped would one day undermine its power to control our fate, it provides the basis for a new kind of humanism.
No wonder the Nazis burned Freud's books...
Let us see if we can use this knowledge to assess one of the recurring themes of these pages - the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Consider the central image of the current wave of violence, which has been relayed time and again on our TV screens: the dramatic confrontation between Palestinian youth and Israeli soldiers. I think we can safely say that Freud would not have approved of the Israeli response to the current wave of rioting. Like many people in the world today he would have considered it inappropriate to shoot children because they were throwing stones. Yet the stone thrower and the soldier are not different species - how can we find some unity between the two poles of this divide?
At first sight it seems that, as far as power is concerned, the relationship is an assymetrical one. Despite the youth and inexperience of many of them, the power lies with the Israeli soldiers and the response seems out of proportion to the threat. It doesn't make 'sense'.
The excessive use of deadly force by individuals who are unable to control their sense of panic is hardly unusual in the history of police forces and armies. In many cases the relationship is entirely one-sided. The policeman in Sussex, England, who shot a naked unarmed man at point blank range in his bedroom - the wrong man unfortunately - could argue sucessfully in court that he felt himself to be under a deadly threat. The policeman who shot and killed a man in Hackney, London, who happened to be carrying a table leg and was Irish, was able to offer the same justification. No one seems to have questioned the training that leads to this propensity to panic. Each of them could, perhaps even truthfully, argue that they feared for their lives.
Do the Israeli soldiers fear for their lives when they see boys throwing stones? If so, where does this fear come from? Why are these stones so dangerous? And how can the Oedipus complex allow us to see a more intimate connection between the Palestinian boy and the Israeli soldier?
A possible key may be the story of David and Goliath, which the soldier-to-be learns at school. An Oedipal logic to the story is self evident. The little hero kills the monster-father with a magically potent pebble and then becomes king. For the little boy who hears this story it allows expression of his Oedipal impulses and also modulates them by offering a hope for the future. He, too, will become a king one day. But the dangerous Oedipal impulses may come back to haunt us. So the Israeli soldier is also, in his unconscious mind, the little Arab boy flinging stones, battling against the monolithic might of the Philistine. Perhaps this identification may somehow vitiate both the apparatus of the state and individual soldiers, who must have felt that the stones they were facing were so magically dangerous that the only response to them was a bullet.