According to the admirable thesis of Shelley’s “In Defence of Poetry,” a great social revolution ought to be presaged and accompanied by a general increase in popular intelligence and a proliferation of extraordinary productions in art and science. Yet, for the case of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, we have quite the contrary picture.

The Great French Revolution was preceded and followed by the greatest intellectual ferment in history — a powerful upsweep of the mind especially from the beginnings of the sixteenth century through approximately the middle of the nineteenth. The Bolshevik Revolution was preceded by approximately a quarter century of erosion of European intellectual life, and was followed by the past half century of deepening moral imbecility in art, and apart from applied science, stagnation (on balance) of truly fundamental advances in basic scientific knowledge.[1] Considering Shelley’s cited thesis, one may be prompted to consider the proposition that the absence of a contextual intellectual renaissance may be a major consideration in the failure of revolutionary socialist movements in Western Europe and North America during the recent fifty years.

On careful reflection, we cannot doubt that this is the case. The failure of the socialist movement to initiate just such a renaissance both embodies and otherwise reflects all the essential reasons for its failures. It is an old philistine asses’ saw that “socialism couldn’t work unless human nature” were changed. Out of the braying of fools! The statement is perversely true: without an intellectual revolution which initiates an effective general change in apparent “human nature” under capitalism, it is improbable that a socialist transformation could occur in the advanced capitalist sector during the period ahead.

This is no “mere opinion,” no arbitrary assertion. The following summary argument locates the connection between socialism and the prerequisite, particular kind of intellectual renaissance required at this time.

As we outlined the case in “Beyond Psychoanalysis,”[2] and elsewhere, socialist transformation is based on the self-organization of a majority of the political working class in agreement with a specific notion of world-wide economy, “expanded socialist reproduction.” As we indicated the nature of the case in our “In Defense of Rosa Luxemburg”[3] none of the formerly hegemonic socialist organized tendencies — e.g., social-democratic, “Stalinist,” “Trotskyist,” “Maoist” had or even sought a conceptual grasp of actual “expanded reproduction.” The mere toleration of the “economic” writings of such incompetents as Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Nikolai Bukharin, Ernest Mandel, Paul Sweezy, et al. as even moot within the bounds of actual Marxian economic theory, is itself indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of the socialist organizations and of academic circles which treat such constipated literature as serious theorizing.

It is not sufficient merely to prescribe that the socialist movement must now master the notion of “expanded reproduction.” The concept to be communicated cannot be understood in terms agreeable to heretofore ordinary forms of mental behavior. To demand clarity on “expanded reproduction” from the old varieties of “socialist” organization is like buying a mule for stud-service. Here we intersect the issue of an urgent general renaissance.

There are two ways in which a student may ordinarily secure the reputation of knowing a subject. He may, on the one hand, merely “learn about” the matter in question, memorizing jargon and prescribed glosses and exegeses, rehearsing himself generally in the production of plausible paraphrases of lecture materials and assigned texts. In mathematics, too often he learns procedures through repetitive drill. Such learning and drill represents no actual knowledge of the ostensible subject-matter itself; it is no more than a plausible, credulous simulation of the bare, dead form of living knowledge. On such premises, it is unfortunately necessary to point out, most Ph.D.’s in general and professors in particular are merely learned and hence obsessively ignorant of the indicated real subjects of their learning.

At best, learning represents something analogous to drawing a boundary around a subject, a differentiation which states in effect: “Within this circumference lies the subject I am naming, as distinct from another subject which is located within this other closed line boundary.” Learning does not go into the enclosed “area,” does not directly seize the subject itself. “Bad infinite” enumeration and circumscriptions, however flawlessly consistent each step of such differentiation, however “infinite” its progression toward “complete distinction” of differentia (predicates), never approaches the immediate perception (“True infinity”) of the subject in this method.

“Seizing the subject-matter” conceptually demands creating or locating within one’s mental process a practical “image” of the external subject. For a simple example: knowledge of an automobile is not a canonical description of the auto and its parts. It must be the kind of Gestalt which appropriately guides one to operate, otherwise use, repair the vehicle, etc. Even that sort of qualification is insufficient to identify the higher kind of difficulty presented by the prospect of actually knowing the concept “expanded reproduction.” Explicitly dialectical concepts require reference to a special aspect of mental life, an aspect which is twofoldly blocked from willful access to direct consciousness in almost all members of capitalist society.

The problem of conceptualizing “expanded reproduction” (or any other dialectical notion) is not a formal difficulty within the realm of learning, but is essentially a neurosis-based blockage, a product of the grandmother of neuroses, bourgeois ideology.

In that connection we now underline a point which we have repeatedly presented in our preceding writings of this series.[4]

Learning and even ordinary knowledge is limited either to object-images or to notions susceptible of being made conscious in the form of object-images. The persuasion that no other form of knowledge is possible is so pervasive that nearly everyone accepts as “axiomatic” the obsessive assertion of mechanistic thinkers to the effect that the physical universe must be primitively based on elementary “discrete particles” (or, the agnostic versions of the same mechanistic world-outlook, that the phenomena of the physical universe are entirely limited to sense-date of self-evident discreteness). Although there have been recurring efforts to conceptualize a “non-particularate” form of temporal-spatial continuity, in all but the rarest instances of this the accomplished definitions of such “lines,” “sheets,” etc. are ultimately intuitions which have been degraded to poorly disguised “bad infinity” constructs within a “logical system” which is itself premised on the axioms of discrete relationships (e.g., illustrated crudely by the widespread paralogical assumption that a straight line is defined by two points). Ordinarily, the constipated logician is therefore about to woo the credulous to his conceit that an infinite continuum cannot be “logically” primitive: there are no true, existent universals.

Our Spinozan treatment of Descartes’ “Perfection” theorem[5] has introduced the general type of conception of a primitive infinite continuity, within which class of mental phenomena the notion of “expanded reproduction” is to be located. The notion of a special kind of “transfinite invariance” for a nested array of historically-ordered Riemannian spaces is the more appropriate paradigm to be considered.[6] In such a derivation from Riemannian conceptions, the physical universe is no longer regarded as defined for finite (“conservation of a fixed quantum of”) energy per se. Instead, the ordinary sort of ‘’entropic” energy phenomena are treated as necessary special cases (predicated cases) of a certain quality (true infinite within the finite) of “negentropy.” The simplest paradigm for the order of conception required by such a definition of transfinite invariance is developed in our treatments of Value for Marxian economic theory[7], in which negentropy is expressed by a tendency for exponential increases in that ratio, S’/(C+V).

The notion for any of such a class of conceptions cannot be located as an “object-image;” there is no way in which this sort of notion can be known on the basis of a logic agreeable to axioms of primitive discreteness. There is only one feature of mental life which corresponds to such universalizing notions. That referent is the true infinity expressed by the fundamental emotion. This emotion is that which is imperfectly encountered in reports of the “oceanic” surge of either the “religious” or “love-death” feeling.[8] To conceptualize the Cartesian “Perfection” theorem, the form of negentropy to which we referred, or “expanded reproduction” in particular, it is essential that the person supersede his experience of the “oceanic” fundamental emotion to such pathological and absolutely terrifying forms as the “religious” or “love-death” expressions. It is essential that this emotion be willfully and familiarly experienced as the primary “tool” of a self-conscious sense of identity, a kind of identity opposite to that associated with the infantile relic of bourgeois culture with the infantile “greedy,” banal Ego.[9]

By contract, the socialist tendencies which formerly shared total collective hegemony over the movement were not only obsessively ignorant of such an ABC of socialism, but predicated socialist struggle as they saw it on an appeal to what they interpreted as the “special greed” of the workers, as those workers remain wholly subject to the prevailing bourgeois ideology expressed by ordinary “militant rank-and-file” trade-unionism. Consequently, these socialist tendencies capitulated to the very pluralist disorganization of the working class which prevents that class from either acting as a unified class or even recognizing a general class interest. By situating socialism within the domain of that infantile relic, the bourgeois Ego, i.e., postulating pseudo-socialism in practice, those tendencies degraded the goal of a unified, world-wide working-class society to an ineffable, hence chiliastic dream, a mere blurred, sentimental vision of “socialism” irrelevant as its efficient result to those same parties’ daily practice. Pandering to “nationalism,” to the chauvinism of either trade-unionists generally, or the more vicious craft-life parochialism of mere sections of organized labor, these tendencies have made a hideous travesty of the very name of “working-class struggle,” and, coherent with this, eschewed real, creative mental life on the Proletcultist premise of thereby adapting to and propitiating the existing, infantile prejudices of the bourgeoisified workers.

From the two preceding articles in this present series on the “new psychoanalysis,” it should be clear enough that we have already demonstrated our case to the degree that our thesis could not be competently regarded as merely moot or speculative. As we emphasized within “The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party,” clinical experience within the Labor Committees has repeatedly located clear emotional (and often enough even psychosomatic) blocking phenomena at the precise point individuals attempt to make the conceptual leap into the “middle of the circle” containing such notions as Cartesian “Perfection” or “negentropy” as we define it.[10] That same work has established that identity of the blocked emotion with an impending surge of “oceanic” feeling. Moreover, the etiology of the blockage respecting “Perfection” (for example) confirms both the identity of the fundamental emotion as the blocked quality, and the fact that the blockage to conceptualizing such notions is entirely neurotic in origin and form. The blocking of such concepts is always fundamentally the outcome of the characteristic neuroses of bourgeois ideology.

Hence, what we are chiefly reflecting in the present series of papers is a fundamental discovery which implies the launching of a world-wide socialist intellectual renaissance.

As we have reported earlier, the immediate short-term objective of this program within the Labor Committees is principally twofold. Firstly, to launch a program of interdependent task-orientation and psychoanalysis through which a plurality of the Labor Committee members proceed toward developing willful powers of creative mentation — what the layman would be obliged to term the deliberate development of “geniuses.” Secondly, to immediately use the progress in the Labor Committee program as a lever for quickly developing black and Hispanic ghetto teenagers often high-school “drop-outs” — into their potential as a working-class intelligentsia. Although the benefits realized so far are merely preliminary, what has been accomplished already suffices to demonstrate what we have now begun the rapid spread of exactly that intellectual renaissance essential to socialist transformation during the period immediately ahead. This series of reports has thus begun to account for the origin of those secondary features of the Labor Committees which have already inspired terror among certain North American and European Communist Party leaderships, and have evoked awed reaction from such other circles as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, the Urban Coalition, and the New York Times.

A new force is now unloosed in the world, a force imminently more terrifying to the philistines than any opponent on which they have speculated before this time.

There will be prolonged resistance to such a “renaissance” thesis. Even so, within months it will begin to be broadly conceded that, at least, the Labor Committees have originated a fundamental discovery. It will be a grudging admission in most instances; the observer will say impotently, in effect: “I want to make clear that I don’t like the Labor Committees’ actions, but ... “ This sort of reaction will develop within such academic fields as history, sociology, anthropology, to which we have made and are continuing to effect important contributions, frequently bearing on the most important issues of those specializations. It will also occur among even our bitterest opponents in political science, the CIA and KGB specialists and their employers, who are already studying our writings and activities as epidemiologists must regard a “diabolically clever” new sort of virus for which they have not yet produced an efficient specific immunizing agent.

In particular, fascination with our work will develop and spread within a stratum of more advanced psychoanalysts. Respecting specific areas of our more original insights into the etiology and treatment of certain stubborn problems of psychopathology, there have been admittedly some partial explorations in the same direction by a minority of professionals outside our work — notably among the factions directly or indirectly associated with the viewpoint of the late Harry Sullivan. However, even those more advanced psychoanalysts have been limited both theoretically and practically by their want of a fundamental grounding of psychoanalysis to replace the crippling old Freudian meta-psychology and its parodies. Our qualitative contribution to psychoanalysis as such is essentially located in our establishment of a fundamental theory of mind, through which necessary reification and coherence can be secured for a variety of otherwise ambiguous and abortive advances in methods and etiological tools of clinical work.

Examples bearing on the point are provided by our treatment of the “Id” problem, our deletion of the “Electra” complex from the clinical lexicon (both men and women have an “Oedipus” syndrome), our elimination of the “Eros/Thanatos” dualism (in connection with the analysis of the way in which the fundamental emotion confronts the infantile Ego as either a “Love-Death” feeling or a “Love-Insanity-Death” feeling), more generally our placing of the “father” question in proper secondary position with respect to the fundamental “mother-image” problems of Ego-psychodynamics, and our consequent contributions to a method for more rapid and profound progress in clinical work toward that “depth analysis” which is the essential precondition of all substantial progress in therapeutic efforts.

Corollary to this, our demonstration of the roots of this “new psychoanalysis” in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, our treatments — like that in the present paper — which make such philosophical writings familiar ground for the study of the professional psychoanalysts, generally enlarges the scope of the professions in several respects. As we have thus made psychoanalysis a branch of scientific anthropology, we have not only located it more efficiently within scientific knowledge in general, but have equipped psychoanalysis to become a self-conscious reflection of its own proper anthropological roots, to quality it as a general epistemological tool of all scientific work rather than a limited therapeutic practice.

The positive relationship to mathematical physics is so far less direct. The mere premise of necessary hylozoic coherence[12] throughout the universe is already sufficient to establish our analysis of the concept of “expanded reproduction” (i.e., universal labor = creative mentation = negentropy in our usage of that term) as equivalent in form and ultimate origins to a fundamental law of the universe as a whole.[13] Otherwise, the Labor Committees are contributing two interconnected approaches to the end of indirectly facilitating the realization of these conceptual advances within mathematical physics. Formally, we have located in the body of mathematical developments per se — in the viewpoint and work of Riemann, Cantor, Klein, Einstein, et al. — those starting-points for approaches which bear on actualization of the Cartesian notion of self-perfection as the fundamental (primitive) feature of a primitive continuum.[14] Empirically, as exemplified by our applied programmatic efforts respecting the food and energy crises, we are exploiting the analysis of the fallacy of the Physiocratic outlook to demonstrate the actual existence of continuous process (per se) as the primitive feature of human “economic” existence.[15] Such development and application serves as a case-history approach in applied epistemology, directed to the conceptual problems of those empirical studies in which the self-evidence of primitive discreteness not only is destroyed by the fundamental features of the process investigated, but in which the existence of discreteness as predicates is a necessary feature of a primitive continuity of negentropy as the subject of the investigation.[16] Otherwise, returning to the general issue, the hylozoic principle leads to certain results for mathematical physics in general through the initial crisis created for empiricism by the effort to locate a physiological basis in mental processes for the phenomenon of negentropy in human creative mentation itself.[17] This latter point, immediately situated in biology, leaves the mathematical physicist no choice but to become a practicing dialectician in mathematical physics, otherwise to join the Jesuits respecting the more sophisticated modern (entropic) arguments for the ontological proofs of the existence of a deus ex machina.

The most important immediate results — and the most obsessive, hysterical opposition — are located within applied political science. Any of the psychoanalysts who adduce the validity of our criticisms of the infantile Ego-state from their own clinical knowledge will immediately agree with us respecting our above-cited criticisms of the previously-existing socialist organizations: rather than concentrating on “changing human nature” (addressing and educating the workers’ self-conscious selves), these groups and tendencies have pandered to the infantile, heteronomic impulses of the workers’ bourgeois Ego, to those forms of “militancy” which are entirely within the bounds of bourgeois ideology.

It should be underlined that the pose of “objectivity” of previously-dominant socialist tendencies incorporates the most vicious subjectivity; the subjectivity of the militant bourgeoisified worker is taken as axiomatic. Hence, since all such bourgeois ideological rubbish in the militant workers’ heads is accepted, the subjective question is settled for them; hence, politics is degraded to merely the “objective” questions so-called. Consequently, any discussion of the suppressed subjective issues is feared as a threat which they must hysterically oppose.

This psycho-pathetic element is embodied as the fundamental principal of no less revolutionary a variety of those tendencies than the advocates of the “Leninist theory of organization.”

This theory of organization has in fact very little to do with the actual V.I. Lenin’s notable propensity for splitting from reformist and centrist organizations, almost at the mere appearance of a principled difference of practice. The recipe generally followed could be more precisely identified as the “Trotskyist theory of organization.” It was Trotsky who abandoned Lenin (with whom he agreed theoretically) in 1903 in order to be with the Menshevik majority of the RSDLP.[18] It was Trotsky who remained in the Menshevik “swamp” for most of the period from 1903 to 1917, Trotsky whom Lenin rightly denounced as a “slimy creature” for blocking organizationally with those with whom he had no principled theoretical conceptions in common! It was Trotsky who, in 1923, betrayed his agreement with Lenin’s firm instruction to make no compromise in booting Stalin out of the Soviet leadership.[19] It was the same Ego-trait in Trotsky which caused him to publicly lie in repudiating his own “Real Situation in Russia;” thus he obliterated the last real possibility of building a viable communist international for that entire ensuing period; his Ego defeated his self-consciousness, on the premise of “working within” the Menshevik centrist swamp of the Stalinized CPSU — as he had adapted to the Menshevik swamp of the 1903-1917 period.[20] The “Leninist theory of organization” is not actually a product of splitter-Lenin’s example, but of such examples as Trotsky’s schlimihl episodes; it is the cult of impotence exemplified by Trotsky’s “tactical” capitulations to the Menshevik, Zinoviev-Stalin, and Cannonite (e.g., Zinovievite) centrist majorities of the organizations in which he was situated at those respective points of his life.[21]

The relevant exemplification of this “Leninist principle” is seen in those old working-class “Trotskyists” who refused to break with the SWP leadership, this on the pretext that the leadership had not made formal literary denunciation of the “old party doctrine,” although nothing but such a break was occurring in the constant everyday practice of those same leaders. There are even a handful of such impotent wretches remaining within the SWP today. They cling to it on the pretext that the organization still (“fundamentally”) is salvageable by virtue of its continued circulation of the writings of L. Trotsky, despite the fact that the entire leadership and the overwhelming majority of members are now streetwalkers for the CIA’s domestic counterinsurgency operations (e.g., the New York City Lower East Side Fuentes CIA-type operations).[22]

More generally, among those who do not profess to be “Trotskyists,” such as CPUSA members, the same miserable impotence is expressed by the umbrella policy of attempting to build a “militant” left faction within the terms of the prevailing bourgeoisified outlooks of trade unionists, “black nationalists,” etc. — i.e., the general principle of political prostitution by which such socialist groups become a pimple on the left buttock of whatever “relevant” organized force they choose to attach themselves.

Still, illustrating this point from the case of the old SWP, any voice which attacked the leadership in terms of its day-to-day conduct was denounced even by most professed “oppositionists” as being “personal,” “subjective,” as abandoning the course of “objective politics.” “Objective politics” for them consisted in debating the literary productions in which the leadership either ignored or falsely characterized the content and purpose of its significant activities. The high point of “oppositionist” “objective politics” was the winning of an amendment to a codicil in a convention resolution, or the securing of nomination of a token representative on the National Committee — or, even to a local branch executive committee. There was, of course, much shouting about “theory and practice,” while always precluding any effort to attribute a political world-outlook from the clinical evidence of actual day-to-day practice. As long as the old party leadership did not make open literary attack on what the members considered “party traditions,” the “oppositionists” were content to limit their criticisms to momentary (impotent) self-purgative outbursts, and otherwise an irrelevant few weeks’ bi-annual ceremonies.

Such jackass-politicking in the old SWP is broadly exemplary of the internal life of all the old organized socialist groups of the capitalist world, ranging from the mass Communist Party of Italy, or the CPChile, down to the most miserable telephone-booth cults of the Atlanta (Georgia, U.S.A.) or Paris streets. This impotence is of course more extreme among the self-styled “independent socialists,” whose uppermost goal for political life is to gather around a handful of slightly-left academic and kindred celebrities at some swamp-like large confabulation, during which little of substance is said and absolutely nothing settled.

That miserable lot of “Stalinists,” “Trotskyists,” “Maoists,” and “independents” will of course be the last to concede that the Labor Committees have made any contribution, and will be howling their decorticated obscenities to such effect even after significant numbers of academic and other professionals are made their cautious acknowledgments of our “special assistances” to their respective fields.

The exact nature of our contributions is not exaggerated. As we emphasized in “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” with respect to Hegel’s Phenomenology, what we have accomplished is essentially to supply that last, decisive ingredient through which the long-outstanding achievements of a variety of predecessors are finally brought to a state for widespread fruitful application. We have taken the real Descartes, the real Spinoza, the real Kant, the real Hegel, the real Feuerbach, the real Marx off the dusty shelves of a century’s suspended animation and brought them to life; we have realized the life that was already if incompletely situated in their work. The impression of broad and profound originality in our present work is principally the consequence of our suddenly reviving so much from the greatest minds of the past centuries, rather than even considerably the effect of our own new discoveries in themselves. We must also consider the related consequences of the prevailing scholarship so-called respecting the same figures from which we have drawn. The case of the two cited theorems of Descartes exemplifies the point. Although the internal evidence of Descartes’ writings is sufficient to totally discredit any assessment but that we have made, the fact is that the bulk of extant scholarship does give institutionalized authority to a fictitious Descartes. Similarly, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. The sense that what we have contributed is “totally new” arises not only from a prevailing ignorance of the actual content of the enormous literary work on which we have drawn, but, worse, from the proliferation of “authoritative” but essentially incompetent representations of those same original sources.

The case of Karl Marx’s four-volume Capital is exemplary. The bulk of the present writer’s literary productions and lectures on economic theory and economic analysis is essentially a replication of the Marxian point of view as summed up in Volumes III and sections of Volume IV of Capital. To this we have added only two things.

Fundamentally, we have resolved the problem of elaborating the historical-materialist notion of expanded reproduction, especially as that was re-identified and summed up by Marx in the famous “Freedom-Necessity” passage from the “Trinitarian Formula” Chapter of Volume III.[23] On this point, we have made a fundamental contribution to Marxian economics by resolving only one specific problem which Marx himself failed to master. By applying that contribution of Volume III, Section VII retrospectively to the preceding sections of Capital, we have given the entirety of Marxian economic theory an applicability as scientific economics to an extent not previously feasible.

Secondly, we have employed our unique competence to fill our certain critical sections of Capital which Marx’s death left in sketch form. This accomplishment of ours is most notable in those chapters from Section IV of Capital, Volume III to which Marx assigned the treatment of fictitious capital, where he did not supply much more than identification of several of the major citations he selected for incorporation in those chapters.[24] The indicated analysis of the phenomena in question is missing in Marx’s text, an omission which has devastating consequences for the effort to reconcile the rest of Marxian economics with the actualities of the monetary side of the capitalist realization process.

At the same time, excepting such readily-isolable critical additions to the whole, the overwhelming bulk of our representation of Marxian economic theory, although in total opposition to generally accepted versions is entirely the contribution of Marx himself, without the slightest premise for competent dispute.[25]

Our general contribution to Marxian economic theory is entirely cognate with all other points on which we have made any important contributions. Respecting Marx’s conceptions of dialectical method and all other subsumed issues, we have located our correction of Marx in connection with the flaw in his outlook which is reflected in the second of his “Theses On Feuerbach.” He properly avoided the fundamental immediate blunder of Feuerbach, the key to all his original accomplishments, but he also evaded the still-deeped issue.[26] Marx’s specific flaw of omission, which becomes a pervasive blunder for Engels, is his failure to consider positively and explicitly the fundamental ontological issue of dialectical method. If the fundamental principle of Hegel’s dialectic is the self-subsisting positive principle, “self-perfection,” “negentropy,” as we have defined this[27], and if this principle is the essence of human revolutionary practice, then the fundamental law of the material universe itself must be of the same form (and, ultimately, also essence) as Hegel’s self subsisting Logos principle. Once we made the necessary correction, interpolating the necessary additional specification to the second of the “Theses,” we implicitly eliminated that error from all Marx’s work — as we have largely done in fact. We emphasize: this correction of the “Theses On Feuerbach” is essentially identical with our enlarged development of the thesis of Section VII, Volume III of Capital, and with every other principled correction we have introduced to Marx’s work as a whole.

In respect to the growing number of students of our work, among academic specialists as well as developing cadres in Western Europe and North America, it becomes our responsibility to recognize and treat the pedagogical problems arising from our initiative in reviving so the Marxian revolution in human knowledge. Although, as we have previously noted, the realization of these contributions is more exactly the outcome of the progress and collaborations within the Labor Committee tendency than the independent work of this writer himself[28], the largest part of the burden of authorship and pedagogical responsibility for this development remains momentarily with him.

Presently, the pedagogical problem confronting the scholar and instructor is still in the general form of distinguishing: “Here is the systematic point in the work of [Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, et al.] at which Marcus introduces his original contribution.” The effective assimilation of knowledge demands for this, as for all parallel advances, that those principally responsible for such upheavals deliver a special quality of representation of the history of development of the conceptions involved.

Response to this challenge imposes two interrelated tasks.

Firstly, although this is not the function of the present paper, it is time that there appear something resembling autobiographical account of the way in which the fundamental contribution was developed. There were definite influences, circumstances, problems, and significant assistance from collaborators from several fields — the latter notably during the recent five years. Important discoveries have a history; their original form does not erupt suddenly “from nowhere;” and usually years of testing and elaborating are required — as was the case with us — to put the new bare initial conceptions into a verified and applicable form of practice for public notice. Approximately two decades were consumed in that way in bringing that writer’s initial germinal insights into matured, elaborated form. Aspects of that history have considerable bearing on a precise understanding of the conceptions themselves, and even greater utility, for purposes of demystification, respecting pedagogy.

The second type of chore is reflected in the present paper.

In the first of the complementary chores, the writer takes his predecessors’ work into account as something which has affected the evolution of his conceptions. In that chore, his own contribution is the subject of the presentation, which the relevant features of others’ work intersect as predicates.

In the second case, this relationship of subject .and predicates is exactly reversed. The work of a predecessor becomes the subject, within which our own critical intervention is located as the leading predicate of the account. In one manner of viewing the latter it appears that we have thus distinguished those parts of the criticized work of a predecessor which we still regard as authoritative from that part which is to be superseded by our contribution.

That states a preliminary descriptive overview of what must be accomplished. A more important, principled problem of scientific pedagogy must now be considered.

The pedagogical prerequisite satisfied by such critical efforts is that of establishing conceptual coherence in the study and practice of an altered branch of scientific inquiry. The problem to be solved is illustrated by our foregoing discussion of Marxian economic theory. The student who does not know where and how Marcus has put together certain loose ends in Capital must be perplexed in the attempt to account for certain of our key conceptions from the standpoint of the textual authority of Capital itself.

A proper sort of textbook (and classroom pedagogy) ought to compel the student to replicate in himself some of that agony of cognition which preceded and accompanied each principal discovery in the field. The object of education ought to be that nothing must be merely “learned” by the student, but should become known to him through his experiencing that surge of elation (the light of a new idea being turned on his mind) which occurs when problem-solving tension is superseded by the realization of the new idea (Gestalt sense of the solution-concept) which the student has experienced “for himself.” When knowledge is enlarged in step-by-step conceptual breakthroughs of this sort (in place of mere learning), the student has more or less replicated within the evolution of his own increased cognitive powers the relevant conceptual development which occurred in that field.

We are not therefore recommending that education ought to be based on a “great book” program. Comment on the case of two great theorems is exemplary for the point at issue.[29]

Descartes’ conceptions of Cogito ergo sum and “Perfection” are so central to the history of evolution of all modern scientific knowledge that it would be impossible to make sense of modern knowledge without some concentrated attention to those theorems and to the circumstances of their original elaboration. Yet, although reference to Descartes’ writings is an essential complement to a presentation of the theorems, his writings do not offer the appropriate pedagogy for imparting those conceptions to our students. The work of such later thinkers as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Riemann, Cantor, Klein et al. provides a more exact conceptual solution where Descartes leaves the result in imprecise form. What is wanted is a retrospective view of Descartes’ effective discovery from the standpoint of what modern knowledge knows to be lasting and historically essential in that work. It is within that pedagogical context, and only that context, that access to Descartes’ writings becomes both essential and pedagogically appropriate. Otherwise, we plunge the student back into the world-outlook of a student from the early seventeenth century, thence to claw his way upward, decade by decade to his actual present starting-point. We require a replication of the achievements of the past in the terms of reference corresponding to that advanced viewpoint which the student ought to bring to the beginning of each step of his efforts.

In general, the point is to accomplish what we have already specified: an historical presentation of the development of knowledge within the conceptual standpoint of the most advanced knowledge. Within that setting, the student must develop all the essential conceptual apparatus for himself, and so arrive at the internal conceptual authority and developed conceptual powers for knowing the field. He must become able to replicate, through his own developed conceptual powers, anything from past accomplishments. He must become the living embodiment of what mankind has achieved in that respect up to his time. In contradistinction to mere learning of procedures, the student will develop conceptual habits for creative work in that field, a qualification which naive opinion might identify as an acquired “instinct” for such creative activity. Instead of making the blunder of learning formal procedures for “composing like Beethoven”[30], the student’s electrifying encounters one after the other with the concept-creating experiences of his principal predecessors “teaches” him the special creative habit of conceptual “intuition” appropriate to that field.

In contrast to such rigor, the preponderance of text is designed to impart mere learning, not knowledge. Formulations are assimilated by students for regurgitation. These are swallowed on the authority of mere plausible edification for the credulous, or, more generally, the student’s sycophantish awe of the institutions which have the power to certify his success or failure to his future employers.

Respecting the second sort of pedagogical chore, it should not be suspected that this writer is about to launch a series of monographs merely to settle accounts with his predecessors one by one. Given the perilous state of humanity and the corresponding special duties of the writer and his organization, there is neither the time nor disposable energy available for purely academic forms of activity.[31] Just so, we criticize Ludwig Feuerbach here, not to settle accounts with him in an academic fashion, not to establish our academic authority at his expense, but as our criticism of his work is a remarkably effective choice of prerequisite to the next step of progress in the politically-urgent “new psychoanalysis” series. In this way, we shall incidentally meet academic responsibilities of the account of the history of ideas, but we shall accomplish that as a by-product of our principal task, as a subsumed feature of undertakings which have a more obviously and urgently practical political purpose.

The principal object of our present paper is a further development of our argument to the effect that the principal types of formal epistemological errors proliferating in every field of knowledge today are entirely neurotogenic in both form and content. Our concern is not especially for the academic expression as such of this psychopathology. The ontological psycho-patheticism, otherwise known as “reductionism” or the belief in primitive discreteness, is the central feature of every expression of reactionary moods within the working class itself, the central feature of all obsessive psychopathologies characteristic of bourgeois ideology among members of the working class today.

Feuerbach’s principal work, The Essence of Christianity[32], is the most efficient selection of a clinical case through which to demonstrate such connections. The book includes the most concentrated and irrefutable evidence of the exact form of Feuerbach’s crippling neurotic problems, and the basis for connecting these problems directly to the crippling flaw for which Marx identified in “Theses On Feuerbach.”[33]

Yet, equally important for the selection of this case study, that book is also one of the most important scientific works in all modern history, combining certain of the most advanced conceptions and original discoveries existing up to the time of its writing with devastating flaws which are entirely neurotogenic.[34] Since Feuerbach both embodies a significant part of the advances of Hegel and other principal predecessors in portions of that book, and yet regresses to a relatively banality (by contrast with Hegel) on other matters, his errors are set into the most useful systematic juxtaposition to the main body of the man’s conceptual advances up to that point. It is this powerful contradiction in his book which renders a criticism of it so correspondingly powerful a tool for subsequent attacks on the more general problem as encountered in other contexts.

There is a collateral, although emphatically secondary importance for such published criticism of Feuerbach at this time. As Helmut Boettiger emphasized in his paper delivered in opposition to Alfred Schmidt’s presentation at the Bielefeld Feuerbach Referat[35], the Social-Democracy has recently resurrected the name of Feuerbach as an auxiliary level through which to propagate its slave-labor policy’s slogan, the “Quality of Life.” This hideous bit of preciosity echoing the old “Work Makes Free” situated above the entry to the Nazi concentration camps, is not accidentally derived from the modern followers of such Nazi philosophers as the existentialist Martin Heidegger. Nor is it therefore accidental that such efforts to make Feuerbach almost a proto-fascist, by Schmidt and others, should be derived from the tradition of epistemological imbecility associated with the middled Karl Loewith, witch-hunting Sidney Hook, and the Frankfurt School itself, by whom Feuerbach is idiotically associated with his bitterest factional opponents, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Heidegger, et al., as another “anti-Hegelian existentialist.” [36]

Of such scholars as Hook, Schmidt and their type, Feuerbach himself wrote aptly:

When he was confronted with serious, systematic criticism of his pornographic existentialist maunderings, in the September 7 session of the Bielefeld Referat, Schmidt abandoned the premises in the midst of his own assigned section of the proceedings, shouting as he left that he would not be subjected to such “Herostratic” criticism.[38] Hence, also, the build-up of the Referat in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung[39], the organ of the Christian Democratic Union in the German Federal Republic ... without account of the only incident which awoke the sixty participants and their chairman (from the slumbers which prevailed through most of the proceedings): the crushing refutation of Schmidt during the Sept. 7 session.

Since the Labor Committee tendency has established the degree of influence through which it can introduce panic into such hideous academic activities as Schmidt’s abuse of Feuerbach, it is our important if secondary obligation to exploit every otherwise useful treatment of philosophical questions to expose the charlatanry of such quacks as Schmidt, Althusser, Hook, Quine, Ayer, et al., whether respecting the issue of Feuerbach himself or any other important topic which such “kosher” scholars attempt to degrade to the minuscule dimensions and banality of their own petty intellects.

Of more lasting importance than the necessary exposure of contemporary academic frauds, is the rescuing of the positive accomplishments of Feuerbach’s major writings from its neurotic flaws. In general, despite the special value of The Principles of the Philosophy of the Future[40], The Essence ... retains the superseding importance which Feuerbach’s own Second Preface to that work implies. It is his major production, which contains, at least by implication, all of his important advances beyond Hegel; it represents the kernel of everything later assimilated in Karl Marx’s works, is both the founding work of scientific anthropology, and is the actual initiating work of scientific psychoanalysis.

The central feature of Feuerbach’s accomplishment is his original insight into the importance of religious belief as the absolutely indispensable subject of special inquiry prerequisite to any further significant advances in the self-conscious conception of scientific knowledge in general. Since Feuerbach’s writings, prior to those of the present author, the only notable explicit appreciation of Feuerbach’s point in important literature is the appearance of the same essential argument in Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.[41]

Even so close a collaborator of Karl Marx as Engels veered toward the bankrupt tendency to regard extant physical science as a body of objective (i.e., supra-historical) knowledge, abandoning the principle of historical specificity which prevails in Marx’s writings and in even Engels’ own treatments of most other branches of knowledge.[42]

We summarize the argument which we have developed more extensively in other locations. The question of the “objectivity” of the judgments of so-called physical science is a question bearing upon the “objectivity” of the mental processes of the scientists, whose world-outlook is subsumed by the same ideology which governs their activities of mate-selection and social habits generally. “Objective” scientific knowledge in any field therefore first demands superseding the historical specificity of membership in a form of society of characteristic (historically-specific) qualities of world-outlook.

This achievement is not entirely impossible!

In general, it is possible to demonstrate the appropriateness of scientifically-governed practice to the expanded reproduction of a society, and so to distinguish certain abstractions from this body of practice as being pragmatically “scientific,” so distinct from superstition. This testing does not suffice to establish the supra-historic “objectivity” of abstract science, but only the quality of appropriateness of a certain body of practice to an historically-specific state of human development. Truly ‘scientific knowledge demands something quite superior to pragmatic authority. If one becomes self-conscious of the prevailing ideology which subsumes the mental behavior of physical scientists, one can thus uniquely abstract the essential features of scientific inquiry from the ideological corruption.

“Consistency,” the obsessive conceit of logicians, affords no solution to such a problem. The essential feature of an ideology is located in the axiomatic premises of its construction; consistency per se is only a measure of the “hereditary fitness” of each predicate of a system to its determining ideology. No scientist could possible know, from arguments based merely on a consistent interpretation of the evidence, that his knowledge was anything more than an ideologically-distorted interpretation of reality. To escape from such a vicious situation there is only one remedy. If we have identified a ruling world-outlook as an ideology, and have, further, distinguished the invariant distortion of reality characteristic of it, such self-consciousness provides the epistemological basis for positively superseding the mystical fallacies of extant ideological knowledge.

The analysis of religious belief is therefore prerequisite to any such achievement under capitalism. It is the Christian doctrine (and its Judaic off-shoot)[43] which overtly, consciously displays those ideological premises otherwise generally hidden (in unconscious processes) respecting their expression within scientific knowledge. It is the thrust of criticism of Christianity from the anthropological standpoint pioneered by Feuerbach, which uniquely makes self-conscious that source of mystical reifications of scientific knowledge otherwise obsessively self-concealed within the axiomatic premises of so-called “objective scientific knowledge.”

For connected reasons, the isolation of a vicious flaw in Feuerbach’s critique of religious belief is the identification of the systematic error necessarily pervading his epistemology. Similarly, to the extent that that variety of flaw we encounter in Feuerbach also occurs generally in the premises of the various factional world-outlooks in science and everyday life, expressing religious ideology, our analysis of this same error for the case of Feuerbach has decisive application to the corresponding extent.

Our criticism of the book is organized along the following broad analytical lines.

His principal contributions to epistemology, to anthropology, and to psychoanalysis are either summarily stated or sufficiently implicit in the first four chapters of that text. Despite certain aspects of these chapters which already threaten to lead to erroneous conclusions, threats which are indeed later developed as explicit blunders, the thrust of his presentation is broadly correct, and even brilliantly so, both as it summarizes certain relevant accomplishments of Hegel and as it adds to that author’s fundamental contributions. Only after we have analyzed-explicit errors in later chapters, and have returned to the opening chapters from that vantage-point, can we competently attribute systematical importance to the occasional jarring notes of mis-formulation and ellipsis speckled among the initial four chapters.

We encounter the first important explicit blunder in the fifth chapter[44], but even here the mistake has not become formally irrevocable. Then, we reach the sixth chapter, in which the psychopathological kernel of his fundamental epistemological error is exposed in what we might justly describe as a lurid shamelessness.

At casual first reading, the error of the sixth chapter might mistakenly be discounted as the author’s ignorance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In itself, the form of the blunder would ordinarily reflect such ignorance. Yet, in theological matters his scholarship is too thorough and longstanding to tolerate such an explanation. The reason for the blunder cannot be ordinary ignorance; he could not have committed such a crude factual error unless his mind were under the control of an obsession strong enough to shatter his reason. This is exactly the case.

Before proceeding to the development of the point, we now summarily describe the doctrinal blunder and indicate its deeper psychological and epistemological significance.

For the most compelling psychological reasons, as we shall indicate, Christian doctrine, evolving through numerous prolonged and hard-won struggles, prescribes a liturgical Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, or Logos, is the essential form and substance of the deity (its “infinite” form)[45], in respect to which God the Law-Giver[46] and Christ[47] are its two principal (alienated) predicates. The New Testament also specifies the brief existence of another sort of “trinity” for the period from the birth of Jesus until the crucifixion and resurrection: God the Father, Jesus the Messiah, and Mary. Christ’s connection to Mary ends with the crucifixion, after which the New Testament firmly insists that she must not touch him; the other, minor “trinity” has therewith ceased to exist.[48]

Feuerbach makes two interconnected errors, the second of these a bald, hysterical act intended to bury the evidence leading directly to exposure of the first. In a work which purports to expose the anthropological-psychological essence of Christian belief, he absolutely ignores the liturgical Trinity, and insists on the alternate of God, Son, and Mary! In the effort to dispense with the embarrassing Holy Spirit, Feuerbach desperately buries the Logos in Christ![49]

There is nothing arbitrary or minor in the liturgical Trinity which Feuerbach ignores. As his own general thesis respecting religious belief properly demands[50], any conception which appears as an essential feature of Christian doctrine thereby establishes a prima facie case for its significance as a reflection of a fundamental feature of the unconscious mind of the members of earthly Christian society.

The absolute exclusion of Mary from the company of the liturgical Trinity properly corresponds to the essential features of alienated mental life. Most notable is the absolute opposition of the “soul,” the self-conscious self, to the other “I” within the person, to the infantile, “dirty” Ego. The fundamental emotion, apotheosized as the Logos or Holy Spirit in Christian doctrine, is the quality which finds agreement with the “soul,” and which simultaneously demands the “denial” of the infantile Ego. It is the infantile Ego of the alienated individual which is directly affiliated to the internalized mother-image. The New Testament is riddled with evidence to this same effect. There, the body of the resurrected Christ is no phantasm, no apparition, but a material body, from which the infantile Ego has been extirpated to give over the “I” entirely to the rule of the self-conscious self. Hence, Mary, a predicate of Christ’s discarded infantile Ego, must not touch his body; he is no longer affiliated to her.[51]

The mystery of religion is dispelled once a few facts of mental life of alienated man are understood. We have developed the outline respecting psychology itself in preceding articles, especially in. the course of our “The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party;” so, we may merely, again summarize the matter at this juncture.

The mental processes of alienated man are principally distinguished not only by the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes, but by the fact that this mind includes two entities each normally capable of being the “I” of the person. The first of these, in the usual order of encounter, is the infantile Ego, associated with the infantile emotions of fear, rage, and elation of object-possession. The second of these two, the self that “comes up behind the back of the Ego,” is the self-conscious self, associated with self-conscious reasoning and (by “cathexis”) with various degrees of intensity of the fundamental emotion.[52]

In a sane society, the infantile Ego would disappear in early childhood. Relative to the self-conscious “I,” the Ego is representative of the “bestial” quality of man; yet, in most of the conscious (and sleeping) life of the members of capitalist society, it is the “dirty,” infantile Ego which normally seizes the quality of the “I,” and controls the individual’s behavior accordingly. Correspondingly, the human qualities of the individual are stultified; the power of self-conscious reasoning is largely atrophied, and the fundamental emotion surges up only in occasional eruptions as an “oceanic” “love-death” feeling, either as the “irrational moment” of actual loving (distinct from ordinary “sexual feelings”) or as the “religious feeling.” The exceptional love of a Tristan and Isolde and religious experience are exemplary of the pathological form in which alienated man occasionally encounters those stultified human qualities usually repressed within him.

In one, important sense, the religious experience is a relatively human quality of individual existence, relative to the bestiality of the same individual’s life and conduct when he or she is ordinarily under control of the infantile Ego. This same pathetic expression of actual humanity, this religious feeling, is therefore perversely expressive of alienated man’s most profound human needs and is relatively a necessary check on the more rampant bestialization of alienated society which would prevail without religious beliefs and practices.[53] The religious man is a stultified, unstable, alienated, and hence pathetic surrogate for what man ought to become.

The essential features of Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of Christ’s passion, crucifixion, and resurrection, are reflective of the most profound psychological truth respecting the mental life of alienated man.[54]

As Feuerbach properly emphasizes, the doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of a personal God, God become man so that man might know God in the likeness of man’s own image and suffering, a God who is therefore a suitable mediator to the God of Universal Law.[55] Yet, since the idea of God is only the apotheosis of the essential human quality of man[56], the doctrine of reconciliation with God through Christ could only be a doctrine of imitation of Christ in the process of freeing oneself from the infantile Ego, and thus obtaining, a “perfect body” for oneself, a body free of the Ego, and under the exclusive control of the self-conscious “I.”[57] Such a “perfect body” is a material being expressing nothing but the human essence. Since God

is nothing but the apotheosis of that human essence, to become entirely a self-conscious “I,” one’s body freed of the infantile Ego, is to achieve the quality of agreement with God’s nature within oneself.

Contrary to Feuerbach’s hysterical assertion, Jesus becomes sinful by being born of woman. He acquires an infantile Ego, whose characteristic emotions are infantile fear, rage, and elation of object-possession. The Life of Jesus, its agony concentrated in the Passion of Gethsemane, is a struggle to free the soul of God-become-man, the self-conscious “I,” from the tyranny of the infantile Ego and that Ego’s desires. The self-conscious “I” conquers the Ego, and rejects the Mother during the crucifixion (crying out: “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”). Through the death of the Ego, through the crucifixion of his body from the corruption of the Ego, his body becomes the perfect material extension of his self-conscious “I,” he has become one with God.

The Passion, extending from Gethsemane through the crucifixion, is a stylized version of the terror which the infantile Ego experiences during every onset of the “oceanic” feeling of “love-death.” If the feeling is not successfully blocked, the result is the temporary “death” of the Ego, which is submerged (disappears) for the duration of that experience. Religious doctrine, which knows virtually nothing of actual self-consciousness, does not realize the quality of this fundamental emotion as the quality of creative mentation. Religious doctrine knows the fundamental emotion only ignorantly, in two alternative stultified forms of expression. The first expression is the most profound terror the Ego-dominated person can experience, the feeling of a plunge into the pit of death (which some have reified as the specious appearance of an autonomous “Thanatos” quality encountered in depth analysis).[58] The second expression is encountered when the naive, imbecilic self-conscious “I” is positively cathexized to this same emotion, under which circumstances the terror gives way to the most intense “oceanic” elation: this is the so-called religious experience, identical with the emotion of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde love-death (Liebestod) duet.

The essential feature of the actual religious experience is a temporary absolute break with “mother-love.”

In the mind of the alienated individual, there are various identities present in addition to the two entities of Ego and self-conscious self. Normally, except in certain types of autistic and schizophrenic psychosis, the quality of “I” cannot be assumed by these other entities. Usually; the figures are what the painters, Breughel, Bosch, and Goya have represented them to be, hideous chimeras torturing the Ego in the pit of the unconscious processes. Chief among these evil chimeras is the mother-image. She is not a replication of the mind of the existing mother, but a construct reflecting the infantile relationship of the child to the mother and mother-surrogates combined.[59] In every instance the mother-image is willfully brought to consciousness in an individual in clinical experience, the image is hideous and viciously destructive, exploiting the Ego’s sense of infantile dependency to control the same Ego which invariably hates the mother-image, usually hating her only less strongly than the feeling of dependency.

The Ego, in primary association with this mother-image, does not know actually human social relationships, but only “goods and services”: relationships between humanoid objects. Exemplary of the arrangement is the fact that Freud was guilty of superficiality and (probably) rationalization in projecting the existence of the daughter’s “Electra complex” as complementary to the son’s “Oedipus complex.” There is only the “Oedipus” pattern in both sons and daughters. It is rather ordinary psychoanalytical knowledge that in most instances of coitus in and out of marriage, the performance of the male is associated with a fantasy, conscious or unconscious, in which the face of the “mother-image” is never then distant from the surface of consciousness as the superimposed identification of the object of his lust. It is often supposed that the father’s image is the frequent fantasy-object of the female under the same circumstances. Not essentially: in each case in which some male-labeled image does seem to occur to the female unconscious during coitus (and related circumstances), a small additional analytical effort strips the male mask from that image to reveal the mother-image’s face beneath.

It is the “mother-image,” constructed from the infantile quality of the alienated, bourgeois relationship between child and mother (and mother-surrogates), which provides the “ego-ideals” of bestiality in man. “Mother-love” is accordingly the association for the individual’s general sense of the most degraded varieties of sexual feelings, otherwise the emotion of “elation of object-possession,” the warm, homely glow of gluttony epitomized by an overdose of “mother’s home-made chicken soup.”

The “mother-image” is also associated with mother’s fears, partially a reflection of her superstitious fears of the world outside the home, imposed upon the oppressed women who become mothers, but also the superstitious, heteronomic outlook implicit in the family’s alienated relationship to that outside world on which its existence depends. All that is narrow, chauvinistic, anti-humanistic, heteronomic in ordinary man, reflected in such reactionary notions as “mother country,” “mother tongue,” “local control,” “hostility to `outsiders,’ “ etc., is immediately linked to the infantile Ego through the ego-ideals associated with the mother-image. It is this same connection which governs virtually all fantasy.

To become truly human — as distinct from “religious” — is to relocate one’s identity in a Spinozan way, away from the sense of identity associated with dependency upon an internalized mother-image. Instead of saying, explicitly or (more significant) implicitly, “I am defined as a child of my parents who have predetermined my nature,” the sane, adult individual defines his identity in a Spinozan way in the real world as a whole. His existing relationships to existing persons in general are the entirety of his identity. He has “grown up;” he is no longer an appendage of the internalized mother-image; his childhood has ended. He has given up the infantile “l,” the Ego associated with the mother-image.[20]

From that psychoanalytical standpoint, the significance of all the principal features and importance of the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation, Passion, and resurrection become clear. Christ is the paradigm of religious man’s pathway to reconciliation with the essential human quality in himself which he externalizes in the apotheosized form of an alienated God. To become human is to become freed from the thrill of the infantile Ego and mother-image, and to locate one’s “I” entirely in the self-conscious self.[60] In that attempted shift of identity from the Ego to self-consciousness by religious man, the bestial sensual emotions are relatively abandoned in moments of religious experience for cathexis of the “I” with the fundamental emotion, with hence the Logos. Universal Law (God), the Holy Spirit, and Man-become-God are reconciled in such a Trinity.

Hence, the enormity and profound clinical significance of Feuerbach’s falsifications of Trinity and Logos. In the absolutely lurid, extended passage to which we referred, he presents the case for “mother” as follows:

What involuted self-contradictory argument, what pathetic sentimentality! Feuerbach is obviously not himself here; his self-conscious “I” has vanished for a while, the pen appropriated by his infantile Ego contemplating its childhood, earthly family. Here, Feuerbach says more about his parents, and himself, than about the Trinity.

Exactly the psychopathology underlying the homosexual fears of the mother’s “little man,” the Macho or Papagallo.

How luridly clear he is. Here we have the “Oedipus complex” and the worship of female sadism apotheosized. Feuerbach makes the most pathological form of bourgeois sexual impotence the “sole truly religious consecration” of love, and such hideous self-degradation of man and woman in banalized forms of “love” the essential principle of religious belief and humanity! Yet, this is not his argument respecting self-conscious feeling and reason in earlier chapters![62] He continues, then:

Feuerbach himself solved that riddle earlier, before his “I” was appropriated by his infantile, mother-image dominated Ego![63]

As Feuerbach’s self-conscious self earlier argued on this very point, only if God became incarnate in the sinful form of man born of woman, in the dual form of a soul opposed to the infantile, sinful mother-dominated Ego, could Christ be a mediator for man, and become through his transfiguration and reconciliation with God, a personal God for man in God.[64]

From a subject in an analytical sessions, the latter sort of assertion is sufficient to demonstrate that the “I” is at that moment entirely located in the Ego. Such mawkish sentimentality is itself sufficient evidence that the subject is momentarily under total control of a most obsessive expression of his neurosis.

Again, indelible clinical evidence of Feuerbach’s mental state at this point in his work.

This suggests more Feuerbach’s early nineteenth century German father than the image of the God from the second chapter.

Feuerbach brings himself thus to a shrieking state of sentimental hysteria on the issue of his own mother and his Ego’s morbid fascination with her sadistic love.

So long as our attention is focused on rigorous psychoanalytical study of the essential doctrine of the principal Christian apostles and mystics, Feuerbach’s blundering must tend to appear not only as a case of hysteria, but a strikingly egregious obsession at that. If we then call up the phrase, “The Mother Church,” our point of view is immediately shifted. The phrase itself is sufficient to imply, if for no more than a moment, that we have perhaps exaggerated our case against him; certainly, the image of the mother figures enormously in later Christianity, not only on premise of the more recently instituted form of Catholic doctrine of Mariolatry.

Contrary to any misleading first impressions, on account of the “Mother Church,” we are not obliged to withdraw anything we have said respecting fundamental Christian doctrine or our criticisms of Feuerbach. There is admittedly a Mother figure in Christianity possessing the attributed qualities and significance which Feuerbach missituates in his substitute for liturgical Trinity. Feuerbach’s error, we reemphasize, is his effort to substitute the temporal “trinity” of the Holy Family for the other, liturgical Trinity he purports to examine.

Feuerbach’s obsession has compelled him to conceal from himself the doubleness of Church doctrine in this matter. Church doctrine, on the one hand, incorporates the essential doctrine of the principal apostles and mystics as its profound mysteries, mysteries bound up with the doctrine of the liturgical Trinity. At the same time, it holds out the model of the Holy Family, and in some versions also the Saints, as a second, more banal doctrine, suitable for the edification of those both ignorant and benumbed souls denied an ongoing actual religious experience.

The secret of this doubleness can be directly exposed from the standpoint we have already established.

In the life of the ordinary communicant, the state of mind corresponding to a profound actual religious experience occurs only a few times, if at all, and is thereafter usually called up only in a much-diluted form by carefully-evolved rituals, notably the various forms of the Catholic mass, and by the hypnotic rituals of prayer. In much Protestant practice, this goal of Catholic rituals is sought more directly by the associative methods of evangelism, baptism, etc. It is this aspect of religious ceremonies which most attracted the attention of the greatest eighteenth and early nineteenth century composers, not by mere propitiatory impulses toward the Church, but because those ceremonies, through their evolution, verged most closely on the methods by which the composer’s own creative emotion, the fundamental emotion, could be evoked.[65]

Despite the Church’s appropriate preoccupation with ceremonies directed to evoking the religious experience in at least a diluted form, the daily religious life of the communicant, as well as his or her daily life in general, corresponds to the state of relative impotence otherwise characteristic of alienated society. To maintain itself as an hegemonic institution, the Church was obliged to make a sweeping compromise with what its essential doctrine must otherwise regard strictly as evil.[66] To function as a “mass organization,” to appeal to the numbed state of mind overwhelmingly characteristic of most of the life of its communicants, thus to hold them to its secular organization, the Church incorporated a second body of doctrine essentially opposed to the first, which latter we may style as the perineum of its body of doctrine, the “dirty” part of the Church.

The doctrines of the “Mother Church” and of the “Holy Family” and Saints represent the set of correlatives for the “dirty” doctrine. Correspondingly, exactly as the passage we cited from the sixth chapter of The Essence of Christianity was written from the standpoint of Feuerbach’s infantile Ego, his doctrine of the Trinity is faithful to the “Mr. Hyde” part of the Catholic doctrine (in particular). It approximates that contradictory facet of Christian doctrine appropriate to the ordinary impotent state of the communicant. Since this soiled feature of religious belief corresponds to the Ego-state, and to the ignorant, superstitious view of the world associated with the internalized mother-image which controls the Ego’s sense of identity, the “Mother Church” and its “Holy Family”/ “Virgin Mary” doctrines become the conspicuous features of the “worldly” side of the Catholic Church and of the private religious superstitions of its communicants.

This idolatrous side of Church doctrine has frequently been rightly identified with pagan vestiges. Unfortunately, the arguments to this effect, usually abstracting certain rituals and practices which have ostensibly pre-Christian origins, are more specious than correct. Although the Catholic Church, in particular, has in fact adapted its internal life to a certain sort of “heathenism” in building up its dirty side, it had not done this in the ordinary sense of the theological term syncretism. Rather, this aspect of Church doctrine is a direct on-going accommodation to “witches” and to contemporary womanly forms of “sorcery.”

The form of past such influence is luridly continued even in present-day Italy, for one example. More notorious in the brutalized, peasant Mezzogiorno, but spreading even into the Italian communities of Switzerland, there is a sizeable profession of “witches” and “magicians,” by many held in higher esteem than physicians for treating a wide range of disorders ranging onward in a long list from the notorious “malocchio.” The examples from Eastern European cultures need not be developed here. The proliferation of identical forms of insane superstition among Spanish-speaking peoples is encountered among the most backward strata of Puerto Ricans even in New York City. Outside of those more backward forms of capitalist culture identified by the hegemony of Catholicism[67], one does not have to dig deeply into Protestant or Jewish strata (even without considering the flagrant example of the Hassidic cult), to locate the same essential belief in witches in only a more shame-faced guise. Digging beneath the surface of the innocent-appearing cult of “(mother’s) home cooking,” we find next “Mother’s remedies,” and the generic code-word for the widespread plague of superstition, “Mother always told me ... “ The relatively-greater credulousness of frigid, lonely women for certain kinds of buncombe, ranging from astrology to outright necrology, is an aspect of the same mental disorder. It is also of most concentrated, if lurid clinical significance that one of the most demented of the groups which briefly proliferated during the “radical feminist” hysteria adopted the acronym “WITCH.”

From the psychoanalytical standpoint, there is nothing mysterious about witches or Poltergeists. In a sense, they exist. The image of the “witch” is the most common form in which a son or daughter evokes an image of the mother from the unconscious processes. The most banal and self-destructive behavior of any individual so inhabited by a witch-image is nearly always the result of the witch’s direct control of the Ego. Under circumstances appropriate to mass-hysteria, or which produce widespread schizophrenic and related psychotic episodes within a population, the image of the witch must inevitably not only pop out spontaneously from the unconscious processes, even in the extreme form of hallucinations, and the belief in the appearance of such witches — as associated with one’s own identity or projected upon another, especially an older woman or a young girl with a characteristic “Mona Lisa” smile — must be frequent.

The witch image is not a learned chimera. It is not Grimm’s fairy-tales, etc., which cause people to believe in witches. The popular notion of a witch is like any other social conception, an evolved means for communicating a commonplace experience which would be original to the individual even without the existence of such a term. The terror which fairy-tales evoke in children — the mixed terror and fascination — is a symptom of the prior existence of a witch-image in the child’s mind, an image which unconscious processes already directly associate with either the child’s mother or with a combination of mother and mother-surrogates. Frequently enough, the adult young woman recognizes this face in one or both of two ways: “My mother was a witch,” or “I’m constantly afraid that I’m really a witch.” She had adopted the idea of the witch as an appropriate representation of some quality which she has located within her mother or herself without need of fairy-tales.[68]

The witch image is the associated quality of the female Ego otherwise identified with female sexual impotence and its correlated forms of social impotence generally. Hence, the clinical significance of the acronym, WITCH, for the cited radical feminist group. Such variety of “radical feminism,” as distinct from its sane bitter factional opponent, Women’s Liberation efforts, is essentially an outbreak of the most pathetic, most sadistic form of lesbianism. The method of indoctrination used by groups such as WITCH, so-called “consciousness-raising” sessions, were undoubtedly a modern replication of ancient “Witch meetings,” and represented the accidentally-discovered but not otherwise accidental most efficient means for turning a merely intensely neurotic young woman into a virtual psychotic.

Through social “reenforcement” in the group, the new victim is induced to call up the witch within her, and then to relinquish defenses against a more direct take-over by that image. The result of this, where it were successfully accomplished, would be a form of disassociation identical in key respects to a schizophrenic episode. Even the ordinary Ego “I” is weakened and the “I” of the outwardly-acting person is placed under intensified, more direct control of the witch called forth from the (Breughel’s Bosch’s Goya’s) pit of unconscious processes. A woman reduced to this psychotic state, must tend to become a prostitute, a lesbian, or both. Although there is generally a necessary connection between the control of the Ego by a witch and lesbianism, and although prostitutes are generally lesbians who depend upon calling up witch qualities as the prerequisites of their professional practice. The special kind of lesbianism developed in radical-feminist “conscious-raising” forcing sessions is not to be simply equated with the ordinary case of lesbian behavior. The radical-feminism-produced lesbian is a special category of virtual psychotic, a synthetic product of a “brain-washing” technique which essentially reverses the psychoanalytical method.

The son of a witch is, suitably enough, a “Prospero,” a “magician.” The most commonplace reflection of this is that class of superstitions among males identified with the form of “If! ... then, I will become ...” or, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” sort of superstitious utterances and behavior. Otherwise, the male pattern has been sufficiently implied by our outline of the female pattern.

It is with this “mother’s religion,” the superstitious cult of witches and such, that the Catholic Church compromised to become the “Mother Church.” In this is located with secret of idolatry, headed by the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is the archetypical witch, the mother of witches — the Madonna whose secret self is “The Whore of Babylon.”

A significant reflection of this can be readily obtained in the report, with an accompanying momentary shudder, from the majority of young adults who have afresh, horrified recollection of their experience in Roman or Greek Catholic parochial schools. The most hideous recollections are usually associated with the constant emulation of a “Mona Lisa” smile on the faces of so many viciously sadistic teaching nuns. Look quickly back and forth to the face of the smiling, vicious nun and the face of the image of the Virgin Mary! Look then at the face of any woman raised in Catholic household in the moments she is either being most sadistic or is hysterically lying: the psychotic “Mona Lisa” smile of the arch-witch, the Virgin Mary.

Most women can readily recall their “two-faced” mothers. There was generally the smiling “company face,” complementary to the mother’s well-kept “living room” of the old “lace-curtain” household cultures of working-class and petit-bourgeois North America. Hidden away from “company” and “the neighbors,” there was mother’s other self, her other face, and the accompanying cult of “family secrets” to be hidden from “strangers” and “outsiders” generally. “Local control” ideology and “patriotism” (respecting the mother country!) are extensions of this same witch pattern of the childhood household. Most of these women could find the same, acquired “two-facedness” in themselves, and hence discover how they learned such manifestations of sexual impotence. They can locate the origin of similar pathologies in their lovers and husbands (among other males), a perception on whose reflection the woman fosters deeper enmity toward the marriage’s principal enemies, the mothers-in-law.

There were usually other most troubling aspects to mother’s “two-facedness.” In one moment, she is the “loving, understanding” mother. In another moment, she is a raging maenad. And, what duplicity she is capable of! She mercilessly provokes the father into a punitive orgy against her children, and then comforts them as they run to her in terror from his blows. Her children consciously, or at least unconsciously, learn to distinguish her as a tricky, calculating person, nearly always speaking and posing for effect, all the while secretly scheming behind her mask.

Probing deeper, most children discover that their mother is usually the immediate agent most responsible for crippling both their intellectual powers and their capacity to love. Only in later childhood did her children begin to imagine themselves to “really believe” that mother-love is love. Somewhere, early in their childhood, they could recall, there was the devastating experience of her repeated rejections of their attempting expression of the deepest (i.e., “oceanic”) feelings, and her constant, stultifying emphasis on their cultivating the artificial outward facial and other behavioral appearances she demanded of them. “There,” the child recalls her voice, as it finally effected the outward dissimulation of its underlying feeling which she had demanded, “Now, that’s mother’s little ... “ boy or girl “again.”

From such an unfortunately commonplace mothering, the child also recalls her treatment of her husband. She was generally a sadistic witch, deprecating everything of importance to him, frustrating his interests and preferred activities, aborting his close relationships to his children, except for those measures doses of approved associations she permitted him. She used her children’s dependency upon her to “turn them against their father” in one fashion or another, one degree or another. The child recalls this with horror and anger, especially his (or her) horror at his own childhood complicity in this vicious household game, especially as the adult is later able to recognize that the mother did the same sort of sadistic thing to him (or her).

Obviously, the class struggle is not against mothers! As we have repeatedly emphasized, two points must be recognized at the same time that one uncovers the evils of the mother-image. Firstly, as we have emphasized above, that the person’ smother-image is not a replication of the existent mother, but a construct based on the child’s pathetic infantile relationship to both the mother and mother-surrogates. In most instances, the establishment of an adult human relationship to the existent mother can be a fruitful auxiliary aspect of the process of liberation from the internalized false representation of her as the mother-image. One of the most embittering aspects of an aging mother’s existence is that her children, in later life, are showing no regard for her as the human being she is, but instead are reflecting their relationship to an internalized mother-image as the control of their conduct toward her. Secondly, more fundamental to the context of this paper’s topics, the sadism of the mother in capitalist culture (in particular) is entirely a product of capitalism and of the banalization of women by capitalism.

Restricting our attention to capitalist culture for convenience (in other, pre-capitalist cultures, the mother problem is more hideous than under capitalism), the reason the mother is the fundamental figure in her children’s neurotic and psychotic problems is that the relationship of mother to infant and post-infancy child is the central feature of the process of maturation. Hence, the fundamental problems of mental life are inevitably mediated through the relationship to the mother. To the extent that mother accepts and thus transmits capitalist culture to her children, she must be a hideous oppressor of those children.

The rest of the mother-problem, the greater sexual impotence and sadism of women relative to men, is entirely a product of the oppression of women. The problems of sexual discrimination are significant, and removing all forms of such sexual discrimination against women is absolutely imperative to the mental health of both men and woman, but these hideous oppressions of discrimination are relatively secondary, or merely subsumed features of the most essential oppression to which women are generally subjected.

The essential oppression is apotheosized in the “feminine image,” the image of the woman as relatively a person of “feeling,” “free” from “male” qualities of “aggressive,” “intellect-dominated” life. It is characteristic of capitalist society, in particular, that any group singled out for oppression is distinguished from the favored strata as a special kind of people more given to “feeling” than intellect. In this way, the sort of “black cultural nationalist” who associates black people with their “genius for musical rhythm,” “soul,” etc., is the most degraded of “Uncle Toms.” His black nationalism consists essentially of making a virtue of the inferior status imposed upon black people by their oppressors. The black cultural nationalist, like the radical feminists who crudely parodied black nationalism in the late 1960’s, has located the quality of “national independence” in internalizing the ideology of the oppressor as the internal chains of self-oppression upon his own mind. The essence of all oppression of women, including the vicious self-oppression women have been induced to internalize, is the belief in the “feminine principle.” The fundamental expression of the capitalist oppression of women is that quality which is worshiped by all radical feminists: the self-oppression of women as “creatures of feeling.” Nothing is more exemplary of a self-degrading woman than a radical feminist ranting loudly against the preferability of “feminine” qualities to “male intellectual aggressiveness.”

Hence, the clinical significance of the “feminine principle” in Feuerbach’s treatment of the Trinity. Hence, the latent blunder in Feuerbach’s treatment of God the Lawgiver.[69]

The identification of the “feminine image” with feeling, with the absence of aggressive (i.e., hubristic) intellectual life, coincides with the oppressed role of the woman as mother in the capitalist alienated form of the family household.

In reality, the material existence of the working-class family is effected through the distribution to those households of a part of the wealth created through a world-wide network of cooperative labor performed by the working members of that same world-wide totality of interdependent households. The increase in the magnitude of this wealth per capita is secured in part through increased productive employment of the unemployed, but more generally through technological advances which have the effect of increasing the per capita output of world-wide labor. Not only is this technological development essential to making possible a general increase in per capita output (and, hence, consumption), but without such qualitative advances in technology the level of production and consumption would decline in consequence of convergence of production upon the relatively-finite extent of the existing resources as defined by a particular, previously-established technology.

Consequently, the essence of continued human existence is that creative “aggressive intellectuality” through which qualitative advancement of the essential technology is initiated and then actualized as general productive practice.

Actually human self-consciousness, a rational, conscious knowledge of the world-wide processes determining one’s own individual existence, therefore cannot be located apart from a world-wide overview of this process of development and realization of new technologies. The question of determining the conditions of life is first of all a question of what one must do, as an individual, to effect the creation of new technologies, secondly, to effect the application of those technologies to the world-wide productive process, and thirdly, to effect the appropriate distribution of that wealth. Any mental outlook which locates determination of the household’s conditions of life in parochial terms of “local community,” “region,” “nation,” or the family itself, are irrational, hence relatively bestial, hence insane.

To the extent that sanity is approximated under capitalism, it is epitomized by the predicates of science, engineering, etc. To put the same point in other terms, capitalism (in particular) identifies the permitted degree of sanity (e.g., science) as the quality of male aggressive intellectuality. The denial of this quality of “aggressive intellectuality” for the “feminine image” is the self-imposition of insanity upon women in their acceptance of that “feminine image.”

Contrary to reality, the capitalist form of the working-class household alienates and mystifies the process of the working-class’s self-reproduction of the material conditions of its own existence and development. The alienated relationship of the household to production is institutionalized in the normative form of the employed “male head of household,” who alienates his labor-power, which is degraded for him into the empiricist form of mere wage-labor. The alienated worker does not essentially associate his production with his self-reflexive, self-conscious contribution to the world’s wealth. He rather sees the essential form of his productive employment as the sale of a section of his living-time to the command of a capricious employer in return for wages: the rigorous definition of the term, “wage-slavery.”

The worker may indeed speak sometimes of what he produces, and pridefully regard this as expressing something of social importance about himself. He may, furthermore, devoutly wish he could locate his moral right to a “decent life” in just such real accomplishments, or — if unemployed or employed in a job below his potential — he may locate these potential moral rights in what he would be capable of accomplishing to that same effect. This secondary aspect of the worker’s potentially self-conscious outlook implicitly expresses his subjective revolutionary potential, but it is not the active basis for his belief in capitalist rights to the wages on which his existence depends. His capitalist right to existence is located in his alienated identification of himself as a wage-laborer.

His wife, usually, is constantly hounding him into psychological conformity with that alienated sense of himself.

It is the alienated aspect of this worker’s existence which is emphasized by his wife and most other members of his household. The wife, normatively, selects and marries a “good provider,” locating his social importance in both “what he brings home” and in the status he enjoys by virtue of his capitalist employment title and other alienated “qualities” of his social standing.

The alienation of the wife is symptomized by her typical reaction to such “men’s talk” as her husband’s discussion of his actual productive work or other “technical questions.” She is “bored,” and withdraws to the company of women to occupy herself usually principally with gossip. She smiles (sadistically) over his technically-oriented “hobbies,” and, when this applies