The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc hosted an
unusual speaker last weekend at its monthly speaker program meeting. Peter Rudnytsky,
UF professor, Shakespeare and Freud scholar, long time honorary American
Psychoanalytic Association member, and long time, former editor of American Imago, explicated in his paper “Freud
as Milton’s God…” the long running critical debate over an inherent
contradiction in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The contradiction concerns whether humankind had free will to choose to disobey
God or whether the Fall was predetermined, even put into motion by God’s
actions, God in Milton’s poem failing intersubjectively to take responsibility for
situating himself* in the outcome. Quoting
Rumrich’s take on the epic poem – “negotiations between narcissistic longings
for perfect recognition and the recalcitrance of an unresponsive reality” – Rudnytsky
adds that God is portrayed as a controlling and narcissistic parent, demanding
obedience, which if not freely given will be exacted through punishment.
We now know that it is failure to provide sufficient response
to longings for recognition which sets up narcissistic longings for perfection.
The narcissistic parent has been unable to accept the imperfect child as good
enough, and the child, humiliatingly aware of its deficiencies, grows up
seeking to overcome or to hide what its parents made glaringly shameful, often
requiring, as Milton’s God seems to, “an insatiable need for praise.” [But what
if the injured God was also seeking healing or, naively, reconciliation?]
Rudnytsky notes that Freud, too, exacted loyalty, or else
followers were extruded from his inner circle.Freud, in anointing Jung the ‘crown prince’ both elevated
Jung above all his other followers and, at the same time, made Jung subordinate
to himself. In subordinating another, rebellion is engendered, as is the
Oedipal struggle and sibling rivalry. God,
too, in Milton’s poem, by anointing Christ, created Satan from a passed over
Lucifer.
*While for Milton, and for many, God is the Father, an interesting discussion ensued about womb envy and the need for men to erect a male Creator in compensation for the fact that it is from women’s bodies that we come into this world; An interesting reversal of this fact is Eve springing from Adam’s rib; or Athena from Zeus’ head.
