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2012
APY20210.1177/1039856211432462LachterAustralasian Psychiatry
AP
Myths and stories
On the crisis of conscience Bruce Lachter Consultant Psychiatrist in private practice and at South Pacific
Australasian Psychiatry 20(2) 148–152 © The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1039856211432462 apy.sagepub.com
Private Hospital, and VMO Psychiatrist at Manly Hospital, Manly, NSW, Australia
Abstract Objective: This paper examines the crisis of conscience as portrayed in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Conclusion: The perspective of allegory allows intense emotion to be contained, and placed in a socio-cultural context, which may work against bloodshed. Keywords: allegory, killing, phenomenology, psychoanalysis
A
crisis of conscience arises when one is ordered to do something one feels is wrong. The biblical story of Abraham preparing his son Isaac for sacrifice represents an archetypal crisis of conscience. This paper examines the Hebrew version of the story and several commentaries upon it. Resemblances are noted with Milgram’s investigation of obedience 50 years ago. The near killing of the son by the father is also juxtaposed with the story of Oedipus, the actual killing of the father by the son. An exegesis of the story of Abraham and Isaac raises several phenomenological and psychoanalytic questions. Abraham’s utterances and their context allow speculation as to his states of mind and motivations. And in keeping with psychoanalytic theory and practice, much remains uncertain, and various assumptions are exposed as just that: assumptions. Later Christian and Koranic versions of the story are left aside, nor does this paper draw on socio-cultural or anthropological perspectives on the practice of child sacrifice. But – as will be elaborated below – the son Isaac was not necessarily a child when the events occurred. As a timeless story, however, Abraham’s binding of Isaac for sacrifice is a story for our time, too. During the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram1 conducted mock experiments in which unwitting individuals were ordered by an authority figure – a man in a white coat – to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage upon a ‘subject’ to investigate the effects of pain upon learning. However, the real subjects were those administering the electric shocks, which were in fact sham: there was no voltage, and the apparent ‘subject’ was an actor, whose expressions of escalating pain were feigned. The point of the experiment was to study how people react when they are ordered to carry out a task against conscience.
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The bleak conclusion Milgram drew was that … ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work became patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources required to resist authority.1 If ‘orders, unfortunately, seldom insist on good deeds’,2 we may expect a high prevalence of such ‘destructive effects’. The gist of Milgram’s findings was that subjects obeyed orders despite the pain they inflicted on others. According to Milgram, ‘the dilemma inherent in obedience to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham’. However, other than this brief prefatory reference, Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority, does not return to that biblical story, a story that exemplifies ‘the dilemma inherent in obedience to authority’ as a crisis of conscience. The plot of the story is disarmingly simple. Abraham believes he is ordered by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepares to obey the order. At the last minute, Abraham is told to set his son free. The drama begins as God’s ‘proving’ of Abraham. It is not explained just what is to be proved, but the apparent order from God is typically assumed to represent a proving of Abraham’s Correspondence: Dr Bruce Lachter, 9/149–153 Sydney Rd, Fairlight, NSW 2094, Australia Email:
[email protected]
Lachter
faith, of his obedience to authority, despite a crisis of conscience.
there was no intention of accepting a human sacrifice, although Abraham was not at first aware of this.’5
The implication of the title of Milgram’s book is that the obedience will be to an external authority. The conflict between this external authority, or command, and an internal authority known as conscience gives rise to stress. A disintegration of the distinction between inner and outer is the condition of hallucinosis, where perceptions arising from within one’s mind are experienced as coming from outside. According to Jaynes,3 the distinction between external command and internal thought is a relatively recent achievement of consciousness. Jaynes states that under stress, the distinction breaks down.
The notion of God’s order as sham of course resembles Milgram’s experiment several millennia later in that no harm was to befall the apparent ‘victim’.
If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar to the guidance of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people … the stress threshold for the release of hallucinations is extremely high; most of us need to be over our head in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower …3 The notion of a psychogenic hallucinosis under stress is broadly consistent with contemporary psychiatric orthodoxy.4 However, clinical experience with schizophrenia brings Jaynes’ assumption in the opening sentence of the above quote into question: the course of schizophrenia typically entails a psychosocial deterioration and loss of purposeful action, which distinguishes its sufferers from the heroes of antiquity, whose experience of hallucination did not preclude them from leading nations into battle, such as Achilles, or Agamemnon, and by Jaynes’ account in fact enhanced their achievements. The commonest hallucinations arise in the auditory mode, such that voice replaces thought. Jaynes also notes that the words ‘to hear’ and ‘to obey’ share a common derivation, ‘from the Latin obedire, which is a composite of ob + audire, to hear facing someone.’ Jaynes’ reflections on the problem of ‘… the control of such obedience’ return us to Milgram’s experimental subjects, as questions of control over one’s actions: to what extent is obedience modulated by one’s own judgment, volition, and control? If ‘… to hear was to obey’, then that would be expected to minimize stress. By abolishing the subjective space within which stress arises, the subject becomes an automaton for whom ‘… the command and the action were not separated.’ 3 Milgram defines this state as the ‘agentic self’.1 There can be no crisis of conscience where there is no such mental space for questions of right and wrong, for operations of conscience. However, to return to the original text of the story, God’s command to Abraham had in fact been to ‘lift him (Isaac) up’.5 The sacrifice of the son was implied – that he be lifted up upon an altar. According to commentary, ‘He [God] did not use the word which signifies the slaying of the sacrificial victim. From the outset, therefore,
This implies, however, that Abraham was all too willing to assume the meaning of the command as being a murderous one, albeit dressed up as sacrifice. Given that Abraham’s assumption may have been a misinterpretation, questions of his motivation are evoked. As Cohen puts it: It should not be forgotten that Abraham would have used the knife on Isaac had it not been for the staying hand of God. This homiletic observation should be enough to suggest that our humanity is indeed defective, that we are all able to turn the word of God into something demonic.6 Rather than proving Abraham’s faith, then, God’s ‘experiment’, like Milgram’s, may demonstrate an innate tendency to destructiveness, as that ‘defect’ in human nature noted by Cohen. It may be that there can be no faith without destructiveness, for is not thought itself sacrificed on the altar of faith? Such a reading establishes faith as that aspect of mind that turns away from the reality of the mind’s own destructiveness, and turns towards obedience, as an identification with the aggressor. Such agentic surrender minimizes the stress of the crisis of conscience. The pain of conflict is displaced onto the intended victim, who may even be hated for ‘causing’ the conflict in the first place. Furthermore, ‘God communicated with Abraham during the night, perhaps in a vision.’5 The implication is that the communication was from within Abraham himself, in the form of a dream. According to Freud, dreams contain a disguised wish fulfilment.7 The further implication, then, is that the imperative to sacrifice his son – rather than arising from the external authority of God – in fact came from within the father himself, albeit from disavowed aspects of his own mind, designated in psychoanalytic theory as the unconscious. The disavowal in this case arises from the shocking content of the impulse to kill one’s own son, which could not be tolerated as coming from within the father himself, and so had to be projected externally, as though from God. Although shocking, such imperatives are not controversial from a psychoanalytic perspective, which allows for the intensity of feelings between parent and child as being at times murderous. When Abraham departs with his son for the intended sacrifice, Abraham says: ‘I and the lad will go yonder; and we will worship, and come back to you [emphasis added].’5 The implication in the use of the collective pronoun ‘we’ is that the son would return with the father, i.e. that the son would not be killed. Abraham may have been obfuscating in order not to alarm those
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he left behind as he set out on the last leg of the journey, just as he later answers his son’s question: ‘… but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ with a placatory ‘God will provide …’ However, according to Hertz, Abraham ‘… spoke more truly than he knew.’5 This describes perfectly the clinical experience in psychoanalytic therapy of the patient again and again ‘speaking more truly’ than he or she knows, which is to say, revealing in their associations the effects of psychological activities of which they are unaware. But, like any ‘wild’ interpretation, Hertz’s may reveal more about the analyst than it does about the analysand: is Hertz attempting to euphemise Abraham’s brutality? Or God’s? The analytic perspective suggests Abraham’s ‘obedience to authority’ was his response to a frightening inner imperative, one which aroused emotional conflict, or stress – as indicated by the contradictions in Abraham’s words – but which even at the outset was never to be carried out. But if the imperative impulse arose from a dream, why was the matter not left at that – as merely a dream? Why did Abraham spend days of travel and stress in preparation for a terrible killing? A certain level of psychological maturity is required to locate dream perceptions in an inner world of subjective reality, to distinguish them from perceptions arising from external stimuli. According to Piaget, this is achieved at around 7 years of age, before which dreams are ‘… systematically considered as an objective reality, as a sort of ethereal, rarefied picture floating in the air and fixed before our eyes.’8 But Abraham was an adult, indeed an old man, at the time of the story. As noted above, Jaynes argues that the socio-cultural conditions were not available in ancient times for sophisticated modes of thinking such as we now take for granted, which relegates the ancient mind to a state of developmental immaturity.3 Alternatively, Abraham had achieved a mature level of mental functioning but had regressed under stress. Intense stress can generate hallucinations. In applying this notion to Abraham’s state of mind, however, it is necessary first to locate the origin of the stressor so as not to conflate cause and effect. An externally derived order to carry out the killing of his son cannot be both a cause and an effect of an assumed hallucinatory state. If the father is ordered to kill his son, and this creates stress, which causes his mind to disintegrate into hallucinosis, then the same order heard as a hallucination cannot also be a cause of its own effect. The possibility remains, however, that the impulse to kill his son could not be tolerated as arising from within his own mind, and is projected (externally). As noted above, this gives rise to a possibly psychogenic aetiology of the hallucination. Perhaps the answer to the puzzle of Abraham’s crisis of conscience lies in a form of mental activity between waking impulse to action and dream, or hallucination – the mode of imagination known as allegory. According to Munz, ‘Allegorical interpretations are based on the
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notion that if we are aware of an event that is invisible, such as an inner turmoil, there is a visible event that corresponds to it …’.9 This is a perspective that the reader of the story may adopt, as allegory is inherent in reading, but was it the perspective of Abraham himself, or indeed of the anonymous author? Neither author nor protagonist is around to say, but Abraham’s dilemma framed as (his own) allegory suggests that the imagination’s internal theatre is allowed to run to its further reaches, in order to prevent killing, not to enact it. His capacity to be aware of – to imagine – the most terrible act marks Abraham as sane, and indeed preserves his sanity, his freedom of mind. If we do allow that Abraham is really preparing his son for sacrifice, further questions arise, again invoking Milgram’s notion of the ‘agentic self’,1 in that Abraham is assumed to have handed his obedience, or personal agency, over to the external authority of God. But that is not the case: the original text indicates that Abraham was terribly conflicted over the sacrifice of Isaac, his beloved son. This is in keeping with an intact self, not an agentic self. Although obeying a powerful and apparently external authority, Abraham is fully aware of – and fully responsible for – his own actions. Such responsibility for one’s actions is expressed by one of Milgram’s subjects who stopped administering electric shocks to the seemingly distressed ‘victim’, in defiance of instructions: ‘One of the things I think is very cowardly is to try to shove the responsibility [for one’s actions] onto someone else.’1 However, in contrast to Milgram’s experimental paradigm, which entailed dramatically escalating protest from the ‘victim’ of the electric shocks, Abraham’s son, the intended victim, does not utter a word of protest. The son’s obedience to the father mirrors the father’s obedience to an assumed higher authority, for Abraham had not questioned God’s order. According to Hertz, ‘There is no response in words on the part of Abraham. His response is in deeds. He lost no time in obeying the [assumed] will of God (emphasis added)’.5 Hertz suggests Abraham’s alacrity marks the greatness of his faith. However, nowhere is Abraham’s destructiveness louder than in his silence. His failure to openly question God, or to share his burden with his son – or his wife, for that matter – represents another ‘turning away’. Speaking permits an expression of impulse short of deed. Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex,10 exemplifies obedience to blind (internal) impulse. The tragic hero, Oedipus, unwittingly kills a stranger, not knowing that the stranger is in fact his father. Oedipus later marries his own mother, and on learning the truth, enucleates himself. He is thus eventually literally blinded, but has been metaphorically blind all along. Again, this contrasts with Abraham’s obedience, which is not blind. Although the authority to whom Abraham succumbs, being ‘God’, may in reality be no more than a projection of Abraham’s own unconscious, this can neither be proven nor disproven, but is a matter of faith.
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Despite his immediate and unquestioning obedience, Abraham was given pause between the order and its ultimate enactment, for the sacrifice was designated to take place 3 days’ walk away. He thus took time for preparation, whereas in the case of Oedipus’ killing of his father, there is no pause, and only misidentification. Abraham is aware of consequences. Oedipus is not. For Abraham, the crisis of conscience arises before any irrevocable action; in the case of Oedipus, the crisis of conscience is all the more terrible, arising after two irrevocable and unwitting actions: the murder of his father, and the incest with his mother. And for Oedipus, the crisis of conscience itself gives rise to further irrevocable action: enucleation. The containing function of allegory was unavailable for Oedipus. The story of Oedipus, of youth, is a story of action; for Abraham, an old man, the conflicts are of the mind. Oedipus was the unwanted son, abandoned by his parents and left to die at an early age; his later life was marked by violence, perversion and self-mutilation. But throughout his life, Abraham, eventually the strong patriarch, had been able to contain great emotions, to be responsible for his actions, to live with sorrow until eventual reward: ‘… he who knows how to wait need make no concessions.’11 One of the lessons the father teaches the son in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic story, The Road,12 is how to wait: the lesson of selfrestraint. The omniscient narrator – a kind of God in creating the story for the reader – asks the father whether he could kill the son, albeit out of mercy: ‘Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?’ Identifying this ‘being within you of which you know nothing’ is the great gift and paradox of that story of Abraham, the patriarch and father, both the authority to the son, and the subordinate to a higher authority called God. By imagining the most terrible act, and placing it in a culturally sanctioned zone such as a dream or a story or a song, we are helped not to enact it. And in experiencing but not enacting a murderous impulse – that is, by waiting it out, and yet being conscious of it, observing all the while – our mental structure is enhanced. According to Winnicott, ‘… if society is in danger, it is not because of man’s aggressiveness but because of the repression of personal aggressiveness in individuals.’ 13 As Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling, his ‘dialectical lyric’ on the story of Abraham: ‘I don’t lack the courage to think a thought whole. No thought has frightened me so far.’14 Whether socially accepted or not, that which we cannot utter and do not approach, out of fear, is likely to return to us with a vengeance, to disrupt our sleep, to corrode our joy, until it may be ameliorated in dream or story or song, such as Dylan’s Highway 61: God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said, Man, you must be puttin’ me on …
Abe said, where you want this killin’ done? God said, out on Highway 61.15 It is a frightening thought for a father to have, that of killing his son, but sometimes that’s where his thoughts may take him, down Highway 61. As Kierkegaard wrote: ‘Should [a father], after having caught the greatness of Abraham’s deed, but also the appallingness of it, venture out on the road, I would saddle my horse and ride along with him.’14 To know old Abe was there – and never shed a drop of blood, or at least no human blood, as he does sacrifice a ram in his son’s place – can be immensely important. The challenge in the face of the most intense crises of conscience is to remain in the world of limits, duties, accountability. Kierkegaard expressed this concern: ‘Can one speak unreservedly of Abraham, then, without risking that someone will go off the rails and do likewise [emphasis added]?’ But once a man has imagined killing his son, the thought of killing, say, his boss, is a walk in the park: he can grin to himself while he thinks it, hear the birds chirp, feel the sun’s warmth during his lunch break. As long as he is not late back for work. A hallmark of mental health is the recognition of the difference between thought and action. Freud referred to an ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ in obsessional patients ‘unable to believe that thoughts are free and [who] will constantly be afraid of expressing evil wishes, as though their expression would inevitably lead to their fulfillment … who believe they can alter the world by mere thinking.’16 It is only with a capacity for distinction between thought and deed – between inner fantasy and outer action – that the crisis of conscience can arise. In summary, the location of Abraham’s imperative as self-imposed suggests various possibilities, including dream, hallucination and imagination, or allegory. But the absence of any mention of hostile feelings casts doubt on this perspective, which assumes some mechanism of disavowal. The story ends with a sudden reprieve. An angel calls to Abraham just as he ‘… took the knife to slay his son …’.5 For the angel, and for God, Abraham had demonstrated his obedience. But obedience to what? The only unambiguous and explicit order from God to the father was the final one: that he should not kill his son. Whatever the origins of this order – origins that ultimately must revisit the question of the existence of God – Abraham does of course obey it. Any conclusions that might be drawn from the story are even more clouded when another question is raised: Isaac’s age at the time of the preparation for sacrifice. According to some sources, the son was aged 37.17,18 The question arises, what ‘If Isaac had said, “I refuse”‘17? Rather than being a test of the father, then, the whole episode could just as accurately be seen as a test of the son, himself an adult whose ‘father was no longer responsible for him.’17
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Not to mention a test of the mother: ‘The immediate cause of her death was the shock of being told that Isaac was being sacrificed [emphasis added].’18
6. Cohen A. The myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
That’s one lethal allegory, Abe …
8. Piaget J. The moral judgment of the child. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977.
Disclosure The author reports no conflict of interest and is alone responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
References 1. Milgram S. Obedience to authority. London: Tavistock, 1974. 2. Camus A. The rebel. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Modern Classics, 1971. 3. Jaynes J. The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976. 4. Phillips LJ, McGorry PD, Garner B, et al. Stress, the hippocampus and the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal axis: the implications for the development of psychotic disorders. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2006; 40: 725–741. 5. Hertz J. (ed). The Pentateuch and Haftorahs Hebrew Text, English translation and commentary. London: Soncino Press, 1972.
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7. Freud S. The interpretation of dreams. In Hutchins R. (ed.) Brittanica great books. Vol. 54. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952.
9. Munz P. Relationship and solitude. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965. 10. Sophocles. The three Theban plays. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1984. 11. Freud S. Group psychology and analysis of the ego. In Hutchins R. (ed.) Brittanica great books. Vol. 54. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952. 12. McCarthy C. The road. London: Picador, 2006. 13. Winnicott D. Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1975. 14. Kierkegaard S. Fear and trembling. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985. 15. Dylan B. Highway 61 revisited. In Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia Records, 1967. 16. Freud S. The origins of religion. In Dickson A. (ed.) The Pelican Freud library. Vol. 13. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985. 17. Anonymous. Zohar. The book of enlightenment. London: SPCK, 1983. 18. Abrahams G. The Jewish mind. London: Constable, 1961.
