The Idols of Sigmund Freud

How Freud and the Torah excavated our musical subconscious

Sigmund Freud’s desk in his home in London, preserved as it was at Freud’s death in 1939. Photo: Freud Museum London.

I couldn’t look away.

Tucked into the Swiss Cottage neighborhood of central London, I found myself this weekend in the midst of Sigmund Freud’s library, meticulously preserved by his daughter Anna at the Freud Museum of London. Until that moment, I had no idea that the thinking chamber and consulting room of the great psychologist was littered with a pantheon of household gods.

As the well-researched museum panels around me proclaimed, Sigmund Freud was a huge devoté of archaeology, which he saw as analogous to the practice of psychoanalysis: “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in their excavations, must dig layer after layer the patient psyche before he can find the most profound and valuable treasures.” Freud acquired countless antiquities over his lifetime, which he referred to as “grubby old gods” and as his “friends.” They were all concentrated in the library on the first floor of his home, where he also saw his patients for analysis.

What does it mean that Freud surrounded himself — and his patients — with idols?

To discover this, we have to take a hint from Freud and dive deep into our communal subconscious. And one of the deepest wells for this wisdom is in the history of music.

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The music writer Ted Gioia has often observed that songs are an original source of psychology, serving as expressive gateways into the interior world of the musician and her society. This insight also applies to the origin story of music in the Hebrew Bible, which provides a trenchant window into the musical subconscious of ancient civilization. And ironically, what it reveals about society are very same human impulses which lie at the heart of psychoanalytic theory.

I have a lot to say about Genesis 4. After all, this part of the Torah describes the descendants of the first murderer, Cain son of Adam. The principal verse that musicians focus on regards his seventh-generation descendant, Yuval, who “was the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe (Gen. 4:21).”

This is enough to make a typical music lover jump for joy, celebrating this brief biblical reference as giving pride of place for musicians in religious life. But there is much more to be said about the full implications of this master story of music in the line of Cain. One of the big punchlines comes out of the mouth of Yuval’s father, Lamech:

Gen. 4:23-24

And Lamech said to his wives,
“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
O wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.
I have slain a person for wounding me,
And a lad for bruising me.

If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

We may forget this in the age of published books and quiet libraries, but here’s an important truth: all biblical poetry is song. Poetry was musically amplified not just in the ancient Near East, but in bardic traditions across the ancient and medieval worlds, from love ballads to epic poems to religious hymns. Even the word “psalm” itself comes from the Greek word psalmos which means “a song accompanied with musical instruments.”

So what is going on in this one? Lamech, the first bigamist on record, boastfully sings to his two wives that he would even kill a boy for a the price of a bruise, and that the fury of his vengeance is eleven times more scary than God’s.¹ This is a clear example of the ancient poetic genre of epic boasting, and arguably the first gangster rap song in the Bible.

Lamech’s paean to violent power is actually the Torah’s second song. And the first? It is Adam’s poem of desire for Eve: “This one at last / is bone of my bones / and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman / for from a Human was she taken (Gen. 2:23).”

Here encapsulated in the first two songs of the Torah are the core Freudian drives towards sex and aggression — the very drives which psychotherapy sought to excavate, understand, and mollify. The origin of music in the Torah thus is wrapped up with the moral baggage of the seven generations of the first murderer, in which human technological development expands but not human morality. The fruits of this musical excavation are made even more potent by the coda to the whole story:

Gen. 4:25-26

“Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning, ‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel,’ for Cain had killed him.

And to Seth, in turn, a son was born, and he named him Enosh. It was then that began to call on the LORD by name.”

After their eldest son’s descendants develop an entire technical civilization of questionable morality, Adam & Eve have more children. Two new generations successfully emerge (their grandson’s name means “human frailty”), and after that people are finally able to reach out again to God. Thus our excavation of the Torah’s musical subconscious reveals music as a technology which does not necessarily get us in touch with God or righteous behavior, and deeply enmeshed with the drives of the Freudian subconscious. Only when humans get above this power-driven din and admit their frailty are they able to get back in touch with their Creator.

These poignant themes of music and the human subconscious converge again in the Talmudic story of King David’s excavation of the Temple (Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 10:2):

“When David came to excavate the foundations of the Temple, he dug down fifteen hundred cubits and did not find the abyss (tehom). In the end, he found a ceramic pot and wanted to cast it away.

It said, “You can’t.”

He said, “Why?”

It said, “I am here to subdue the abyss.”

He said, “Since when have you been here?”

It said, “From the time that God announced His voice at Sinai — ‘I am the LORD’ the land trembled and sank (Ps 68:9)’, I was placed here to subdue the abyss.”

Even so, he didn’t listen to him.

When he threw it, the abyss rose up and wanted to overflow the world.

Ahitofel was standing there. He thought to himself: “Now David will drown and I will rule!”

David said, “Anyone wise who knows its place and doesn’t set it in place, may he eventually hang himself!” He said what he said, and [he] set it in place.

Thereupon David recited a song – the song of ascents – song of one hundred ascents. For each 100 cubits he recited a song…

This is a highly enigmatic story. But one of the key insights here is that David’s attempt to prepare the building of the Temple, he ends up uncovering the tehom — the abyss, the primordial chaos that was given order in the Creation story. So too, in excavating the human spirit, psychology often uncovers chaos underneath that human beings attempt to manage and face. Sometimes it is even the removal of a little ceramic pot — the most seemingly insignificant thing — that unleashes the chaos within.

This reading is perhaps a low anthropology of the human being, recalling the dashed expectations of God before the flood. But the Jerusalem Talmud here provides a far more redeeming place for music within Judaism and Freudian psychoanalysis: as an important vehicle of sublimation, restoring balance and taming chaos.²

I have not solved the entire riddle of Freud’s embrace of idols. But what is clear is that they reminded him of what humankind, through monotheism, had attempted to suppress.³ Was Freud a liberator of the human psyche? Or did he remove a clay pot and bring us closer to the abyss? The truth is probably in between.

Yet Freud’s idols also illuminate a darker, yet important side of a Torah view of music — not that it is inherently good, but that it is rather a tool that should be used for good. This is the essence of music in Judaism as hiddur mitzvah — as something which adorns a commandment, pointing that which is beautiful towards that which is good.

1. This is an allusion to God’s promise to Cain: “The Lord said to him, ‘I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be exacted.’ And The Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him (Gen. 4:15).”

2. Another version of this story exists in the Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 53a-b. I am indebted to Rabbi Aviva Richman for teaching me these sources as part of the Hadar Wisdom Fellowship in 2022.

3. I have just come home from watching Carmina Burana at the Barbican in London. Apart from being an excellent performance, the piece always reminds me of this disturbing truth. I plan to write more about this in the future.