Notes: Freud’s “The Acquisition and Control of Fire” (1931)
This short and enigmatic essay seems to demonstrate a movement in Freud’s thinking. He picked up a footnote from his Civilization and Discontents, which was published the year prior, and developed it into an independent paper. Yet, its core theme was already apparent since at least 1898 when, in his 97th letter to Fliess, he remarked that children who wet the bed regularly until the age of seven must have experienced sexual excitation in infancy. This point demonstrates something of instinctual satisfactions, lingering through the latency period. What Freud adds to this ongoing theme is the following: (1) an emphasis on the necessity for instinctual renunciation in order to enter civilization, and (2) an analysis, indeed construction, at the innermost core of mythological systems.
So what, precisely, is the movement?
First, Freud had discovered the mechanisms of censorship which insulate the dreamer within the continuity of their dreamworlds. During this earlier period, Freud had relied upon myth — what Levi Strauss would later call “mythemes,” also picked up by Roland Barthes — to support his efforts toward a metapsychology.
Second, Freud discovered the movement of symptoms and creative writing as instinctual satisfactions that were allowed to pass in public. At around this time, he began to recognize the prevalence of dreams within waking life. The implicit thesis at this period was: ‘in some sense, we do not wake up.’
Finally, during this last period, which is the period of civilizational analyses, he does not plot the technique of interpretation and censorship but rather returns to study myth as such through dream interpretation.
We could therefore conclude that it is a movement from (1) dreams to (2) symptoms to (3) myths, or from (1) insulated dwelling space of the dreamer, (2) extended dreams into waking life, and (3) civilizational dreams as such.
In this essay, Freud was interested in the examination of the Greek myth of Prometheus. I want to focus only on Freud’s larger points, ignoring some of the detail.
Freud aimed to interpret … at this point I would like to make a minor point about this word “interpretation.” Freud had used the word “interpretation” in a psychoanalytic sense when discussing his conclusions about the myth. He aimed to show how the myth operated like dream censorship, using representations and reversals to conceal instinctual satisfactions. Yet, 6 years later, in 1937, Freud wrote a short paper on “Constructions in Analysis” which, to put it simply, shows us that the construction is on the side of the analyst. It is on the side of the analyst to the extent that one must reasonably conclude upon a given foundation without having the actual testimony from the patient. For example, a patient has been in analysis for many years and all roads lead toward a particular conclusion about his earliest moments, yet the memory is not present to confirm it. The analyst says: “What must have happened was…”
Hence, one wonders the extent to which Freud is providing a construction, while the mythemes are themselves intepretations. This orientation has the advantage of clearing up some of the difficulties or redundancies in the beginning of the essay: Freud admits that there have been numerous distortions of the myth. Mythological systems are almost certainly intepretations and hence do not themselves necessarily require analytic interpretation. They may call for interpretation, and we have many examples of myths that have been told in different ways within different contexts. However, the analyst does not want to simply repeat the myth, or extend it by introducing further interpretations. Rather, the analyst should be interested in the instinctual satisfactions that give rise to myths themselves, and also to the structure of the myth: where is the satisfaction and where is the knowledge?
Freud reasoned that “in order to gain control over fire, men had to renounce the homosexually-tinged desire to put it out with a stream of urine.” For Freud, the myth of Prometheus should be interpreted as if it were a dream from a patient: “[i]f we were interpreting a dream we should be inclined to regard such an object as a penis symbol [the hollow stick of Prometheus, which he used to hide and transport the flame], although the unusual stress laid on its hollowness might make us hesitate.” Freud reminded us that dreams often conceal meaning by turning toward its opposite: “what a man harbors in his penis-tube is not fire. On the contrary, it is the means of quenching fire; it is the water of his stream of urine.” The homosexual element that Freud is pointing at is perhaps a psychoanalytic feature: one sees in the fire one’s own potency and seeks to engage with it, as if in a battle. Yet, what is hetero, as a civilizational principle within the Oediapl modern period, is likely the turning toward difference — the turning away from the instinctual satisfaction.
Some have read this as an endorsement of heterosexuality, against homosexuality. This was Todd Dufresne’s reading, in his popular critique of Freud. However, is Freud not, here during the last period of his work, demonstrating the insularity of man as such? In other words, is he not increasingly moving toward the Lacanian thesis of the non-rapport by showing the way in which we are all locked up inside of our own worlds, our own dream-worlds. Moreover, is he not increasingly moving toward the position that the world, civilization, is, in some admittedly naive sense, reducible to the body? Thus, he is pointing toward the homme-sexuality of man as such — a point demonstrated very well also in Lacan’s chart of sexuation, where the objet a, which can be seen as the fire, is inside of his man’s own hollow tube, $.
What we have therefore is a bringing together of fire and water, not as a conscious contradiction — since the unconscious allows contradictory ideas to exist side by side — but rather as a satisfaction. This satisfaction is taken up in the myth as a crime, as if it were a robbery or a theft: one is stealing the satisfactions of the Gods. Freud moves too quickly, perhaps, in supposing the universal applicability of this mytheme: “[it is a] constant feature in all the legends about the acquiring of control over fire. It is found among the most different and widely separated peoples and not merely in the Greek myth of Prometheus, the Bringer of Fire.” I would ask about the place of fire in Hindu mythology, as in, for example, Sati, the wife of the angered God Shiva, tossed rushed to include herself in his self-immolation. This is a practice that still exists within some places of India. Or, there are the stories of the burning monks. It seems to me that in these cases, it is not about acquiring control of fire, but rather of relinquishing it.
In any case, Freud asked a rather simple question: why was it a crime to steal fire? Who was injured by the crime? It is a crime, he reasons, because it gives men power over their gods. It means that men have satisfaction too, and that the Gods, having lost some of theirs, have relinquished something of their own satisfaction in favor of the worldly ones. Freud concluded that “it was the Gods, then, who were defrauded [since] in myths the Gods are granted the satisfaction of all the desires which human creatures have to renounce, as we have learnt from the case of incest.” At this point, again, we could turn to India, simply as a counterpoint, where it is clear that incest prohibitions do not function in the way Freud had thought. This allows us to conclude that it is likely that the incest prohibition does not have the reach that we originally believed in Western civilization as well.
This leads to a crucial passage in the text:
Speaking in analytic terms, we should say that instinctual life — the id — is the god who is defrauded when the quenching of fire is renounced: in the legend, a human desire is transformed into a divine privilege. But in the legend the deity possesses nothing of the characteristics of a super-ego, he is still the representative of the paramount life of the instincts.
This powerful passage shows that God is here associated with the ID rather than the superego, as is traditionally thought in the Freudian field. This lends itself to a concept I have been developing over several years, namely the God-all-alone, which is something of the instinctual creature, without renunciation, alone within the scientific or university discourse, with his or her gadgets or interpretations. At this stage, the Gods are “representative of the paramount life of the instincts.”
This explains, according to Freud, why it is that the liver was selected as the site of punishment for Prometheus. Freud wrote: “in ancient times, the liver was regarded as the seat of all passions and desires; hence a punishment like that of Prometheus was the right one for a criminal driven by instinct, who had committed an offense at the prompting of evil desires.” Freud provides a concluding remark on this point: “the acquisition of control over fire presupposes an instinctual renunciation, at least it makes no secret of the resentment which the culture-hero could not fail to arouse in men driven by the instincts.”
It is an instinctual renunciation — but what type? It is not the punishment by the bird against his liver that produced the renunciation. Rather, it is the acquisition of the fire in the hollow tube that presupposed an instinctual renunciation. It is not clear that it was a successful one. Yet, it goes against the demand for renunciation of instinct, which is sometimes called for within modern civilizations, and which transforms later into a sense of guilt.
Freud claims that the fire, his movements, his warmth, and its power, show a phallic activity. To control it, within one’s own hollow penis, the place of water, was homoerotic to the extent to it involves “a pleasurable struggle with another phallus.” Yet, the sexual organ remains seen in this way as both sexual, that is, a place of power and virility as well as a place of release, or urine. If at once they are united, as if we imagine the two functions as the same, it is closer to the instinctual moment, the homoerotic one. If they are separated, then this is what Freud referred to as a more mature and adult position. For Prometheus, they are still united in their function. But the adult knows that fire and water cannot unite.
Freud writes:
The antithesis between the two functions might lead us to say that man quenches his own fire with his own water. And primal man, who has to understand the external world by the help of his own bodily sensations and states, would surely not have failed to notice and utilize the analogies pointed out to him by the behavior of fire.
This passage is the most perplexing, but also the most revealing. I leave it there.
