Freud, the Serpent and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children ¹
DANIEL BURSTON

The fact that none of this registers anywhere in the analytic corpus, or in the secondary literature to date, prompts one to reflect that these were not perceived as important issues by Freud and his followers. One consequence of this general neglect has been the failure to recognize that between 1910 and 1912 a momentous shift took place in Freud's characterization of the etiology of psychic disturbance, the child's sexual curiosity, its rebellious temper, and its disposition to truth. For once the centrality of the Oedipus complex has been established, rebellion or mistrust of adult authority is ascribed increasingly to an infantile antipathy to civilized constraints, which adults enforce with (more or less) benign intent. Adult duplicity, and the child's disposition to truth, are no longer salient clinical considerations.

Here then are two mysterious circumstances whose deliberate juxtaposition may yield an increment in our understanding of Freud. One is that Freud left not a single published fragment on the myth of the Fall. The second is that the issue of the child's disposition to truth, and its pathogenic frustration under adverse environmental circumstances, disappeared after 1910, never to return. Oddly enough, the myth of the Fall relates the story of two 'innocents' seeking knowledge in the face of a superior power bent on withholding it, and the dire repercussions of their rebellion against Him. And according to conventional wisdom, interestingly enough, the nature or content of the knowledge they sought is specifically sexual.

Descriptively speaking, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2: 1-3 comprise a single narrative unit. The story begins with the emergence of order out of chaos, and takes the reader through the creation of plant and animal life. Genesis 1 culminates in the creation of man and woman in God's image, and depicts a kind of investiture ceremony in which Adam and Eve are given complete dominion over all the plants and animals in the biosphere, accompanied by the single positive injunction: 'Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1: 28)'. This positive injunction evidently presupposes that the primal pair already had a rudimentary knowledge of sex and reproduction, have mastered agrarian cultivation, and enjoy an unfettered freedom to roam the earth with God's blessing. Otherwise, God's blessing simply makes no sense.

In view of the preceding , it is interesting to note that Genesis 2:4 through Genesis 3 is quite literally a different story. Adam is created, not in God's image, but from 'the clods of the earth'. Eve emerges later, being fashioned out of Adam's rib. Adam is given the privilege of naming all cattle, birds and wild beasts, but is in no way invested with sovereignty over the earth . He is confined to the vicinity of the Garden, 'to till and tend it', and is expressly forbidden from eating from one tree within it (Genesis 2: 17). When Adam and Eve finally roam the world, it is not with God's blessing, as was formerly the case, but as punishment for their failure to obey Him. At the moment of their eviction, Adam and Eve sail forth on a terrifying stream of invective, in which God promises to make their lives -- and those of their children -- burdensome and miserable in perpetuity. Genesis 2:4 through Genesis 3, or the myth of the Fall, properly speaking, is thus a chronicle of disobedience and retribution. Let us examine this act of disobedience a little more closely.

Genesis 3:1 relates that the serpent inquired of Eve whether God gave humans free access to all the plants of the Garden. Eve, of course, replied that one tree -- the tree of knowledge -- is expressly forbidden. According to Eve, God warned the primal pair that the day they eat of it, they would die. The serpent's reply is instructive.

'But the serpent said to the woman, You are not going to die. No, God well knows that in the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be the same as God in knowing good from bad' (Genesis 2:4-5)'.

In contradicting God's death threat, the serpent implies that God is dishonest , and intent on maintaining privileged access to 'knowledge of good and bad' (Marks, 1971, p.5). Those unfamiliar with the Hebrew original should note that what the King James translates as 'knowledge' -- the Hebrew da'at -- has a variety of overlapping meanings. To E.A. Speiser, Chairman of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, da'at signifies powers of judgement and discrimination, maturity and wisdom. Significantly, the same word is used throughout the Old Testament to refer to the act of penetration in coitus, as for example in Genesis 4:1 : 'And Adam knew Eve his wife . . .' (King James version). In his commentary on Genesis, Speiser notes that wisdom and sexual maturity are densely interwoven in the Semitic idiom, and a wealth of Sumero-Babylonian lore well known to the Hebrews, so that the powers or faculties in question in the dialogue between Eve and the serpent refer to the whole gamut of physical, moral and intellectual powers characteristic of maturity, and that this was clearly intended by the authors of Genesis.

But to fully appreciate the dialogue between Eve and the serpent, another point must be born in mind. The serpent, who is reproached by devout souls for his deceptiveness, his antipathy to righteousness, and so on, is actually telling the truth . In Genesis 2: 17, God warns Adam not to eat of the tree for his own good, 'For the moment you eat of it, you shall be doomed to death'. In repudiating this warning, the serpent implies that God is engaging in a deliberate infantilization of the human species. And this proves to be true. For when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they do not die, but are exiled from Eden and live remarkably long lives, despite the misery and toil that God ordains as punishment for hearkening to the serpent's 'temptation'.

Some devout souls may object that my argument is flawed by an obvious oversight or misreading of the text. Adam and Eve, they generally assert, were immortal prior to eating the forbidden fruit, and the meaning of the Divine admonition was that they would forfeit their immortality as a result of disobedience. Inasmuch as the Fall introduced death to human existence, so the argument goes, it was the serpent who lied, while God kept to His ominous promise. In fairness to people like this, their interpretation is backed by centuries of tradition (Pagels, 1988, chapter 6). Consequently, many people will be surprised to discover that it has virtually no textual support whatsoever. Indeed, the text actively resists this commonplace interpretation. For though God's warning is not intended to signify instantaneous, but eventual death, according to tradition, Genesis 3: 22-23 indicates that this sort of threat was entirely superfluous, since Adam and Eve were already mortal. Thus:

'God Yaweh said, 'Now that man has become like one of us in discerning good from bad, what if he should put out his hand and taste also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever . . . '

In other words, just prior to expulsion from Paradise, God saw Adam as potentially immortal, but as mortal nonetheless. Indeed, He exiled him to prevent Adam and Eve from wresting the one remaining attribute which He had exclusively in His own possession, i.e. immortality. In short, Adam's immortality before the Fall is a later doctrinal interpolation. And in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we will grant the serpent his due: his instigation to rebellion -- whether we like it or not -- was premissed on truth, not on lies and misrepresentation.

Of course, I am not the first to suggest that the serpent was 'framed'. In the second and third centuries, Gnostic speculators commended Eve for taking the initiative in seeking wisdom, and saw the serpent as an emancipator, or a messenger of the true a-cosmic God who created Jehovah (Pagels, 1988, chapter 3). In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), Hegel observed that "the serpent does not lie. God himself confirms his words (cited in Fackenheim, 1970, p. 133). Finally, in our own century, in You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament, Erich Fromm argued that the serpent is an emancipator, a kind of Jewish Prometheus, who inaugurates human history by inciting disobedience against a punitive, irrational authority (Fromm, 1966, pp.21-23).

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"Freud, The Serpent, and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children"
International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 1994 vol. 3, pp. 205-219.


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