Alexey Sklyarenko: To give an example
of mesmertie (my "protologism"): В основу религии Фрейда положен краеугольный
догмат месмертия души ("At the base of Freudian religion is the doctrine of
mesmertie of soul").
JM: In Speak,Memory (Vintage
298) Nabokov writes that "there is also keen pleasure ( and, after all, what
else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the
initial blossoming of man's mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth
of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafinf which allowed first of all the
formation of Homo poeticus without which sapiens could no have
been evolved. 'Struggle for life' indeed!...Toilers of the world, disband! Old
books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday." Later, (p.300)
Nabokov will rail against Freud: "It might be rewarding to
go into the phylogenetic aspects of the passion male children have for things on
wheels, particularly railway trains. Of course, we know what the Viennese Quack
thought of the matter. We will leave him and his fellow travelers to jog on, in
their third-class carriage of thought... all forms of vitality are forms of
velocity...Innermost in man is the spiritual pleasure derivable from the
possibilities of outtugging and outrunnin gravity, of overcoming or re-enacting
the earth's pul...a chromosome or two behind Lamarck's back..."
What a curious place Nabokov found to
remember Freud who, like so many other scientists, didn't believe in any
"Intelligent Design" but considered that the growing complexity of life resulted
from external obstacles against a drive's surge forward.
Here is a collection of sentences related to
Sklyarenko's provocative "protologism":
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength
from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." --Sigmund Freud,
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,1933.
"Religion is
comparable to a childhood neurosis." --Sigmund Freud, The Future of an
Illusion, 1927
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we
are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a
result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to
assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a
lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized
individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." –Sigmund
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939;
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to
reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to
think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this
view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of
people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable,
nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard
actions." "The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the
sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a
claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin."
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
.