Michael S. Stroh
It is my contention that voluntary martyrdom is an act of sacred violence that is, in fact, a ritual sacrifice. In Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud understands an act of violence, murder, as the founding act of religion and civilization. This act becomes the basis for sacrifice. For Freud , human existence is a perpetual war of the forces of life and the forces of death. So Freud tells us in Civilization And Its Discontents :
“The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure(of energy). In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration... Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reactionformations.”"
Sacrifice displaces the guilt and aggression onto a victim and itis through the sacrificial mechanism that civilization is held together and is not destroyed by its centrifugal forces. Like the struggle between the yetzer hara and the yetzer tov, this is not something that human beings will evolve out of. As the Jewish tradition tells us that the Torah was given to us to aid the good drive in its struggle with the evil drive, so Freud suggests that civilization needs a Torah of some kind. Perhaps, in the Days of the Messiah, God will take the yetzer hara, out of the world, but in this world the battle is permanent. Since this struggle is a defining characteristic of human existence, we will not be surprised to learn that every human institution, including religion, contains the contest. As a matter of fact, the evil drive can express itself in religious symbols and language. For Freud there is, even, a desire for death, a kind of entropy-wish. As Freud says in Beyond The Pleasure Principle :
“ If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that‘the aim of all life is death.”»'?