Trinity

In 1931, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation invited Albert Einstein to have an intellectual exchange with a thinker of his selection. He selected Sigmund Freud. They corresponded, and Freud’s essay Why War? (1933/1964) was his response to Einstein’s questions on how to free humanity from the threat of war. Freud’s letter to Einstein is a discourse on the relationship between Right (Recht) and Might (Macht), between the two instincts, and between culture and human nature (p. 203). Freud states, “Such, then, was the original state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might—domination by brute violence or by violence supported by intellect“ (pp. 204-205).

The recent film Oppenheimer (2023), based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) and brilliantly directed by Christopher Nolan, is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who was instrumental in developing the first atomic bomb.

The film opens with the presentation of Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) as a tortured and brilliant man. Nolan’s use of fantastical imagery invites the viewer to experience the intrapsychic world of this man. The film portrays a complex character, depressed, ambitious, arrogant, charming, morose, reactive, unable to tolerate limits and perceived humiliations. In one scene, we see him poisoning the apple of his instructor in response to being prevented from attending an important lecture. It is believed that the incident actually took place while he was studying at Cambridge University and that to avoid being expelled from this institution he had to seek psychiatric treatment. In American Prometheus, we are told that, within the span of four months, he had three different analysts—in London, in Paris, and in Cambridge. He was diagnosed with dementia praecox in London and with a crise moral—a moral crisis associated with sexual issues—in Paris, and, by the time he began seeing his third analyst in Cambridge, he had read a good deal about psychoanalysis. He found his third analyst wiser and saw him for a few months. Oppenheimer’s friend and teacher Herbert Smith said that Oppenheimer “gave the psychiatrist in Cambridge an outrageous song and dance . . . . The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who’s being analyzed” (Bird & Sherwin, 2005, pp. 46–47, 49).

As the film progresses, we are given increasing insight into Oppenheimer’s character. With respect to his politics, he had an interest in communism, as did Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh), an aspiring psychoanalyst with whom Oppenheimer became romantically involved (Bird & Sherwin, 2005, pp. 111–113). The relationship with Tatlock is marked by mixed intense emotions and fueled by existential questions, deep thinking, lust, and similar intellectual and political interests. The relationship culminates with her suicide. In a scene in which she and Oppenheimer are having sex and discussing Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis, she asks him to read a line from the Bhagavad Gita. Oppenheimer, a student of Sanskrit and of the Bhagavad Gita, reads from the ancient text the iconic line, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The drives of sexuality and aggression intermingled, fused.

In Why War?, Freud writes:

According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite—which we call ‘erotic’, exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word ‘Eros’ in his Symposium, or ‘sexual’, with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of ‘sexuality’—and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we group together as the aggressive or destructive instinct. As you see, this is in fact no more than a theoretical clarification of the universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge. But we must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgements of good and evil. (p. 209)

In Hinduism, the deity Krishna is not only involved in creation but also in destruction. A more conventional translation of the thirty-second verse of the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is:

I [Krishna] am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world. Even without your [i.e., the prince Arjuna's] participation, all the warriors gathered here will die. (2007, p. 198)

In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is timeless. In Hinduism, Krishna is time, the destroyer of all. The film follows two timelines, identified by the words “fission” (splitting of a nucleus into two smaller nuclei) and “fusion” (two nuclei combining together, releasing an enormous amount of energy). Fission, which consists of scenes shown in color, follows Oppenheimer’s early life, his education at Cambridge University and Göttingen University, his academic positions at Caltech and Berkeley, his marriage, his affair, his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and the creation of the atomic bomb. This timeline is presented from Oppenheimer’s subjective view. Fusion, which consists of scenes shown in black and white, centers on the campaign by Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, to discredit Oppenheimer. Both timelines involve nonsequential flashbacks that continually cross over. However, fission and fusion are not only labels for two different timelines. They also seem to indicate the difference between a weapon of mass destruction and weapon of total extinction. Fission releases the energy used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while fusion unleashes energy that can annihilate the world. In The Ego and the Id, Freud used the terms fusion (Mischung) and defusion (Entmischung) to explain the mixing and separation of Eros and Thanatos (1923/1961, p. 41; 1923/1998, p. 269-270). For Freud the expression of the fusion of the instincts was sadism, the turning of Thanatos toward the external world.

All the discrete details that the film presents—Oppenheimer's complex character, that specific time in history, the curiosity of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, and the process of the atomic bomb’s creation—are what absorbs the viewer. One is disturbed in watching how individuals, governments, and societies make decisions fueled by fear, arrogance, and a search for knowledge and power without taking the time to thoroughly analyze the immediate and far-reaching consequences of those decisions.

There is no doubt that Oppenheimer understood what he was making, although he might have initially justified it as a necessary creation. He accepted the position of director of the Manhattan Project fully aware that the weapon would be used against Germany or Japan. Oppenheimer said that, after seeing the first test of the atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, he thought of the line from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” (Bird & Sherwin, 2005, p. 309).

After the first test, Oppenheimer knew—exactly as did everyone else involved in the project—what they had created and what they were going to unleash. On August 6, 1945, “Little Boy,” a uranium gun–type atomic bomb, was dropped in Hiroshima, killing between 90,000 and 166,000 people in the first four months after the explosion, with tens of thousands more dying in the years after. Three days later, a second atomic bomb known as “Fat Man” was dropped in Nagasaki, killing between 40,000 and 75,000 people immediately, with deaths reaching as much as 80,000 by the end of 1945 (“Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 2014).

Freud (1932) writes:

It is very rarely that an action is the work of a single instinctual impulse . . . . In order to make an action possible there must be as a rule a combination of such compounded motives. This was perceived long ago by a specialist in your own subject, a Professor G. C. Lichtenberg who taught physics at Göttingen during our classical age . . . . He invented a Compass of Motives, for he wrote: ‘The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names in a similar way: for instance, “bread-bread-fame” or “fame-fame-bread”.’ . . . A lust for aggression and destruction is certainly among them: the countless cruelties in history and in our everyday lives vouch for its existence and its strength. (p. 210)

Oppenheimer was a student of languages, literature, art, philosophy. He stated that he was transformed after reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Perhaps because after reading it he did not feel so singular. Oppenheimer had a history of depression and intense anxiety. He suffered severe humiliation when he attended a camp during his adolescence. He was doted on by his parents, perhaps too much. He craved recognition and adulation. He loved the New Mexico desert and, for that reason, selected it as the site of the first test of the bomb. He named this test “Trinity,” ostensibly due to his love for the poems of John Donne, a love that arose out of his relationship with Jean Tatlock (Bird & Sherwin, 2005, pp. 15–16, 21–22, 25–28, 51, 111, 304). The poem in question is Holy Sonnet XIV:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, ’and bend
Your force, to break, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be lov’d faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, ’untie, or break that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
(Gardner, 1985, p. 85–86)

This is a plea to God as holy trinity, asking God to break the ties of sin. It speaks of a willingness to submit to God’s will to find freedom. It’s a poem that speaks of judgment and salvation. It’s desperate, sexual, and violent.

In a 1947 lecture at MIT, Oppenheimer said, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose” (1948, p. 65). After the war, he lobbied for arms control, and, along with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph Rotblat, he founded the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. He was given the Enrico Fermi Award (an award given to scientists for achievements in the field of nuclear energy) in 1963. He died of throat cancer in 1967.

In Why War?, Freud (1932) says:

For incalculable ages mankind has been passing through a process of evolution of culture. (Some people, I know, prefer to use the term ‘civilization’.) We owe to that process the best of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from. (p. 214)

At the end of this essay, he adds, “But one thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war” (p. 215).

At any given moment in time, I hope we can remember that, together with our instinctual nature, our drives that can fuse and defuse, we were also given the power to reflect on ourselves, to grow, to learn, and to choose.

references

The Bhagavad Gita (E. Easwaran, Trans.; 2nd ed.). (2007). The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.

Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2005). American Prometheus: The triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Vintage.

“Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – 1945.” (2014, June 5). Atomic Heritage Foundation.

Freud, S. (1961). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 12-59). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)

Freud, S. (1964). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 22, pp. 203-215). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1933)

Freud, S. (1998). Gesammelte Werke: chronologisch geordnet (Vol. 13, pp. 237-289). Imago Publishing. (Original work published 1923)

Gardner, H. (Ed.). (1985). The metaphysical poets. Penguin.

Oppenheimer, J. R. (1948). Physics in the contemporary world. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 40(3), 65-68.