whole of humanity on Judgment Day, but it is also strikingly modern because it results from technological progress and has been prophesied scientifically. The omnivorous monster of modernity releases its victims by devouring itself. Freudianism locates the original sin within the individual by postulating a demonic, elusive, self-generating, and inextinguishable “unconscious.” Salvation, or making the world whole again, amounts to individual self- knowledge, or the overcoming of the alienation between ego and libido and the achievement of inner peace (“mental unity”). This cannot be accomplished by “maladjusted” people themselves, because they are, by definition, possessed by the demon of the unconscious. Only professionally trained experts in touch with their own selves can tame (not exorcise!) the unruly unconscious, and only willing patients ready to open their hearts to their analysts can be healed. The séance itself combines features of both Christian confession and medical intervention but differs from them radically (possibly in the direction of greater efficacy) in that the sinner/patient is assumed to possess neither free will nor reason. “The modern malaise” is just that—a sickness that can be treated. Indeed, both the sickness and the treatment are perfect icons of the modern condition: the afflicted party is a lone individual, and the healer is a licensed professional hired by the sufferer (in what is the only certifiably rational act on his part). The result is individual, market-regulated, this-worldly redemption. 59 Both Marxism and Freudianism were organized religions, with their own churches and sacred texts, and both Marx and Freud were true messiahs insofar as they stood outside time and could not be justified in terms of their own teachings. Marx knew History before History could know itself, and Freud— Buddha-like—was the only human to have achieved spontaneous self- knowledge (through a heroic act of self-healing that made all future healing possible). Both Marxism and Freudianism addressed the modern predicament by dealing with eternity; both combined the language of science with a promise of deliverance; and both spawned coherent all-purpose ideologies that claimed access to the hidden springs of human behavior. One foresaw and welcomed the violent suicide of universal Mercurianism; the other taught how to adjust to it (because there was nothing else one could do). Neither one survived in Central Europe, where they were born: one went east to become the official religion of a cosmopolitan state that replaced the most obstinate ancien régime in Europe; the other moved to the United States to reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop. Liberalism had always made use of nationalism to give some life, color, and communal legitimacy to its Enlightenment premise; in America, where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of