Freud - Complete Works (636 page)

  
¹
‘Mourning and Melancholia’
(1917
e
).

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   It is quite conceivable that the
separation of the ego ideal from the ego cannot be borne for long
either, and has to be temporarily undone. In all renunciations and
limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical infringement of the
prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the institution of
festivals, which in origin are nothing less nor more than excesses
provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the
release which they bring.¹ The Saturnalia of the Romans and
our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the
festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of
every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the
most sacred commandments. But the ego ideal comprises the sum of
all the limitations in which the ego has to acquiesce, and for that
reason the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a
magnificent festival for the ego, which might then once again feel
satisfied with itself.²

   There is always a feeling of
triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And
the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of inferiority) can also
be understood as an expression of tension between the ego and the
ego ideal.

  
¹
Totem and Taboo
.

  
²
Trotter traces repression back to the herd
instinct. It is a translation of this into another form of
expression rather than a contradiction when I say in my paper on
narcissism that ‘for the ego the formation of an ideal would
be the conditioning factor of repression’.

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   It is well known that
there are people the general colour of whose mood oscillates
periodically from an excessive depression through some kind of
intermediate state to an exalted sense of well-being. These
oscillations appear in very different degrees of amplitude, from
what is just noticeable to those extreme instances which, in the
shape of melancholia and mania, make the most tormenting or
disturbing inroads upon the life of the person concerned. In
typical cases of this cyclical depression external precipitating
causes do not seem to play any decisive part; as regards internal
motives, nothing more, or nothing else is to be found in these
patients than in all others. It has consequently become the custom
to consider these cases as not being psychogenic. We shall refer
presently to those other exactly similar cases of cyclical
depression which
can
easily be traced back to mental
traumas.

   Thus the foundation of these
spontaneous oscillations of mood is unknown; we are without insight
into the mechanism of the displacement of a melancholia by a mania.
So we are free to suppose that these patients are people in whom
our conjecture might find an actual application - their ego ideal
might be temporarily resolved into their ego after having
previously ruled it with especial strictness.

   Let us keep to what is clear: On
the basis of our analysis of the ego it cannot be doubted that in
cases of mania the ego and the ego ideal have fused together, so
that the person, in a mood of triumph and self-satisfaction,
disturbed by no self-criticism, can enjoy the abolition of his
inhibitions, his feelings of consideration for others, and his
self-reproaches. It is not so obvious, but nevertheless very
probable, that the misery of the melancholic is the expression of a
sharp conflict between the two agencies of his ego, a conflict in
which the ideal, in an excess of sensitiveness, relentlessly
exhibits its condemnation of the ego in delusions of inferiority
and in self-depreciation. The only question is whether we are to
look for the causes of these altered relations between the ego and
the ego ideal in the periodic rebellions, which we have postulated
above, against the new institution, or whether we are to make other
circumstances responsible for them.

   A change into mania is not an
indispensable feature of the symptomatology of melancholic
depression. There are simple melancholias, some in single and some
in recurrent attacks, which never show this development.

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   On the other hand there are
melancholias in which the precipitating cause clearly plays an
aetiological part. They are those which occur after the loss of a
loved object, whether by death or as the result of circumstances
which have necessitated the withdrawal of the libido from the
object. A psychogenic melancholia of this sort can end in mania,
and this cycle can be repeated several times, just as easily as in
a case which appears to be spontaneous. Thus the state of things is
somewhat obscure, especially as only a few forms and cases of
melancholia have been submitted to psycho-analytic
investigation.¹ So far we only understand those cases in which
the object is given up because it has shown itself unworthy of
love. It is then set up again inside the ego, by means of
identification, and severely condemned by the ego ideal. The
reproaches and attacks directed towards the object come to light in
the shape of melancholic self-reproaches.²

   A melancholia of this kind, too,
may end in a change into mania; so that the possibility of this
happening represents a feature which is independent of the other
characteristics of the clinical picture.

   Nevertheless I see no difficulty
in assigning to the factor of the periodic rebellion of the ego
against the ego ideal a share in both kinds of melancholia, the
psychogenic as well as the spontaneous. In the spontaneous kind it
may be supposed that the ego ideal is inclined to display a
peculiar strictness, which then results automatically in its
temporary suspension. In the psychogenic kind the ego would be
incited to rebellion by ill-treatment on the part of its ideal - an
ill-treatment which it encounters when there has been
identification with a rejected object.

  
¹
Cf. Abraham (1912).

  
²
To speak more accurately, they conceal
themselves behind the reproaches directed towards the
subject’s own ego, and lend them the fixity, tenacity, and
imperativeness which characterize the self-reproaches of a
melancholic.

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XII

POSTSCRIPT

In the course of the enquiry which has just
been brought to a provisional end we came across a number of
side-paths which we avoided pursuing in the first instance but in
which there was much that offered us promises of insight. We
propose now to take up a few of the points that have been left on
one side in this way.

   A. The distinction between
identification of the ego with an object and replacement of the ego
ideal by an object finds an interesting illustration in the two
great artificial groups which we began by studying, the army and
the Christian Church.

   It is obvious that a soldier
takes his superior, that is, in fact, the leader of the army, as
his ideal, while he identifies himself with his equals, and derives
from this community of their egos the obligations for giving mutual
help and for sharing possessions which comradeship implies. But he
becomes ridiculous if he tries to identify himself with the
general. The soldier in
Wallensteins Lager
laughs at the
sergeant for this very reason:

                                               
Wie er räuspert und wie er spuckt,

                                               
Das habt ihr ihm glücklich abgeguckt!

   It is otherwise in the Catholic
Church. Every Christian loves Christ as his ideal and feels himself
united with all other Christians by the tie of identification. But
the Church requires more of him. He has also to identify himself
with Christ and love all other Christians as Christ loved them. At
both points, therefore, the Church requires that the position of
the libido which is given by group formation should be
supplemented. Identification has to be added where object-choice
has taken place, and object-love where there is identification.
This addition evidently goes beyond the constitution of the group.
One can be a good Christian and yet be far from the idea of putting
oneself in Christ’s place and of having like him an
all-embracing love for mankind. One need not think oneself capable,
weak mortal that one is, of the Saviour’s largeness of soul
and strength of love. But this further development in the
distribution of libido in the group is probably the factor upon
which Christianity bases its claim to have reached a higher ethical
level.

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   B. We have said that it would be
possible to specify the point in the mental development of mankind
at which the advance from group psychology to individual psychology
was achieved also by the individual members of the group.¹

   For this purpose we must return
for a moment to the scientific myth of the father of the primal
horde. He was later on exalted into the creator of the world, and
with justice, for he had produced all the sons who composed the
first group. He was the ideal of each one of them, at once feared
and honoured, a fact which led later to the idea of taboo. These
many individuals eventually banded themselves together, killed him
and cut him in pieces. None of the group of victors could take his
place, or, if one of them did, the battles began afresh, until they
understood that they must all renounce their father’s
heritage. They then formed the totemic community of brothers, all
with equal rights and united by the totem prohibitions which were
to preserve and to expiate the memory of the murder. But the
dissatisfaction with what had been achieved still remained, and it
became the source of new developments. The persons who were united
in this group of brothers gradually came towards a revival of the
old state of things at a new level. The male became once more the
chief of a family, and broke down the prerogatives of the
gynaecocracy which had become established during the fatherless
period. As a compensation for this he may at that time have
acknowledged the mother deities, whose priests were castrated for
the mother’s protection, after the example that had been
given by the father of the primal horde. And yet the new family was
only a shadow of the old one; there were numbers of fathers and
each one was limited by the rights of the others.

  
¹
What follows at this point was written
under the influence of an exchange of ideas with Otto Rank. See
also Rank (1922).

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It was then, perhaps,
that some individual, in the exigency of his longing, may have been
moved to free himself from the group and take over the
father’s part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and
the advance was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised
the truth with lies in accordance with his longing. He invented the
heroic myth. The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father
- the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemic monster.
Just as the father had been the boy’s first ideal, so in the
hero who aspires to the father’s place the poet now created
the first ego ideal. The transition to the hero was probably
afforded by the youngest son, the mother’s favourite, whom
she had protected from paternal jealousy, and who, in the era of
the primal horde, had been the father’s successor. In the
lying poetic fancies of prehistoric times the woman, who had been
the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, was probably
turned into the active seducer and instigator to the crime.

   The hero claims to have acted
alone in accomplishing the deed, which certainly only the horde as
a whole would have ventured upon. But, as Rank has observed, fairy
tales have preserved clear traces of the facts which were
disavowed. For we often find in them that the hero who has to carry
out some difficult task (usually the youngest son, and not
infrequently one who has represented himself to the
father-substitute as being stupid, that is to say, harmless) - we
often find, then, that this hero can carry out his task only by the
help of a crowd of small animals, such as bees or ants. These would
be the brothers in the primal horde, just as in the same way in
dream symbolism insects or vermin signify brothers and sisters
(contemptuously, considered as babies). Moreover every one of the
tasks in myths and fairy tales is easily recognizable as a
substitute for the heroic deed.

   The myth, then, is the step by
which the individual emerges from group psychology. The first myth
was certainly the psychological, the hero myth; the explanatory
nature myth must have followed much later. The poet who had taken
this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in
his imagination, is nevertheless able (as Rank has further
observed) to find his way back to it in reality. For he goes and
relates to the group his hero’s deeds which he has invented.
At bottom this hero is no one but himself. Thus he lowers himself
to the level of reality, and raises his hearers to the level of
imagination. But his hearers understand the poet, and, in virtue of
their having the same relation of longing towards the primal
father, they can identify themselves with the hero.¹