Freud - Complete Works (658 page)

   It is easy to show that the ego
ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature
of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains
the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgement
which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the
religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his
longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by
teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and
prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the
form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension
between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of
the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feelings rest on
identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same
ego ideal.

   Religion, morality, and a social
sense - the chief elements in the higher side of man¹ - were
originally one and the same thing. According to the hypothesis
which I put forward in
Totem and Taboo
they were acquired
phylogenetically out of the father-complex: religion and moral
restraint through the process of mastering the Oedipus complex
itself, and social feeling through the necessity for overcoming the
rivalry that then remained between the members of the younger
generation. The male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these
moral acquisitions; and they seem to have then been transmitted to
women by cross-inheritance. Even to-day the social feelings arise
in the individual as a superstructure built upon impulses of
jealous rivalry against his brothers and sisters. Since the
hostility cannot be satisfied, an identification with the former
rival develops. The study of mild cases of homosexuality confirms
the suspicion that in this instance, too, the identification is a
substitute for an affectionate object-choice which has taken the
place of the aggressive, hostile attitude.²

  
¹
I am at the moment putting science and art
on one side.

  
²
Cf.
Group Psychology
(1921
c
)
and ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and
Homosexuality’ (1922
b
).

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   With the mention of phylogenesis,
however, fresh problems arise, from which one is tempted to draw
cautiously back. But there is no help for it, the attempt must be
made - in spite of a fear that it will lay bare the inadequacy of
our whole effort. The question is: which was it, the ego of
primitive man or his id, that acquired religion and morality in
those early days out of the father-complex? If it was his ego, why
do we not speak simply of these things being inherited by the ego?
If it was the id, how does that agree with the character of the id?
Or are we wrong in carrying the differentiation between ego,
super-ego, and id back into such early times? Or should we not
honestly confess that our whole conception of the processes in the
ego is of no help in understanding phylogenesis and cannot be
applied to it?

   Let us answer first what is
easiest to answer. The differentiation between ego and id must be
attributed not only to primitive man but even to much simpler
organisms, for it is the inevitable expression of the influence of
the external world. The super-ego, according to our hypothesis,
actually originated from the experiences that led to totemism. The
question whether it was the ego or the id that experienced and
acquired these things soon comes to nothing. Reflection at once
shows us that no external vicissitudes can be experienced or
undergone by the id, except by way of the ego, which is the
representative of the external world to the id. Nevertheless it is
not possible to speak of direct inheritance in the ego. It is here
that the gulf between an actual individual and the concept of a
species becomes evident. Moreover, one must not take the difference
between ego and id in too hard-and-fast a sense, nor forget that
the ego is a specially differentiated part of the id. The
experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance;
but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient
strength in many individuals in successive generations, they
transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the
impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id,
which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the
existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego
out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former
egos and be bringing them to resurrection.

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   The way in which the super-ego
came into being explains how it is that the early conflicts of the
ego with the object-cathexes of the id can be continued in
conflicts with their heir, the super-ego. If the ego has not
succeeded in properly mastering the Oedipus complex, the energic
cathexis of the latter, springing from the id, will come into
operation once more in the reaction-formation of the ego ideal. The
abundant communication between the ideal and these
Ucs.
instinctual impulses solves the puzzle of how it is that the ideal
itself can to a great extent remain unconscious and inaccessible to
the ego. The struggle which once raged in the deepest strata of the
mind, and was not brought to an end by rapid sublimation and
identification, is now continued in a higher region, like the
Battle of the Huns in Kaulbach’s painting.

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IV

THE
TWO CLASSES OF INSTINCTS

We have already said that, if the
differentiation we have made of the mind into an id, an ego, and a
super-ego represents any advance in our knowledge, it ought to
enable us to understand more thoroughly the dynamic relations
within the mind and to describe them more clearly. We have also
already concluded that the ego is especially under the influence of
perception, and that, speaking broadly, perceptions may be said to
have the same significance for the ego as instincts have for the
id. At the same time the ego is subject to the influence of the
instincts, too, like the id, of which it is, as we know, only a
specially modified part.

   I have lately developed a view of
the instincts¹ which I shall here hold to and take as the
basis of my further discussions. According to this view we have to
distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual
instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to
study. It comprises not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct
proper and the instinctual impulses of an aim-inhibited or
sublimated nature derived from it, but also the self-preservative
instinct, which must be assigned to the ego and which at the
beginning of our analytic work we had good reason for contrasting
with the sexual object-instincts. The second class of instincts was
not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize sadism as
its representative. On the basis of theoretical considerations,
supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death
instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the
inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros, by
bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the
particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at
complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving
it. Acting in this way, both the instincts would be conservative in
the strictest sense of the word, since both would be endeavouring
to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the
emergence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of
the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving
towards death; and life itself would be a conflict and compromise
between these two trends. The problem of the origin of life would
remain a cosmological one; and the problem of the goal and purpose
of life would be answered dualistically.

  
¹
Beyond the Pleasure
Principle.

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   On this view, a special
physiological process (of anabolism of catabolism) would be
associated with each of the two classes of instincts; both kinds of
instinct would be active in every particle of living substance,
though in unequal proportions, so that some one substance might be
the principal representative of Eros.

   This hypothesis throws no light
whatever upon the manner in which the two classes of instincts are
fused, blended, and alloyed with each other; but that this takes
place regularly and very extensively is an assumption indispensable
to our conception. It appears that, as a result of the combination
of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the
death instinct of the single cell can successfully be neutralized
and the destructive impulses be diverted on to the external world
through the instrumentality of a special organ. This special organ
would seem to be the muscular apparatus; and the death instinct
would thus seem to express itself - though probably only in part -
as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world
and other organisms.

   Once we have admitted the idea of
a fusion of the two classes of instincts with each other, the
possibility of a - more or less complete - ‘defusion’
of them forces itself upon us. The sadistic component of the sexual
instinct would be a classical example of a serviceable instinctual
fusion; and the sadism which has made itself independent as a
perversion would be typical of a defusion, though not of one
carried to extremes. From this point we obtain a view of a great
domain of facts which has not before been considered in this light.
We perceive that for purposes of discharge the instinct of
destruction is habitually brought into the service of Eros; we
suspect that the epileptic fit is a product and indication of an
instinctual defusion; and we come to understand that instinctual
defusion and the marked emergence of the death instinct call for
particular consideration among the effects of some severe neuroses
- for instance, the obsessional neuroses. Making a swift
generalization, we might conjecture that the essence of a
regression of libido (e. g. from the genital to the sadistic-anal
phase) lies in a defusion of instincts, just as, conversely, the
advance from the earlier phase to the definitive genital one would
be conditioned by an accession of erotic components. The question
also arises whether ordinary ambivalence, which is so often
unusually strong in the constitutional disposition to neurosis,
should not be regarded as the product of a defusion; ambivalence,
however, is such a fundamental phenomenon that it more probably
represents an instinctual fusion that has not been completed.

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   It is natural that we should turn
with interest to enquire whether there may not be instructive
connections to be traced between the structures we have assumed to
exist - the ego, the super-ego and the id - on the one hand and the
two classes of instincts on the other; and, further, whether the
pleasure principle which dominates mental processes can be shown to
have any constant relation both to the two classes of instincts and
to these differentiations which we have drawn in the mind. But
before we discuss this, we must clear away a doubt which arises
concerning the terms in which the problem itself is stated. There
is, it is true, no doubt about the pleasure principle, and the
differentiation within the ego has good clinical justification; but
the distinction between the two classes of instincts does not seem
sufficiently assured and it is possible that facts of clinical
analysis may be found which will do away with its pretension.

   One such fact there appears to
be. For the opposition between the two classes of instincts we may
put the polarity of love and hate. There is no difficulty in
finding a representative of Eros; but we must be grateful that we
can find a representative of the elusive death instinct in the
instinct of destruction, to which hate points the way. Now,
clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected
regularity accompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in
human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but
also that in a number of circumstances hate changes into love and
love into hate. If this change is more than a mere succession in
time - if, that is, one of them actually turns into the other -
then clearly the ground is cut away from under a distinction so
fundamental as that between erotic instincts and death instincts,
one which presupposes physiological processes running in opposite
directions.

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   Now the case in which someone
first loves and then hates the same person (or the reverse) because
that person has given him cause for doing so, has obviously nothing
to do with our problem. Nor has the other case, in which feelings
of love that have not yet become manifest express themselves to
begin with by hostility and aggressive tendencies; for it may be
that here the destructive component in the object-cathexis has
hurried on ahead and is only later on joined by the erotic one. But
we know of several instances in the psychology of the neuroses in
which it is more plausible to suppose that a transformation does
take place. In persecutory paranoia the patient fends off an
excessively strong homosexual attachment to some particular person
in a special way; and as a result this person whom he loved most
becomes a persecutor, against whom the patient directs an often
dangerous aggressiveness. Here we have a right to interpolate a
previous phase which has transformed the love into hate. In the
case of the origin of homosexuality, and of desexualized social
feelings as well, analytic investigation has only recently taught
us to recognize that violent feelings of rivalry are present which
lead to aggressive inclinations, and that it is only after these
have been surmounted that the formerly hated object becomes the
loved one or gives rise to an identification. The question arises
whether in these instances we are to assume a direct transformation
of hate into love. It is clear that here the changes are purely
internal and an alteration in the behaviour of the object plays no
part in them.