Freud - Complete Works (670 page)

   Erotogenic masochism accompanies
the libido through all its developmental phases and derives from
them its changing psychical coatings. The fear of being eaten up by
the totem animal (the father) originates from the primitive oral
organization; the wish to be beaten by the father comes from the
sadistic-anal phase which follows it; castration, although it is
later disavowed, enters into the content of masochistic phantasies
as a precipitate of the phallic stage or organization;¹ and
from the final genital organization there arise, of course, the
situations of being copulated with and of giving birth, which are
characteristic of femaleness. The part played in masochism by the
nates, too, is easily understandable, apart from its obvious basis
in reality. The nates are the part of the body which is given
erotogenic preference in the sadistic-anal phase, like the breast
in the oral phase and the penis in the genital phase.

   The third form of masochism,
moral masochism, is chiefly remarkable for having loosened its
connection with what we recognize as sexuality. All other
masochistic sufferings carry with them the condition that they
shall emanate from the loved person and shall be endured at his
command. This restriction has been dropped in moral masochism. The
suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone
who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance.
It may even be caused by impersonal powers or by circumstances; the
true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of
receiving a blow. It is very tempting, in explaining this attitude,
to leave the libido out of account and to confine oneself to
assuming that in this case the destructive instinct has been turned
inwards again and is now raging against the self; yet there must be
some meaning in the fact that linguistic usage has not given up the
connection between this norm of behaviour and erotism and calls
these self-injurers masochists too.

  
¹
See ‘The Infantile Genital
Organization’ (1923
e
).

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   Let us keep to a habit of our
technique and consider first the extreme and unmistakably
pathological form of this masochism. I have described
elsewhere¹ how in analytic treatment we come across patients
to whom, owing to their behaviour towards its therapeutic
influence, we are obliged to ascribe an ‘unconscious’
sense of guilt. I pointed out the sign by which such people can be
recognized (a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’) and I
did not conceal the fact that the strength of such an impulse
constitutes one of the most serious resistances and the greatest
danger to the success of our medical or educative aims. The
satisfaction of this unconscious sense of guilt is perhaps the most
powerful bastion in the subject’s (usually composite) gain
from illness - in the sum of forces which struggle against his
recovery and refuse to surrender his state of illness. The
suffering entailed by neuroses is precisely the factor that makes
them valuable to the masochistic trend. It is instructive, too, to
find, contrary to all theory and expectation, that a neurosis which
has defied every therapeutic effort may vanish if the subject
becomes involved in the misery of an unhappy marriage, or loses all
his money, or develops a dangerous organic disease. In such
instances one form of suffering has been replaced by another; and
we see that all that mattered was that it should be possible to
maintain a certain amount of suffering.

   Patients do not easily believe us
when we tell them about the unconscious sense of guilt. They know
only too well by what torments - the pangs of conscience - a
conscious sense of guilt, a consciousness of guilt, expresses
itself, and they therefore cannot admit that they could harbour
exactly analogous impulses in themselves without being in the least
aware of them. We may, I think, to some extent meet their objection
if we give up the term ‘unconscious sense of guilt’,
which is in any case psychologically incorrect, and speak instead
of a ‘need for punishment’, which covers the observed
state of affairs just as aptly. We cannot, however, restrain
ourselves from judging and localizing this unconscious sense of
guilt in the same way as we do the conscious kind.

  
¹
The Ego and the Id
(1923
b
)
.

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   We have attributed the function
of conscience to the super-ego and we have recognized the
consciousness of guilt as an expression of a tension between the
ego and the super-ego. The ego reacts with feelings of anxiety
(conscience anxiety) to the perception that it has not come up to
the demands made by its ideal, the super-ego. What we want to know
is how the super-ego has come to play this demanding role and why
the ego, in the case of a difference with its ideal, should have to
be afraid.

   We have said that the function of
the ego is to unite and to reconcile the claims of the three
agencies which it serves; and we may add that in doing so it also
possesses in the super-ego a model which it can strive to follow.
For this super-ego is as much a representative of the id as of the
external world. It came into being through the introjection into
the ego of the first objects of the id’s libidinal impulses -
namely, the two parents. In this process the relation to those
objects was desexualized; it was diverted from its direct sexual
aims. Only in this way was it possible for the Oedipus complex to
be surmounted. The super-ego retained essential features of the
introjected persons - their strength, their severity, their
inclination to supervise and to punish. As I have said
elsewhere,¹ it is easily conceivable that, thanks to the
defusion of instinct which occurs along with this introduction into
the ego, the severity was increased. The super-ego - the conscience
at work in the ego - may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable
against the ego which is in its charge. Kant’s Categorical
Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex.

   But the same figures who continue
to operate in the super-ego as the agency we know as conscience
after they have ceased to be objects of the libidinal impulses of
the id - these same figures also belong to the real external world.
It is from there that they were drawn; their power, behind which
lie hidden all the influences of the past and of tradition, was one
of the most strongly-felt manifestations of reality. In virtue of
this concurrence, the super-ego, the substitute for the Oedipus
complex, becomes a representative of the real external world as
well and thus also becomes a model for the endeavours of the
ego.

  
¹
The Ego and the Id.

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   In this way the Oedipus complex
proves to be - as has already been conjectured in a historical
sense¹ - the source of our individual ethical sense, our
morality. The course of childhood development leads to an
ever-increasing detachment from parents, and their personal
significance for the super-ego recedes into the background. To the
imagos they leave behind there are then linked the influences of
teachers and authorities, self-chosen models and publicly
recognized heroes, whose figures need no longer be introjected by
an ego which has become more resistant. The last figure in the
series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny
which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal.
There is little to be said against the Dutch writer Multatuli²
when he replaces the
Μοία
[Destiny]
of the Greeks by the divine pair ‘
Λόγος
χαί’
Αυάγχη
‚
[Reason
and necessity]; but all who transfer the guidance of the world to
Providence, to God, or to God and Nature, arouse a suspicion that
they still look upon these ultimate and remotest powers as a
parental couple, in a mythological sense, and believe themselves
linked to them by libidinal ties. In
The Ego and the Id
I
made an attempt to derive mankind’s realistic fear of death,
too, from the same parental view of fate. It seems very hard to
free oneself from it.

  
¹
In Essay IV of
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13).

  
²
E. D. Dekker (1820-87).

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   After these preliminaries we can
return to our consideration of moral masochism. We have said that,
by their behaviour during treatment and in life, the individuals in
question give an impression of being morally inhibited to an
excessive degree, of being under the domination of an especially
sensitive conscience, although they are not conscious of any of
this ultra-morality. On closer inspection, we can see the
difference there is between an unconscious extension of morality of
this kind and moral masochism. In the former, the accent falls on
the heightened sadism of the super-ego to which the ego submits; in
the latter, it falls on the ego’s own masochism which seeks
punishment, whether from the super-ego or from the parental powers
outside. We may be forgiven for having confused the two to begin
with; for in both cases it is a question of a relationship between
the ego and the super-ego (or powers that are equivalent to it),
and in both cases what is involved is a need which is satisfied by
punishment and suffering. It can hardly be an insignificant detail,
then, that the sadism of the super-ego becomes for the most part
glaringly conscious, whereas the masochistic trend of the ego
remains as a rule concealed from the subject and has to be inferred
from his behaviour.

   The fact that moral masochism is
unconscious leads us to an obvious clue. We were able to translate
the expression ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ as meaning
a need for punishment at the hands of a parental power. We now know
that the wish, which so frequently appears in phantasies, to be
beaten by the father stands very close to the other wish, to have a
passive (feminine) sexual relation to him and is only a regressive
distortion of it. If we insert this explanation into the content of
moral masochism, its hidden meaning becomes clear to us. Conscience
and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the
desexualization, of the Oedipus complex; but through moral
masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus
complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from
morality to the Oedipus complex. This is to the advantage neither
of morality nor of the person concerned. An individual may, it is
true, have preserved the whole or some measure of ethical sense
alongside of his masochism; but, alternatively, a large part of his
conscience may have vanished into his masochism. Again, masochism
creates a temptation to perform ‘sinful’ actions, which
must then be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience
(as is exemplified in so many Russian character-types) or by
chastisement from the great parental power of Destiny. In order to
provoke punishment from this last representative of the parents,
the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his own
interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the
real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence.

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   The turning back of sadism
against the self regularly occurs where a
cultural suppression
of the instincts
holds back a large part of the subject’s
destructive instinctual components from being exercised in life. We
may suppose that this portion of the destructive instinct which has
retreated appears in the ego as an intensification of masochism.
The phenomena of conscience, however, lead us to infer that the
destructiveness which returns from the external world is also taken
up by the super-ego, without any such transformation, and increases
its sadism against the ego. The sadism of the super-ego and the
masochism of the ego supplement each other and unite to produce the
same effects. It is only in this way, I think, that we can
understand how the suppression of an instinct can - frequently or
quite generally - result in a sense of guilt and how a
person’s conscience becomes more severe and more sensitive
the more he refrains from aggression against others. One might
expect that if a man knows that he is in the habit of avoiding the
commission of acts of aggression that are undesirable from a
cultural standpoint he will for that reason have a good conscience
and will watch over his ego less suspiciously. The situation is
usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary
thing and the renunciation of instinct followed from them. This
leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained. Actually, it
seems to be the other way about. The first instinctual renunciation
is enforced by external powers, and it is only this which creates
the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands
a further renunciation of instinct.

   Thus moral masochism becomes a
classical piece of evidence for the existence of fusion of
instinct. Its danger lies in the fact that it originates from the
death instinct and corresponds to the part of that instinct which
has escaped being turned outwards as an instinct of destruction.
But since, on the other hand, it has the significance of an erotic
component, even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot
take place without libidinal satisfaction.