Freud - Complete Works (725 page)

  
¹
Based on
The Cambridge Ancient
History
, 7 (1928): ‘The Founding of Rome’ by Hugh
Last.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4470

   Now let us, by a flight of
imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a
psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past - an
entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into
existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of
development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would
mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of
Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the
Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying
on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the
siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place
occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand - without
the Palazzo having to be removed - the Temple of Jupiter
Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans
of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still
showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes.
Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire
Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon
we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was
bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original
edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would
be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the
ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would
perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his
position in order to call up the one view or the other.

   There is clearly no point in
spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are
unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical
sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in
space: the same space cannot have two different contents. Our
attempt seems to be an idle game. It has only one justification. It
shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of
mental life by representing them in pictorial terms.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4471

   There is one further objection
which has to be considered. The question may be raised why we chose
precisely the past of a
city
to compare with the past of the
mind. The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good
even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind
has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by
trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be
compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the
history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than
Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from
the visitations of an enemy. Demolitions and replacement of
buildings occur in the course of the most peaceful development of a
city. A city is thus
a priori
unsuited for a comparison of
this sort with a mental organism.

   We bow to this objection; and,
abandoning our attempt to draw a striking contrast, we will turn
instead to what is after all a more closely related object of
comparison - the body of an animal or a human being. But here, too,
we find the same thing. The earlier phases of development are in no
sense still preserved; they have been absorbed into the later
phases for which they have supplied the material. The embryo cannot
be discovered in the adult. The thymus gland of childhood is
replaced after puberty by connective tissue, but is no longer
present itself; in the marrow-bones of the grown man I can, it is
true, trace the outline of the child’s bone, but it itself
has disappeared, having lengthened and thickened until it has
attained its definitive form. The fact remains that only in the
mind is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside of
the final form possible, and that we are not in a position to
represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms.

   Perhaps we are going too far in
this. Perhaps we ought to content ourselves with asserting that
what is past in mental life
may
be preserved and is not
necessarily
destroyed. It is always possible that even in
the mind some of what is old is effaced or absorbed - whether in
the normal course of things or as an exception - to such an extent
that it cannot be restored or revivified by any means; or that
preservation in general is dependent on certain favourable
conditions. It is possible, but we know nothing about it. We can
only hold fast to the fact that it is rather the rule than the
exception for the past to be preserved in mental life.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4472

   Thus we are perfectly willing to
acknowledge that the ‘oceanic’ feeling exists in many
people, and we are inclined to trace it back to an early phase of
ego-feeling. The further question then arises, what claim this
feeling has to be regarded as the source of religious needs.

   To me the claim does not seem
compelling. After all, a feeling can only be a source of energy if
it is itself the expression of a strong need. The derivation of
religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the
longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible,
especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood
days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of
Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need
for a father’s protection. Thus the part played by the
oceanic feeling, which might seek something like the restoration of
limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. The
origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear
outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness. There may
be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped
in obscurity.

   I can imagine that the oceanic
feeling became connected with religion later on. The ‘oneness
with the universe’ which constitutes its ideational content
sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though
it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego
recognizes as threatening it from the external world. Let me admit
once more that it is very difficult for me to work with these
almost intangible quantities. Another friend of mine, whose
insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most
unusual experiments and has ended by giving him encyclopaedic
knowledge, has assured me that through the practices of Yoga, by
withdrawing from the world, by fixing the attention on bodily
functions and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact
evoke new sensations and coenaesthesias in oneself, which he
regards as regressions to primordial states of mind which have long
ago been overlaid. He sees in them a physiological basis, as it
were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism. It would not be hard to
find connections here with a number of obscure modifications of
mental life, such as trances and ecstasies. But I am moved to
exclaim in the words of Schiller’s diver:-

                                                               
‘. . . Es freue sich.

                                                               
Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht.’

Civilization And Its Discontents

4473

II

In my
Future of an Illusion
I was
concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious
feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion -
with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand
explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable
completeness, and, on the otter, assures him that a careful
Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a
future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common
man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of
an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the
needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and
placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so
patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a
friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great
majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of
life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number
of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is
not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a
series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among
the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who
think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an
impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them
with the warning words: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the
Lord thy God in Vain!’ And if some of the great men of the
past acted in the same way, no appeal can be made to their example:
we know why they were obliged to.

   Let us return to the common man
and to his religion - the only religion which ought to bear that
name. The first thing that we think of is the well-known saying of
one of our great poets and thinkers concerning the relation of
religion to art and science:

                                               
Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;

                                               
Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!

Civilization And Its Discontents

4474

   This saying on the one hand draws
an antithesis between religion and the two highest achievements of
man, and on the other, asserts that, as regards their value in
life, those achievements and religion can represent or replace each
other. If we also set out to deprive the common man of his
religion, we shall clearly not have the poet’s authority on
our side. We will choose a particular path to bring us nearer an
appreciation of his words. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us;
it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.
In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.
‘We cannot do without auxiliary constructions’, as
Theodor Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such measures:
powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery;
substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating
substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind
is indispensable.¹ Voltaire has deflections in mind when he
ends
Candide
with the advice to cultivate one’s
garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too.
The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in
contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically
effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental
life. The intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its
chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has its
place in this series. We must look further afield.

   The question of the purpose of
human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet
received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.
Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn
out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But
this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though
one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive
from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which
are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the
life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in
being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for
there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to
describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of
animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became
extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only religion can
answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong
in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and
falls with the religious system.

  
¹
In
Die Fromme Helene
Wilhelm Busch
has said the same thing on a lower plane: ‘Wer Sorgen hat,
hat auch Likör.’

Civilization And Its Discontents

4475

   We will therefore turn to the
less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their
behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do
they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this
can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to
become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a
positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an
absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the
experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense
the word ‘happiness’ only relates to the last. In
conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity
develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize - in
the main, or even exclusively - the one or the other of these
aims.

   As we see, what decides the
purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.
This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from
the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its
programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the
macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at
all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the
universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the
intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in
the plan of ‘Creation’. What we call happiness in the
strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of
needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from
its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any
situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged,
it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that
we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very
little from a state of things.¹ Thus our possibilities of
happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness
is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with
suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed
to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and
anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage
against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction;
and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which
comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any
other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition,
although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the
suffering which comes from elsewhere.