Freud - Complete Works (730 page)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4497

   The love which founded the family
continues to operate in civilization both in its original form, in
which it does not renounce direct sexual satisfaction, and in its
modified form as aim-inhibited affection. In each, it continues to
carry on its function of binding together considerable numbers of
people, and it does so in a more intensive fashion than can be
effected through the interest of work in common. The careless way
in which language uses the word ‘love’ has its genetic
justification. People give the name ‘love’ to the
relation between a man and a woman whose genital needs have led
them to found a family; but they also give the name
‘love’ to the positive feelings between parents and
children, and between the brothers and sisters of a family,
although
we
are obliged to describe this as
‘aim-inhibited love’ or ‘affection’. Love
with an inhibited aim was in fact originally fully sensual love,
and it is so still in man’s unconscious. Both - fully sensual
love and aim-inhibited love - extend outside the family and create
new bonds with people who before were strangers. Genital love leads
to the formation of new families, and aim-inhibited love to
‘friendships’ which become valuable from a cultural
standpoint because they escape some of the limitations of genital
love, as, for instance, its exclusiveness. But in the course of
development the relation of love to civilization loses its
unambiguity. On the one hand love comes into opposition to the
interests of civilization; on the other, civilization threatens
love with substantial restrictions.

   This rift between them seems
unavoidable. The reason for it is not immediately recognizable. It
expresses itself at first as a conflict between the family and the
larger community to which the individual belongs. We have already
perceived that one of the main endeavours of civilization is to
bring people together into large unities. But the family will not
give the individual up. The more closely the members of a family
are attached to one another, the more often do they tend to cut
themselves off from others, and the more difficult is it for them
to enter into the wider circle of life. The mode of life in common
which is phylogenetically the older, and which is the only one that
exists in childhood, will not let itself be superseded by the
cultural mode of life which has been acquired later. Detaching
himself from his family becomes a task that faces every young
person, and society often helps him in the solution of it by means
of puberty and initiation rites. We get the impression that these
are difficulties which are inherent in all psychical - and, indeed,
at bottom, in all organic - development.

   Furthermore, women soon come into
opposition to civilization and display their retarding and
restraining influence - those very women who, in the beginning,
laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love.
Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The
work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men,
it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them
to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little
capable. Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of
psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by
making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for
cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual
life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his
relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband
and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background
by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude
towards it.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4498

   The tendency on the part of
civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its
other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic,
phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous
choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation
which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced. Taboos,
laws and customs impose further restrictions, which affect both men
and women. Not all civilizations go equally far in this; and the
economic structure of the society also influences the amount of
sexual freedom that remains. Here, as we already know, civilization
is obeying the laws of economic necessity, since a large amount of
the psychical energy which it uses for its own purposes has to be
withdrawn from sexuality. In this respect civilization behaves
towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does
which has subjected another one to its exploitation. Fear of a
revolt by the suppressed elements drives it to stricter
precautionary measures. A high-water mark in such a development has
been reached in our Western European civilization. A cultural
community is perfectly justified, psychologically, in starting by
proscribing manifestations of the sexual life of children, for
there would be no prospect of curbing the sexual lusts of adults if
the ground had not been prepared for it in childhood. But such a
community cannot in any way be justified in going to the length of
actually
disavowing
such easily demonstrable, and, indeed,
striking phenomena. As regards the sexually mature individual, the
choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex, and most
extra-genital satisfactions are forbidden as perversions. The
requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there shall
be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, disregards the
dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual
constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them
from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious
injustice. The result of such restrictive measures might be that in
people who are normal - who are not prevented by their constitution
- the whole of their sexual interests would flow without loss into
the channels that are left open. But heterosexual genital love,
which has remained exempt from outlawry, is itself restricted by
further limitations, in the shape of insistence upon legitimacy and
monogamy. Present-day civilization makes it plain that it will only
permit sexual relationships on the basis of a solitary,
indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, and that it does
not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and is
only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute
for it as a means of propagating the human race.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4499

   This, of course, is an extreme
picture. Everybody knows that it has proved impossible to put it
into execution, even for quite short periods. Only the weaklings
have submitted to such an extensive encroachment upon their sexual
freedom, and stronger natures have only done so subject to a
compensatory condition, which will be mentioned later. Civilized
society has found itself obliged to pass over in silence many
transgressions which, according to its own prescripts, it ought to
have punished. But we must not err on the other side and assume
that, because it does not achieve all its aims, such an attitude on
the part of society is entirely innocuous. The sexual life of
civilized man is notwithstanding severely impaired; it sometimes
gives the impression of being in process of involution as a
function, just as our teeth and hair seem to be as organs. One is
probably justified in assuming that its importance as a source of
feelings of happiness, and therefore in the fulfilment of our aim
in life, has sensibly diminished.¹ Sometimes one seems to
perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but
something in the nature of the function itself which denies us full
satisfaction and urges us along other paths. This may be wrong; it
is hard to decide.²

  
¹
Among the works of that sensitive English
writer, John Galsworthy, who enjoys general recognition to-day,
there is a short story of which I early formed a high opinion. It
is called ‘The Apple-Tree’, and it brings home to us
how the life of present-day civilized people leaves no room for the
simple natural love of two human beings.

  
²
The view expressed above is supported by
the following considerations. Man is an animal organism with (like
others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual
corresponds to a fusion of two symmetrical halves, of which,
according to some investigators, one is purely male and the other
female. It is equally possible that each half was originally
hermaphrodite. Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of
extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp
psychologically. We are accustomed to say that every human being
displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and
attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the
characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. For
psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one
between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily
identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a
view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal
kingdom. The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many
obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in
psycho-analysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory
of the instincts. However this may be, if we assume it as a fact
that each individual seeks to satisfy both male and female wishes
in his sexual life, we are prepared for the possibility that those
demands are not fulfilled by the same object, and that they
interfere with each other unless they can be kept apart and each
impulse guided into a particular channel that is suited to it.
Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so
often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its
own sadistic components, a quota of plain inclination to
aggression. The love-object will not always view these
complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown
by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love
her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week.

   The
conjecture which goes deepest, however, is the one which takes its
start from what I have said above (
p. 4495
) in my footnote. It is to the
effect that, with the assumption of an erect posture by man and
with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his
anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic
repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the
sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot
further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete
satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into
sublimations and libidinal displacements. I know that Bleuler
(1913) once pointed to the existence of a primary repelling
attitude like this towards sexual life. All neurotics, and many
others besides, take exception to the fact that ‘
inter
urinas et faeces nascimur
’. The genitals, too, give rise
to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and
which spoil sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that
the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with
civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life
achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal
existence. This result of scientific research coincides in a
remarkable way with commonplace prejudices that have often made
themselves heard. Nevertheless, these things are at present no more
than unconfirmed possibilities which have not been substantiated by
science. Nor should we forget that, in spite of the undeniable
depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in Europe
people among whom the strong genital odours which are so repellent
to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give
them up. (Cf. the collections of folklore obtained from Iwan
Bloch’s questionnaire on the sense of smell in sexual life
published in different volumes of Friedrich S. Krauss’s
Anthropophyteia
.)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4500

V

Psycho-analytic work has shown us that it is
precisely these frustrations of sexual life which people known as
neurotics cannot tolerate. The neurotic creates substitutive
satisfactions for himself in his symptoms, and these either cause
him suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering for him
by raising difficulties in his relations with his environment and
the society he belongs to. The latter fact is easy to understand;
the former presents us with a new problem. But civilization demands
other sacrifices besides that of sexual satisfaction.

   We have treated the difficulty of
cultural development as a general difficulty of development by
tracing it to the inertia of the libido, to its disinclination to
give up an old position for a new one. We are saying much the same
thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and
sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship
between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or
disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a
considerable number of individuals. When a love-relationship is at
its height there is no room left for any interest in the
environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do
not even need the child they have in common to make them happy. In
no other case does Eros so clearly betray the core of his being,
his purpose of making one out of more than one; but when he has
achieved this in the proverbial way through the love of two human
beings, he refuses to go further.