Freud - Complete Works (732 page)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4507

   If civilization imposes such
great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his
aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be
happy in that civilization. In fact, primitive man was better off
in knowing no restrictions of instinct. To counterbalance this, his
prospects of enjoying this happiness for any length of time were
very slender. Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his
possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. We must not
forget, however, that in the primal family only the head of it
enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the rest lived in slavish
suppression. In that primal period of civilization, the contrast
between a minority who enjoyed the advantages of civilization and a
majority who were robbed of those advantages was, therefore,
carried to extremes. As regards the primitive peoples who exist
to-day, careful researches have shown that their instinctual life
is by no means to be envied for its freedom. It is subject to
restrictions of a different kind but perhaps of greater severity
than those attaching to modern civilized man.

   When we justly find fault with
the present state of our civilization for so inadequately
fulfilling our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy,
and for allowing the existence of so much suffering which could
probably be avoided - when, with unsparing criticism, we try to
uncover the roots of its imperfection, we are undoubtedly
exercising a proper right and are not showing ourselves enemies of
civilization. We may expect gradually to carry though such
alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needs
and will escape our criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize
ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to
the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at
reform. Over and above the tasks of restricting the instincts,
which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our notice the
danger of a state of things which might be termed ‘the
psychological poverty of groups’. This danger is most
threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by
the identification of its members with one another, while
individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance that
should fall to them in the formation of a group.¹ The present
cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for
studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But
I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of
American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of
wanting myself to employ American methods.

  
¹
See
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego
(1921
c
).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4508

VI

In none of my previous writings have I had so
strong a feeling as now that what I am describing is common
knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and, in due course,
the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in
order to expound things which are, in fact, self-evident. For that
reason I should be glad to seize the point if it were to appear
that the recognition of a special, independent aggressive instinct
means an alteration of the psycho-analytic theory of the
instincts.

   We shall see, however, that this
is not so and that it is merely a matter of bringing into sharper
focus a turn of thought arrived at long ago and of following out
its consequences. Of all the slowly developed parts of analytic
theory, the theory of the instincts is the one that has felt its
way the most painfully forward. And yet that theory was so
indispensable to the whole structure that something had to be put
in its place. In what was at first my utter perplexity, I took as
my starting-point a saying of the poet-philosopher, Schiller, that
‘hunger and love are what moves the world’. Hunger
could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving
the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief
function, favoured in every way by nature, is the preservation of
the species. Thus, to begin with, ego-instincts and
object-instincts confronted each other. It was to denote the energy
of the latter and only the latter instinct that I introduced the
term ‘libido’. Thus the antithesis was between the
ego-instincts and the ‘libidinal’ instincts of love (in
its widest sense) which were directed to an object. One of these
object-instincts, the sadistic instinct, stood out from the rest,
it is true, in that its aim was so very far from being loving.
Moreover it was obviously in some respects attached to the
ego-instincts: it could not hide its close affinity with instincts
of mastery which have no libidinal purpose. But these discrepancies
were got over; after all, sadism was clearly a part of sexual life,
in the activities of which affection could be replaced by cruelty.
Neurosis was regarded as the outcome of a struggle between the
interest of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a
struggle in which the ego had been victorious but at the price of
severe sufferings and renunciations.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4509

   Every analyst will admit that
even to-day this view has not the sound of a long-discarded error.
Nevertheless, alterations in it became essential, as our enquiries
advanced from the repressed to the repressing forces, from the
object-instincts to the ego. The decisive step forward was the
introduction of the concept of narcissism - that is to say, the
discovery that the ego itself is cathected with libido, that the
ego, indeed, is the libido’s original home, and remains to
some extent its headquarters. This narcissistic libido turns
towards objects, and thus becomes object-libido; and it can change
back into narcissistic libido once more. The concept of narcissism
made it possible to obtain an analytic understanding of the
traumatic neuroses and of many of the affections bordering on the
psychoses, as well as of the latter themselves. It was not
necessary to give up our interpretation of the transference
neuroses as attempts made by the ego to defend itself against
sexuality; but the concept of libido was endangered. Since the
ego-instincts, too, were libidinal, it seemed for a time inevitable
that we should make libido coincide with instinctual energy in
general, as C. G. Jung had already advocated earlier. Nevertheless,
there still remained in me a kind of conviction, for which I was
not as yet able to find reasons, that the instincts could not all
be of the same kind. My next step was taken in
Beyond the
Pleasure Principle
(1920
g
), when the compulsion to
repeat and the conservative character of instinctual life first
attracted my attention. Starting from speculations on the beginning
of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that,
besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it
into ever larger units,¹ there must exist another, contrary
instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to
their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros
there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be
explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these
two instincts. It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the
activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations of
Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that
the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards
its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful
idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the
external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness
and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be
pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was
destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead
of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this
aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the
self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding. At the same time
one can suspect from this example that the two kinds of instinct
seldom - perhaps never - appear in isolation from each other, but
are alloyed with each other in varying and very different
proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgement. In
sadism, long since known to us as a component instinct of
sexuality, we should have before us a particularly strong alloy of
this kind between trends of love and the destructive instinct;
while its counterpart, masochism, would be a union between
destructiveness directed inwards and sexuality - a union which
makes what is otherwise an imperceptible trend into a conspicuous
and tangible one.

  
¹
The opposition which thus emerges between
the ceaseless trend by Eros towards extension and the general
conservative nature of the instincts is striking, and it may become
the starting-point for the study of further problems.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4510

   The assumption of the existence
of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even
in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent
inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in
love to an original bipolarity in its own nature. To begin with it
was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed
here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon
me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they
are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any
other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without
either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive
in scientific work. I know that in sadism and masochism we have
always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct
(directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with erotism; but
I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity
of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed
to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. (The desire
for destruction when it is directed
inwards
mostly eludes
our perception, of course, unless it is tinged with erotism.) I
remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of
destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how
long it took before I became receptive to it. That others should
have shown, and still show, the same attitude of rejection
surprises me less. For ‘little children do not like it’
when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to
‘badness’, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and
so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own
perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile
the undeniable existence of evil - despite the protestations of
Christian Science - with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness.
The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that
way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic
discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even
so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil
just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil
embodies. In view of these difficulties, each of us will be well
advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply
moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular
and much will be forgiven us for it.¹

  
¹
In Goethe’s Mephistopheles we have a
quite exceptionally convincing identification of the principle of
evil with the destructive instinct:

                                                               
Denn alles, was entsteht,

                                               
Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht . . .

                                               
So ist dann alles, was Ihr Sünde,

                                               
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,

                                               
Mein eigentliches Element.

   The
Devil himself names as his adversary, not what is holy and good,
but Nature’s power to create, to multiply life - that is,
Eros:

                                               
Der Luft, dem Wasser, wie der Erden

                                               
Entwinden tausend Keime sich,

                                               
Im Trocknen, Feuchten, Warmen, Kalten!

                                               
Hätt’ ich mir nicht die Flamme vorbehalten,

                                               
Ich hätte nichts Aparts für mich.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4511

   The name ‘libido’ can
once more be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros
in order to distinguish them from the energy of the death
instinct.¹ It must be confessed that we have much greater
difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it
were, as something in the background behind Eros, and it escapes
detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed with
Eros. It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic
aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the
erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into
its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges
without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of
destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction
of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of
narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a
fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. The
instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were,
inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects,
provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with
control over nature. Since the assumption of the existence of the
instinct is mainly based on theoretical grounds, we must also admit
that it is not entirely proof against theoretical objections. But
this is how things appear to us now, in the present state of our
knowledge; future research and reflection will no doubt bring
further light which will decide the matter.