Freud - Complete Works (733 page)

  
¹
Our present point of view can be roughly
expressed in the statement that libido has a share in every
instinctual manifestation, but that not everything in that
manifestation is libido.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4512

   In all that follows I adopt the
standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an
original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I
return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to
civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led
to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind
undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may
now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros,
whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after
that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great
unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not
know; the work of Eros is precisely this. 1 These collections of
men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone,
the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But
man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each
against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of
civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the
main representative of the death instinct which we have found
alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now,
I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer
obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death,
between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it
works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all
life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may
therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human
species.¹ And it is this battle of the giants that our
nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.

  
¹
And we may probably add more precisely, a
struggle for life in the shape it was bound to assume after a
certain event which still remains to be discovered.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4513

VII

Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit
any such cultural struggle? We do not know. Very probably some of
them - the bees, the ants, the termites - strove for thousands of
years before they arrived at the State institutions, the
distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individual,
for which we admire them to-day. It is a mark of our present
condition that we know from our own feelings that we should not
think ourselves happy in any of these animal States or in any of
the roles assigned in them to the individual. In the case of other
animal species it may be that a temporary balance has been reached
between the influences of their environment and the mutually
contending instincts within them, and that thus a cessation of
development has come about. It may be that in primitive man a fresh
access of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of
the destructive instinct. There are a great many questions here to
which as yet there is no answer.

   Another question concerns us more
nearly. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the
aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of
it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these
methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be the most
important. This we can study in the history of the development of
the individual. What happens in him to render his desire for
aggression innocuous? Something very remarkable, which we should
never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. His
aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of
fact, sent back to where it came from - that is, it is directed
towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the
ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as
super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience’,
is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh
aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other,
extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and
the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of
guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization,
therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous
desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting
up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a
conquered city.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4514

   As to the origin of the sense of
guilt, the analyst has different views from other psychologists;
but even he does not find it easy to give an account of it. To
begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt,
we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels
guilty (devout people would say ‘sinful’) when he has
done something which he knows to be ‘bad’. But then we
notice how little this answer tells us. Perhaps, after some
hesitation, we shall add that even when a person has not actually
done
the bad thing but has only recognized in himself an
intention
to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the
question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal to
the deed. Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already
recognized that what is bad is reprehensible, is something that
must not be carried out. How is this judgement arrived at? We may
reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity
to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what
is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be
something which is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here,
therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this
that decides what is to be called good or bad. Since a
person’s own feelings would not have led him along this path,
he must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous
influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in his helplessness
and his dependence on other people, and it can best be designated
as fear of loss of love. If he loses the love of another person
upon whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected from a
variety of dangers. Above all, he is exposed to the danger that
this stronger person will show his superiority in the form of
punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever
causes one to be threatened with loss of love. For fear of that
loss, one must avoid it. This, too, is the reason why it makes
little difference whether one has already done the bad thing or
only intends to do it. In either case the danger only sets in if
and when the authority discovers it, and in either case the
authority would behave in the same way.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4515

   This state of mind is called a
‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this
name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear
of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it
can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only
changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two
parents is taken by the larger human community. Consequently, such
people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which
promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the
authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for
it; they are afraid only of being found out.¹ Present-day
society has to reckon in general with this state of mind.

   A great change takes place only
when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a
super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage.
Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or
a sense of guilt.² At this point, too, the fear of being found
out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing
something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since
nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. It is
true that the seriousness of the situation from a real point of
view has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego, has no
motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is
intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the
survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt
in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the
beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same
feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting
it punished by the external world.

  
¹
This reminds one of Rousseau’s famous
mandarin.

  
²
Everyone of discernment will understand and
take into account the fact that in this summary description we have
sharply delimited events which in reality occur by gradual
transitions, and that it is not merely a question of the
existence
of a super-ego but of its relative strength and
sphere of influence. All that has been said above about conscience
and guilt is, moreover, common knowledge and almost
undisputed.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4516

   At this second stage of
development, the conscience exhibits a peculiarity which was absent
from the first stage and which is no longer easy to account for.
For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is
its behaviour, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who
have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the
worst sinfulness. This means that virtue forfeits some part of its
promised reward; the docile and continent ego does not enjoy the
trust of its mentor, and strives in vain, it would seem, to acquire
it. The objection will at once be made that these difficulties are
artificial ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more
vigilant conscience is precisely the hallmark of a moral man.
Moreover, when saints call themselves sinners, they are not so
wrong, considering the temptations to instinctual satisfaction to
which they are exposed in a specially high degree - since, as is
well known, temptations are merely increased by constant
frustration, whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them
to diminish, at least for the time being. The field of ethics,
which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely
that ill-luck - that is, external frustration - so greatly enhances
the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things to
well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all
sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his
soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his
conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself
with penances.¹ Whole peoples have behaved in this may, and
still do. This, however, is easily explained by the original
infantile stage of conscience, which, as we see, is not given up
after the introjection into the super-ego, but persists alongside
of it and behind it. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the
parental agency. If a man is unfortunate it means that he is no
longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss
of love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his
super-ego - a representative whom, in his days of good fortune, he
was ready to neglect. This becomes especially clear where Fate is
looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else
than an expression of the Divine Will. The people of Israel had
believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the
great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon
this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his
relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness.
Instead, they produced the prophets, who held up their sinfulness
before them; and out of their sense of guilt they created the
over-strict commandments of their priestly religion. It is
remarkable how differently a primitive man behaves. If he has met
with a misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on
his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it
a thrashing instead of punishing himself.

  
¹
This enhancing of morality as a consequence
of ill-luck has been illustrated by Mark Twain in a delightful
little story,
The First Melon I ever Stole
. This first melon
happened to be unripe. I heard Mark Twain tell the story himself in
one of his public readings. After he had given out the title, he
stopped and asked himself as though he was in doubt:
‘
Was
it the first?’ With this, everything had
been said. The first melon was evidently not the only
one.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4517

   Thus we know of two origins of
the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the
other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego. The first
insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the
second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the
continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed from the
super-ego. We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego -
the demands of conscience - is to be understood. It is simply a
continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it
has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. We now see in what
relationship the renunciation of instinct stands to the sense of
guilt. Originally, renunciation of instinct was the result of fear
of an external authority: one renounced one’s satisfactions
in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this
renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no
sense of guilt should remain. But with fear of the super-ego the
case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough,
for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego.
Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of
guilt comes about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage
in the erection of a super-ego, or, as we may put it, in the
formation of a conscience. Instinctual renunciation now no longer
has a completely liberating effect; virtuous continence is no
longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external
unhappiness - loss of love and punishment on the part of the
external authority - has been exchanged for a permanent internal
unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.