Freud - Complete Works (734 page)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4518

   These interrelations are so
complicated and at the same time so important that, at the risk of
repeating myself, I shall approach them from yet another angle. The
chronological sequence, then, would be as follows. First comes
renunciation of instinct owing to fear of aggression by the
external
authority. (This is, of course, what fear of the
loss of love amounts to, for love is a protection against this
punitive aggression.) After that comes the erection of an
internal
authority, and renunciation of instinct owing to
fear of it - owing to fear of conscience. In this second situation
bad intentions are equated with bad actions, and hence come a sense
of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of
conscience keeps up the aggressiveness of the authority. So far
things have no doubt been made clear; but where does this leave
room for the reinforcing influence of misfortune (of renunciation
imposed from without), and for the extraordinary severity of
conscience in the best and most tractable people? We have already
explained both these peculiarities of conscience, but we probably
still have an impression that those explanations do not go to the
bottom of the matter, and leave a residue still unexplained. And
here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to
psycho-analysis and which is foreign to people’s ordinary way
of thinking. This idea is of a sort which enables us to understand
why the subject-matter was bound to seem so confused and obscure to
us. For it tells us that conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety
which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual
renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is
reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic
source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the
latter’s severity and intolerance. If we could only bring it
better into harmony with what we already know about the history of
the origin of conscience, we should be tempted to defend the
paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual
renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from
without) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual
renunciation.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4519

   The contradiction between this
statement and what we have previously said about the genesis of
conscience is in point of fact not so very great, and we see a way
of further reducing it. In order to make our exposition easier, let
us take as our example the aggressive instinct, and let us assume
that the renunciation in question is always a renunciation of
aggression. (This, of course, is only to be taken as a temporary
assumption.) The effect of instinctual renunciation on the
conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose
satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the super-ego
and increases the latter’s aggressiveness (against the ego).
This does not harmonize well with the view that the original
aggressiveness of conscience is a continuance of the severity of
the external authority and therefore has nothing to do with
renunciation. But the discrepancy is removed if we postulate a
different derivation for this first instalment of the
super-ego’s aggressivity. A considerable amount of
aggressiveness must be developed in the child against the authority
which prevents him from having his first, but none the less his
most important, satisfactions, whatever the kind of instinctual
deprivation that is demanded of him may be; but he is obliged to
renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness. He
finds his way out of this economically difficult situation with the
help of familiar mechanisms. By means of identification he takes
the unattackable authority into himself. The authority now turns
into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the
aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against
it. The child’s ego has to content itself with the unhappy
role of the authority - the father - who has been thus degraded.
Here, as so often, the situation is reversed: ‘If I were the
father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.’ The
relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return,
distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as
yet undivided, and an external object. That is typical, too. But
the essential difference is that the original severity of the
super-ego does not - or does not so much - represent the severity
which one has experienced from it, or which one attributes to it;
it represents rather one’s own aggressiveness towards it. If
this is correct, we may assert truly that in the beginning
conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse,
and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions of the
same kind.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4520

   Which of these two views is
correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed so unassailable,
or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome
fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too, of direct observations,
both are justified. They do not contradict each other, and they
even coincide at one point, for the child’s revengeful
aggressiveness will be in part determined by the amount of punitive
aggression which he expects from his father. Experience shows,
however, that the severity of the super-ego which a child develops
in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has
himself met with.¹ The severity of the former seems to be
independent of that of the latter. A child who has been very
leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it
would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence; it is not
difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also
exert a strong influence on the formation of the child’s
super-ego. What it amounts to is that in the formation of the
super-ego and the emergence of a conscience innate constitutional
factors and influences from the real environment act in
combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary, it is
a universal aetiological condition for all such
processes.²

  
¹
As has rightly been emphasized by Melanie
Klein and by other English writers.

  
²
The two main types of pathogenic methods of
upbringing - over-strictness and spoiling - have been accurately
assessed by Franz Alexander in his book
The Psychoanalysis of
the Total Personality
(1927) in connection with
Aichhorn’s study of delinquency. The ‘unduly lenient
and indulgent father’ is the cause of children’s
forming an over-severe super-ego, because, under the impression of
the love that they receive, they have no other outlet for their
aggressiveness but turning it inwards. In delinquent children, who
have been brought up without love, the tension between ego and
super-ego is lacking, and the whole of their aggressiveness can be
directed outwards. Apart from a constitutional factor which may be
supposed to be present, it can be said, therefore, that a severe
conscience arises from the joint operation of two factors: the
frustration of instinct, which unleashes aggressiveness, and the
experience of being loved, which turns the aggressiveness inwards
and hands it over to the super-ego.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4521

   It can also be asserted that when
a child reacts to his first great instinctual frustrations with
excessively strong aggressiveness and with a correspondingly severe
super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond
the response that would be currently justified; for the father of
prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount
of aggressiveness may be attributed to him. Thus, if one shifts
over from individual to phylogenetic development, the differences
between the two theories of the genesis of conscience are still
further diminished. On the other hand, a new and important
difference makes its appearance between these two developmental
processes. We cannot get away from the assumption that man’s
sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at
the killing of the father by the brothers banded together. On that
occasion an act of aggression was not suppressed but carried out;
but it was the same act of aggression whose suppression in the
child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt. At this
point I should not be surprised if the reader were to exclaim
angrily: ‘So it makes no difference whether one kills
one’s father or not - one gets a feeling of guilt in either
case! We may take leave to raise a few doubts here. Either it is
not true that the sense of guilt comes from suppressed
aggressiveness, or else the whole story of the killing of the
father is a fiction and the children of primaeval man did not kill
their fathers any more often than children do nowadays. Besides, if
it is not fiction but a plausible piece of history, it would be a
case of something happening which everyone expects to happen -
namely, of a person feeling guilty because he really has done
something which cannot be justified. And of this event, which is
after all an everyday occurrence, psycho-analysis has not yet given
any explanation.’

   That is true, and we must make
good the omission. Nor is there any great secret about the matter.
When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and
because of it, the feeling should more properly be called
remorse
. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and,
of course, it presupposes that a
conscience
- the readiness
to feel guilty - was already in existence before the deed took
place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help us to
discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in
general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an
instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in
spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its
strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owing to its
having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored.
Psycho-analysis is thus justified in excluding from the present
discussion the case of a sense of guilt due to remorse, however
frequently such cases occur and however great their practical
importance.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4522

   But if the human sense of guilt
goes back to the killing of the primal father, that was after all a
case of ‘remorse’. Are we to assume that a conscience
and a sense of guilt were not, as we have presupposed, in existence
before the deed? If not, where, in this case, did the remorse come
from? There is no doubt that this case should explain the secret of
the sense of guilt to us and put an end to our difficulties. And I
believe it does. This remorse was the result of the primordial
ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but
they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satisfied by their
act of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for
the deed. It set up the super-ego by identification with the
father; it gave that agency the father’s power, as though as
a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out
against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended to
prevent a repetition of the deed. And since the inclination to
aggressiveness against the father was repeated in the following
generations, the sense of guilt, too, persisted, and it was
reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that was
suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, I think, we can
at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love
in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the
sense of guilt. Whether one has killed one’s father or has
abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is
bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an
expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal
struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death.
This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task
of living together. So long as the community assumes no other form
than that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in
the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience and to create the
first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the
community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are
dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a
further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization
obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to
unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through
an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began
in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If
civilization is a necessary course of development from the family
to humanity as a whole, then - as a result of the inborn conflict
arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the
trends of love and death - there is inextricably bound up with it
an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights
that the individual finds hard to tolerate. One is reminded of the
great poet’s moving arraignment of the ‘Heavenly
Powers’:-

                                               
Ihr führt in’s Leben uns hinein.

                                               
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,

                                               
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn den Pein,