Freud - Complete Works (735 page)

                                               
Denn iede Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.
¹

And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the
thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage
without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest
truths, towards which the rest of us have to find our way through
tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping.

  
¹
One of the Harp-player’s songs in
Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister
.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4523

VIII

Having reached the end of his journey, the
author must ask his readers’ forgiveness for not having been
a more skilful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches
of road and troublesome
détours
. There is no doubt
that it could have been done better. I will attempt, late in the
day, to make some amends.

   In the first place, I suspect
that the reader has the impression that our discussions on the
sense of guilt disrupt the framework of this essay: that they take
up too much space, so that the rest of its subject-matter, with
which they are not always closely connected, is pushed to one side.
This may have spoilt the structure of my paper; but it corresponds
faithfully to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the
most important problem in the development of civilization and to
show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a
loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of
guilt.¹ Anything that still sounds strange about this
statement, which is the final conclusion of our investigation, can
probably be traced to the quite peculiar relationship - as yet
completely unexplained - which the sense of guilt has to our
consciousness. In the common case of remorse, which we regard as
normal, this feeling makes itself clearly enough perceptible to
consciousness. Indeed, we are accustomed to speak of a
‘consciousness of guilt’ instead of a ‘sense of
guilt’. Our study of the neuroses, to which, after all we owe
the most valuable pointers to an understanding of normal
conditions, brings us up against some contradictions. In one of
those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes
itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical
picture and the patient’s life as well, and it hardly allows
anything else to appear alongside of it. But in most other cases
and forms of neurosis it remains completely unconscious, without on
that account producing any less important effects. Our patients do
not believe us when we attribute an ‘unconscious sense of
guilt’ to them. In order to make ourselves at all
intelligible to them, we tell them of an unconscious need for
punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression. But its
connection with a particular form of neurosis must not be
over-estimated. Even in obsessional neurosis there are types of
patients who are not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only
feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety, if they are
prevented from carrying out certain actions. It ought to be
possible eventually to understand these things; but as yet we
cannot. Here perhaps we may be glad to have it pointed out that the
sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical
variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides completely
with
fear of the super-ego
. And the relations of anxiety to
consciousness exhibit the same extraordinary variations. Anxiety is
always present somewhere or other behind every symptom; but at one
time it takes noisy possession of the whole of consciousness, while
at another it conceals itself so completely that we are obliged to
speak of unconscious anxiety or, if we want to have a clearer
psychological conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance
simply a feeling, of possibilities of anxiety. Consequently it is
very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization
is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent
unconscious, or appears as a sort of
malaise
, a
dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations.
Religions, at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in
civilization by a sense of guilt. Furthermore - a point which I
failed to appreciate elsewhere² - they claim to redeem mankind
from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the manner in
which, in Christianity, this redemption is achieved - by the
sacrificial death of a single person, who in this manner takes upon
himself a guilt that is common to everyone - we have been able to
infer what the first occasion may have been on which this primal
guilt, which was also the beginning of civilization, was
acquired.³

  
¹
‘Thus conscience does make cowards of
us all . . .’

  
That the education of young people at the present day conceals from
them the part which sexuality will play in their lives is not the
only reproach which we are obliged to make against it. Its other
sin is that it does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of
which they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young
out into life with such a false psychological orientation,
education is behaving as though one were to equip people starting
on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian
Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being
made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not
do so much harm if education were to say: ‘This is how men
ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you
have to reckon on their not being like that.’ Instead of this
the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfils those
ethical demands - that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on
this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become
virtuous.

  
²
In
The Future of an Illusion
(1927
c
)

  
³
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13).

Civilization And Its Discontents

4524

   Though it cannot be of great
importance, it may not be superfluous to elucidate the meaning of a
few words such as ‘super-ego’,
‘conscience’, ‘sense of guilt’, ‘need
for punishment’ and ‘remorse’, which we have
often, perhaps, used too loosely and interchangeably. They all
relate to the same state of affairs, but denote different aspects
of it. The super-ego is an agency which has been inferred by us,
and conscience is a function which we ascribe, among other
functions, to that agency. This function consists in keeping a
watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them,
in exercising a censorship. The sense of guilt, the harshness of
the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the severity of the
conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched
over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own
strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this
critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the whole
relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual
manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic
under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that
is to say, of the instinct towards internal destruction present in
the ego, employed for forming an erotic attachment to the
super-ego. We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego
is demonstrably present. As to a sense of guilt, we must admit that
it is in existence before the super-ego, and therefore before
conscience, too. At that time it is the immediate expression of
fear of the external authority, a recognition of the tension
between the ego and that authority. It is the direct derivative of
the conflict between the need for the authority’s love and
the urge towards instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition
produces the inclination to aggression. The superimposition of
these two strata of the sense of guilt - one coming from fear of
the
external
authority, the other from fear of the
internal
authority - has hampered our insight into the
position of conscience in a number of ways. Remorse is a general
term for the ego’s reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It
contains, in little altered form, the sensory material of the
anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself
a punishment and can include the need for punishment. Thus remorse,
too, can be older than conscience.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4525

   Nor will it do any harm if we
once more review the contradictions which have for a while
perplexed us during our enquiry. Thus, at one point the sense of
guilt was the consequence of acts of aggression that had been
abstained from; but at another point - and precisely at its
historical beginning, the killing of the father - it was the
consequence of an act of aggression that had been carried out. But
a way out of this difficulty was found. For the institution of the
internal authority, the super-ego, altered the situation radically.
Before this, the sense of guilt coincided with remorse. (We may
remark, incidentally, that the term ‘remorse’ should be
reserved for the reaction after an act of aggression has actually
been carried out.) After this, owing to the omniscience of the
super-ego, the difference between an aggression intended and an
aggression carried out lost its force. Henceforward a sense of
guilt could be produced not only by an act of violence that is
actually carried out (as all the world knows), but also by one that
is merely intended (as psycho-analysis has discovered).
Irrespectively of this alteration in the psychological situation,
the conflict arising from ambivalence - the conflict between the
two primal instincts - leaves the same result behind. We are
tempted to look here for the solution of the problem of the varying
relation in which the sense of guilt stands to consciousness. It
might be thought that a sense of guilt arising from remorse for an
evil
deed
must always be conscious, whereas a sense of guilt
arising from the perception of an evil
impulse
may remain
unconscious. But the answer is not so simple as that. Obsessional
neurosis speaks energetically against it.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4526

   The second contradiction
concerned the aggressive energy with which we suppose the super-ego
to be endowed. According to one view, that energy merely carries on
the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive in
the mind; while, according to another view, it consists, on the
contrary, of one’s own aggressive energy which has not been
used and which one now directs against that inhibiting authority.
The first view seemed to fit in better with the
history
, and
the second with the
theory
, of the sense of guilt. Closer
reflection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable
contradiction almost too completely; what remained as the essential
and common factor was that in each case we were dealing with an
aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards. Clinical
observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources
for the aggressiveness which we attribute to the super-ego; one or
the other of them exercises the stronger effect in any given case,
but as a general rule they operate in unison.

   This is, I think, the place at
which to put forward for serious consideration a view which I have
earlier recommended for provisional acceptance. In the most recent
analytic literature a predilection is shown for the idea that any
kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction,
results, or may result, in a heightening of the sense of
guilt.¹ A great theoretical simplification will, I think, be
achieved if we regard this as applying only to the
aggressive
instincts, and little will be found to contradict
this assumption. For how are we to account, on dynamic and economic
grounds, for an increase in the sense of guilt appearing in place
of an unfulfilled
erotic
demand? This only seems possible in
a round-about way - if we suppose, that is, that the prevention of
an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of aggressiveness against
the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this
aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is
so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed
into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the
super-ego. I am convinced that many processes will admit of a
simpler and clearer exposition if the findings of psycho-analysis
with regard to the derivation of the sense of guilt are restricted
to the aggressive instincts. Examination of the clinical material
gives us no unequivocal answer here, because, as our hypothesis
tells us, the two classes of instinct hardly ever appear in a pure
form, isolated from each other; but an investigation of extreme
cases would probably point in the direction I anticipate.

  
¹
This view is taken in particular by Ernest
Jones, Susan Isaacs and Melanie Klein; and also, I understand, by
Reik and Alexander.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4527

   I am tempted to extract a first
advantage from this more restricted view of the case by applying it
to the process of repression. As we have learned, neurotic symptoms
are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled
sexual wishes. In the course of our analytic work we have
discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neurosis conceals a
quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies
the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. It now seems
plausible to formulate the following proposition. When an
instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are
turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of
guilt. Even if this proposition is only an average approximation to
the truth, it is worthy of our interest.