Freud - Complete Works (792 page)

Moses And Monotheism

4917

   A decision is made still more
difficult when we turn to the analogous case in primaeval times. It
is quite certain that in the course of thousands of years the fact
was forgotten that there had been a primal father with the
characteristics we know and what his fate had been; nor can we
suppose that there was any oral tradition of it, as we can in the
case of Moses. In what sense, then, does a tradition come in
question at all? In what form can it have been present?

   In order to make it easier for
readers who do not desire or are not prepared to plunge into a
complicated psychological state of affairs, I will anticipate the
outcome of the investigation that is to follow. In my opinion there
is an almost complete conformity in this respect between the
individual and the group: in the group too an impression of the
past is retained in unconscious memory-traces.

   In the case of the individual we
believe we can see clearly. The memory-trace of his early
experience has been preserved in him, but in a special
psychological condition. The individual may be said to have known
it always, just as one knows about the repressed. Here we have
formed ideas, which can be confirmed without difficulty through
analysis, of how something can be forgotten and how it can then
reappear after a while. What is forgotten is not extinguished but
only ‘repressed’; its memory-traces are present in all
their freshness, but isolated by ‘anticathexes’. They
cannot enter into communication with other intellectual processes;
they are unconscious - inaccessible to consciousness. It may also
be that certain portions of the repressed, having evaded the
process, remain accessible to memory and occasionally emerge into
consciousness; but even so they are isolated, like foreign bodies
out of connection with the rest. It may be so, but it need not be
so; repression may also be complete, and it is with that
alternative that we shall deal in what follows.

Moses And Monotheism

4918

   The repressed retains its upward
urge, its effort to force its way to consciousness. It achieves its
aim under three conditions: (1) if the strength of the anticathexis
is diminished by pathological processes which overtake the other
part, what we call the ego, or by a different distribution of the
cathectic energies in that ego, as happens regularly in the state
of sleep; (2) if the instinctual elements attaching to the
repressed receive a special reinforcement (of which the best
example is the processes during puberty); and (3) if at any time in
recent experience impressions or experiences occur which resemble
the repressed so closely that they are able to awaken it. In the
last case the recent experience is reinforced by the latent energy
of the repressed, and the repressed comes into operation behind the
recent experience and with its help. In none of these three
alternatives does what has hitherto been repressed enter
consciousness smoothly and unaltered; it must always put up with
distortions which testify to the influence of the resistance (not
entirely overcome) arising from the anticathexis, or to the
modifying influence of the recent experience or to both.

   The difference between whether a
psychical process is conscious or unconscious has served us as a
criterion and a means of finding our bearings. The repressed is
unconscious. Now it would simplify things agreeably if this
sentence admitted of reversal - if, that is, the difference between
the qualities of conscious (
Cs.
) and unconscious
(
Ucs.
) coincided with the distinction between
‘belonging to the ego’ and ‘repressed’. The
fact of there being isolated and unconscious things like this in
our mental life would be sufficiently novel and important. But in
reality the position is more complicated. It is true that
everything repressed is unconscious, but it is not true that
everything belonging to the ego is conscious. We notice that
consciousness is a transient quality which attaches to a psychical
process only in passing. For our purposes therefore we must replace
‘conscious’ by ‘capable of being conscious’
and we call this quality ‘preconscious’ (
Pcs.
).
We then say, more correctly, that the ego is mainly preconscious
(virtually conscious) but that portions of the ego are
unconscious.

Moses And Monotheism

4919

   The establishment of this latter
fact shows us that the qualities on which we have hitherto relied
are insufficient to give us our bearings in the obscurity of mental
life. We must introduce another distinction which is no longer
qualitative but
topographical
and - what gives it special
value - at the same time
genetic
. We now distinguish in our
mental life (which we regard as an apparatus compounded of several
agencies, districts or provinces) one region which we call the
ego
proper and another which we name the
id
. The id
is the older of the two; the ego has developed out of it, like a
cortical layer, through the influence of the external world. It is
in the id that all our primary instincts are at work, all the
processes in the id take place unconsciously. The ego, as we have
already said, coincides with the region of the preconscious; it
includes portions which normally remain unconscious. The course of
events in the id, and their mutual interaction, are governed by
quite other laws than those prevailing in the ego. It is in fact
the discovery of these differences that has led to our new view and
justifies it.

   The
repressed
is to be
counted as belonging to the id and is subject to the same
mechanisms; it is distinguished from it only in respect to its
genesis. The differentiation is accomplished in the earliest period
of life, while the ego is developing out of the id. At that time a
portion of the contents of the id is taken into the ego and raised
to the preconscious state; another portion is not affected by this
translation and remains behind in the id as the unconscious proper.
In the further course of the formation of the ego, however, certain
psychical impressions and processes in the ego are excluded from it
by a defensive process; the characteristic of being preconscious is
withdrawn from them, so that they are once more reduced to being
component portions of the id. Here then is the
‘repressed’ in the id. So far as intercourse between
the two mental provinces is concerned, we therefore assume that, on
the one hand, unconscious processes in the id are raised to the
level of the preconscious and incorporated into the ego, and that,
on the other hand, preconscious material in the ego can follow the
opposite path and be put back into the id. The fact that later on a
special region - that of the ‘super-ego’ - is separated
off in the ego lies outside our present interest.

   All of this may appear to be far
from simple. But when one has grown reconciled to this unusual
spatial view of the mental apparatus, it can present no particular
difficulties to the imagination. I will add the further comment
that the psychical topography that I have developed here has
nothing to do with the anatomy of the brain, and actually only
touches it at one point. What is unsatisfactory in this picture -
and I am aware of it as clearly as anyone - is due to our complete
ignorance of the
dynamic
nature of the mental processes. We
tell ourselves that what distinguishes a conscious idea from a
preconscious one, and the latter from an unconscious one, can only
be a modification, or perhaps a different distribution, of
psychical energy. We talk of cathexes and hypercathexes, but beyond
this we are without any knowledge on the subject or even any
starting-point for a serviceable working hypothesis. Of the
phenomenon of consciousness we can at least say that it was
originally attached to perception. All sensations which originate
from the perception of painful, tactile, auditory or visual stimuli
are what are most readily conscious. Thought-processes, and
whatever may be analogous to them in the id, are in themselves
unconscious and obtain access to consciousness by becoming linked
to the mnemic residues of visual and auditory perceptions along the
path of the function of speech. In animals, which lack speech,
these conditions must be of a simpler kind.

Moses And Monotheism

4920

   The impressions of early traumas,
from which we started out, are either not translated into the
preconscious or are quickly put back by repression into the
id-condition. Their mnemic residues are in that case unconscious
and operate from the id. We believe we can easily follow their
further vicissitudes so long as it is a question of what has been
experienced by the subject himself. But a fresh complication arises
when we become aware of the probability that what may be operative
in an individual’s psychical life may include not only what
he has experienced himself but also things that were innately
present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin -
an
archaic heritage
. The questions then arise of what this
consists in, what it contains and what is the evidence for it.

   The immediate and most certain
answer is that it consists in certain dispositions such as are
characteristic of all living organisms: in the capacity and
tendency, that is, to enter particular lines of development and to
react in a particular manner to certain excitations, impressions
and stimuli. Since experience shows that there are distinctions in
this respect between individuals of the human species, the archaic
heritage must include these distinctions; they represent what we
recognize as the
constitutional
factor in the individual.
Now, since all human beings, at all events in their early days,
have approximately the same experiences, they react to them, too,
in a similar manner; a doubt was therefore able to arise whether we
should not include these reactions, along with their individual
distinctions, in the archaic heritage. This doubt should be put on
one side: our knowledge of the archaic heritage is not enlarged by
the fact of this similarity.

   Nevertheless, analytic research
has brought us a few results which give us cause for thought. There
is, in the first place, the universality of symbolism in language.
The symbolic representation of one object by another - the same
thing applies to actions - is familiar to all our children and
comes to them, as it were, as a matter of course. We cannot show in
regard to them how they have learnt it and must admit that in many
cases learning it is impossible. It is a question of an original
knowledge which adults afterwards forget. It is true that an adult
makes use of the same symbols in his dreams, but he does not
understand them unless an analyst interprets them to him, and even
then he is reluctant to believe the translation. If he makes use of
one of the very common figures of speech in which this symbolism is
recorded, he is obliged to admit that its true sense has completely
escaped him. Moreover, symbolism disregards differences of
language; investigations would probably show that it is ubiquitous
- the same for all peoples. Here, then, we seem to have an assured
instance of an archaic heritage dating from the period at which
language developed. But another explanation might still be
attempted. It might be said that we are dealing with
thought-connections between ideas - connections which had been
established during the historical development of speech and which
have to be repeated now every time the development of speech has to
be gone through in an individual. It would thus be a case of the
inheritance of an intellectual disposition similar to the ordinary
inheritance of an instinctual disposition - and once again it would
be no contribution to our problem.

Moses And Monotheism

4921

   The work of analysis has,
however, brought something else to light which exceeds in its
importance what we have so far considered. When we study the
reactions to early traumas, we are quite often surprised to find
that they are not strictly limited to what the subject himself has
really experienced but diverge from it in a way which fits in much
better with the model of a phylogenetic event and, in general, can
only be explained by such an influence. The behaviour of neurotic
children towards their parents in the Oedipus and castration
complex abounds in such reactions, which seem unjustified in the
individual case and only become intelligible phylogenetically - by
their connection with the experience of earlier generations. It
would be well worth while to place this material, which I am able
to appeal to here, before the public in a collected form. Its
evidential value seems to me strong enough for me to venture on a
further step and to posit the assertion that the archaic heritage
of human beings comprises not only dispositions but also
subject-matter - memory-traces of the experience of earlier
generations. In this way the compass as well as the importance of
the archaic heritage would be significantly extended.

   On further reflection I must
admit that I have behaved for a long time as though the inheritance
of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently
of direct communication and of the influence of education by the
setting of an example, were established beyond question. When I
spoke of the survival of a tradition among a people or of the
formation of a people’s character, I had mostly in mind an
inherited tradition of this kind and not one transmitted by
communication. Or at least I made no distinction between the two
and was not clearly aware of my audacity in neglecting to do so. My
position, no doubt, is made more difficult by the present attitude
of biological science, which refuses to hear of the inheritance of
acquired characters by succeeding generations. I must, however, in
all modesty confess that nevertheless I cannot do without this
factor in biological evolution. The same thing is not in question,
indeed, in the two cases: in the one it is a matter of acquired
characters which are hard to grasp, in the other of memory-traces
of external events - something tangible, as it were. But it may
well be that at bottom we cannot imagine one without the other.