what means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it?

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS (1930)

Chapter VII (last paragraph, on aggression)

[69] ... In all that follows I prefer the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to assailment is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I render to my view [see p. 59 above] that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the grade of this enquiry [see p. 43] I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still nether the influence of that idea. I may at present add that civilisation is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine unmarried human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, nosotros do not know; the piece of work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally leap to one some other. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, volition not hold them together. But human'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 principal representative of the expiry instinct which nosotros have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with information technology. And now, I think, the meaning of the development of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must nowadays the struggle betwixt Eros and Expiry, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, every bit information technology 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 man species. And it is this boxing of the giants that our nurse-maids endeavor to appease with their lullaby virtually Heaven [NB: The reference here is to Heine's poem Frg].

Chapter VII (Freud's theory of guilt and the super-ego)

WHY do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do non 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 today. It is a marker of our present status that we know from our own feelings that we should not think ourselves happy in any of these animal States or in whatever of the roles assigned in them to the individual. In the instance of other animal species information technology may be that a temporary balance has been reached between the influences of their surround and the mutually contending instincts inside them, and that thus a cessation of evolution has come about. It may be that in archaic man a fresh admission of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of the destructive instinct. There are a cracking many questions hither to which equally yet there is no reply.

Another question concerns us more than about. What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to brand it harmless, to get rid of information technology, maybe? Nosotros have already become acquainted with a few of these methods, but not yet with the ane that appears to exist the nearly important. This nosotros 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 remainder of the ego every bit super-ego, and which now, in the form of 'conscience', is ready to put into action confronting 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; information technology limited itself equally a need for penalization. Civilization, therefore, obtains [71] mastery over the individual'southward unsafe desire for aggression by weakening and convincing it and by setting up an agency within him to scout over it, similar a garrison in a conquered city.

As to the origin of the sense of guilt, the annotator 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 accept a sense of guilt, nosotros 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 exist 'bad'. But then we find how trivial this answer tells u.s.. Peradventure, afterwards some hesitation, we shall add together that even when a person has not actually washed the bad affair merely has only recognized in himself an intention to practice it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the question then arises of why the intention is regarded every bit equal, to the deed. Both cases, all the same, 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 information technology were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or unsafe to the ego; on the contrary, it may exist something which is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Hither, therefore, in that location is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good or bad. Since a person'due south ain 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 all-time be designated every bit fear loss of love. If he loses the love of some other person upon whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. To a higher place all, he is exposed to the danger that this stronger person will evidence his superiority in the form of punishment. At the offset, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to exist threatened with loss of love. For fright of that loss, ane must avoid information technology. This, likewise, is the reason why it makes little difference whether i has already done the bad thing or simply intends to do information technology. In either case the danger only sets in if and when the authority discovers it, and in either case the dominance would behave in the same way.

This country of mind is called a 'bad censor'; but actually [72] it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is conspicuously only a fear of loss of love, 'social' feet. In small children information technology can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has but changed to the extent that the place of the begetter or the ii parents is taken by the larger homo customs. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do whatever bad thing which promises them enjoyment, and so long as they are certain that the authority will non know annihilation most information technology or cannot arraign them for information technology; they are afraid simply of beingness found out. Present-solar day society has to reckon in general with this state of mind.

A great modify takes place just when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of censor then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt. At this indicate, besides, the fear of beingness found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and to practise it disappears entirely, since nothing tin be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation from a real indicate of view has passed away, for the new dominance, the super-ego, has no motive that nosotros know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound upwardly; 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 feet and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world.

At this second stage of development, the censor exhibits a peculiarity which was absent-minded from the kickoff phase and which is no longer easy to account for. For the more virtuous a human [73] is, the more astringent 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, information technology would seem, to acquire it. The objection will at once exist made that these difficulties are bogus ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more vigilant censor 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 only increased by constant frustration whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at to the lowest degree for the time being. The field of ethics, which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely that sick-luck -- that is, external frustration -- then greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long equally things get well with a human, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego practice all sorts of things; simply 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. Whole peoples have behaved in this way, and notwithstanding exercise. This, however, is easily explained by the original infantile stage of censor, which, as we see, is non given up afterwards the introjection into the super-ego, but persists alongside of information technology and behind it. Fate is regarded equally 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 one time more bows to the parental [74] representative in his super-ego -- a representative whom, in his days of skilful fortune, he was ready to fail. This becomes especially clear where looked Fate is looked upon in the strictly religious sense of beingness nothing else than an expression of the Divine Volition. The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favorite child of God, and when the not bad. Male parent caused misfortune afterward misfortune to rain downwardly 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 earlier 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 washed its duty, and he gives it a thrashing instead of punishing himself.

Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authorisation, and the other, later on, arising from fright of the super-ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the 2nd, besides equally 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. Information technology is only a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which information technology has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. Nosotros 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 non to lose its dear. If one has carried out this renunciation, ane is, as information technology were, quits with the say-so and no sense of guilt should remain. Just with fear of the super-ego the case is different. Hither, instinctual enunciation 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 virtually. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of a super-ego, or, equally nosotros may put it, in the germination of a conscience. Instinctual [75] renunciation at present no longer has a completely liberating upshot; virtuous continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of honey. 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.

These interrelations are so complicated and at the same time so important that, at the run a risk of repeating myself, I shall approach them from yet another angle. The chronological sequence then, would be as follows. Outset comes renunciation of instinct owing to fright of assailment by the external authority. (This is, of form, what fear of the loss of love amounts to, for dearest is a protection confronting this punitive assailment.) After that comes the erection of an internal potency, and renunciation of instinct owing to fear of it -- owing to fearfulness of conscience. In this 2nd situation bad intentions are equated with bad actions; and hence come a sense of guilt and a need for penalization .

The aggressiveness of conscience keeps up the aggressiveness of the dominance. So far things take no incertitude 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 censor in the best and near tractable people? Nosotros have already explained both these peculiarities of censor, but we probably still have an impression that those explanations do non become to the lesser of the matter, and exit a balance withal unexplained. And hither at final an thought 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 the states to understand why the subject-matter was bound to seem so confused and obscure to us. For it tells us that conscience (or more than correctly, the anxiety which after becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that afterward the human relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of censor and every fresh renunciation increases the latter's severity and intolerance. If we could just bring it better into harmony with what nosotros already know almost the history of the origin of conscience, we should be [76] tempted to defend the paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on. us from without) creates censor, which so demands further instinctual renunciation.

The contradiction between this statement and what we have previously said well-nigh the genesis of conscience is in bespeak of fact not so very nifty, and nosotros come across a way of further reducing it. In order to make our exposition easier, permit us accept as our example the ambitious instinct, and let united states presume that the renunciation in question is e'er 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 upwardly 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 nil to do with renunciation. But the discrepancy is removed if we postulate a different derivation for this beginning instalment of the super-ego's aggressivity. A considerable amount of aggressiveness must be developed in the child confronting the authority which prevents him from having his first, merely 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 style out of this economically difficult situation with the help of familiar mechanisms. By ways of identification he takes the unattackable authorisation into himself. The authorization now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a kid. would take liked to practice against it. The child'due south ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the say-so -- the father -- has been thus degraded. Here, equally then oftentimes, the [real] situation is reversed: 'If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.' The relationship betwixt the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted past a wish, of the real relationships betwixt the ego, equally however undivided, and an external object. That is typical, too. Merely the essential difference is that the original severity of the super-ego does not -- or does not so much -- represent the severity which ane has experienced from it [the object], or which i attributes to it; [77] information technology represents rather one's own aggressiveness towards information technology. If this is correct, we may assert truly that in the showtime conscience arises through the suppression of an ambitious impulse, and than information technology is afterwards reinforced by fresh suppressions of the aforementioned kind.

Which of these two views is correct? The earlier i, which genetically seemed so unassailable, or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome fashion? Conspicuously, and past the bear witness, besides, of direct observations, both are justified, they practice not contradict each other, and they even coincide at one point, for the kid'southward revengeful aggressiveness volition be in office determined past the amount of castigating assailment which he expects from his male parent. Experience shows, however, that the severity of the superego which a child develops in no mode corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with. The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A kid who has been very leniently brought up can learn a very strict conscience. Simply it would besides be incorrect to exaggerate this independence; information technology is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does besides exert a potent influence on the germination of the child'due south super-ego. What information technology amounts to is that in the formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a censor innate constitutional factors and influences from the real environment act in combination. This is not at all surprising; on the reverse, it is a universal aetiological condition for all such processes.[78]

Information technology tin besides 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 post-obit a phylogenetic model and is going across the response that would exist currently justified; for the male parent of prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may exist attributed to him. Thus, if one shifts over from individual to phylogenetic development, the differences between the 2 theories of the genesis of conscience are still further diminished. On the other hand, a new and important departure makes its advent between these ii developmental processes. We cannot go away from the assumption that man'due south sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together [see Freud's earlier work, Totem and Taboo]. On that occasion an act of assailment was not suppressed just carried out; but it was the same act of assailment whose suppression in the child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt. At this point I should non be surprised if the reader were to exclaim angrily:

'So it makes no difference whether i kills i'due south father or not -- ane gets a feeling of guilt in either instance! We may take go out 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 impale their fathers any more often than children do nowadays. Besides, if information technology is non fiction simply a plausible piece of history, it would exist a instance of something happening which anybody expects to happen -- namely, of a person feeling guilty because he really has done something which cannot be justified. And of this issue, which is after all an everyday occurrence, psycho-analysis has non even so given any explanation.'

That is true, and we must make good the omission. Nor is there any great secret about the matter. When 1 has a sense of guilt later having committed a criminality, and considering of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of grade, it presupposes that a censor -- the readiness to feel guilty -- was already in existence before the act took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help us to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of congenital in general. What happens in these [79] everyday cases is unremarkably this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, afterward all, limited in its force; 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 nowadays discussion the case of a sense of guilt due to remorse, however frequently such cases occur and all the same peachy their applied importance.

But if the human being sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the cardinal father, that was after all a example of 'remorse'. Are we to assume that [at that time] a censor and a sense of guilt were non, as we take presupposed, in existence before the deed? If non, where, in this case, did the remorse come from? At that place is no uncertainty that this case should explain the secret of the sense of guilt to united states and put an end to our difficulties. And I believe it does. This remorse was the issue of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, simply they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satisfied past their deed of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. Information technology gear up the super-ego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father's ability, equally though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, and information technology created the restrictions which were intended to forbid a repetition of the act. And since the inclination to aggressiveness confronting the father was repeated in the following generations, the sense of guilt, also, persisted, and it was reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that was suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, I call up, we tin at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played past dear in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether ane has killed i'due south 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 devastation or death. This conflict is set going as shortly as men are faced with the job of living together. Then long every bit the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the disharmonize is jump to express itself in the Oedipus circuitous, to establish the censor and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same disharmonize is connected in forms [80] which are dependent on the past; and information technology is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilisation obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it tin 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 grouping. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, and so -- every bit a result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death -- there is inextricably spring up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which volition perhaps reach heights that the individual finds difficult to tolerate. One is reminded of the great poet's moving arraignment of the 'Heavenly Powers':

Ihr führt in'southward Leben uns hinein.
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn den Pein,
Denn jede Schuld racht sich auf Erden.

[To world, this weary earth, ye bring the states
To guilt ye allow the states daydreaming go,
And then exit repentance fierce to wring united states:
A moment'south guilt, an age of woe!
(Carlyle'southward translation of one of the Harp-player's songs in Goethe'due south Wilhelm Meister)]

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

---

If yous similar this reading, yous may find these web sites interesting too:

• A Library of Congress exhibit of some relevant photographs, commentaries, and facsimiles of Civilation and Its Discontents.
• A list of study questions some other instructor has cooked up for his students, covering the entire book.
• There are other sites which will probably prove up on the webliography for this chapter.

knoppwiself.blogspot.com

Source: https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch9/civilization.htm

Share this post