IV

This task seems too big a one; one may well confess oneself diffident.

Here follows what little I have been able to elicit about it.

Once primitive man had made the discovery that it lay in his own

hands—speaking literally—to improve his lot on earth by working, it

cannot have been a matter of indifference to him whether another

man worked with him or against him. The other acquired the value

of a fellow-worker, and it was advantageous to live with him. Even

earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had adopted the habit of

forming families: his first helpers were probably the members of his

family. One may suppose that the founding of families was in some way

connected with the period when the need for genital satisfaction,

no longer appearing like an occasional guest who turns up suddenly

and then vanishes without letting one hear anything of him for long

intervals, had settled down with each man like a permanent lodger. When

this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or

rather, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who wanted

not to be separated from her helpless young, in their interests, too,

had to stay by the stronger male.[13] In this primitive family one

essential feature of culture is lacking; the will of the father, the

head of it, was unfettered. I have endeavoured in _Totem und Tabu_ to

show how the way led from this family-life to the succeeding phase of

communal existence in the form of a band of brothers. By overpowering

the father, the sons had discovered that several men united can be

stronger than a single man. The totemic stage of culture is founded

upon the restrictions that the band were obliged to impose on one

another in order to maintain the new system. These taboos were the

first ‘Right’ or law. The life of human beings in common therefore

had a twofold foundation, _i.e._ the compulsion to work, created by

external necessity, and the power of love, causing the male to wish to

keep his sexual object, the female, near him, and the female to keep

near her that part of herself which has become detached from her, her

child. Eros and Ananke were the parents of human culture, too. The

first result of culture was that a larger number of human beings could

then live together in common. And since the two great powers were here

co-operating together, one might have expected that further cultural

evolution would have proceeded smoothly towards ever greater mastery

over the external world, as well as towards greater extension in the

numbers of men sharing the life in common. Nor is it easy to understand

how this culture can be felt as anything but satisfying by those who

partake of it.

Before we go on to enquire where the disturbances in it arise, we will

let ourselves digress from the point that love was one of the founders

of culture and so fill a gap left in our previous discussion. We

said that man, having found by experience that sexual (genital) love

afforded him his greatest gratification, so that it became in effect a

prototype of all happiness to him, must have been thereby impelled to

seek his happiness further along the path of sexual relations, to make

genital erotism the central point of his life. We went on to say that

in so doing he becomes to a very dangerous degree dependent on a part

of the outer world, namely, on his chosen love-object, and this exposes

him to most painful sufferings if he is rejected by it or loses it

through death or defection. The wise men of all ages have consequently

warned us emphatically against this way of life; but in spite of all it

retains its attraction for a great number of people.

A small minority are enabled by their constitution nevertheless

to find happiness along the path of love; but far-reaching mental

transformations of the erotic function are necessary before this is

possible. These people make themselves independent of their object’s

acquiescence by transferring the main value from the fact of being

loved to their own act of loving; they protect themselves against loss

of it by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all

men equally, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of

genital love by turning away from its sexual aim and modifying the

instinct into an impulse with an _inhibited aim_. The state which they

induce in themselves by this process—an unchangeable, undeviating,

tender attitude—has little superficial likeness to the stormy

vicissitudes of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived.

It seems that Saint Francis of Assisi may have carried this method of

using love to produce an inner feeling of happiness as far as anyone;

what we are thus characterizing as one of the procedures by which the

pleasure-principle fulfils itself has in fact been linked up in many

ways with religion; the connection between them may lie in those remote

fastnesses of the mind where the distinctions between the ego and

objects and between the various objects become matters of indifference.

From one ethical standpoint, the deeper motivation of which will

later become clear to us, this inclination towards an all-embracing

love of others and of the world at large is regarded as the highest

state of mind of which man is capable. Even at this early stage in the

discussion I will not withhold the two principal objections we have to

raise against this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to

us to lose some of its own value, since it does an injustice to its

object. And secondly, not all men are worthy of love.

The love that instituted the family still retains its power; in its

original form it does not stop short of direct sexual satisfaction, and

in its modified form as aim-inhibited friendliness it influences our

civilization. In both these forms it carries on its task of binding

men and women to one another, and it does this with greater intensity

than can be achieved through the interest of work in common. The casual

and undifferentiated way in which the word ‘love’ is employed by

language has its genetic justification. In general usage the relation

between a man and a woman whose genital desires have led them to found

a family is called love; but the positive attitude of feeling between

parents and children, between brothers and sisters in a family, is

also called love, although to us this relation merits the description

of aim-inhibited love or affection. Love with an inhibited aim was

indeed originally full sensual love and in men’s unconscious minds is

so still. Both of them, the sensual and the aim-inhibited forms, reach

out beyond the family and create new bonds with others who before

were strangers. Genital love leads to the forming of new families;

aim-inhibited love to ‘friendships’, which are valuable culturally

because they do not entail many of the limitations of genital love—for

instance, its exclusiveness. But the interrelations between love and

culture lose their simplicity as development proceeds. On the one hand,

love opposes the interests of culture; on the other, culture menaces

love with grievous restrictions.

This rift between them seems inevitable; the cause of it is not

immediately recognizable. It expresses itself first in a conflict

between the family and the larger community to which the individual

belongs. We have seen already that one of culture’s principal

endeavours is to cement men and women together into larger units. But

the family will not give up the individual. The closer the attachment

between the members of it, the more they often tend to remain aloof

from others, and the harder it is for them to enter into the wider

circle of the world at large. That form of life in common which is

phylogenetically older, and is in childhood its only form, resists

being displaced by the type that becomes acquired later with culture.

Detachment from the family has become a task that awaits every

adolescent, and often society helps him through it with pubertal and

initiatory rites. One gets the impression that these difficulties form

an integral part of every process of mental evolution—and indeed, at

bottom, of every organic development, too.

The next discord is caused by women, who soon become antithetical to

cultural trends and spread around them their conservative influence—the

women who at the beginning laid the foundations of culture by the

appeal of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and

sexual life; the work of civilization has become more and more men’s

business; it confronts them with ever harder tasks, compels them to

sublimations of instinct which women are not easily able to achieve.

Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy at his disposal,

he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best

advantage. What he employs for cultural purposes he withdraws to a

great extent from women and his sexual life; his constant association

with men and his dependence on his relations with them even estrange

him from his duties as husband and father. Woman finds herself thus

forced into the background by the claims of culture and she adopts an

inimical attitude towards it.

The tendency of culture to set restrictions upon sexual life is no

less evident than its other aim of widening its sphere of operations.

Even the earliest phase of it, the totemic, brought in its train the

prohibition against incestuous object-choice, perhaps the most maiming

wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life of man.

Further limitations are laid on it by taboos, laws and customs, which

touch men as well as women. Various types of culture differ in the

lengths to which they carry this; and the material structure of the

social fabric also affects the measure of sexual freedom that remains.

We have seen that culture obeys the laws of psychological economic

necessity in making the restrictions, for it obtains a great part of

the mental energy it needs by subtracting it from sexuality. Culture

behaves towards sexuality in this respect like a tribe or a section

of the population which has gained the upper hand and is exploiting

the rest to its own advantage. Fear of a revolt among the oppressed

then becomes a motive for even stricter regulations. A high-water mark

in this type of development has been reached in our Western European

civilization. Psychologically it is fully justified in beginning by

censuring any manifestations of the sexual life of children, for there

would be no prospect of curbing the sexual desires of adults if the

ground had not been prepared for it in childhood. Nevertheless there

is no sort of justification for the lengths beyond this to which

civilized society goes in actually denying the existence of these

manifestations, which are not merely demonstrable but positively

glaring. Where sexually mature persons are concerned, object-choice is

further narrowed down to the opposite sex and most of the extragenital

forms of satisfaction are interdicted as perversions. The standard

which declares itself in these prohibitions is that of a sexual life

identical for all; it pays no heed to the disparities in the inborn

and acquired sexual constitutions of individuals and cuts off a

considerable number of them from sexual enjoyment, thus becoming a

cause of grievous injustice. The effect of these restrictive measures

might presumably be that all the sexual interest of those who are

normal and not constitutionally handicapped could flow without further

forfeiture into the channel left open to it. But the only outlet not

thus censured, heterosexual genital love, is further circumscribed by

the barriers of legitimacy and monogamy. Present-day civilization gives

us plainly to understand that sexual relations are permitted only on

the basis of a final, indissoluble bond between a man and woman; that

sexuality as a source of enjoyment for its own sake is unacceptable

to it; and that its intention is to tolerate it only as the hitherto

irreplaceable means of multiplying the human race.

This, of course, represents an extreme. Everyone knows that it has

proved impossible to put it into execution, even for short periods.

Only the weaklings have submitted to such comprehensive interference

with their sexual freedom, and stronger natures have done so only

under one compensatory condition, of which mention may be made later.

Civilized society has seen itself obliged to pass over in silence many

transgressions which by its own ordinances it ought to have penalized.

This does not justify anyone, however, in leaning towards the other

side and assuming that, because it does not achieve all it aims at,

such an attitude on the part of society is altogether harmless. The

sexual life of civilized man is seriously disabled, whatever we may

say; it sometimes makes an impression of being a function in process of

becoming atrophied, just as organs like our teeth and our hair seem to

be. One is probably right in supposing that the importance of sexuality

as a source of pleasurable sensations, _i.e._ as a means of fulfilling

the purpose of life, has perceptibly decreased.[14] Sometimes one

imagines one perceives that it is not only the oppression of culture,

but something in the nature of the function itself that denies us full

satisfaction and urges us in other directions. This may be an error;

it is hard to decide.[15]