Why do the animals, kin to ourselves, not manifest any such cultural
struggle? Oh, we don’t know. Very probably certain of them, bees, ants,
termites, had to strive for thousands of centuries before they found
the way to those state institutions, that division of functions, those
restrictions upon individuals, which we admire them for to-day. It is
characteristic of our present state that we know by our own feelings
that we should not think ourselves happy in any of these communities of
the animal world, or in any of the rôles they delegate to individuals.
With other animal species it may be that a temporary deadlock has been
reached between the influences of their environment and the instincts
contending within them, so that a cessation of development has taken
place. In primitive man a fresh access of libido may have kindled a new
spurt of energy on the part of the instinct of destruction. There are a
great many questions in all this to which as yet we have no answer.
Another question concerns us more closely now. What means does
civilization make use of to hold in check the aggressiveness that
opposes it, to make it harmless, perhaps to get rid of it? Some of
these measures we have already come to know, though not yet the one
that is apparently the most important. We can study it in the evolution
of the individual. What happens in him to render his craving for
aggression innocuous? Something very curious, that we should never
have guessed and that yet seems simple enough. The aggressiveness is
introjected, ‘internalized’; in fact, it is sent back where it came
from, _i.e._ directed against the ego. It is there taken over by a part
of the ego that distinguishes itself from the rest as a super-ego,
and now, in the form of ‘conscience’, exercises the same propensity
to harsh aggressiveness against the ego that the ego would have liked
to enjoy against others. The tension between the strict super-ego and
the subordinate ego we call the sense of guilt; it manifests itself as
the need for punishment. Civilization therefore obtains the mastery
over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by enfeebling and
disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to keep
watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
As to the origin of the sense of guilt, analysts have different
views from those of the psychologists; nor is it easy for analysts to
explain it either. First of all, when one asks how a sense of guilt
arises in anyone, one is told something one cannot dispute: people feel
guilty (pious people call it ‘sinful’) when they have done something
they know to be ‘bad’. But then one sees how little this answer tells
one. Perhaps after some hesitation one will add that a person who has
not actually committed a bad act, but has merely become aware of the
intention to do so, can also hold himself guilty; and then one will ask
why in this case the intention is counted as equivalent to the deed. In
both cases, however, one is presupposing that wickedness has already
been recognized as reprehensible, as something that ought not to be
put into execution. How is this judgement arrived at? One may reject
the suggestion of an original—as one might say, natural—capacity for
discriminating between good and evil. Evil is often not at all that
which would injure or endanger the ego; on the contrary, it can also be
something that it desires, that would give it pleasure. An extraneous
influence is evidently at work; it is this that decides what is to
be called good and bad. Since their own feelings would not have led
men along the same path, they must have had a motive for obeying this
extraneous influence. It is easy to discover this motive in man’s
helplessness and dependence upon others; it can best be designated the
dread of losing love. If he loses the love of others on whom he is
dependent, he will forfeit also their protection against many dangers,
and above all he runs the risk that this stronger person will show his
superiority in the form of punishing him. What is bad is, therefore, to
begin with, whatever causes one to be threatened with a loss of love;
because of the dread of this loss, one must desist from it. That is why
it makes little difference whether one has already committed the bad
deed or only intends to do so; in either case the danger begins only
when the authority has found it out, and the latter would behave in the
same way in both cases.
We call this state of mind a ‘bad conscience’ but actually it does not
deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is obviously
only the dread of losing love, ‘social’ anxiety. In a little child
it can never be anything else, but in many adults too it has only
changed in so far as the larger human community takes the place of
the father or of both parents. Consequently such people habitually
permit themselves to do any bad deed that procures them something they
want, if only they are sure that no authority will discover it or make
them suffer for it; their anxiety relates only to the possibility
of detection.[23] Present-day society has to take into account the
prevalence of this state of mind.
A great change takes place as soon as the authority has been
internalized by the development of a super-ego. The manifestations of
conscience are then raised to a new level; to be accurate, one should
not call them conscience and sense of guilt before this.[24] At this
point the dread of discovery ceases to operate and also once for all
any difference between doing evil and wishing to do it, since nothing
is hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. The real seriousness
of the situation has vanished, it is true: for the new authority, the
super-ego, has no motive, as far as we know, for ill-treating the
ego with which it is itself closely bound up. But the influence of
the genetic derivation of these things, which causes what has been
outlived and surmounted to be re-lived, manifests itself so that on
the whole things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego
torments the sinful ego with the same feelings of dread and watches for
opportunities whereby the outer world can be made to punish it.
At this second stage of development, conscience exhibits a peculiarity
which was absent in the first and is not very easy to account for.
That is, the more righteous a man is the stricter and more suspicious
will his conscience be, so that ultimately it is precisely those
people who have carried holiness farthest who reproach themselves
with the deepest sinfulness. This means that virtue forfeits some of
her promised reward; the submissive and abstemious ego does not enjoy
the trust and confidence of its mentor, and, as it seems, strives in
vain to earn it. Now, to this some people will be ready to object
that these difficulties are artificialities. A relatively strict and
vigilant conscience is the very sign of a virtuous man, and though
saints may proclaim themselves sinners, they are not so wrong, in view
of the temptations of instinctual gratifications to which they are
peculiarly liable—since, as we know, temptations do but increase under
constant privation, whereas they subside, at any rate temporarily,
if they are sometimes gratified. The field of ethics is rich in
problems, and another of the facts we find here is that misfortune,
_i.e._ external deprivation, greatly intensifies the strength of
conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his
conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all kinds of things; when
some calamity befalls, he holds an inquisition within, discovers his
sin, heightens the standards of his conscience, imposes abstinences
on himself and punishes himself with penances.[25] Whole peoples have
acted in this way and still do so. But this is easily explained from
the original infantile stage of conscience which, as we thus see, is
not abandoned after the introjection into the super-ego, but persists
alongside and behind the latter. Fate is felt to be a substitute for
the agency of the parents: adversity means that one is no longer loved
by this highest power of all, and, threatened by this loss of love,
one humbles oneself again before the representative of the parents in
the super-ego which in happier days one had tried to disregard. This
becomes especially clear when destiny is looked upon in the strictly
religious sense as the expression of God’s will and nothing else. The
people of Israel believed themselves to be God’s favourite child, and
when the great Father hurled visitation after visitation upon them, it
still never shook them in this belief or caused them to doubt His power
and His justice; they proceeded instead to bring their prophets into
the world to declare their sinfulness to them and out of their sense
of guilt they constructed the stringent commandments of their priestly
religion. It is curious how differently a savage behaves! If he has had
bad fortune, he does not throw the blame on himself, but on his fetish,
who has plainly not done his duty by him, and he belabours it instead
of punishing himself.
Hence we know of two sources for feelings of guilt: that arising
from the dread of authority and the later one from the dread of
the super-ego. The first one compels us to renounce instinctual
gratification; the other presses over and above this towards
punishment, since the persistence of forbidden wishes cannot be
concealed from the super-ego. We have also heard how the severity of
the super-ego, the rigour of conscience, is to be explained. It simply
carries on the severity of external authority which it has succeeded
and to some extent replaced. We see now how renunciation of instinctual
gratification is related to the sense of guilt. Originally, it is
true, renunciation is the consequence of a dread of external authority;
one gives up pleasures so as not to lose its love. Having made this
renunciation, one is quits with authority, so to speak; no feeling of
guilt should remain. But with the dread of the super-ego the case is
different. Renunciation of gratification does not suffice here, for the
wish persists and is not capable of being hidden from the super-ego. In
spite of the renunciations made, feelings of guilt will be experienced
and this is a great disadvantage economically of the erection of
the super-ego, or, as one may say, of the formation of conscience.
Renunciation no longer has a completely absolving effect; virtuous
restraint is no longer rewarded by the assurance of love; a threatened
external unhappiness—loss of love and punishment meted out by external
authority—has been exchanged for a lasting inner unhappiness, the
tension of a sense of guilt.
These interrelations are so complicated and at the same time so
important that, in spite of the dangers of repetition, I will consider
them again from another angle. The chronological sequence would
thus be as follows: first, instinct-renunciation due to dread of an
aggression by external authority—this is, of course, tantamount to
the dread of loss of love, for love is a protection against these
punitive aggressions. Then follows the erection of an internal
authority, and instinctual renunciation due to dread of it—that is,
dread of conscience. In the second case, there is the equivalence of
wicked acts and wicked intentions; hence comes the sense of guilt,
the need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience carries
on the aggressiveness of authority. Thus far all seems to be clear;
but how can we find a place in this scheme for the effect produced
by misfortune (_i.e._ renunciations externally imposed), for the
effect it has of increasing the rigour of conscience? how account
for the exceptional stringency of conscience in the best men, those
least given to rebel against it? We have already explained both these
peculiarities of conscience, but probably we still have an impression
that these explanations do not go to the root of the matter, and that
they leave something still unexplained. And here at last comes in an
idea which is quite peculiar to psycho-analysis and alien to ordinary
ways of thinking. Its nature enables us to understand why the whole
matter necessarily seemed so confused and obscure to us. It tells us
this: in the beginning conscience (more correctly, the anxiety which
later became conscience) was the cause of instinctual renunciation,
but later this relation is reversed. Every renunciation then becomes a
dynamic fount of conscience; every fresh abandonment of gratification
increases its severity and intolerance; and if we could only bring it
better into harmony with what we already know about the development
of conscience, we should be tempted to make the following paradoxical
statement: Conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or:
Renunciation (externally imposed) gives rise to conscience, which then
demands further renunciations.
The contradiction between this proposition and our previous knowledge
about the genesis of conscience is not in actual fact so very great and
we can see a way in which it may be still further reduced. In order
to state the problem more easily, let us select the example of the
instinct of aggression, and let us suppose that the renunciation in
question is always a renunciation of aggression. This is, of course,
merely a provisional assumption. The effect of instinctual renunciation
on conscience then operates as follows: every impulse of aggression
which we omit to gratify is taken over by the super-ego and goes to
heighten its aggressiveness (against the ego). It does not fit in
well with this that the original aggressiveness of conscience should
represent a continuance of the rigour of external authority, and so
have nothing to do with renunciation. But we can get rid of this
discrepancy if we presume a different origin for the first quantum of
aggressiveness with which the super-ego was endowed. When authority
prevented the child from enjoying the first but most important
gratifications of all, aggressive impulses of considerable intensity
must have been evoked in it, irrespective of the particular nature of
the instinctual deprivations concerned. The child must necessarily have
had to give up the satisfaction of these revengeful aggressive wishes.
In this situation, in which it is economically so hard pressed, it
has recourse to certain mechanisms well known to us; by the process
of identification it absorbs into itself the invulnerable authority,
which then becomes the super-ego and comes into possession of all the
aggressiveness which the child would gladly have exercised against it.
The child’s ego has to content itself with the unhappy rôle of the
authority—the father—who has been thus degraded. It is, as so often,
a reversal of the original situation, ‘If I were father and you my
child, I would treat _you_ badly’. The relation between super-ego and
ego is a reproduction, distorted by a wish, of the real relations
between the ego, before it was subdivided, and an external object.
That is also typical. The essential difference, however, is that the
original severity of the super-ego does not—or not so much—represent
the severity which has been experienced or anticipated from the object,
but expresses the child’s own aggressiveness towards the latter. If
this is correct, one could truly assert that conscience is formed
in the beginning from the suppression of an aggressive impulse and
strengthened as time goes on by each fresh suppression of the kind.
Now, which of these two theories is the true one? The earlier, which
seemed genetically so unassailable, or the new one, which rounds
off our theories in such a welcome manner? Clearly, they are both
justified, and by the evidence, too, of direct observation; they do not
contradict each other, and even coincide at one point, for the child’s
revengeful aggressiveness will be in part provoked by the amount of
punishing aggression that it anticipates from the father. Experience
has shown, however, that the severity which a child’s super-ego
develops in no way corresponds to the severity of the treatment it has
itself experienced.[26] It seems to be independent of the latter; a
child which has been very leniently treated can acquire a very strict
conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence;
it is not difficult to assure oneself that strict upbringing also has
a strong influence on the formation of a child’s super-ego. It comes
to this, that the formation of the super-ego and the development of
conscience are determined in part by innate constitutional factors and
in part by the influence of the actual environment; and that is in
no way surprising—on the contrary, it is the invariable aetiological
condition of all such processes.[27]
It may also be said that when a child reacts to the first great
instinctual deprivations with an excessive aggressiveness and a
corresponding strictness of its super-ego, it is thereby following a
phylogenetic prototype, unheedful of what reaction would in reality be
justified; for the father of primitive times was certainly terrifying,
and one may safely attribute the utmost degree of aggressiveness
to him. The differences between the two theories of the genesis of
conscience are thus still further diminished if one passes from
individual to phylogenetic development. But then, on the other hand,
we find a new important difference between the two processes. We cannot
disregard the conclusion that man’s sense of guilt has its origin in
the Oedipus complex and was acquired when the father was killed by
the association of the brothers. At that time the aggression was not
suppressed but carried out, and it is this same act of aggression whose
suppression in the child we regard as the source of feelings of guilt.
Now, I should not be surprised if a reader were to cry out angrily:
‘So it makes no difference whether one does kill one’s father or does
not, one gets a feeling of guilt in either case! Here I should think
one may be allowed some doubts. Either it is not true that guilt is
evoked by suppressed aggressiveness or else the whole story about the
father-murder is a romance, and primeval man did not kill his father
any more often than people do nowadays. Besides this, if it is not a
romance but a plausible piece of history, it would only be an instance
of what we all expect to happen, namely, that one feels guilty because
one has really done something which cannot be justified. And what we
are all waiting for is for psycho-analysis to give us an explanation of
this reaction, which at any rate is something that happens every day.’
This is true, and we must make good the omission. There is no great
mystery about it either. When one has feelings of guilt after one
has committed some crime and because of it, this feeling should more
properly be called _remorse_. It relates only to the one act, and
clearly it presupposes that _conscience_, the capacity for feelings of
guilt, was already in existence before the deed. Remorse of this kind
can, therefore, never help us to find out the source of conscience and
feelings of guilt in general. In these everyday instances the course
of events is usually as follows: an instinctual need acquires the
strength to achieve fulfilment in spite of conscience, the strength
of which also has its limits, whereupon the inevitable reduction of
the need after satisfaction restores the earlier balance of forces.
Psycho-analysis is quite justified, therefore, in excluding the case
of a sense of guilt through remorse from this discussion, however
frequently it may occur and however great its importance may be
practically.
But if man’s sense of guilt goes back to the murder of the father, that
was undoubtedly an instance of ‘remorse’, and yet are we to suppose
that there were no conscience and feelings of guilt before the act
on that occasion? If so, where did the remorse come from then? This
instance must explain to us the riddle of the sense of guilt and so
make an end of our difficulties. And it will do so, as I believe.
This remorse was the result of the very earliest primal ambivalence
of feelings towards the father: the sons hated him, but they loved
him too; after their hate against him had been satisfied by their
aggressive acts, their love came to expression in their remorse about
the deed, set up the super-ego by identification with the father, gave
it the father’s power to punish as he would have done the aggression
they had performed, and created the restrictions which should prevent a
repetition of the deed. And since impulses to aggressions against the
father were repeated in the next generations, the feelings of guilt,
too, persisted, and were further reinforced every time an aggression
was suppressed anew and made over to the super-ego. At this point, it
seems to me, we can at last clearly perceive the part played by love
in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitableness of the sense
of guilt. It is not really a decisive matter whether one has killed
one’s father or abstained from the deed; one must feel guilty in either
case, for guilt is the expression of the conflict of ambivalence, the
eternal struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct.
This conflict is engendered as soon as man is confronted with the
task of living with his fellows; as long as he knows no other form of
life in common but that of the family, it must express itself in the
Oedipus complex, cause the development of conscience and create the
first feelings of guilt. When mankind tries to institute wider forms of
communal life, the same conflict continues to arise—in forms derived
from the past—and intensified so that a further reinforcement of the
sense of guilt results. Since culture obeys an inner erotic impulse
which bids it bind mankind into a closely-knit mass, it can achieve
this aim only by means of its vigilance in fomenting an ever-increasing
sense of guilt. That which began in relation to the father ends in
relation to the community. If civilization is an inevitable course of
development from the group of the family to the group of humanity as a
whole, then an intensification of the sense of guilt—resulting from the
innate conflict of ambivalence, from the eternal struggle between the
love and the death trends—will be inextricably bound up with it, until
perhaps the sense of guilt may swell to a magnitude that individuals
can hardly support. One is reminded of the telling accusation made by
the great poet against the ‘heavenly forces’:
Ye set our feet on this life’s road,
Ye watch our guilty, erring courses,
Then leave us, bowed beneath our load,
For earth its every debt enforces.[28]
And one may heave a sigh at the thought that it is vouchsafed to a
few, with hardly an effort, to salve from the whirlpool of their own
emotions the deepest truths, to which we others have to force our way,
ceaselessly groping amid torturing uncertainties.