On reaching the end of such a journey as this, the author must beg his
readers to pardon him for not having been a more skilful guide, not
sparing them bleak stretches of country at times and laborious detours
at others. There is no doubt that it could have been done better. I
will now try to make some amends.
First of all, I suspect the reader feels that the discussion about
the sense of guilt oversteps its proper boundaries in this essay and
takes up too much space, so that the rest of the subject-matter, which
is not always closely connected with it, gets pushed on one side.
This may have spoilt the composition of the work; but it faithfully
corresponds to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the
most important problem in the evolution of culture, and to convey that
the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness
through the heightening of the sense of guilt.[29] What sounds
puzzling in this statement, which is the final conclusion of our whole
investigation, is probably due to the quite peculiar relation—as yet
completely unexplained—the sense of guilt has to our consciousness. In
the common cases of remorse which we think normal it becomes clearly
perceptible to consciousness; indeed, we often speak of ‘consciousness
of guilt’ instead of sense of guilt. In our study of the neuroses,
in which we have found invaluable clues towards an understanding of
normal people, we find some very contradictory states of affairs in
this respect. In one of these maladies, the obsessional neurosis, the
sense of guilt makes itself loudly heard in consciousness; it dominates
the clinical picture as well as the patient’s life and lets hardly
anything else appear alongside of it. But in most of the other types
and forms of neurosis it remains completely unconscious, without its
effect being any less great, however. Our patients do not believe us
when we ascribe an ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ to them; in order to
become even moderately intelligible to them we have to explain that
the sense of guilt expresses itself in an unconscious seeking for
punishment. But its connection with the form of the neurosis is not to
be over-estimated; even in the obsessional neurosis there are people
who are not aware of their sense of guilt or who perceive it only as
a tormenting uneasiness or kind of anxiety and then not until they
are prevented from carrying out certain actions. We ought some day to
be able at last to understand these things; as yet we cannot. Here
perhaps is the place to remark that at bottom the sense of guilt is
nothing but a topographical variety of anxiety, and that in its later
phases it coincides completely with the dread of the super-ego. The
relation of anxiety to consciousness, moreover, is characterized by
the same extraordinary variations. Somewhere or other there is always
anxiety hidden behind all symptoms; at one moment, however, it sweeps
into consciousness, drowning everything else with its clamour, and at
the next it secretes itself so completely that we are forced to speak
of unconscious anxiety—or if we want to have a cleaner conscience
psychologically, since anxiety is after all only a perception—of
possibilities of anxiety. Consequently it is very likely that the sense
of guilt produced by culture is not perceived as such and remains
to a great extent unconscious, or comes to expression as a sort of
uneasiness or discontent for which other motivations are sought.
The different religions at any rate have never overlooked the part
played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come
forward with a claim, which I have not considered elsewhere,[30] to
save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. We indeed
have drawn our conclusions, from the way in which in Christianity this
salvation is won—the sacrificial death of one who therewith takes
the whole of the common guilt of all upon himself—about the occasion
on which this primal sense of guilt was first acquired, that is, the
occasion which was also the inception of culture.[31]
It will not be very important, but it may be just as well to go more
precisely into the meaning of certain words like super-ego, conscience,
sense of guilt, need for punishment, remorse, which we have perhaps
often used too loosely and in place of one another. They all relate
to the same situation, but they denote different aspects of it. The
super-ego is an agency or institution in the mind whose existence we
have inferred: conscience is a function we ascribe, among others, to
the super-ego; it consists of watching over and judging the actions and
intentions of the ego, exercising the functions of a censor. The sense
of guilt, the severity of the super-ego, is therefore the same thing as
the rigour of conscience; it is the perception the ego has that it is
watched in this way, the ego’s appreciation of the tension between its
strivings and the standards of the super-ego; and the anxiety that lies
behind all these relations, the dread of that critical institution,
the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part
of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of the
sadistic super-ego, _i.e._ which has brought a part of the instinct
of destruction at work within itself into the service of an erotic
attachment to the super-ego. We ought not to speak of conscience
before a super-ego is demonstrable; as to consciousness of guilt, we
must admit that it comes into being before the super-ego, therefore
before conscience. At that time it is the direct expression of the
dread of external authority, the recognition of the tension between
the ego and this latter; it is the direct derivative of the conflict
between the need for parental love and the urgency towards instinctual
gratification, and it is the thwarting of this urgency that provokes
the tendency to aggression. It is because these two different versions
of the sense of guilt—one arising from dread of the external and the
other from dread of the inner authority—are superimposed one on the
other that our insight into the relations of conscience has been
hampered in so many ways. Remorse is a general term denoting the ego’s
reaction under a special form of the sense of guilt; it includes the
almost unaltered sensory material belonging to the anxiety that is
at work behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and may
include the need for punishment; it too, therefore, may occur before
conscience has developed.
Further, it will do no harm for us to review once more the
contradictions which have confused us at times during our enquiries.
The sense of guilt, we said at one point, was the consequence of
uncommitted aggressions; but another time and in particular in the
case of its historical beginning, the murder of the father, it was the
consequence of an aggression that was carried out. We also found a way
out of this difficulty. The development of the inner authority, the
super-ego, was precisely what radically altered the whole situation.
Before this, the sense of guilt coincided with remorse; we observe, in
saying this, that the term remorse is to be reserved for the reaction
after an actual performance of an aggressive deed. After this, the
omniscience of the super-ego robbed the distinction between intended
aggressions and aggressions committed of its significance; a mere
intention to commit an act of violence could then evoke a sense of
guilt—as psycho-analysis has found—as well as one which has actually
been committed—as all the world knows. The conflict of ambivalence
between the two primal instincts leaves the same impress on the
psychological situation, irrespective of the change that has taken
place in this. A temptation arises to look here for an explanation of
the mystery of the varying relation between the sense of guilt and
consciousness. The sense of guilt which is due to remorse for an evil
deed must always have been conscious; that due to a perception of an
evil impulse could have remained unconscious. But it cannot be as
simple as that: the obsessional neurosis contradicts it emphatically.
The second contradiction was that the aggressive energy with which
one imagined the super-ego to be endowed was, according to one view,
merely a continuation of the punitive energy belonging to external
authority, preserved within the mind; whereas according to another view
it consisted, on the contrary, of aggressive energy originating in
the self, levelled against this inhibiting authority but not allowed
to discharge itself in actions. The first view seemed to accord
better with the history of the sense of guilt, the second with the
theory of it. More searching reflection has resolved this apparently
irreconcilable contradiction almost too completely; what remained as
essential and common to both was that in both cases we were dealing
with an aggression that had been turned inward. Clinical observation,
moreover, really permits us to distinguish two sources for the
aggressiveness we ascribe to the super-ego, each of which in any given
case may be operating predominantly, but which usually are both at work
together.
This, I think, is the place to suggest that a proposal which I
previously put forward as a provisional assumption should be taken
in earnest. In the latest analytical literature[32] a predilection
has been shown for the view that any kind of privation, any thwarted
instinctual gratification, results in a heightening of the sense of
guilt, or may do so. I believe one obtains a great simplification
of theory if one regards this as valid _only_ for the aggressive
instincts, and that little will be found to contradict this assumption.
How then is it to be explained dynamically and economically that
a heightening of the sense of guilt should appear in place of
an unfulfilled erotic desire? This can surely only happen in a
roundabout way: the thwarting of the erotic gratification provokes an
access of aggressiveness against the person who interfered with the
gratification, and then this tendency to aggression in its turn has
itself to be suppressed. So then it is, after all, only the aggression
which is changed into guilt, by being suppressed and made over to
the super-ego. I am convinced that very many processes will admit of
much simpler and clearer explanation if we restrict the findings of
psycho-analysis in respect of the origin of the sense of guilt to the
aggressive instincts. Reference to the clinical material here gives
us no unequivocal answer, because, according to our own hypothesis,
the two kinds of instincts hardly ever appear in a pure form, unmixed
with each other; but the investigation of extreme cases would probably
point in the direction I anticipate. I am tempted to extract our
first advantage from this narrower conception by applying it to the
repression-process. The symptoms of neurosis, as we have learnt, are
essentially substitutive gratifications for unfulfilled sexual wishes.
In the course of our analytic work we have found to our surprise that
perhaps every neurosis masks a certain amount of unconscious sense of
guilt, which in its turn reinforces the symptoms by exploiting them as
punishment. One is now inclined to suggest the following statement as a
possible formulation: when an instinctual trend undergoes repression,
its libidinal elements are transformed into symptoms and its aggressive
components into a sense of guilt. Even if this statement is only
accurate as an approximation it merits our interest.
Some readers of this essay, too, may be under the impression that the
formula of the struggle between Eros and the death instinct has been
reiterated too often. It is supposed to characterize the cultural
process which evolves in humanity; but it has been related also to
the development of the individual, and besides this, is supposed
to have revealed the secret of organic life in general. It becomes
necessary for us to examine the relation of these three processes to
one another. Now, the repetition of the same formula is vindicated by
the consideration that the cultural processes both in humanity and in
the development of an individual are life-processes; consequently they
must both partake of the most universal characteristic of life. On the
other hand, evidence of the presence of this universal characteristic
does not help us to discriminate, unless it is further narrowed down
by special qualifications. We can therefore set our minds at rest only
if we say that the cultural process is the particular modification
undergone by the life-process under the influence of the task set
before it by Eros and stimulated by Ananke, external necessity; and
this task is that of uniting single human beings into a larger unity
with libidinal attachments between them. When, however, we compare
the cultural process in humanity with the process of development or
upbringing in an individual human being, we shall conclude without much
hesitation that the two are very similar in nature, if not in fact the
same process applied to a different kind of object. The civilizing
process in the human species is naturally more of an abstraction than
the development of an individual, and therefore harder to apprehend
in concrete terms, nor should the discovery of analogies be pushed
to extremes; but in view of the similar character of the aims of the
two processes—in one the incorporation of an individual as a member
of a group and in the other the creation of a single group out of
many individuals—the similarity of the means employed and of the
results obtained in the two cases is not surprising. In view of its
exceptional importance, we must no longer postpone mention of one
feature differentiating the two processes. The development of the
individual is ordered according to the programme laid down by the
pleasure-principle, namely, the attainment of happiness, and to this
main objective it holds firmly; the incorporation of the individual as
a member of a community, or his adaptation to it, seems like an almost
unavoidable condition which has to be filled before he can attain this
objective of happiness. If he could achieve it without fulfilling this
condition it would perhaps be better. To express it differently, we may
say: individual development seems to us a product of the interplay of
two trends, the striving for happiness, generally called ‘egoistic’,
and the impulse towards merging with others in the community, which
we call ‘altruistic’. Neither of these descriptions goes far beneath
the surface. In individual development, as we have said, the main
accent falls on the egoistic trend, the striving for happiness; while
the other tendency, which may be called the ‘cultural’ one, usually
contents itself with instituting restrictions. But things are different
in the development of culture: here far the most important aim is
that of creating a single unity out of individual men and women, while
the objective of happiness, though still present, is pushed into the
background; it almost seems as if humanity could be most successfully
united into one great whole if there were no need to trouble about the
happiness of individuals. The process of development in individuals
must therefore be admitted to have its special features which are not
repeated in the cultural evolution of humanity; the two processes only
necessarily coincide in so far as the first also includes the aim of
incorporation into the community.
Just as a planet circles round its central body while at the same time
rotating on its own axis, so the individual man takes his part in the
course of humanity’s development as he goes on his way through life.
But to our dull eyes the play of forces in the heavens seems set fast
in a never-varying scheme, though in organic life we can still see how
the forces contend with one another and the results of the conflict
change from day to day. So in every individual the two trends, one
towards personal happiness and the other towards unity with the rest of
humanity, must contend with each other; so must the two processes of
individual and of cultural development oppose each other and dispute
the ground against each other. This struggle between individual and
society, however, is not derived from the antagonism of the primal
instincts, Eros and Death, which are probably irreconcilable; it is a
dissension in the camp of the libido itself, comparable to the contest
between the ego and its objects for a share of the libido; and it
does eventually admit of a solution in the individual, as we may hope
it will also do in the future of civilization—however greatly it may
oppress the lives of individuals at the present time.
The analogy between the process of cultural evolution and the path of
individual development may be carried further in an important respect.
It can be maintained that the community, too, develops a super-ego,
under whose influence cultural evolution proceeds. It would be an
enticing task for an authority on human systems of culture to work
out this analogy in specific cases. I will confine myself to pointing
out certain striking details. The super-ego of any given epoch of
civilization originates in the same way as that of an individual;
it is based on the impression left behind them by great leading
personalities, men of outstanding force of mind, or men in whom some
one human tendency has developed in unusual strength and purity, often
for that reason very disproportionately. In many instances the analogy
goes still further, in that during their lives—often enough, even if
not always—such persons are ridiculed by others, ill-used or even
cruelly done to death, just as happened with the primal father who also
rose again to become a deity long after his death by violence. The most
striking example of this double fate is the figure of Jesus Christ, if
indeed it does not itself belong to the realm of mythology which called
it into being out of a dim memory of that primordial event. Another
point of agreement is that the cultural super-ego, just like that of
an individual, sets up high ideals and standards, and that failure to
fulfil them is punished by both with ‘anxiety of conscience’. In this
particular, indeed, we come across the remarkable circumstance that the
mental processes concerned here are actually more familiar to us and
more accessible to consciousness when they proceed from the group than
they can be in the individual. In the latter, when tension arises, the
aggressions of the super-ego voicing its noisy reproaches are all that
is perceived, while its injunctions themselves often remain unconscious
in the background. If we bring them to the knowledge of consciousness
we find that they coincide with the demands of the prevailing cultural
super-ego. At this point the two processes, that of the evolution of
the group and the development of the individual, are always firmly
mortised together, so to speak. Consequently many of the effects and
properties of the super-ego can be more easily detected through its
operations in the group than in the individual.
The cultural super-ego has elaborated its ideals and erected its
standards. Those of its demands which deal with the relations of
human beings to one another are comprised under the name of ethics.
The greatest value has at all times been set upon systems of ethics,
as if men had expected them in particular to achieve something
especially important. And ethics does in fact deal predominantly with
the point which is easily seen to be the sorest of all in any scheme
of civilization. Ethics must be regarded therefore as a therapeutic
effort: as an endeavour to achieve something through the standards
imposed by the super-ego which had not been attained by the work of
civilization in other ways. We already know—it is what we have been
discussing—that the question is how to dislodge the greatest obstacle
to civilization, the constitutional tendency in men to aggressions
against one another; and for that very reason the commandment to
love one’s neighbour as oneself—probably the most recent of the
cultural super-ego’s demands—is especially interesting to us. In our
investigations and our therapy of the neuroses we cannot avoid finding
fault with the super-ego of the individual on two counts: in commanding
and prohibiting with such severity it troubles too little about the
happiness of the ego, and it fails to take into account sufficiently
the difficulties in the way of obeying it—the strength of instinctual
cravings in the id and the hardships of external environment.
Consequently in our therapy we often find ourselves obliged to do
battle with the super-ego and work to moderate its demands. Exactly
the same objections can be made against the ethical standards of the
cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble enough about the mental
constitution of human beings; it enjoins a command and never asks
whether or not it is possible for them to obey it. It presumes, on the
contrary, that a man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that
is required of it—that his ego has unlimited power over his id. This is
an error; even in so-called normal people the power of controlling the
id cannot be increased beyond certain limits. If one asks more of them,
one produces revolt or neurosis in individuals or makes them unhappy.
The command to love our neighbours as ourselves is the strongest
defence there is against human aggressiveness and it is a superlative
example of the unpsychological attitude of the cultural super-ego.
The command is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of
love can only lower its value and not remedy the evil. Civilization
pays no heed to all this; it merely prates that the harder it is to
obey the more laudable the obedience. The fact remains that anyone
who follows such preaching in the present state of civilization only
puts himself at a disadvantage beside all those who set it at naught.
What an overwhelming obstacle to civilization aggression must be if
the defence against it can cause as much misery as aggression itself!
‘Natural’ ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here beyond the
narcissistic satisfaction of thinking oneself better than others. The
variety of ethics that links itself with religion brings in at this
point its promises of a better future life. I should imagine that as
long as virtue is not rewarded in this life ethics will preach in vain.
I too think it unquestionable that an actual change in men’s attitude
to property would be of more help in this direction than any ethical
commands; but among the Socialists this proposal is obscured by new
idealistic expectations disregarding human nature, which detract from
its value in actual practice.
It seems to me that the point of view which seeks to follow the
phenomena of cultural evolution as manifestations of a super-ego
promises to yield still further discoveries. I am coming quickly to
an end. There is one question, however, which I can hardly ignore. If
the evolution of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity with
the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed
in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of
civilization—or epochs of it—possibly even the whole of humanity—have
become ‘neurotic’ under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To
analytic dissection of these neuroses therapeutic recommendations might
follow which could claim a great practical interest. I would not say
that such an attempt to apply psycho-analysis to civilized society
would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behoves us to be
very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with
analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with
concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and
have matured. The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be
confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual
we can use as a starting-point the contrast presented to us between
the patient and his environment which we assume to be ‘normal’. No
such background as this would be available for any society similarly
affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with
regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be
the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one
possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite
of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will
venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities.
For various reasons, it is very far from my intention to express any
opinion concerning the value of human civilization. I have endeavoured
to guard myself against the enthusiastic partiality which believes our
civilization to be the most precious thing that we possess or could
acquire, and thinks it must inevitably lead us to undreamt-of heights
of perfection. I can at any rate listen without taking umbrage to those
critics who aver that when one surveys the aims of civilization and the
means it employs, one is bound to conclude that the whole thing is not
worth the effort and that in the end it can only produce a state of
things which no individual will be able to bear. My impartiality is
all the easier to me since I know very little about these things and am
sure only of one thing, that the judgements of value made by mankind
are immediately determined by their desires for happiness: in other
words, that those judgements are attempts to prop up their illusions
with arguments. I could understand it very well if anyone were to point
to the inevitable nature of the process of cultural development and
say, for instance, that the tendency to institute restrictions upon
sexual life or to carry humanitarian ideals into effect at the cost of
natural selection are developmental trends which it is impossible to
avert or divert, and to which it is best for us to submit as though
they were natural necessities. I know, too, the objection that can
be raised against this: that tendencies such as these, which are
believed to have insuperable power behind them, have often in the
history of man been thrown aside and replaced by others. My courage
fails me, therefore, at the thought of rising up as a prophet before
my fellow-men, and I bow to their reproach that I have no consolation
to offer them; for at bottom this is what they all demand—the frenzied
revolutionary as passionately as the most pious believer.
The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether
and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeed
in mastering the derangements of communal life caused by the human
instinct of aggression and self-destruction. In this connection,
perhaps the phase through which we are at this moment passing deserves
special interest. Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces
of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily
exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises
a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of
apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two
‘heavenly forces’, eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to
maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.