We have glided unawares out of the economic plane over into the
psychological. At first we were tempted to seek the essence of culture
in the existing material resources and in the arrangements for their
distribution. But with the discovery that every culture is based on
compulsory labour and instinctual renunciation, and that it therefore
inevitably evokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it
became clear that the resources themselves, the means of acquiring them,
and the arrangements for their distribution could not be its essential
or unique characteristic; for they are threatened by the rebelliousness
and destructive passions of the members of the culture. Thus in addition
to the resources there are the means of defending culture: the coercive
measures, and others that are intended to reconcile men to it and to
recompense them for their sacrifices. And these last may be described as
the psychical sphere of culture.
For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an
instinct cannot be satisfied as ‘frustration’, the means by which this
frustration is secured as ‘prohibition’, and the condition produced by
the prohibition as ‘privation’. Then the next step is to distinguish
between privations that do affect everybody and those that do not, those
that merely affect groups, classes, or even individuals. The former are
the oldest; with the prohibitions that cause them culture began, who
knows how many thousands of years ago, to detach itself from the
primordial animal condition of mankind. To our surprise we have found
that they are still operative, that they still form the kernel of the
hostility to culture. The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are
born anew with every child; there is a class of men, the neurotics, who
react already to this first group of frustrations by an asocial
attitude. Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism,
and of murder. It seems strange to classify these, in repudiating which
all men seem to be at one, with those others, about whose permissibility
or impermissibility in our culture there is so vigorous a dispute; but
psychologically one is justified in doing this. Nor is the attitude of
culture to these oldest instinctual wishes the same in each case;
cannibalism alone seems to be proscribed by everyone, and—to other than
analytic observation—completely overcome; the strength of the incest
wishes can still be perceived behind the prohibition; and under certain
conditions murder is still practised, indeed enjoined, by our culture.
It is possible that cultural developments lie before us, in which yet
other wish-gratifications, which are to-day entirely permissible, will
appear just as disagreeable as those of cannibalism do now.
Already in these earliest instinctual renunciations a psychological
factor is involved, which remains of great importance for everything
that follows. It is not true to say that the human mind has undergone no
development since the earliest times and that in contrast to the
advances of science and technical skill it is still the same to-day as
at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these advances
here. It is in accordance with the course of our development that
external compulsion is gradually internalized, in that a special mental
function, man’s super-ego, takes it under its jurisdiction. Every child
presents to us the model of this transformation; it is only by that
means that it becomes a moral and social being. This strengthening of
the super-ego is a highly valuable psychological possession for culture.
Those people in whom it has taken place, from being the foes of culture,
become its supporters. The greater their number in a cultural community,
the more secure it is and the more easily can it dispense with external
coercion. Now the degree of this internalization differs widely in the
case of each instinctual prohibition. As far as the earliest demands of
culture, already mentioned, are concerned, the process of
internalization seems to have been to a great extent accomplished, if we
leave out of account the unwelcome exception of the neurotics. But the
case is altered when we turn to the other instinctual claims. One notes
with surprise and concern that a majority of men obey the cultural
prohibitions in question only under the pressure of external force, in
fact only where the latter can assert itself and for as long as it is an
object of fear. This also holds good for those so-called moral cultural
demands, which in the same way apply to everyone. The greater part of
what one experiences of man’s moral untrustworthiness is to be explained
in this connection. There are innumerable civilized people who would
shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify
their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have
no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as
they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many
cultural epochs.
If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of
society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and
has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected
classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they
will do everything in their power to rid themselves of their own surplus
of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent
will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous
outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the
satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the
suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all
modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should
develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence
they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too
small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an
internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed
classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these
prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture
itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These
classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the
more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been
overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied
and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither
has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.
The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized—to express it
popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of the members—is not
the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value
of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic
creations, that is to say, of the satisfactions they both yield.
One will be only too readily inclined to include among the psychical
possessions of a culture its ideals, that is, its judgements of what are
its loftiest and its most ambitious accomplishments. It seems at first
as if these ideals would determine the achievements of the cultural
group; but the actual process would seem to be that the ideals are
modelled on the first achievements that the co-operation of internal
ability and external circumstances made possible, and that now these
first achievements are merely held fast by the ideal as examples to be
followed. The satisfaction the ideal gives to the members of the culture
is thus of a narcissistic nature, it is based on pride in what has
already been successfully achieved. To make this satisfaction complete
the culture compares itself with others which have applied themselves to
other tasks and have developed other ideals. On the strength of these
differences every culture claims the right to despise the rest. In this
way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between
different cultural groups, as can be most clearly seen among nations.
The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also one
of the forces that effectively counteract the hostility to culture
within the cultural group. It can be shared not only by the favoured
classes, which enjoy the benefits of this culture, but also by the
suppressed, since the right to despise those that are outside it
compensates them for the wrongs they suffer in their own group. True,
one is a miserable plebeian, tormented by obligations and military
service, but withal one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the
task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This
identification of the suppressed with the class that governs and
exploits them is, however, only a part of a larger whole. Thus the
former can be attached affectively to the latter; in spite of their
animosity they can find their ideals in their masters. Unless such
relations, fundamentally of a satisfying kind, were in existence, it
would be impossible to understand how so many cultures have contrived to
exist for so long in spite of the justified hostility of great masses of
men.
Different in kind is the satisfaction that art yields to the members of
a cultural group. As a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who
are engaged in exhausting labour and who have not enjoyed the benefits
of individual education. As we have long known, art offers substitutive
gratifications for the oldest cultural renunciations, still always most
deeply felt, and for that reason serves like nothing else to reconcile
men to the sacrifices they have made on culture’s behalf. On the other
hand, works of art promote the feelings of identification, of which
every cultural group has so much need, in the occasion they provide for
the sharing of highly valued emotional experiences. And when they
represent the achievements of a particular culture, thus in an
impressive way recalling it to its ideals, they also subserve a
narcissistic gratification.
No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important part
of the psychical inventory of a culture: that is to say, its—in the
broadest sense—religious ideas; in other words, the use of which will be
justified later, its illusions.