One would suppose that this last proposal could be carried out without
any special difficulty. It is true that it would involve some measure of
renunciation, but one would gain, perhaps, more than one lost, and a
great danger would be avoided. But people have a horror of it, as if
civilization would thereby be exposed to an even greater danger. When
Saint Boniface felled the tree which was venerated as sacred by the
Saxons, those who stood round expected some fearful event to follow the
outrage. It did not happen, and the Saxons were baptized.
It is manifestly in the interest of man’s communal existence, which
would not otherwise be practicable, that civilization has laid down the
commandment that one shall not kill the neighbour whom one hates, who is
in one’s way, or whose property one covets. For the murderer would draw
on to himself the vengeance of the murdered man’s kinsmen and the secret
envy of the others who feel as much inward inclination as he did to such
an act of violence. Thus he would not enjoy his revenge or his spoil for
long, but would have every prospect of being killed soon himself. Even
if he could defend himself against single foes by his extraordinary
strength and caution, he would be bound to succumb to a combination of
these weaker foes. If a combination of this sort did not take place,
then murder would continue ceaselessly, and the end of it would be that
men would exterminate one another. It would be the same state of affairs
among individuals that still prevails in Corsica among families, but
otherwise survives only among nations. Insecurity of life, an equal
danger for all, now unites men into one society, which forbids the
individual to kill and reserves to itself the right to kill in the name
of society the man who violates this prohibition. This, then, is justice
and punishment.
We do not, however, tell others of this rational basis for the murder
prohibition; we declare, on the contrary, that God is its author. Thus,
making bold to divine his intentions, we find that he has no wish,
either, for men to exterminate each other. By acting thus we invest the
cultural prohibition with a quite peculiar solemnity, but at the same
time we risk making its observance dependent on belief in God. If we
retract this step, no longer saddling God with our own wishes, and
content ourselves with the social justification for the cultural
prohibition, then we renounce, it is true, its hallowed nature, but we
also avoid endangering its existence. And we gain something else as
well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection the character of
sanctity and inviolability, of other-worldliness, one might say, has
been extended from some few important prohibitions to all other cultural
institutions and laws and ordinances. And often the halo becomes these
none too well; not only do they invalidate each other by making
conflicting decisions according to the time and place of their origin;
even apart from this they betray every sign of human inadequacy. One can
easily recognize among them things which can only be the product of
shortsightedness and apprehensiveness, the expression of narrow
interests, or the result of inadequate hypotheses. The criticism to
which one must subject them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent
people’s respect for other and more justified cultural demands. As it is
a delicate task to decide what God has himself ordained and what derives
rather from the authority of an allpowerful parliament or a supreme
judicial decision, it would be an indubitable advantage to leave God out
of the question altogether, and to admit honestly the purely human
origin of all cultural laws and institutions. Along with their
pretensions to sanctity the rigid and immutable nature of these laws and
regulations would also cease. Men would realize that these have been
made, not so much to rule them, as, on the contrary, to serve their
interests; they would acquire a more friendly attitude to them, and
instead of aiming at their abolition they would aim only at improving
them. This would be an important advance on the road which leads to
reconciliation with the burden of culture.
But here our plea for a purely rational basis for cultural laws, that is
to say, for deriving them from social necessity, is interrupted by a
sudden doubt. We have chosen as our example the origin of the murder
prohibition. But does our account of it correspond to historical truth?
We fear not; it appears to be merely a rationalistic construction. With
the help of psycho-analysis we have studied this very point in the
history of human culture, and supported by this study we are bound to
say that in reality it did not happen like this. Even in men to-day
purely reasonable motives are of little avail against passionate
impulses. How much weaker, then, must they have been in the primordial
animal man! Perhaps even now his descendants would still kill one
another without inhibition, if there had not been among those acts of
murder one—the slaughter of the primal father—which evoked an
irresistible emotional reaction, momentous in its consequences. From it
arose the commandment: thou shalt not kill, which in totemism was
confined to the father-substitute, and was later extended to others, but
which even to-day is not universally observed.
But according to arguments which I need not repeat here, that primal
father has been the prototype of God, the model after which later
generations have formed their figure of God. Hence the religious
explanation is right. God was actually concerned in the origin of that
prohibition; his influence, not insight into what was necessary for
society, brought it into being. And the process of attributing man’s
will to God is fully justified; for men, knowing that they had brutally
set aside the father, determined, in the reaction to their outrage, to
respect his will in future. And so the religious doctrine does give us
the historical truth, though of course in a somewhat remodelled and
disguised form; our rational explanation belies it.
We now observe that the stock of religious ideas contains not only
wish-fulfilments, but also important historical memories. What
matchless, what abundant power this combination of past and present must
give to religion! But with the help of an analogy we may perhaps feel
our way towards another view of the problem. It is not a good thing to
transplant ideas far away from the soil in which they grew, but we
cannot resist pointing out the resemblance which forms this analogy. We
know that the human child cannot well complete its development towards
culture without passing through a more or less distinct phase of
neurosis. This is because the child is unable to suppress by rational
mental effort so many of those instinctual impulsions which cannot later
be turned to account, but has to check them by acts of repression,
behind which there stands as a rule an anxiety motive. Most of these
child neuroses are overcome spontaneously as one grows up, and
especially is this the fate of the obsessional neuroses of childhood.
The remainder can be cleared up still later by psycho-analytic
treatment. In just the same way one might assume that in its development
through the ages mankind as a whole experiences conditions that are
analogous to the neuroses, and this for the same reasons, because in the
ages of its ignorance and intellectual weakness it achieved by purely
affective means the instinctual renunciations, indispensable for man’s
communal existence. And the residue of these repression-like processes,
which took place in antiquity, has long clung on to civilization. Thus
religion would be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. It,
like the child’s, originated in the Oedipus complex, the relation to the
father. According to this conception one might prophesy that the
abandoning of religion must take place with the fateful inexorability of
a process of growth, and that we are just now in the middle of this
phase of development.
So we should form our behaviour after the model of a sensible teacher,
who does not oppose the new development confronting him, but seeks to
further it and to temper the force of its onset. To be sure this analogy
does not exhaust the essence of religion. If on the one hand religion
brings with it obsessional limitation, which can only be compared to an
individual obsessional neurosis, it comprises on the other hand a system
of wish-illusions, incompatible with reality, such as we find in an
isolated form only in Meynert’s amentia, a state of blissful
hallucinatory confusion. But these are only just comparisons, with whose
help we can endeavour to understand social phenomena; individual
psychology supplies us with no exact counterpart.
It has been shown repeatedly (by myself, and particularly by Theodor
Reik) into what details the analogy of religion and the obsessional
neurosis may be pursued, how much of the vicissitudes and peculiarities
of the formation of religion may be understood in this way. And it
accords well with this that the true believer is in a high degree
protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by
accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a
personal neurosis.
Our knowledge of the historical value of certain religious doctrines
increases our respect for them, but it does not invalidate our proposal
to exclude them from the motivation of cultural laws. On the contrary!
This historical residue has given us the conception of religious dogmas
as, so to speak, neurotic survivals, and now we may say that the time
has probably come to replace the consequences of repression by the
results of rational mental effort, as in the analytic treatment of
neurotics. One may prophesy, but hardly regret, that this process of
remodelling will not stop at dispelling the solemn air of sanctity
surrounding the cultural laws, but that a general revision of these must
involve the abolition of many of them. And this will go far to solve our
appointed problem of reconciling men to civilization. We need not regret
the loss of historical truth involved in accepting the rational
motivation of cultural laws. The truths contained in religious doctrines
are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of
mankind cannot recognize them as truth. It is an instance of the same
thing when we tell the child that new-born babies are brought by the
stork. Here, too, we tell the truth in symbolic guise, for we know what
that large bird signifies. But the child does not know it; he hears only
the distortion, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how
often his refractoriness and his distrust of the grown-ups gets bound up
with this impression. We have come to the conclusion that it is better
to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth, and to allow the child
knowledge of the real state of affairs in a way suitable for his stage
of intellectual development.