FactsOfADrunkenMan.com - Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents

In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, the ego is originally all-inclusive, but later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present sense of self is thus only a shrunken residue of a far more comprehensive, indeed all-embracing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it. If we may assume that this primary sense of self has survived, to a greater or lesser extent, in the mental life of many people, it would coexist, as a kind of counterpart, with the narrower, more sharply defined sense of self belonging to the years of maturity, and the ideational content appropriate to it would be precisely those notions of limitlessness and oneness with the universe – the very notions used by my friend to elucidate the ‘oceanic’ feeling. But have we any right to assume that what was originally present has survived beside what later evolved from it? Undoubtedly! There is nothing surprising about such an occurrence, either in the mental sphere or in other spheres. Regarding the animal world, we adhere to the hypothesis that the most highly developed species have evolved from the lowest. Yet we find all the simple forms of life still existing today. The race of the great saurians has become extinct and made way for the mammals, but a genuine representative of this race, the crocodile, is still with us. The analogy may be too remote, and it is weakened by the fact that as a rule the lower species that survive are not the true ancestors of the more highly developed species of today. The intermediate stages have mostly died out and are known to us only through reconstructions. In the realm of the mind, however, the retention of the primitive beside what has evolved from it is so common that there is no need to cite examples to prove it. When this happens it is mostly the result of divergent developments. One portion (in quantitative terms) of an attitude, of an instinctual impulse, has remained unchanged, while another has developed further.

The fact that the ego employs exactly the same methods to expel certain unpleasurable sensations from within as it does to repel others from without becomes the starting point for significant pathological disorders. In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, the ego is originally all-inclusive, but later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present sense of self is thus only a shrunken residue of a far more comprehensive, indeed all-embracing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it. If we may assume that this primary sense of self has survived, to a greater or lesser extent, in the mental life of many people, it would coexist, as a kind of counterpart, with the narrower, more sharply defined sense of self belonging to the years of maturity, and the ideational content appropriate to it would be precisely those notions of limitlessness and oneness with the universe – the very notions used by my friend to elucidate the ‘oceanic’ feeling. But have we any right to assume that what was originally present has survived beside what later evolved from it? Undoubtedly! There is nothing surprising about such an occurrence, either in the mental sphere or in other spheres. Regarding the animal world, we adhere to the hypothesis that the most highly developed species have evolved from the lowest. Yet we find all the simple forms of life still existing today. The race of the great saurians has become extinct and made way for the mammals, but a genuine representative of this race, the crocodile, is still with us. The analogy may be too remote, and it is weakened by the fact that as a rule the lower species that survive are not the true ancestors of the more highly developed species of today. The intermediate stages have mostly died out and are known to us only through reconstructions. In the realm of the mind, however, the retention of the primitive beside what has evolved from it is so common that there is no need to cite examples to prove it. When this happens it is mostly the result of divergent developments. One portion (in quantitative terms) of an attitude, of an instinctual impulse, has remained unchanged, while another has developed further.

To me the derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the child and a longing for its father seems irrefutable, especially as this feeling is not only prolonged from the days of childhood, but constantly sustained by a fear of the superior power of fate. I cannot cite any childish need that is as strong as the need for paternal protection. The role of the oceanic feeling, which might seek to restore unlimited narcissism, is thus pushed out of the foreground. The origin of the religious temperament can be traced in clear outline to the child’s feeling of helplessness. Something else may be concealed behind it, but for the time being this remains obscure.

In my piece entitled ‘The Future of an Illusion’ I was much less concerned with the most profound sources of religious sentiment than with what the common man understands by his religion, the system of teachings and promises that on the one hand explains to him, with enviable thoroughness, the riddles of this world, and on the other assures him that a careful providence will watch over his life and compensate him in a future existence for any privations he suffers in this. The common man cannot imagine this providence otherwise than as an immensely exalted father. Only such a being can know the needs of the children of men, be softened by their pleas and propitiated by signs of their remorse. All this is so patently infantile, so remote from reality, that it pains a philanthropic temperament to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above such a view of life. It is still more embarrassing to learn how many of those living today, who cannot help seeing that this religion is untenable, nevertheless seek to defend it, bit by bit, in pathetic rearguard actions. One would like to mingle with the believers, in order to confront those philosophers who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him with an impersonal, shadowy, abstract principle, and to remind them of the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’ If some of the greatest spirits of the past did the same, we cannot appeal to their example here, for we know why they had to.

This striving has two goals, one negative and one positive: on the one hand it aims at an absence of pain and unpleasurable experiences, on the other at strong feelings of pleasure. ‘Happiness’, in the strict sense of the word, relates only to the latter. In conformity with this dichotomy in its aims, human activity develops in two directions, according to whether it seeks to realize – mainly or even exclusively – the one or the other of these aims. As we see, it is simply the programme of the pleasure principle that determines the purpose of life. This principle governs the functioning of our mental apparatus from the start; there can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at odds with the whole world – with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. It is quite incapable of being realized; all the institutions of the universe are opposed to it; one is inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ has no part in the plan of ‘creation’. What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.* Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. Suffering threatens us from three sides: from our own body, which, being doomed to decay and dissolution, cannot dispense with pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which can unleash overwhelming, implacable, destructive forces against us; and finally from our relations with others. The suffering that arises from this last source perhaps causes us more pain than any other; we are inclined to regard it as a somewhat superfluous extra, though it is probably no less ineluctable than suffering that originates elsewhere.

We know, after all, that by ‘drowning our sorrows’ we can escape at any time from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of our own that affords us better conditions for our sensibility. It is well known that precisely this property of intoxicants makes them dangerous and harmful. In some circumstances they are responsible for the futile loss of large amounts of energy that might have been used to improve the lot of mankind.

The feeling of happiness resulting from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse that has not been tamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that occasioned by the sating of one that has been tamed.

Another technique for avoiding suffering makes use of the displacements of the libido that are permitted by our psychical apparatus and lend its functioning so much flexibility. Here the task is to displace the aims of the drives in such a way that they cannot be frustrated by the external world. Sublimation of the drives plays a part in this. We achieve most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm us.

The hermit turns his back on the world and refuses to have anything to do with it. But one can do more than this: one can try to re-create the world, to build another in its place, one in which the most intolerable features are eliminated and replaced by others that accord with one’s desires. As a rule anyone who takes this path to happiness, in a spirit of desperate rebellion, will achieve nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He will become a madman and will usually find nobody to help him realize his delusion. It is asserted, however, that in some way each of us behaves rather like a paranoiac, employing wishful thinking to correct some unendurable aspect of the world and introducing this delusion into reality. Of special importance is the case in which substantial numbers of people, acting in concert, try to assure themselves of happiness and protection against suffering through a delusional reshaping of reality. The religions of mankind too must be described as examples of mass delusion. Of course, no one who still shares a delusion will ever recognize it as such.

Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing human beings in a state of psychical infantilism and drawing them into a mass delusion, religion succeeds in saving many of them from individual neurosis. But it hardly does any more; there are, as we have said, many paths that can lead to such happiness as is within the reach of human beings, but none that is certain to do so. Not even religion can keep its promise. If the believer is finally obliged to speak of God’s ‘inscrutable decrees’, he is admitting that all he has left to him, as the ultimate consolation and source of pleasure in the midst of suffering, is unconditional submission. And if he is ready to accept this he could probably have spared himself the detour.

Our attitude to the third source of suffering, the social source, is different. We refuse to recognize it at all; we cannot see why institutions that we ourselves have created should not protect and benefit us all. However, when we consider how unsuccessful we have been at preventing suffering in this very sphere, the suspicion arises that here too an element of unconquerable nature may be at work in the background – this time our own psyche.

There is an added factor of disappointment. In recent generations the human race has made extraordinary advances in the natural sciences and their technical application, and it has increased its control over nature in a way that would previously have been unimaginable. The details of these advances are generally known and need not be enumerated. Human beings are proud of these achievements, and rightly so. Yet they believe they have observed that this newly won mastery over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature – the fulfilment of an age-old longing – has not increased the amount of pleasure they can expect from life or made them feel any happier. We ought to be content to infer from this observation that power over nature is not the sole condition of human happiness, just as it is not the sole aim of cultural endeavours, rather than to conclude that technical progress is of no value in the economy of our happiness.

By way of objection it might be asked whether it is not a positive addition to my pleasure, an unequivocal increment of my happiness, if I can hear, as often as I wish, the voice of the child who lives hundreds of miles away, or if a friend can inform me, shortly after reaching land, that he has survived his long and arduous voyage. Is it of no importance that medicine has succeeded in significantly reducing infant mortality and the risk of infection to women in childbirth, and in adding a good many years to the average life-span of civilized man? We can cite many such benefits that we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances. At this point, however, the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard, reminding us that most of these satisfactions follow the pattern of the ‘cheap pleasure’ recommended in a certain joke, a pleasure that one can enjoy by sticking a bare leg out from under the covers on a cold winter’s night, then pulling it back in. If there were no railway to overcome distances, my child would never have left his home town, and I should not need the telephone in order to hear his voice. If there were no sea travel, my friend would not have embarked on his voyage, and I should not need the telegraph service in order to allay my anxiety about him. What is the good of the reduction of infant mortality if it forces us to practise extreme restraint in the procreation of children, with the result that on the whole we rear no more children than we did before hygiene became all-important, but have imposed restraints on sexual life within marriage and probably worked against the benefits of natural selection? And finally, what good is a long life to us if it is hard, joyless and so full of suffering that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

We will content ourselves with repeating that the word ‘civilization’ designates the sum total of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations.

What man, through his science and technology, has produced in this world, where he first appeared as a frail animal organism and where every individual of his species must still make his entry as a helpless babe – ‘oh inch of nature!’ – all this not only sounds like a fairy tale, but actually fulfils all – no, most – fairy-tale wishes. All these assets he can claim as cultural acquisitions. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience, which he embodied in his gods, attributing to them whatever seemed beyond the reach of his desires – or was forbidden him. We may say, then, that these gods were cultural ideals. Man has now come close to reaching these ideals and almost become a god himself. Admittedly only in the way ideals are usually reached, according to the general judgement of humanity – not completely, in some respects not at all, in others only partly. Man has become, so to speak, a god with artificial limbs.

But in the interest of our investigation let us also remember that modern man does not feel happy with his god-like nature.

we also welcome it as a sign of civilization if people devote care to things that have no practical value whatever, that indeed appear useless – for instance, when the urban parks that are needed as playgrounds and reservoirs of fresh air also contain flowerbeds, or when the windows of the houses are adorned with pots of flowers. We soon realize that what we know to be useless, but expect civilization to value, is beauty; we demand that civilized man should revere beauty where he comes across it in nature and create it, if he can, through the work of his hands.

No feature, however, seems to us to characterize civilization better than the appreciation and cultivation of the higher mental activities, of intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements, and the leading role accorded to ideas in human life.

The fact that civilization is not concerned solely with utility is demonstrated by the example of beauty, which we insist on including among the interests of civilization.

If we assume, quite generally, that the mainspring of all human activities is the striving for the two confluent goals of utility and the attainment of pleasure, we have to agree that this applies also to the manifestations of civilization that we have mentioned here, though it is easy to see only in the case of scientific and artistic activity.

As the last and certainly not the least important characteristic of a civilization we have to consider how the mutual relations of human beings are regulated, the social relations that affect a person as a neighbour, employee or sexual object of another, as a member of a family or as a citizen of a state. Here it becomes particularly difficult to keep oneself free from certain ideal requirements and to grasp what pertains to civilization in general. Perhaps one may begin by declaring that the element of civilization is present as soon as the first attempt is made to regulate these social relations. If no such attempt were made, they would be subject to the arbitrary will of the individual; that is to say, whoever was physically stronger would dictate them in accordance with his interests and instinctual impulses.

The replacement of the power of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization.

Whatever makes itself felt in a human community as an urge for freedom may amount to a revolt against an existing injustice, thus favouring a further advance of civilization and remaining compatible with it. But it may spring from what remains of the original personality, still untamed by civilization, and so become a basis for hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom is thus directed against particular forms and claims of civilization, or against civilization as a whole. It does not seem as though any influence can induce human beings to change their nature and become like termites; they will probably always defend their claim to individual freedom against the will of the mass. Much of mankind’s struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable, that is to say a happy accommodation, between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization.

sublimation is a fate that civilization imposes on the drives

It is not easy to understand how it is possible to deprive a drive of satisfaction. It cannot be done without risk; if there is no economic compensation, one can expect serious disturbances. However, if we want to know what value can be claimed by our conception of the development of civilization as a particular process, comparable with the normal maturation of the individual, we clearly have to address another problem and ask ourselves to what influences the development of civilization owes its origin, how it emerged and what has determined its course.

When primitive man had discovered that he had it in his own hands – quite literally – to improve his earthly lot by working, it could no longer be a matter of indifference to him whether someone else was working with him or against him. This other person now acquired for him the value of a fellow-worker, and it was useful to him if they both lived together. Even earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had taken to forming families, and members of the family were probably his first helpers. Presumably the founding of the family was linked with the fact that the need for genital satisfaction no longer made its appearance like a guest who turns up suddenly one day, then leaves and is not heard of again for a long time, but moved in as a permanent lodger. Hence, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female or – to put it more generally – his sexual objects around him, while the females, not wanting to be separated from their helpless young, had for their sake to remain with the stronger male.

A small minority of people are enabled by their constitution, in spite of everything, to find happiness through love, though this necessitates great psychical modifications of its function. These people make themselves independent of the concurrence of the object of their love by shifting the main emphasis from being loved to their own loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the love object by directing their love not to individuals, but to everyone in equal measure, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by deviating from its sexual aim and transforming the drive into an aim-inhibited impulse. What they thereby create in themselves – a state of balanced, unwavering, affectionate feeling – no longer bears much outward resemblance to the turbulent genital love-life from which it none the less derives.

The careless way in which the language uses the word ‘love’ can be justified historically. The word denotes not only the relation between a man and a woman, whose genital needs have led them to found a family, but also the positive feelings that exist within the family between parents and children, and between siblings, though we are bound to describe the latter relation as aim-inhibited love or affection. This aim-inhibited love was in fact once a fully sensual love, and it still is in the individual’s unconscious.

The closer the solidarity of the family, the more often its members tend to cut themselves off from other people and the harder it is for them to enter into the wider circle of life. The phylogenetically older mode of living together – the only one that exists in childhood – resists being superseded by the civilized one that was acquired later. Detaching oneself from the family is a task that faces every young person, and society often supports him in performing it with puberty and initiation rites. One has the impression that such difficulties attach to any psychical development, indeed to any organic development.

Civilization thus behaves towards sexuality like a tribe or a section of the population that has sub jected another and started exploiting it. Fear that the victims may rebel necessitates strict precautionary measures. A high point in such a development can be seen in our western European civilization. It is psychologically quite justified to begin by prohibiting expressions of infantile sexuality, for there is no prospect of curbing the sexual appetities of adults unless preparatory measures have been taken in childhood.

Psychoanalytic work has taught us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life that those whom we call neurotics cannot endure. Neurotics create substitutive satisfactions for themselves in their symptoms, but these either create suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering by causing the subjects difficulties in their relations with their surroundings and society.

When a love relationship is at its height, the lovers no longer have any interest in the world around them; they are self-sufficient as a pair, and in order to be happy they do not even need the child they have in common. In no other case does Eros so clearly reveal what is at the core of his being, the aim of making one out of more than one; however, having achieved this proverbial goal by making two people fall in love, he refuses to go any further.

I am not concerned with economic criticisms of the communist system; I have no way of knowing whether the abolition of private property is expedient and beneficial.* But I can recognize the psychological presumption behind it as a baseless illusion. With the abolition of private property the human love of aggression is robbed of one of its tools, a strong one no doubt, but certainly not the strongest. No change has been made in the disparities of power and influence that aggression exploits in pursuit of its ends, or in its nature. Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty.

I once discussed this phenomenon, the fact that it is precisely those communities that occupy contiguous territories and are otherwise closely related to each other – like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North Germans and the South Germans, the English and the Scots, etc. – that indulge in feuding and mutual mockery. I called this phenomenon ‘the narcissism of small differences’ – not that the name does much to explain it. It can be seen as a convenient and relatively innocuous way of satisfying the tendency to aggression and facilitating solidarity within the community.

And it is understandable that the attempt to establish a new, communist culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with some anxiety, what the Soviets will turn to when they have exterminated their bourgeoisie.

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality, but also on his aggressivity, we are in a better position to understand why it is so hard for him to feel happy in it. Primitive man was actually better off, because his drives were not restricted. Yet this was counterbalanced by the fact that he had little certainty of enjoying this good fortune for long. Civilized man has traded in a portion of his chances of happiness for a certain measure of security.

‘the psychological misery of the mass’. This danger is most threatening where social bonding is produced mainly by the participants’ identification with one another, while individuals of leadership calibre do not acquire the importance that should be accorded to them in the formation of the mass. The present state of American civilization would provide a good opportunity to study the cultural damage that is to be feared.

proposition by the poet-philosopher Schiller, to the effect that the mechanism of the world was held together by ‘hunger and love’. Hunger could be taken to represent those drives that seek to preserve the individual creature, whereas love strives after objects, and its chief function, favoured in every way by nature, is to preserve the species. Thus at first ego-drives and object-drives confronted one another. To denote the energy of the latter – and them alone – I introduced the term ‘libido’; there was thus a contrast between the ego-drives and the libidinal drives of love, in the widest sense of the word, which were directed towards an object. One of these latter, the sadistic drive, admittedly stood out from the rest because its aim was so utterly devoid of love. Moreover, in some respects it was obviously attached to the ego-drives; it could not conceal its close affinity to the drives that aim at domination and have no libidinal purpose. However, it proved possible to get over this discrepancy: after all, sadism was clearly part of sexual life, in which cruelty could replace tenderness. Neurosis appeared to be the result of a struggle between the interest of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which the ego had triumphed, but at the price of grave suffering and sacrifice.

My next step was taken in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), when I was first struck by the compulsion to repeat and the conservative nature of the drives. Starting from speculations about the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I reached the conclusion that, in addition to the drive to preserve the living substance and bring it together in ever larger units,* there must be another, opposed to it, which sought to break down these units and restore them to their primordial inorganic state. Beside Eros, then, there was a death drive, and the interaction and counteraction of these two could explain the phenomena of life. Now, it was not easy to demonstrate the activity of this supposed death drive.

I take the view that the tendency to aggression is an original, autonomous disposition in man, and I return to my earlier contention that it represents the greatest obstacle to civilization. At one point in this investigation we were faced with the realization that civilization was a special process undergone by humanity, and we are still under the spell of this idea. We will now add that it is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to gather together individuals, then families and finally tribes, peoples and nations in one great unit – humanity. Why this has to happen we do not know: it is simply the work of Eros.

And now, I think, the meaning of the development of civilization is no longer obscure to us. This development must show us the struggle between Eros and death, between the life drive and the drive for destruction, as it is played out in the human race. This struggle is the essential content of all life; hence, the development of civilization may be described simply as humanity’s struggle for existence.

What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggression it faces, to render it harmless and possibly eliminate it? We have already become acquainted with some of the methods, but not with the one that seems most important. We can study this in the development of the individual. What happens to him to render his aggressivity harmless? Something very curious, which we would not have suspected, but which is plain to see. The aggression is introjected, internalized, actually sent back to where it came from; in other words, it is directed against the individual’s own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego that sets itself up as the super-ego, in opposition to the rest, and is now prepared, as ‘conscience’, to exercise the same severe aggression against the ego that the latter would have liked to direct towards other individuals. The tension between the stern super-ego and the ego that is subject to it is what we call a ‘sense of guilt’; this manifests itself as a need for punishment. In this way civilization overcomes the dangerous aggressivity of the individual, by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town.

Evil is often far from harmful or dangerous to the ego; it may even be something it welcomes and takes pleasure in. Here, then, is a pointer to an outside influence, which determines what is to be called good or evil.

We may reject the notion of an original – as it were, natural – capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Evil is often far from harmful or dangerous to the ego; it may even be something it welcomes and takes pleasure in. Here, then, is a pointer to an outside influence, which determines what is to be called good or evil. As a person’s own feelings would not have led him in this direction, he must have a motive for submitting to this outside influence. This is easily dicovered in his helplessness and dependency on others; it can best be described as a fear of loss of love.

Nothing much changes until the authority is internalized through the establishment of the super-ego. The phenomena of conscience are thereby raised to a new level; only now can one properly speak of conscience and a sense of guilt.

The more virtuous a person is, the sterner and more distrustful is his conscience, so that the very people who have attained the highest degree of saintliness are in the end the ones who accuse themselves of being most sinful.

We thus know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one is fear of authority; the other, which came later, is fear of the super-ego.

But if man’s sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primeval father, this too was a case of ‘remorse’. So should we suppose that conscience and a sense of guilt did not exist before the deed was done? Where did the remorse come from in this case? Undoubtedly this case should clear up the mystery of the sense of guilt and put an end to our embarrassments. And I believe it does. This remorse was the result of the primordial emotional ambivalence towards the father: his sons hated him, but they also loved him. Once their hate was satisfied by this act of aggression, their love manifested itself in the remorse they felt for the deed. Through identification with the father, this love established the super-ego, endowed it with the power of the father – as though to punish the act of aggression committed against him – and invented restrictions that would prevent its repetition.

This may have disturbed the structure of the study, but accords entirely with its intention, which is to present the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show how the price we pay for cultural progress is a loss of happiness, arising from a heightened sense of guilt.

The super-ego is an authority that we postulate, and conscience a function that we ascribe to it, along with others – this function being to supervise and assess the actions and intentions of the ego, to exercise a kind of censorship.

The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus identical with the severity of the conscience; it is the ego’s perception of being supervised in this way, its assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the claims of the super-ego.

Fear of this critical authority – a fear that underlies the whole relationship and amounts to a need for punishment – is the manifestation of a drive on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of the sadistic super-ego and devotes a portion of its inherent drive for internal destruction to establishing an erotic bond with the super-ego. One should not speak of conscience until the super-ego can be shown to exist.

As for the sense of guilt, one has to admit that it predates the super-ego, and therefore the conscience. At this early stage it is a direct manifestation of the fear of external authority, an acknowledgement of the tension between the ego and this authority, a direct derivative of the conflict between the need for its love and the urge for the satisfaction of the drives, the inhibiting of which generates aggressivity.

At one point it was said that the sense of guilt resulted from an act of aggression that had not been carried out, while at another – and precisely at its historical inception, the killing of the father – it was said to derive from one that had been.

This state of mind we call a ‘bad conscience’, but it really does not merit the name, for at this stage consciousness of guilt is clearly no more than a fear of loss of love, a ‘social’ anxiety. In a small child it can never be anything else, but for many adults too the only change is that the place once occupied by the father, or by both parents, has been taken over by the wider human community.

We thus know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one is fear of authority; the other, which came later, is fear of the super-ego. The former forces us to forgo the satisfaction of our drives; in addition to this, the latter insists on punishment, for the continuance of our forbidden desires cannot be hidden from the super-ego.

The chronological sequence, then, would be as follows: first, renunciation of the drives, resulting from fear of aggression from the external authority (for this is what fear of the loss of love amounts to, love being a protection against this punitive aggression), then the setting up of the internal authority and the renunciation of the drives, resulting from fear of this authority, fear of conscience. In this second situation an evil deed is on a par with an evil intention; hence the consciousness of guilt and the need for punishment. The aggression of the conscience continues the aggression of the external authority.

Best quotes from Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents