Civilization and its Discontents-Sigmund Freud (1930)

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

By Sigmund Freud

(First published in 1930)

I

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false
standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for
themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of
true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are
in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.
There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold
admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which
are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. One might easily
be inclined to suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates these
great men, while the large majority cares nothing for them. But things are
probably not as simple as that, thanks to the discrepancies between people’s
thoughts and their actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses.

One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had
sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion [The Future of an Illusion
(1927)], and he answered that he entirely agreed with my judgement upon
religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of
religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he
himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which
he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would
like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless,
unbounded — as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective
fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality,
but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various
Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and
doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself
religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every
belief and every illusion.

The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself
once praised the magic of illusion in a poem, caused me no small difficulty. I
cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically
with feelings. One can attempt to describe their physiological signs. Where this is
not possible — and I am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of
characterization — nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content
which is most readily associated with the feeling. If I have understood my friend
rightly, he means the same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original
and somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death.
‘We cannot fall out of this world.’ That is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble
bond, of being one with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me
this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception, which is
not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be
present with any other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I
could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives
me no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only question is
whether it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought to be regarded as
the fons et origo of the whole need for religion.

I have nothing to suggest which could have a decisive influence on the solution
of this problem. The idea of men’s receiving an intimation of their connection
with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the
outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the
fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-
analytic — that is, a genetic-explanation of such a feeling. The following line of
thought suggests itself. Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain
than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something
autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such
an appearance is deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is continued
inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity
which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of facade — this
was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic research, which should still have
much more to tell us about the relation pf the ego to the id. But towards the
outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of
demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one
that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the
height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt
away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is; in love declares that
‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. What can be
temporarily done away with by a physiological [i.e., normal] function must also,
of course, be liable to be disturbed by pathological processes. Pathology has
made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines
between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are
actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person’s own
body, even portions of his own mental life — his perceptions, thoughts and
feelings — appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other
cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in
his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. Thus even the feeling of
our own ego is subject to disturbances and the boundaries of the ego are not
constant.

Further reflection tells us that the adult’s ego-feeling cannot have been the same
from the beginning. It must have gone through a process of development, which
cannot, of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being constructed with a
fair degree of probability. An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his
ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him.
He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He must be
very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will
later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any
moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time — among them
what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast — and only reappear as a result
of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against
the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is
only forced to appear by a special action.

A further incentive to a disengagement of the ego from the general mass of
sensations — that is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external world — is
provided by the frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and
unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined by the pleasure
principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination. A tendency arises to
separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to
throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a
strange and threatening ‘outside’. The boundaries of this primitive pleasure-ego
cannot escape rectification through experience. Some of the things that one is
unwilling to give up, because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but
object; and some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be inseparable
from the ego in virtue of their internal origin. One comes to learn a procedure by
which, through a deliberate direction of one’s sensory activities and through
suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal — what
belongs to the ego — and what is external — what emanates from the outer
world. In this way one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality
principle which is to dominate future development.

This differentiation, of course, serves the practical purpose of enabling one to
defend oneself against sensations of unpleasure which one actually feels or with
which one is threatened. In order to fend off certain unpleasurable excitations
arising from within, the ego can use no other methods than those which it uses
against unpleasure coming from without, and this is the starting-point of
important pathological disturbances.

In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it
more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an
external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken
residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which
corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If
we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary
ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side
by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity,
like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to
it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe —
the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the ‘oceanic’ feeling.

But have we a right to assume the survival of something that was originally
there, alongside of what was later derived from it? Undoubtedly. There is
nothing strange in such a phenomenon, whether in the mental field or elsewhere.
In the animal kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed
species have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we find the simple forms still in
existence to-day. The race of the great saurians is extinct and has made way for
the mammals; but a true representative of it, the crocodile, still lives among us.
This analogy may be too remote, and it is also weakened by the circumstance
that the lower species which survive are for the most part not the true ancestors
of the present-day more highly developed species. As a rule the intermediate
links have died out and are known to us only through reconstruction. In the
realm of the mind, on the other hand, what is primitive is so commonly
preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is
unnecessary to give instances as evidence. When this happens it is usually in
consequence of a divergence in development: one portion (in the quantitative
sense) of an attitude or instinctual impulse has remained unaltered, while
another portion has undergone further development.

This brings us to the more general problem of preservation in the sphere of the
mind. The subject has hardly been studied as yet; but it is so attractive and
important that we may be allowed to turn our attention to it for a little, even
though our excuse is insufficient. Since we overcame the error of supposing that
the forgetting we are familiar with signified a destruction of the memory-trace —
that is, its annihilation — we have been inclined to take the opposite view, that in
mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish — that everything is
somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances (when, for instance,
regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light. Let us try
to grasp what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field.
We will choose as an example the history of the Eternal City.’ Historians tell us
that the oldest Rome was the Roma Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the Palatine.
Then followed the phase of the Septimontium) a federation of the settlements on
the different hills; after that came the city bounded by the Servian wall; and later
still, after all the transformations during the periods of the republic and the early
Caesars, the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls. We will
not follow the changes which the city went through any further, but we will ask
ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose to be equipped with the
most complete historical and topographical knowledge, may still find left of
these early stages in the Rome of to-day. Except for a few gaps, he will see the
wall of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to find
sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated and brought to
light. If he knows enough — more than present-day archaeology does — he may
perhaps be able to trace out in the plan of the city the whole course of that wall
and the outline of the Roma Quadrata. Of the buildings which once occupied this
ancient area he will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they exist no longer.
The best information about Rome in the republican era would only enable him at
the most to point out the sites where the temples and public buildings of that
period stood. Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves
but of later restorations made after fires or destruction. It is hardly necessary to
remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the
jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since
the Renaissance. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil
of the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in which the past
is preserved in historical sites like Rome.

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human
habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an
entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have
passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist
alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the
Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their
old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying
on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the
Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo
Caffarelli would once more stand — without the Palazzo having to be removed
— the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the
Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed
Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the
Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden
House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of
to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original
edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be
supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over
which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the
direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the
other.

There is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to
things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical
sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same
space cannot have two different contents. Our attempt seems to be an idle game.
It has only one justification. It shows us how far we are from mastering the
characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms.

There is one further objection which, has to be considered. The question may be
raised why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of the
mind. The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in
mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and
that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But
destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are
never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than
Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of
an enemy. Demolitions and replacement of buildings occur in the course of the
most peaceful development of a city. A city is thus a priori unsuited for a
comparison of this sort with a mental organism.

We bow to this objection; and, abandoning our attempt to draw a striking
contrast, we will turn instead to what is after all a more closely related object of
comparison — the body of an animal or a human being. But here, too, we find
the same tiling. The earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved;
they have been absorbed into the later phases for which they have supplied the
material. The embryo cannot be discovered in the adult. The thymus gland of
childhood is replaced after puberty by connective tissue, but is no longer present
itself; in the marrow-bones of the grown man I can, it is true, trace the outline of
the child’s bone, but it itself has disappeared, having lengthened and thickened
until it has attained its definitive form. The feet remains that only in the mind is
such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside of the final form possible;
and that we are not in a position to represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms.

Perhaps we are going too far in this. Perhaps we ought to content ourselves With
asserting that what is past in mental life nap be preserved and is not necessarily
destroyed. It is always possible that even in the mind some of what is old is
effaced or absorbed — whether in the normal course of things or as an exception
— to such an extent that it cannot be restored or revivified by any means; or that
preservation in general is dependent on certain favourable conditions. It is
possible, but we know nothing about it. We can only hold fast to the fact that it is
rather the rule than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life.

Thus we are perfectly willing to acknowledge that the ‘oceanic’ feeling exists in
many people, and we are inclined to trace it back to an early phase of ego-feeling.
The further question then arises, what claim this feeling has to be regarded as the
source of religious needs.

To me the claim does not seem compelling. After all a feeling can only be a
source of energy if it is itself the expression of a strong need. The derivation of
religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father
aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not
simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of
the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as
the need for a father’s protection. Thus the part played by the oceanic feeling,
which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism, is ousted
from a place in the foreground The origin of the religious attitude can be traced
back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness. There may be
something farmer behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling became connected: with religion later on.
The ‘oneness with the universe’ which constitutes its ideational content sounds
like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of
disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the
external world. Let me admit once more that it is very difficult for me to work
with these almost intangible quantities. Another friend of mine, whose insatiable
craving for knowledge has fed him to make the most unusual experiments and
has ended by giving him encyclopaedic knowledge, has assured me that through
the practices of Yoga, by withdrawing from the world, by fixing the attention on
bodily functions and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact evoke
new sensations and coenaesthesias in oneself, which he regards as regressions to
primordial states of mind which have long ago been overlaid. He sees in them a
physiological basis, as it were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism. It would not
be hard to find connections here with a number of obscure modifications of
mental life, such as trances and ecstasies. But I am moved to exclaim in the
words of Schiller’s diver: —

… Es freue sich,
Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht.

[‘Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light!’ Schiller, ‘Der Taucher’.]

II

In my Future of an Illusion [1927] I was concerned much less with the deepest
sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by
his religion — with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand
explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the
other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will
compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The
common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an
enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the
children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of
their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that
to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great
majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still
more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who
cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece
by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the
ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can
rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and
abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: Thou shalt not
take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. And if some of the great men of the
past acted in the same way, no appeal can be made to their example: we know
why they were obliged to.

Let us return to the common man and to his religion — the only religion which
ought to bear that name. The first thing that we think of is the well-known saying
of one of our great poets and thinkers concerning the relation of religion to art
and science:

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!

[He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion! — Goethe, Zahme Xenien IX (Gedichte aus dem Nachlass).]

This saying on the one hand draws an antithesis between religion and the two
highest achievements of man, and on the other, asserts that, as regards their
value in life, those achievements and religion can represent or replace each other.
If we also set out to deprive the common man, [who has neither science nor art]
of his religion, we shall clearly not have the poet’s authority on our side. We will
choose a particular path to bring us nearer an appreciation of his words. Life, as
we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and
impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.
We cannot do without ‘auxiliary constructions’, as Theodor Fontane tells us.
There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to
make light of our misery; substitute satisfactions, which diminish it; and
intoxicating substances , which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind is
indispensable. Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the
advice to cultivate one’s garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind,
too.

The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with
reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which
phantasy has assumed in mental life. The intoxicating substances influence our
body and alter its chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has its
place in this series. We must look further afield.

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has
never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one.
Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life
has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It
looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it
seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations
of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of
animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man.
But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can
make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable
species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became
extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only religion can answer the
question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the
idea of life having a meaning stands and falls with the religious system, will
therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what themselves show by their
behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of
life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They
strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This
endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand,
at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of
strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word ‘happiness’ only
relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity
develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even
exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.

So we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the
pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental
apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its
programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as
much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried
through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to
say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of
‘Creation’. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the
(preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high
degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When
any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only
produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive
intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with
suffering from three directions: from our own body; which is doomed to decay
and dissolution and which cannot “even do without pain and anxiety as warning
signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming
and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men.
The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us
than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it
cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from
elsewhere.

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are
accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness. Must as the pleasure principle
itself indeed’ under the influence of the external world, changed into the more
modest reality principle — if a man thinks himself happy merely to nave escaped
unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of
avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
Reflection shows that the accomplishment of this task can be attempted along
very different paths; and all these paths have been recommended by the various
schools of worldly wisdom and put into practice by men. An unrestricted
satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of
conducting one’s life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon
brings its own punishment. The other methods, in which avoidance of
unpleasure is the main purpose, are differentiated according to the source of
unpleasure to which their attention is chiefly turned. Some of these methods are
extreme and some moderate; some are one-sided and some attack the problem
simultaneously at several points. Against the suffering which may come upon
one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation,
keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved
along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded
external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from
it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is, indeed, another and better
path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of
a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and
subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all.
But the most interesting methods of averting suffering are those which seek to
influence our own organism. In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than
sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in consequence
of certain ways in which our organism is regulated. The crudest, but also the
most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one —
intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understand the mechanism,
but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood
or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the
conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving
unpleasurable impulses. The two effects not only occur simultaneously, but seem
to be intimately bound up with each other. But there must be substances in the
chemistry of our own bodies which have similar effects, for we know at least one
pathological state, mania, in which a condition similar to intoxication arises
without the administration of any intoxicating drug. Besides this, our normal
mental life exhibits oscillations between a comparatively easy liberation of
pleasure and a comparatively difficult one, parallel with which there goes a
diminished or an increased receptivity to unpleasure. It is greatly to be regretted
that this toxic side of mental processes has so far escaped scientific examination.
The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in
keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and
peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their
libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but
also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one
knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time
withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own
with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this
property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their
injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless
waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the
improvement of the human lot.

The complicated structure of our mental apparatus admits, however, of a whole
number of other influences. Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for
us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses
to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one’s
sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. This type of defence against
suffering is no longer brought to bear on the sensory apparatus; it seeks to
master the internal sources of our needs. The extreme form of this is brought
about by killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the
East and practised by Yoga. If it succeeds, then the subject has, it is true, given up
all other activities as well — he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he
has once more only achieved the happiness of quietness. We follow the same
path when our aims, are less extreme and we merely attempt to control our
instinctual life. In that case, the controlling elements are the higher psychical
agencies, which have subjected themselves to the reality principle. Here the aim
of satisfaction is not by any means relinquished; but a certain amount of
protection against suffering is secured, in that non-satisfaction is not so painfully
felt in the case of instincts kept in dependence as in the case of uninhibited ones.
As against this, there is an undeniable diminution in the potentialities of
enjoyment. The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild
instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that
derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed. The irresistibility of perverse
instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of forbidden things finds an
economic explanation here.

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the
displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through
which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the
instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from
the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance. One
gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the
sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little
against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in
giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering
truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to
characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively
that such satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher’. But their intensity is mild as
compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual
impulses; it does not convulse our physical being. And the weak point of this
method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people.
It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts winch are far from
being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess
them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no
impenetrable armour against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when
the source of suffering is a person’s own body.*

*[When there is no special disposition in a person which imperatively prescribes what
direction his interests in life shall take, the ordinary professional work that is open to
everyone can play the part assigned to it by Voltaire’s wise advice [above]. It is not
possible, within the limits of a short survey to discuss adequately the significance of work
for the economics of the libido. No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the
individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on Work; for his work at least gives him
a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of
displacing a large amount libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even
erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a
value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the
preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of
special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation,
it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally
reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized
by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The
great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human
aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.]

While this procedure already clearly shows an intention of making oneself
independent of the external world by seeking sanction in internal, psychical
processes, the next procedure brings out those features yet more strongly. In it,
the connection with reality is still further loosened; satisfaction is obtained from
illusions, which are recognized as such without the discrepancy between them
and reality being allowed to interfere with enjoyment. The region from which
these illusions arise is the life of the imagination; at the time when the
development of the sense of reality took place, this region was expressly
exempted from the demands of reality-testing and was set apart for the purpose
of fulfilling wishes which were difficult to carry out. At the head of these
satisfactions through phantasy stands the enjoyment of works of art — an
enjoyment which, by the agency of the artist, is made accessible even to those
who are not themselves creative. People who are receptive to the influence of art
cannot set too high a value on it as a source of pleasure and consolation in life.
Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring
about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong
enough to make us forget real misery.

Another procedure operates more energetically and more thoroughly. It regards
reality as the sole enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is
impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in
any way happy. The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck
with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build
up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are
eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes.
But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a
rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for
the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion. It is
asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a
paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the
construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality. A special
importance attaches to the case in which this attempt to procure a certainty of
happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of
reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of
mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one,
needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

I do not think that I have made a complete enumeration of the methods by which
men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away and I know, too, that the
material might have been differently arranged. One procedure I have not yet
mentioned — not because I have forgotten it but because it will concern us later
in another connection. And how could one possibly forget, of all others, this
technique in the art of living? It is conspicuous for a most remarkable
combination of characteristic features. It, too, aims of course at making the
subject independent of Fate (as it is best to call it), and to that end it locates
satisfaction in internal mental processes, making use, in so doing, of the
displaceability of the libido of which we have already spoken. But it does not
turn away from the external world; on the contrary, it clings to the objects
belonging to that world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to
them. Nor is it content to aim at an avoidance of unpleasure — a goal, as we
might call it, of weary resignation; it passes this by without heed and holds fast
to the original passionate striving for a positive fulfilment of happiness. And
perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. I am, of
course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything,
which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved. A psychical attitude of
this sort comes naturally enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love
manifests itself — sexual love — has given us our most intense experience of an
overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for
our search for happiness. What is more natural than that we should persist in
looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it? The
weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being
would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that
we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so
helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. But this
does not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of love as a means
to happiness. There is much more to be said about it.

We may go on from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in,
life is predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty
presents itself to our senses and our judgement — the beauty of human forms
and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of artistic and even scientific
creations. This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against
the threat of suffering, but it can compensate tor a great deal. The enjoyment of
beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no
obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could
not do without it. The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under
which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation
of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually happens, lack of success is
concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. Psycho-analysis,
unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either. All that seems
certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems
a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are
originally attributes of the sexual object. It is worth remarking that the genitals
themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever
judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain
secondary sexual characters.

In spite of the incompleteness, I will venture on a few remarks as a conclusion to
our enquiry. The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle
imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not — indeed, we cannot — give
up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other. Very
different paths may be taken in that direction, and we may give priority either to
the positive aspect of the aim, that of gaining pleasure, or to its negative one, that
of avoiding unpleasure. By none of these paths can we attain all that we desire.
Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a
problem of the economics of the individual’s libido. There is no golden rule
which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what
particular fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to
direct his choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to
get from the external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it,
and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his
wishes. In this, his psychical constitution will play a decisive part, irrespectively
of the external circumstances. The man who is predominantly erotic will give
first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic
man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his
internal mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external
world on which he can try out his strength. As regards the second of these types,
the nature of his talents and the amount of instinctual sublimation open to him
will decide where he shall locate his interests. Any choice that is pushed to an
extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which arise
if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove
inadequate. Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his capital in one
concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of
our satisfaction from a single aspiration. Its success is never certain, for that
depends on the convergence of many factors, perhaps on none more than on the
capacity of the psychical constitution to. adapt its function to the environment
and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person who is
born with a specially unfavourable instinctual constitution, and who has not
properly undergone the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal
components which is indispensable for later achievements, will find it hard to
obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of
some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least bring him
substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness — a
flight which he usually accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees
his pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years can still find consolation
in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate
attempt at rebellion seen in a psychosis.

Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on
everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from
suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the
picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an
intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of
psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion
succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything
more. There are, as we have said, many paths which may lead to such happiness
as is attainable by men, but there is none which does so for certain. Even religion
cannot keep its promise. If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of
God’s ‘inscrutable decrees’, he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last
possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional
submission. And if he is prepared for that, he could probably have spared
himself the detour he has made.

III

Our enquiry concerning happiness has not so far taught us much that is not
already common knowledge. And even if we proceed from it to the problem of
why it is so hard for men to be happy, there seems no greater prospect of
learning anything new. We have given the answer already by pointing to the
three sources from which our suffering comes: the superior power of nature, the
feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust
the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society. In
regard to the first two sources, our judgement cannot hesitate long. It forces us to
acknowledge those sources of suffering and to submit to the inevitable. We shall
never completely master nature; and our bodily organism, itself a part of that
nature, will always remain a transient structure with a limited capacity for
adaptation and achievement. This recognition does not have a paralysing effect.
On the contrary, it points the direction for our activity. If we cannot remove all
suffering, we can remove some, and we can mitigate some: the experience of
many thousands of yean has convinced us of that. As regards the third source,
the social source of suffering, our attitude is a different one. We do not admit it at
all; we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not, on the
contrary, be a protection and a benefit for every one of us. And yet, when we
consider how unsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of
suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable
nature may lie behind — this time a piece of our own psychical constitution.

When we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is
so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we
call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be
much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this
contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of
civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect
ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part
of that very civilization.

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange
altitude of hostility to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and
long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization and that
on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned by certain specific
historical events. I think I know what the last and the last but one of those
occasions were. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back
enough in the history of the human species; but a factor of this land hostile to
civilization must already have been at work in the victory of Christendom over
the heathen religions, for it was very closely related to the low estimation put
upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine. The last but one of these occasions
was when the progress of voyages of discovery led to contact with primitive
peoples and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken
view of their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a
simple, happy life with few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their
visitors with their superior civilization. Later experience has corrected some of
those judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly attributed to the
absence of complicated cultural demands what was in fact due to the bounty of
nature and the ease with which the major human needs were satisfied. The last
occasion is especially familiar to us. It arose when people came to know about
the mechanism of the neuroses, which threaten to undermine the modicum of
happiness enjoyed by civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes
neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society
imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this
that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to
possibilities of happiness.

There is also an added factor of disappointment During the last few generations
mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their
technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never
before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common knowledge and it
is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those achievements, and
have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power
over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the
fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the
amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not
made them feel happier. From the recognition of this fact we ought to be content
to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human
happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavour; we ought not to
infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our
happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure’ no
unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear
the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn
in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has
come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing
that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the
danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably
lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might
be added to benefits of this kind Which we owe to the much-despised era of
scientific and technical advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism
makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model
of the ‘cheap enjoyment’ extolled in the anecdote — the enjoyment obtained by
putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing
it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would
never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear has voice;
if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would
not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my
anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is
precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the
begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more
children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we
have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have
probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally,
what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full
of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

It seems certain that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization,
but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an
earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played in the
matter. We shall always tend to consider people’s distress objectively — that is,
to place ourselves, with our own wants and sensibilities, in their conditions, and
then to examine what occasions we should find in them for experiencing
happiness or unhappiness. This method of looking at things, which seems
objective because it ignores the variations in subjective sensibility, is, of course,
the most subjective possible, since it puts one’s own mental states in the place of
any others, unknown though they may be. Happiness, however, is something
essentially subjective. No matter how much we may shrink with horror from
certain situations — of a galley-slave in antiquity, of a peasant during the Thirty
Years’ War, of a victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting a pogrom — it
is nevertheless impossible for us to feel our way into such people — to divine the
changes which original obtuseness of mind, a gradual stupefying process, the
cessation of expectations, and cruder or more refined methods of narcotization
have produced upon their receptivity to sensations of pleasure and unpleasure.
Moreover, in the case of the most extreme possibility of suffering, special mental
protective devices are brought into operation. It seems to me unprofitable to
pursue this aspect of the problem any further.

It is time for us to turn our attention to the nature of this civilization on whose
value as a means to happiness doubts have been thrown. We shall not look for a
formula in which to express that nature in a few words, until we have learned
something by examining it. We shall therefore content ourselves with saying
once more that the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the
achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our
animal ancestors and which serve two purposes — namely to protect men
against nature and to adjust their mutual relations. In order to learn more, we
will bring together the various features of civilization individually, as they are
exhibited in human communities. In doing so, we shall have no hesitation in
letting ourselves be guided by linguistic usage or, as it is also called, linguistic
feeling, in the conviction that we shall thus be doing justice to inner discernments
which still defy expression in abstract terms’

The first stage is easy. We recognize as cultural all activities and resources which
are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them
against the violence at the forces of nature, and so on. As regards this side of
civilization, there can be scarcely any doubt. If we go back for enough, we find
that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of control over
fire and the construction of dwellings. Among these, the control over fire stands
out as a quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement*, while the others
opened up paths which man has followed ever since, and the stimulus to which
is easily guessed. With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether
motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor power
places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in
any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his
movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye;
by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the
microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina.
In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the
fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting
auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of
recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances
which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its
origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a substitute for
the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs,
and in which he was safe and felt at ease.

*[Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation,
nevertheless admits of a conjecture — a fantastic-sounding one — about the origin of this
human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire,
of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his
urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken
of tongues of flame as they shoot, upwards. Putting out fire by micturating — a theme to
which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back — was
therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a
homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was
able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his
own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest
was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had
been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth,
because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It
is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between
ambition, fire and urethral erotism.]

These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this
earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism and on which each
individual of his species must once more make its entry (‘Oh inch of nature!’) as
a helpless suckling — these things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an
actual fulfilment of every — or of almost every — fairy-tale wish. All these assets
he may lay claim to as his cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an ideal
conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To
these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or
that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore, that these gods were cultural
ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has
almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are
usually attained according to the general judgement of humanity. Not
completely; in some respects not at all, in others only half way. Man has, as it
were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs
he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they fall
give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself
with the thought that this development will not come to an end precisely with
the year 1930 A.D. Future ages will bring with them new and probably
unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s
likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not
forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.

We recognize, then, that countries have attained a high level of civilization if we
find that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by
man and in his protection against the forces of nature — everything, in short,
which is of use to him — is attended to and effectively carried out in such
countries rivers which threaten to flood the land are regulated in their flow, and
their water is directed through canals to places where there is a shortage of it.
The soil is carefully cultivated and planted with the vegetation which it is suited
to support; and the mineral wealth below ground is assiduously brought to the
surface and fashioned into the required implements and utensils. The means of
communication are ample, rapid and reliable. Wild and dangerous animals have
been exterminated, and the breeding of domesticated animals flourishes. But we
demand other things from civilization besides these, and it is a noticeable fact
that we hope to find them realized in these same countries. As though we were
seeking to repudiate the first demand we made, we welcome it as a sign of
civilization as well if we see people directing their care too to what has no
practical value whatever, to what is useless — if, for instance, the green spaces
necessary in a town as playgrounds and as reservoirs of fresh air are also laid out
with flower-beds, or if the windows of the houses are decorated with pots of
flowers. We soon observe that this useless thing which we expect civilization to
value is beauty. We require civilized man to reverence beauty wherever he sees it
in nature and to create it in the objects of his handiwork so far as he is able. But
this is far from exhausting our demands on civilization. We expect besides to see
the signs of cleanliness and order. We do not think highly of the cultural level of
an English country town in Shakespeare’s time when we read that there was a
big dung-heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and
call it ‘barbarous’ (which is the opposite of civilized) when we find the paths in
the Wiener Wald littered with paper. Dirtiness of any kind seems to us
incompatible with civilization. We extend our demand for cleanliness to the
human body too. We are astonished to learn of the objectionable smell which
emanated from the Roi Soleil, and we shake our heads on the Isola Bella when
we are shown the tiny wash-basin in which Napoleon made his morning toilet.
Indeed, we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual
yardstick of civilization. The same is true of order. It, like cleanliness, applies
solely to the works of man. But whereas cleanliness is not to be expected in
nature, order, on the contrary, has been imitated from her. Man’s observation of
the great astronomical regularities not only furnished him with a model for
introducing order into his life, but gave him the first points of departure for
doing so. Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has
been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be
done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and
indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable. If enables men to use space
and time to the best advantage, while conserving their psychical forces. We
should have a right to expect that order would have taken its place in human
activities from the start and without difficulty; and we may well wonder that this
has not happened — that, on the contrary, human beings exhibit an inborn
tendency to carelessness, irregularity and unreliability in their work, and that a
laborious training is needed before they learn to follow the example of their
celestial models.

Beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the
requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are as important for
life as control over the forces of nature or as some other factors with which we
shall become acquainted. And yet no one would care to put them in the
background as trivialities. That civilization is not exclusively taken up with what
is useful is already shown by the example of beauty, which we decline to omit
from among the interests of civilization. The usefulness of order is quite evident.
With regard to cleanliness, we must bear in mind that it is demanded of us by
hygiene as well, and we may suspect that even before the days of scientific
prophylaxis the connection between the two was not altogether strange to man.
Yet utility does not entirely explain these efforts; something else must be at work
besides.

No feature, however, seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and
encouragement of man’s higher mental activities — his intellectual, scientific and
artistic achievements — and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human
life. Foremost among those ideas are the religious systems, on whose
complicated structure I have endeavoured to throw light elsewhere. Next come
the speculations of philosophy; and finally what might be called man’s ‘ideals’ —
his ideas of a possible perfection of individuals, or of peoples or of the whole of
humanity, and the demands he sets up on the basis of such ideas. The fact that
these creations of his are not independent of one another, but are on the contrary
closely interwoven, increases the difficulty not only of describing them but of
tracing their psychological derivation. If we assume quite generally that the
motive force of all human activities is a striving towards the two confluent goals
of utility and a yield of pleasure, we must suppose that this is also true of the
manifestations of civilization which we have been discussing here, although this
is easily visible only in scientific and aesthetic activities. But it cannot be doubted
that the other activities, too, correspond to strong needs in men — perhaps to
needs which are only developed in a minority. Nor must we allow ourselves to
be misled by judgements of value concerning any particular religion, or
philosophic system, or ideal. Whether we think to find in them the highest
achievements of the human spirit, or whether we deplore them as aberrations,
we cannot but recognize that where they are present and, in especial, where they
arc dominant, a high level of civilization is implied.

The last, but certainly not the least important, of the characteristic features of
civilization remains to be assessed: the manner in which the relationships of men
to one another, their social relationships, are regulated — relationships which
affect a person as a neighbour, as a source of help, as another person’s sexual
object, as a member of a family and of a State. Here it is especially difficult to
keep clear of particular ideal demands and to see what is civilized in general.
Perhaps we may begin by explaining mat the element of civilization enters on the
scene with the first attempt to regulate these social relationship. If the attempt
were not made, the relationships would be subject to the arbitrary will of the
individual: that is to say, the physically stronger man would decide them in the
sense of his own interests and instinctual impulses. Nothing would be changed
in this if this stronger man should in his turn meet someone even stronger than
he. Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes
together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains
united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set
up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as
‘brute force’. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a
community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in
the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their
possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions.
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the
assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual.
This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law. The further course of
cultural development seems to tend towards making the law no longer an
expression of the will of a small community — a caste or a stratum of the
population or a racial group — which, in its turn, behaves like a violent
individual towards other, and perhaps more numerous, collections of people.
The final outcome should be a rule of law to which all — except those who are
not capable of entering a community — have contributed by a sacrifice of their
instincts, and which leaves no one — again with the same exception — at the
mercy of brute force.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there
was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value,
since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of
civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall
escape those restrictions. What makes itself felt in a human community as a
desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and so
may prove favourable to a further development of civilization; it may remain
compatible with civilization. But it may also spring from the remains of their
original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become
the basis in them of hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom, therefore, is
directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against
civilization altogether. It does not seem as though any influence could induce a
man to change his nature into a termite’s . No doubt he will always defend his
claim to individual liberty against the will of the group. A good part of the
struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient
accommodation — one, that is, that will bring happiness — between this claim of
the individual and the cultural claims of the group; and one of the problems that
touches the fate of humanity is whether such an accommodation can be reached
by means of some particular form of civilization or whether this conflict is
irreconcilable.

By allowing common feeling to be our guide in deciding what features of human
life are to be regarded as civilized, we have obtained a clear impression of the
general picture of civilization; but it is true that so far we have discovered
nothing that is not universally known. At the same time we have been careful not
to fall in with the prejudice that civilization is synonymous with perfecting, that
it is the road to perfection pre-ordained for men. But now a point of view
presents itself which may lead in a different direction. The development of
civilization appears to us as a peculiar process which mankind undergoes, and in
which several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize this process with
reference to the changes which it brings about in the familiar instinctual
dispositions of human beings, to satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of
our lives. A few of these instincts are used up in such a manner that something
appears in their place which, in an individual, we describe as a character-trait.
The most remarkable example of such a process is found in the anal erotism of
young human beings. Their original interest in the excretory function, its organs
and products, is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits
which are familiar to us as parsimony, a sense of order and cleanliness —
qualities which, though valuable and welcome in themselves, may be intensified
till they become markedly dominant and produce what is called the anal
character. How this happens we do not know, but there is no doubt about the
correctness of the finding. Now we have seen that order and cleanliness are
important requirements of civilization, although their vital necessity is not very
apparent, any more than their suitability as sources of enjoyment. At this point
we cannot fail-to be struck by the similarity between the process of civilization
and the libidinal development of the individual. Other instincts [besides anal
erotism] are induced to displace the conditions for their satisfaction, to lead them
into other paths. In most cases this process coincides with that of the sublimation
(of instinctual aims) with which we are familiar, but in some it can be
differentiated from it. Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature
of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical
activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in
civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that
sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by
civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third
place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to
overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of
instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression,
repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’
dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we
already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have
to struggle. It will also make severe demands on our scientific work, and we shall
have much to explain here. It is not easy to understand how it can become
possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If
the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious
disorders will ensue.

But if we want to know what value can be attributed to our view that the
development of civilization is a special process, comparable to the normal
maturation of the individual, we must clearly attack another problem. We must
ask ourselves to what influences the development of civilization owes its origin,
how it arose, and by what its course has been determined.

IV

The task seems an immense one, and it is natural to feel diffidence in the face of
it. But here are such conjectures as I have been able to make.

After primal man had discovered that it lay in his own hands, literally, to
improve his lot on earth by working, it cannot have been a matter of indifference
to him whether another man worked with or against him. The other man
acquired the value for him of a fellow-worker, with whom it was useful to live
together. Even earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had adopted the habit of
forming families, and the members of his family were probably his first helpers.
One may suppose that the founding of families was connected with the fact that
a moment came when the need for genital satisfaction no longer made its
appearance like a guest who drops in suddenly, and, after his departure, is heard
of no more for a long time, but instead took up its quarters as a permanent
lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female,
or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who
did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their
interests, to remain with the stronger male.* In this primitive family one essential
feature of civilization is still lacking. The arbitrary will of its head, the father, was
unrestricted. In Totem and Taboo [1912-13] I have tried to show how the way led
from this family to the succeeding stage of communal life in the form of bands of
brothers. In overpowering their father, the sons had made the discovery that a
combination can be stronger than a single individual. The totemic culture is
based on the restrictions which the sons had to impose on one another in order to
keep this new state of affairs m being. The taboo-observances were the first
‘right’ or ‘law’. The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold
foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity,
and the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his
sexual object — the woman — and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of
the part of herself which had been separated off from her — her child. Eros and
Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization too.
The first result of civilization was that even a fairly large number of people were
now able to live together in a community. And since these two great powers
were co-operating in this, one might expect that the further development of
civilization would proceed smoothly towards an even better control over the
external world and towards a further extension of the number of people included
in the community. Nor is it easy to understand how civilization could act upon
its participants otherwise than to make them happy.

*[The organic periodicity of the sexual process has persisted, it fa true, but its effect on
psychical sexual excitation has rather been reversed. This change seems most likely to be
connected with the diminution of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual
process produced an effect on the male psyche. Their role was taken over by visual
excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a
permanent effect. The taboo on menstruation is derived from this ‘organic repression’, as
a defence against a phase of development that has been surmounted. All other motives
are probably of a secondary nature. (Cf. C. D. Daly, 1927.) This process is repeated on
another level when the gods of a superseded period of civilization turn into demons. The
diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising
himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals,
which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked
feelings of shame in him.

The fateful process of civilization would thus have set in with man’s adoption of an erect
posture. From that point the chain of events would have proceeded through the
devaluation of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when
visual stimuli were paramount and the genitals became visible, and thence to the
continuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family and so to the threshold of
human civilization. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to
deserve careful checking with reference to the conditions of life which obtain among
animals closely related to man.

A social factor is also unmistakably present in the cultural trend towards cleanliness,
which has received ex post facto justification in hygienic considerations but which
manifested itself before their discovery. The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge
to get rid of the excreta, which have become disagreeable to the sense perceptions. We
know that in the nursery things are different. The excrete arouse no disgust in children.
They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from
it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development
which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent
and abominable. Such a reversal of values would scarcely be possible if the substances
that are expelled from the body were not doomed by their strong smells to share the fate
which overtook olfactory stimuli after man adopted the erect posture. Anal erotism,
therefore, succumbs in the first instance to the organic repression which paved the way to
civilization. The existence of the social factor which is responsible for the further
transformation of anal erotism is attested by the circumstance that, in spite of all man’s
developmental advances, he scarcely finds the smell of his own excreta repulsive, but only
that of other people’s . Thus a person who is not clean — who does not hide his excreta —
is offending other people; he is showing no consideration for them. And this is confirmed
by our strongest and commonest terms of abuse. It would be incomprehensible, too, that
man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world — the dog — as a
term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics:
that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of
excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions.]

Before we go on to enquire from what quarter an interference might arise, this
recognition of love as one of the foundations of civilization may serve as an
excuse for a digression which will enable us to fill in a gap which we left in an
earlier discussion. We said there that man’s discovery that sexual (genital) love
afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact provided him
with the prototype of all happiness, must have suggested to him that he should
continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual
relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life. We
went on to say that in doing so he made himself dependent in a most dangerous
way on a portion of the external world, namely, his chosen love-object, and
exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or
should lose it through unfaithfulness or death. For that reason the wise men of
every age have warned us most emphatically against this way of life; but in spite
of this it has not lost its attraction for a great number of people.

A small minority are enabled by their constitution to find happiness, in spite of
everything, along the path of love. But far-reaching mental changes in the
function of love are necessary before this can happen. These people make
themselves independent of their object’s acquiescence by displacing what they
mainly value from being loved on to loving; they protect themselves against the
loss of the object by directing their love, not to single objects but to all men alike;
and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning
away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an
inhibited aim. What they bring about in themselves in this way is a state of
evenly suspended, steadfast, affectionate feeling, which has little external
resemblance any more to the stormy agitations of genital love, from which it is
nevertheless derived. Perhaps St. Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus
exploiting love for the benefit of an inner feeling of happiness. Moreover, what
we have recognized as one of the techniques for fulfilling the pleasure principle
has often been brought into connection with religion; this connection may lie in
the remote regions where the distinction between the ego and objects or between
objects themselves is neglected. According to one ethical view, whose deeper
motivation will become clear to us presently, this readiness for a universal love
of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can
reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my
two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me
to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly,
not all men are worthy of love.

The love which founded the family continues to operate in civilization both in its
original form, in which it does not renounce direct sexual satisfaction, and in its
modified form as aim-inhibited affection. In each, it continues to carry on its
function of binding together considerable numbers of people, and it does so in a
more intensive fashion than can be effected through the interest of work in
common. The careless way in which language uses the word ‘love’ has its genetic
justification. People give the name ‘love’ to the relation between a man and a
woman whose genital needs have led them to found a family; but. they also give
the name ‘love’ to the positive feelings between parents and children, and
between the brothers and sisters of a family, although we are obliged to describe
this as ‘aim-inhibited love’ or ‘affection’. Love with an inhibited aim was in fact
originally fully sensual love, and it is so still in man’s unconscious. Both — fully
sensual love and aim-inhibited love — extend outside the family and create new
bonds with people who before were strangers. Genital love leads to the
formation of new families, and aim-inhibited love to ‘friendships’ which become
valuable from a cultural standpoint because they escape some of the limitations
of genital love, as, for instance, its exclusiveness. But in the course of
development the relation of love to civilization loses its unambiguity. On the one
hand love comes into opposition to the interests of civilization; on the other
civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions.

This rift between them seems unavoidable. The reason for it is not immediately
recognizable. It expresses itself at first as a conflict between the family and the
larger community to which the individual belongs. We have already perceived
that one of the main endeavours of civilization is to bring people together into
large unities. But the family will not give the individual up. The more closely the
members of a family are attached to one another, the more often do they tend to
cut themselves off from others, and the more difficult is it for them to enter into
the wider circle of life. The mode of life in common which is phylogenetically the
older, and which is the only one that exists in childhood, will not let itself be
superseded by the cultural mode of life which has been acquired later. Detaching
himself from his family becomes a task that faces every young person, and
society often helps him in the solution of it by means of puberty and initiation
rites. We get the impression that these are difficulties which are inherent in all
psychical — and, indeed, at bottom, in all organic — development.

Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their
retarding and restraining influence — those very women who, in the beginning,
laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent
the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become
increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks
and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little
capable. Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at
his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution
of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws
from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his
dependence on his relations with mem, even estrange him from his duties as a
husband and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by
the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.

The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than
its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already
brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is
perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time
experienced. Taboos, laws and customs impose further restrictions, which affect
both men and women. Not all civilizations go equally far in this; and the
economic structure of the society also influences the amount of sexual freedom
that remains. Here, as we already know, civilization is obeying the laws of
economic necessity, since a large amount of the psychical energy which it uses
for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality. In this respect
civilization behaves towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population
does which has subjected another one to its exploitation. Fear of a revolt by the
suppressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures. A high-water
mark in such a development has been reached in our Western European
civilization. A cultural community is perfectly justified, psychologically, in
starting by proscribing manifestations of the sexual life of children, for there
would be no prospect of curbing the sexual lusts of adults if the ground had not
been prepared for it in childhood. But such a community cannot in any way be
justified in going to the length of actually disavowing such easily demonstrable,
and, indeed, striking phenomena. As regards the sexually mature individual, the
choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex, and most extra-genital
satisfactions are forbidden as perversions. The requirement, demonstrated in
these prohibitions, that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone,
disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual
constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual
enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice. The result of such
restrictive measures might be that in people who are normal — who are not
prevented by their constitution — the whole of their sexual interests would flow
without loss into the channels that are left open. But hetero-sexual genital love,
which has remained exempt From outlawry, is itself restricted by further
limitations, in the shape of insistence upon legitimacy and monogamy. Present-
day civilization makes it plain that it will only permit sexual relationships on the
basis of a solitary, indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, and that
it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and is only
prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of
propagating the human race.

This, of course, is an extreme picture. Everybody knows that it has proved
impossible to put it into execution, even for quite short periods. Only the
weaklings have submitted to such an extensive encroachment upon their sexual
freedom, and stronger natures have only done so subject to a compensatory
condition, which will be mentioned later. Civilized society has found itself
obliged to pass over in silence many transgressions which, according to its own
rescripts, it ought to have punished. But we must not err on the other side and
assume that, because it does not achieve all its aims, such an attitude on the part
of society is entirely innocuous. The sexual life of civilized man is
notwithstanding severely impaired; it sometimes gives the impression of being
in process of involution as a function, just as our teeth and hair seem to be as
organs. One is probably justified in assuming that its importance as a source of
feelings of happiness, and therefore in the fulfilment of our aim in life, has
sensibly diminished. Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the
pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself which
denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths. This may be wrong; it
is hard to decide.*

*[The view expressed above is supported by the following considerations. Man is an
animal organism with (like others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual
corresponds to a fusion of two symmetrical halves, of which, according to some
investigators, one is purely male and the other female. It is equally possible that each half
was originally hermaphrodite. Sex is a biological fact which, although it is of
extraordinary importance in mental life, is hard to grasp psychologically. We are
accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual
impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the
characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. For psychology the contrast
between the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too
readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by
no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom. The theory of bisexuality is still
surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but see it as a serious impediment in
psycho-analysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts,
However this may be, if we assume it as a fact that each individual seeks to satisfy both
male and female wishes in his sexual life, we are prepared for the possibility that those
[two sets of] demands are not fulfilled by the same object, and that they interfere with
each other unless they can be kept apart and each impulse guided into a particular
channel that is suited to it. Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so
often associated with the erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components,
a quota of plain inclination to aggression. The love-object will not always view these
complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant
woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more,
since he had not beaten her for a week.

The conjecture which goes deepest, however, is the one which tales its start from what I
have said above in my footnote on p. 46f. It is to the effect that, with the assumption of an
erect posture by man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his
anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his
sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance
which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and
forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements. I know
that Bleuler (1913) once pointed to the existence of a primary repelling attitude Eke this
towards sexual life. All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that
‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’ [we are born between urine and faeces]’. The genitals, too,
give rise to strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil
sexual intercourse for them. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual
repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form
of life achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal existence. This result of
scientific research coincides in a remarkable way with commonplace prejudices that have
often made themselves heard. Nevertheless, these things arc at present no more than
unconfirmed possibilities which have not been substantiated by science. Nor should we
forget that, in spite of the undeniable depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in
Europe peoples among whom the strong genital odours which are so repellent to us are
highly prized as sexual stimulants and who refuse to give them up.]

V
Psycho-analytic work has shown us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual
life which people known as neurotics cannot tolerate. The neurotic creates
substitutive satisfactions for himself in his symptoms, and these either cause him
suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering for him by raising
difficulties in his relations with his environment and the society he belongs to.
The latter fact is easy to understand; the former presents us with a new problem.
But civilization demands other sacrifices besides that of sexual satisfaction.

We have treated the difficulty of cultural development as a general difficulty of
development by tracing it to the inertia of the libido, to its disinclination to give
up an old position for a new one. We are saying much the same thing when we
derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance
that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can
only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships
between a considerable number of individuals. When a love-relationship is at its
height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers
are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in
common to make them happy. In no other case does Eros so clearly betray the
core of his being, his purpose of making one out of more than one; but when he
has achieved this in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings,
he refuses to go further.

So far, we can quite well imagine a cultural community consisting of double
individuals like this, who, libidinally satisfied in themselves, are connected with
one another through the bonds of common “work and common interests. If this
were so, civilization would not have to withdraw any energy from sexuality. But
this desirable state of things does not, and never did, exist. Reality shows us that
civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at
binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and
employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which strong
identifications can be established between the members of the community, and it
summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the
communal bond by relations of friendship. In order for these aims to be fulfilled,
a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable. But we are unable to understand
what the necessity is which forces civilization along this path and which causes
its antagonism to sexuality. There must be some disturbing factor which we have
not yet discovered.

The clue may be supplied by one of the ideal demands, as we have called them,
of civilized society. It runs: ‘Thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself.’ It is known
throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it
forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical
times it was still strange to mankind. Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it, as
though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress
a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it
do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is
something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It
imposes duties on me for whose fulfilment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I
love someone, he must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use he
may be to me, and also his possible significance for me as a sexual object, for
neither of these two kinds of relationship comes into question where the precept
to love my neighbour is concerned.) He deserves it if he is so like me in
important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much
more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him. Again, I
have to love him if he is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if
any harm came to him would be my pain too — I should have to share it. But if
he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any
significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be
hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is
valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an
injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love him
(with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth,
like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small
modicum of my love will fall to his share — not by any possibility as much as, by
the judgement of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. What is the point
of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfilment cannot be
recommended as reasonable?

On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in
general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to
my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for
me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he
has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of
advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me.
Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire
by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and
showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless
I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me. If he behaves
differently, if he shows me consideration and forbearance as a stranger, I am
ready to treat him in the same way, in any case and quite apart from any precept.
Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run ‘Love thy neighbour as thy
neighbour loves thee’, I should not take exception to it. And there is a second
commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses
still stronger opposition in me. It is ‘Love thine enemies’. If I think it over,
however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it
is the same thing.

I think I can now hear a dignified voice admonishing me: ‘It is precisely because
your neighbour is not worthy of love, and is on the contrary your enemy, that
you should love him as yourself.’ I then understand that the case is one like that
of Credo quia absurdum.

Now it is very probable that my neighbour, when he is enjoined to love me as
himself, will answer exactly as I have done and will repel me for the same
reasons. I hope he will not have the same objective grounds for doing so, but he
will have the same idea as I have. Even so, the behaviour of human beings shows
differences, which ethics, disregarding the fact that such differences are
determined, classifies as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. So long as these undeniable differences
have not been removed, obedience to high ethical demands entails damage to the
aims of civilization, for it puts a positive premium on being bad. One is
irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital
punishment was being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its
abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a
voice from the hall called out: ‘Que messieurs les assassins commencent‘. [‘It’s
the murderers who should make the first move.’]

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is
that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can
defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures
among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of
aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential
helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their
aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to
use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him,
to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [“Man is a wolf
to man”]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have
the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for
some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal
might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are
favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are
out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage
beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone
who calls mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations the
invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan
and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even,
indeed, the horrors of the recent World War — anyone who calls these things to
mind will$ have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.

The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detects in ourselves
and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our
relations with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high
expenditure of energy. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of
human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration.
The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions
are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in
order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of
men in check by psychical reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of
methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited
relationships of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the
ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself — a commandment
which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to
the original nature of man. In spite of every effort, these endeavours of
civilization have not so far achieved very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest
excesses of brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against
criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined
manifestations of human aggressiveness. The time comes when each one of us
has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon
his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been
added to his life by their ill-will. At the same time, it would be unfair to reproach
civilization with trying to eliminate strife and competition from human activity.
These things are undoubtedly indispensable. But opposition is not necessarily
enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our
evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his
neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The
ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the
temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from
possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property
were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the
enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since
everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard
another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was
necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist
system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is
expedient or advantageous.* But I am able to recognize that the psychological
premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing
private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its
instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we
have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused
by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness
was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times,
when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery
almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of
every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception,
perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal
rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual
relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and
the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal
footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of
sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we
cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization
could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible
feature of human nature, will follow it there.

*[Anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty in his own youth and has experienced
the indifference and arrogance of the well-to-do, should be safe from the suspicion of
having no understanding or good will towards endeavours to fight against the inequality
of wealth among men and all that it leads to. To be sure, if an attempt is made to base this
fight upon an abstract demand, in the name of justice, for equality for all men, there is a
very obvious objection to be made — that nature, by endowing individuals with
extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices
against which there is no remedy.]

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to
aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a
comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in
the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible
to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are
other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once
discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining
territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in
constant feuds and in ridiculing each other — like the Spaniards and Portuguese,
for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch,
and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor
differences’, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it
is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to
aggression, by means of which, cohesion between the members of the
community is made easier; in this respect the Jewish people, scattered
everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the
countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the
Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and
secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited
universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community,
extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained
outside it became the inevitable consequence. To the Romans, who had not
founded their communal life as a State upon love, religious intolerance was
something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the State and
the State was permeated by religion. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that
the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-semitism as its
complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist
civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of
the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after
they have wiped out their bourgeois.

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his
aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that
civilization. In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of
instinct. To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happiness for any
length of time were very slender. Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his
possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. We must not forget, however,
that in the primal family only the head of it enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the
rest lived in slavish suppression. In that primal period of civilization, the contrast
between a minority who enjoyed the advantages of civilization and a majority
who were robbed of those advantages was, therefore, carried to extremes. As
regards the primitive peoples who exist to-day, careful researches have shown
that their instinctual life is by no means to be envied for its freedom. It is subject
to restrictions of a different kind but perhaps of greater severity than those
attaching to modern civilized man.

When we justly find fault with the present state of our civilization for so
inadequately fulfilling our demands for a plan of life that shall make us happy;
and for allowing the existence of so much suffering which could probably be
avoided — when, with unsparing criticism, we try to uncover the roots of its
imperfection, we are undoubtedly exercising a proper right and are not showing
ourselves enemies of civilization. We may expect gradually to carry through such
alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needs and will escape our
criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there
are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any
attempt at reform. Over and above the tasks of restricting the instincts, which we
are prepared for, there forces itself on our notice the danger of a state of things
which might be termed ‘the psychological poverty of groups’. This danger is
most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the
identification of its members with one another, while individuals of the leader
type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of a
group. The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity
for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall
avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do
not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods.

VI

In none of my previous writings have I had so strong a feeling as now that what I
am describing is common knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and,
in due course, the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in order to
expound things which are, in feet, self-evident. For that reason I should be glad
to seize the point if it were to appear that the recognition of a special,
independent aggressive instinct means an alteration of the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts.

We shall see, however, that this is not so and that it is merely a matter of
bringing into sharper focus a turn of thought arrived at long ago and of
following out its consequences. Of all the slowly developed parts of analytic
theory, the theory of the instincts is the one that has felt its way the most
painfully forward. And yet that theory was so indispensable to the whole
structure that something had to be put in its place. In what was at first my utter
perplexity, I took as my starting-point a saying of the poet-philosopher, Schiller,
that ‘hunger and love are what moves the world’. Hunger could be taken to
represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives
after objects, and its chief function, favoured in every way by nature, is the
preservation of the species. Thus, to begin with, ego-instincts and object-instincts
confronted each other. It was to denote the energy of the latter and only the latter
instincts that I introduced the term ‘libido’. Thus the antithesis was between the
ego-instincts and the libidinal instincts of love (in its widest sense) which were
directed to an object. One of these object-instincts, the sadistic instinct, stood out
from the rest, it is true, in that its aim was so very far from being loving.
Moreover it was obviously in some respects attached to the ego instincts: it could
not hide its close affinity with instincts of mastery which have no libidinal
purpose. But these discrepancies were got over; after all, sadism was clearly a
part of sexual life, in the activities of which affection could be replaced by
cruelty. Neurosis was regarded as the outcome of a struggle between the interest
of self-preservation and the demands of the libido, a struggle in which the ego
had been victorious but at the price of severe sufferings and renunciations.

Every analyst will admit that even to-day this view has not the sound of a long-
discarded error. Nevertheless, alterations in it became essential, as our enquiries
advanced from the repressed to the repressing forces, from the object-instincts to
the ego. The decisive step forward was the introduction of the concept of
narcissism — that is to say, the discovery that the ego itself is cathected with
libido, that the ego, indeed, is the libido’s original home, and remains to some
extent its headquarters. This narcissistic libido turns towards objects, and thus
becomes object-libido; and it can change back into narcissistic libido once more.
The concept of narcissism made it possible to obtain an analytic understanding of
the traumatic neuroses and of many of the affections bordering on the psychoses,
as well as of the latter themselves. It was not necessary to give up our
interpretation of the transference neuroses as attempts made by the ego to
defend itself against sexuality; but the concept of libido was endangered. Since
the ego-instincts, too, were libidinal, it seemed for a tune inevitable that we
should make libido coincide with instinctual energy in general, as C. G. Jung had
already advocated earlier. Nevertheless, there still remained in me a kind of
conviction, for which I was not as yet able to find reasons, that the instincts could
not all be of the same kind. My next step was taken in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920), when the compulsion to repeat and the conservative character of
instinctual life first attracted my attention. Starting from speculations on the
beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides
the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there
must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring
them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there
was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the
concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts. It was not easy,
however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The
manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed
that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its
dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a
portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light
as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself
could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying
some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own
self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would
be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding. At the
same time one can suspect from this example that the two kinds of instinct
seldom — perhaps never — appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed
with each other in varying and very different proportions and so become
unrecognizable to our judgement. In sadism, long since known to us as a
component instinct of sexuality, we should have before us a particularly strong
alloy of this kind between trends of love and the destructive instinct; while its
counterpart, masochism, would be a union between destructiveness directed
inwards and sexuality — a union which makes what is otherwise an
imperceptible trend into a conspicuous and tangible one.

The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met
with resistance even in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent
inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an
original bipolarity in its own nature. To begin with it was only tentatively that I
put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have
gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my
mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other
possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing
violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work. I know that in sadism
and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive
instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with erotism; but I
can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-
erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place
in our interpretation of life. (The desire for destruction when it is directed
inwards mostly eludes our perception, of course, unless it is tinged with
erotism.) I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of
destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took
before I became receptive to it. That others should have shown, and still show,
the same attitude of rejection surprises me less. For ‘little children do not like it’
when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to ‘badness’, to aggressiveness
and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image
of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile
the undeniable existence of evil — despite the protestations of Christian Science
— with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness. The Devil would be the best
way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as
an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal.

But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as
well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies. In view of
these difficulties, each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to
make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be
generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it.*

*[In Goethe’s Mephistopheles we have a quite exceptionally convincing identification of
the principle of evil with the destructive instinct:

Denn alles, was entsteht,
Ist wert, das es zu Grunde geht . . .
So ist dann alles, was Ihr Sünde,
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,
Mein eigentliches Element.

[For all the things from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed . . .
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated —
Destruction, — aught with Evil blent, —
That is my proper element.]

The Devil himself names as his adversary, not what is holy and good, but Nature’s power
to create, to multiply life — that is, Eros:

Der Luft, dem Wasser, wie der Erden
Entwinden tausend Keime sich,
Im Trocknen, Feuchten, Warmen, Kalten!
Hätt’ ich mir nicht die Flamme vorbehalten,
Ich hätte nichts Aparts für mich.

[From Water, Earth, and Air unfolding,
A thousand germs break forth and grow,
In dry, and wet, and warm, and chilly:
And had I not the Flame reserved, why, really,
There’s nothing special of my own to show.]

The name ‘libido’ can once more be used to denote the manifestations of the
power of Eros in order to distinguish them from the energy of the death instinct.
It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that
instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background
behind Eros, and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being
alloyed with Eros. It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in
its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we
succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros.
But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of
destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is
accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing
to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for
omnipotence.

The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were,
inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego
with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. Since the
assumption of the existence of the instinct is mainly based on theoretical
grounds, we must also admit that it is not entirely proof against theoretical
objections. But this is how things appear to us now, in the present state of our
knowledge; future research and reflection will no doubt bring further light which
will decide the matter.

In all that follows I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to
aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I
return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At
one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a
special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of
that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros,
whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families,
then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why
this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These
collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone,
advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural
aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each,
opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative
and, the main representative of the death instinct which we have found
alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think,
the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must
present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life arid the
instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is
what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may
therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.* And
it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby
about Heaven.

*[And we may probably add more precisely, a struggle for life in the shape it was bound
to assume after a certain event which still remains to be discovered.]

VII

Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do
not know. Very probably some of them — the bees, the ants, the termites —
strove for thousands of years before they arrived at the State institutions, the
distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individual, for which we
admire them to-day.

It is a mark of our present condition that we know from our own feelings that we should not think ourselves happy in any of these animal States or in any of the roles assigned in them to the individual. In the case of other animal species it may be that a temporary balance has been reached between the influences of their environment and the mutually contending instincts within them, and that thus a cessation of development has come about. It may be that in primitive man a fresh access of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of the destructive instinct. There are a great many
questions here to which as yet there is no answer.

Another, question concerns us more nearly. What means does civilization
employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it
harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a
few of these methods, but not yet with the one that appears to be the most
important. This we can study in the history of the development of the individual.
What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? Something
very remarkable, which we should never have guessed:, and which is
nevertheless quite obvious. His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in
point of fact, sent back to where it came from — that is, it is directed towards his
own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over
against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of
‘conscience’, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh
aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous
individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is
subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for
punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s
dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting
up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

As to the origin of the sense of guilt, the analyst has different views from other
psychologists; but even he does not find it easy to give an account of it. To begin
with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt, we arrive at an
answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (devout people would
say ‘sinful’) when he has done something which he knows to be ‘bad’. But then
we notice how little this answer tells us. Perhaps, after some hesitation, we shall
add that even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only
recognized in himself an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and
the question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal to the deed.

Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already recognized that what is
bad is reprehensible, is something that must not be carried out. How is this
judgement arrived at? We may reject the existence of an original, as it were
natural, capacity, to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all
what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something
which is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an
extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good
or bad. Since a person’s own feelings would not have led him along this path, he
must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a
motive is easily discovered in his helplessness and his dependence on other
people, and it can best be designated as . fear of loss of love. If he loses the love
of another person upon whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected
from a variety of dangers. Above all, he is exposed to the danger that this
stronger person will show his superiority in the form of punishment. At the
beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with
loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. This, too, is the reason why it
makes little difference whether one has already done the bad thing or only
intends to do it. In either case the danger only sets in if and when the authority
discovers it, and in either case the authority would behave in the same way.

This state of mind is called a ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve
this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love,
‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many
adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the
two parents is taken by the larger human community. Consequently, such people
habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which promises them
enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything
about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out.
Present-day society has to reckon in general with this state of mind.

A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the
establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher
stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense
of guilt. At this point, too, the fear of being found out comes to an end; the
distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it
disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even
thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation from a real point of view
has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we
know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic
influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted,
makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the
beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of
anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the
external world.

At this second stage of development, the conscience exhibits a peculiarity which
was absent from the first stage and which is no longer easy to account for. For
the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its behaviour, so
that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness the
furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness. This means that
virtue forfeits some part of its promised reward; the docile and continent ego
does not enjoy the trust of its mentor, and strives in vain, it would seem, to
acquire it the objection will at once be made that these difficulties are superficial
ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more vigilant conscience is precisely
the hallmark of a moral man. Moreover, when saints call themselves sinners,
they are not so wrong, considering the temptations to instinctual satisfaction to
which they are exposed in a specially high degree — since, as is well known,
temptations are merely increased by constant frustration, whereas an occasional
satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for the time being. The field
of ethics, which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely that
ill-luck — that is, external frustration — so greatly enhances the power of the
conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience
is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him,
he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his
conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and. punishes himself with penances.
Whole peoples have behaved in this way, and still do. This, however, is easily
explained by the original infantile stage of conscience, which, as we see, is not
given up after the introjection into the super-ego, but persists alongside of it and
behind it. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is
unfortunate it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and,
threatened by such a loss of love, he once more bows to the parental
representative in his super-ego — a representative whom, in his days of good
fortune, he was ready to neglect. This becomes especially clear where Fate is
looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else than an
expression of the Divine Will. The people of Israel had believed themselves to be
the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after
misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their
belief in his relationship to them or questioned his power or righteousness,
Instead, they produced the prophets, who held up their sinfulness before them;
and out of their sense of guilt they created the over-strict commandments of their
priestly religion. It is remarkable how differently a primitive man behaves. If he
has met with a misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on his
fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it a thrashing instead
of punishing himself.

Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an
authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego. The first
insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as
doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes
cannot be concealed from the super-ego. We have also learned how the severity
of the super-ego — the demands of conscience — is to be understood. It is simply
a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded
and which it has in part replaced. We now see in what relationship the
renunciation of instinct stands to the sense of guilt. Originally, renunciation of
instinct was the result of fear of an external authority: one renounced one’s
satisfactions in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this renunciation,
one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain.
But with fear of the super-ego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation
is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego.
Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes
about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of a super-
ego, or, as we may put it, in the formation of a conscience. Instinctual
renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect; virtuous
continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened
external unhappiness — loss of love and punishment on the part of the external
authority — has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the
tension of the sense of guilt.

These interrelations are so complicated and at the same time so important that, at
the risk of repeating myself, I shall approach them from yet another angle. The
chronological sequence, then, would be as follows. First comes renunciation of
instinct owing to fear of aggression by the external authority. (This is, of course,
what fear of the loss of love amounts to, for love is a protection against this
punitive aggression.) After that comes the erection of an internal authority, and
renunciation of instinct owing to fear of it — owing to fear of conscience. In this
second situation bad intentions are equated with bad actions, and hence come a
sense of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience keeps
up the aggressiveness of the authority. So far things have no doubt been made
clear; but where does this leave room for the reinforcing influence of misfortune
(of renunciation imposed from without) and for the extraordinary severity of
conscience in the best and most tractable people? We have already explained
both these peculiarities of conscience, but we probably still have an impression
that those explanations do not go to the bottom of the matter, and leave a residue
still unexplained. And here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to
psycho-analysis and which is foreign to people’s ordinary way of thinking. This
idea is of a sort which enables us to understand why the subject-matter was
bound to seem so confused and obscure to us. For it tells us that conscience (or
more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause
of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is
reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of
conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and
intolerance. If we could only bring it better into harmony with what we already
know about the history of the origin of conscience, we should be tempted to
defend the paradoxical statement that confidence is the result of instinctual
renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without)
creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renunciation.

The contradiction between this statement and what we have previously said
about the genesis of conscience is in point of fact not so very great, and we see a
way of further reducing it. In order to make our exposition easier, let us take as
our example the aggressive instinct, and let us assume that the renunciation in
question is always a renunciation of aggression. (This, of course, is only to be
taken as a temporary assumption.) The effect of instinctual renunciation on the
conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject
gives up is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter’s aggressiveness
(against the ego) . This does not harmonize well with the view that the original
aggressiveness of conscience is a continuance of the severity of the external
authority and therefore has nothing to do with renunciation. But the discrepancy
is removed if we postulate a different derivation for this first instalment of the
super-ego’s aggressivity. A considerable amount of aggressiveness must be
developed in the child against the authority which prevents him from having his
first, but none the less his most important, satisfactions, whatever the kind of
instinctual deprivation that is demanded of him may be; but he is obliged to
renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness. He finds his way out
of this economically difficult situation with the help of familiar mechanisms. By
means of identification he takes the unattackable authority into himself. The
authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the
aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child’s
ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the authority — the father —
who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the [real] situation is reversed: ‘If
I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly’. The
relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish,
of the real relationships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external
object. That is typical, too. But the essential difference is that the original severity
of the super-ego does not — or does not so much — represent the severity which
one has experienced from it [the object], or which one attributes to it; it
represents rather one’s own aggressiveness towards it. If this is correct, we may
assert truly that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression of an
aggressive impulse, and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions
of the same kind.

Which of these two views is correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed
so unassailable, or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome
fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too, of direct observations, both are
justified. They do not contradict each other, and they even coincide at one point,
for the child’s revengeful aggressiveness will be in part determined by the
amount of punitive aggression which he expects from his father. Experience
shows, however, that the severity of the super-ego which a child develops in no
way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with. The
severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A child who
has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it
would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence; it is not difficult to
convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also exert a strong influence on
the formation of the child’s super-ego. What it amounts to is that in the
formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a conscience innate
constitutional factors and , influences from the real environment act in
combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary, it is a universal
aetiological condition for all such processes.

It can also be asserted that when a child reacts to his first great instinctual
frustrations with excessively strong aggressiveness and with a correspondingly
severe super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond the
response that would be currently justified; for the father of prehistoric times was
undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may be
attributed to him. Thus, if one shifts over from individual to phylogenetic
development, the differences between the two theories of the genesis of
conscience are still further diminished. On the other hand, a new and important
difference makes its appearance between these two developmental processes. We
cannot get away from the assumption that man’s sense of guilt springs from the
Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers
banded together. On that occasion an act of aggression was not suppressed but
carried out; but it was the same act of aggression whose suppression in the child
is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt. At this point I should not be
surprised if the reader were to exclaim angrily: ‘so it makes no difference
whether one kills one’s father or not — one gets a feeling of guilt in either case!’
We may take leave to raise a few doubts here. Either it is not true that the sense
of guilt comes from suppressed aggressiveness, or else the whole story of the
killing of the father is a fiction and the children of primaeval man did not kill
their fathers any more often than children do nowadays. Besides, if it is not
fiction but a plausible piece of history, it would be a case of something
happening which everyone expects to happen — namely, of a person feeling
guilty because he really has done something which cannot be justified. And of
this event, which is after all an everyday occurrence, psycho-analysis has not yet
given any explanation.

That is true, and we must make good the omission. Nor is there any great secret
about the matter. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a
misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It
relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a
conscience — the readiness to feel guilty — was already in existence before the
deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help us to discover the
origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these
everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to
achieve satisfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its
strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owing to its having been
satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. Psycho-analysis is thus
justified in excluding from the present discussion the case of a sense of guilt due
to remorse, however frequently such cases occur and however great their
practical importance.

But if the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, that
was after all a case of ‘remorse’. Are we to assume that at that time a conscience
and a sense of guilt were not, as we have presupposed, in existence before the
deed? If not, where, in this case, did the remorse come from? There is no doubt
that this case should explain the secret of the sense of guilt to us and put an end
to our difficulties. And I believe it does. This remorse was the result of the
primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but
they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satisfied by their act of
aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. It set up the
super-ego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father’s
power, as though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried
out against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended, to prevent a
repetition of the deed. And since the inclination to aggressiveness against the
father was repeated in the following generations, the sense of guilt, too,
persisted, and it was reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that
was suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, I think, we can at last
grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the origin of
conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has killed
one’s father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is
bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the
conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct
of destruction or death. This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with
the task of living together. So long as the community assumes no other form than
that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex,
to establish the conscience and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt
is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which
are dependent on the put; and it if strengthened and results in a further
intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic
impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can
only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of
guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If
civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as
a whole, then— as a result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the
eternal struggle between the trends of love and death — there is inextricably
bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach
heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. One is reminded of the great
poet’s moving arraignment of the ‘Heavenly Powers’: —

Ihr führt in’s Leben uns hinein.
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlasst Ihr ihn den Pein,
Denn jede Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.

[To the earth, this weary earth, ye bring us
To guilt ye let us heedless go,
Then leave repentance fierce to wring us:
A moment’s guilt, an age of woe!]

And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless
vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own
feelings the deepest truths, towards which the rest of us have to find our way
through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping.

VII

Having reached the end of his journey, the author must ask his readers’
forgiveness for not having been a more skilful guide and for not having spared
them empty stretches of road and troublesome detours. There is no doubt that it
could have been done better. I will, attempt, late in the day, to make some
amends.

In the first place, I suspect that the reader has the impression that our discussions
on the sense of guilt disrupt the framework of this essay: that they take up too
much space, so that the rest of its subject-matter, with which they are not always
closely connected, is pushed to one side. This may have spoilt the structure of my
paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to represent the sense of guilt
as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show
that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness
through the heightening of the sense of guilt. Anything that still sounds strange
about that statement, which is the final conclusion of our investigation, can
probably be traced to the quite peculiar relationship — as yet completely
unexplained — which the sense of guilt has to our consciousness. ln the common
case of remorse, which we regard as normal, this feeling makes itself clearly
enough perceptible to consciousness. Indeed, we are accustomed to speak of a
‘consciousness of guilt’ instead of 

‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all …’

That the education of young people at the present day conceals from them the part which
sexuality will play in their lives is not the only reproach which we are obliged to make
against it. Its other sin is that it does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which
they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a
false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people
starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this
it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being made of ethical demands. The strictness
of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: ‘This is how men
ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on
their not being like that.’ Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else
fulfils those ethical demands — that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the
demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous.

A ‘sense of guilt’. Our study of the neuroses, to which, after all, we owe the most
valuable pointers to an understanding of normal conditions, brings us up against
some contradictions. In one of those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of
guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture
and the patient’s life as well, and it hardly allows anything else to appear
alongside of it. But in most other cases and forms of neurosis it remains
completely unconscious, without on that account producing any less important
effects. Our patients do not believe us when we attribute an ‘unconscious sense
of guilt’ to them. In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them, we tell
them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds
expression . But its connection with a particular form of neurosis must not be
over-estimated. Even in obsessional neurosis there are types of patients who are
not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a
kind of anxiety, if they are prevented from carrying out certain actions. It ought
to be possible eventually to understand these things; but as yet we cannot. Here
perhaps we may be glad to have it pointed out that the sense of guilt is at bottom
nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides
completely with fear of the super-ego. And the relations of anxiety to consciousness
exhibit the same extraordinary variations. Anxiety is always present somewhere
or other behind every symptom; but at one time it takes noisy possession of the
whole of consciousness, while at another it conceals itself so completely that we
are obliged to speak of unconscious anxiety or, if we want to have a clearer
psychological conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance simply a feeling, a
of possibilities of anxiety. Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of
guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either and remains to a
large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for
which people seek other motivations.

Religions at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in civilization by a sense of guilt. Furthermore — a point which I failed to appreciate elsewhere — they claim to redeem mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the manner in which, in Christianity, this redemption is achieved — by the sacrificial death of a single person, who in this manner takes upon himself a guilt that is common to everyone we have been able to infer what the first occasion may have been on which this primal guilt, which was also the beginning of civilization, was acquired.

Though it cannot be of great importance, it may not be superfluous to elucidate
the meaning of a few words such as ‘super-ego’, ‘conscience’, ‘sense of guilt’,
‘need for punishment’ and ‘remorse’, which we have often, perhaps, used too
loosely and interchangeably. They all relate to the same state of affairs, but
denote different aspects of it. The super-ego is an agency which has been inferred
by us, and conscience is a function which we ascribe, among other functions, to
that agency. This function consists in keeping a watch over the actions and
intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising at censorship. The sense of
guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the severity of the
conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this
way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of
the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the
whole relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on
tile part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a
sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct towards internal
destruction present in the ego, employed for forming an erotic attachment to the
super-ego. We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego is
demonstrably present. As to a sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence
before the super-ego, and therefore before conscience, too. At that time it is the
immediate expression of fear of the external authority, a recognition of the
tension between the ego and that authority. It is the direct derivative of the
conflict between the need for the authority’s love and the urge towards
instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition produces the inclination to aggression.
The superimposition of these two strata of the sense of guilt — one coming from
fear of the external authority, the other from fear of the internal authority — has
hampered our insight into the position of conscience in a number of ways.
Remorse is a general term for the ego’s reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It
contains, in little altered form, the sensory material of the anxiety which is
operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and can include the
need for punishment. Thus remorse, too, can be older than conscience.

Nor will it do any harm if we once more review the contradictions which have
for a while perplexed us during our enquiry. Thus, at one point the sense of guilt
was the consequence of acts of aggression that had been abstained from; but at
another point — and precisely at its historical beginning, the killing of the father
— it was the consequence of an act of aggression that had been carried out. But a
way out of this difficulty was found. For the institution of the internal authority,
the super-ego, altered the situation radically. Before this, the sense of guilt
coincided with remorse. (We may remark, incidentally, that the term ‘remorse’
should be reserved for the reaction after an act of aggression has actually been
carried out’ ) After this, owing to the omniscience of the super-ego, the difference
between an aggression intended and an aggression carried out lost its force.
Henceforward a sense of guilt could be produced not only by an act of violence
that is actually carried out (as all the world knows), but also by one that is merely
intended (as psycho-analysis has discovered). Irrespectively of this alteration in
the psychological situation, the conflict arising from ambivalence — the conflict
between the two primal instincts — leaves the same result behind. We are
tempted to look here for the solution of the problem of the varying relation in
which the sense of guilt stands to consciousness. It might be thought that a sense
of guilt arising from remorse for an evil deed must always be conscious, whereas
a sense of guilt arising from the perception of an evil impulse may remain
unconscious. But the answer is not so simple as that. Obsessional neurosis speaks
energetically against it.

The second contradiction concerned the aggressive energy with which we
suppose the super-ego to be endowed. According to one view, that energy
merely carries on the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive
in the mind; while, according to another view, it consists, on the contrary, of
one’s own aggressive energy which has not been used and which one now
directs against that inhibiting authority. The first view seemed to fit in better
with the history, and the second with the theory of the sense of guilt. Closer
selection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable contradiction almost too
completely; what remained as the essential and common factor was that in each
case we were dealing with an aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards.
Clinical observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources for
the aggressiveness which we attribute to the super-ego; one or the other of them
exercises the stronger effect in any given case, but as a general rule they operate
in unison.

This is, I think, the place at which to put forward for serious consideration a view
which I have earlier recommended for provisional acceptance. In the most recent
analytic literature a predilection is shown for the idea that any kind of
frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction, results, or may result, in a
heightening of the sense of guilt. A great theoretical simplification will, I think,
be achieved if we regard this as applying only to the aggressive instincts, and
little will be found to contradict this assumption. For how are we to account, on
dynamic and economic grounds, for an increase in the sense of guilt appearing in
place of an unfulfilled erotic demand? This only seems possible in a round-about
way — if we suppose, that is, that the prevention of art erotic satisfaction calls up
a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the
satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if
this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense
of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego. I am convinced
that many processes will admit of a simpler and clearer exposition if the findings
of psycho-analysis with regard to the derivation of the sense of guilt are
restricted to the aggressive instincts. Examination of the clinical material gives us
no unequivocal answer here, because, as our hypothesis tells us, the two classes
of instinct hardly ever appear in a pure form, isolated from each other; but an
investigation of extreme cases would probably point in the direction I anticipate.

I am tempted to extract a first advantage from this more restricted view of the
case by applying it to the process of repression. As we have learned, neurotic
symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual
wishes. In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise
that perhaps every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which
in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. It now
seems plausible to formulate the following proposition. When an instinctual
trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and
its aggressive components into a sense of guilt. Even if this proposition is only an
average approximation to the truth, it is worthy of our interest.

Some readers of this work may further have an impression that they have heard
the formula of the struggle between Eros and the death instinct too often. It was
alleged to characterize the process of civilization which mankind undergoes but
it was also brought into connection with the development of the individual, and,
in addition, it was said to have revealed the secret of organic life in general. We
cannot, I think, avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one
another. The repetition of the same formula is justified by the consideration that
both the process of human civilization and of the development of the individual
are also vital processes — which is to say that they must share in the most
general characteristic of life. On the other hand, evidence of the presence of this
general characteristic fails, for the very reason of its general nature, to help us to
arrive at any differentiation [between the processes], so long as it is not narrowed
down by special qualifications. We can only be satisfied, therefore, if we assert
that the process of civilization is a modification which the vital process
experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by Eros and instigated by
Ananke — by the exigencies of reality; and that this task is one of uniting
separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties. When,
however, we look at the relation between the process of human civilization and
the developmental or educative process of individual human beings, we shall
conclude without much hesitation that the two are very similar in nature, if not
the very same process applied to different kinds of object. The process of the
civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order
than is the development of the individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend
in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme; but
in view of the similarity between the aims of the two processes — in the one case
the integration of a separate individual into a human group, and in the other case
the creation of a unified group out of many individuals — we cannot be
surprised at the similarity between the means employed and the resultant
phenomena.

In view of its exceptional importance, we must not long postpone the mention of
one feature which distinguishes between the two processes. In the
developmental process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure
principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as
the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a
scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness
can be achieved. If it could be done without that condition, it would perhaps be
preferable. To put it in other words, the development of the individual seems to
us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards
happiness, which we usually call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with
others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic’. Neither of these descriptions
goes much below the surface. In the process of individual development, as we
have said, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic urge (or the urge towards
happiness); while the other urge, which may be described as a ‘cultural’ one, is
usually content with the role of imposing restrictions. But in the process of
civilization things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim
of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of
happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost seems as if
the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no
attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual. The developmental
process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own
which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization. It is only in so far
as the first of these processes has union with the community as its aim that it
need coincide with the second process.

Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own
axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of
mankind at the same time as he pursues his own path in life. But to our dull eyes
the play of forces in the heavens seems fixed in a never-changing order; in the
field of organic life we can still see how the forces contend with one another, and
how the effects of the conflict are continually changing. So, also, the two urges,
the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other
human beings must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also,
the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in
hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground But this
struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the
contradiction — probably an irreconcilable one — between the primal instincts of
Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to
the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects; and it
does admit of an eventual accommodation in the individual, as, it may be hoped,
it will also do in the future of civilization, however much that civilization may
oppress the life of the individual to-day.

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual
development may be extended in an important respect It can he asserted that the
community, too, evolves a super-ego .under whose influence cultural
development proceeds. It would be a tempting task for anyone who has a
knowledge of human civilizations to follow out this analogy in detail. I will
confine myself to bringing forward a few striking points. The super-ego of an
epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on
the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders — men of
overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has
found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided,
expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their
lifetime these figures were — often enough, even if not always — mocked and
maltreated by others and even despatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way,
indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his
death by violence. The most arresting example of this fateful conjunction is to be
seen in the figure of Jesus Christ — if, indeed, that figure is not a part of
mythology, which called it into being from an obscure memory of that primal
event. Another point of agreement between the cultural and the individual
super-ego is that the former, just like the latter, sets up strict ideal demands,
disobedience to which is visited with ‘fear of conscience’. Here, indeed, we come
across the remarkable circumstance that the mental processes concerned are
actually more familiar to us and more accessible to consciousness as they are
seen in the group than they can be in the individual man. In him, when tension
arises, it is only the aggressiveness of the super-ego which, in the form of
reproaches, makes itself noisily heard; its actual demands often remain
unconscious in the background. If we bring them to conscious knowledge, we
find that they coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego. At
this point the two processes, that of the cultural development of the group and
that of the cultural development of the individual, are, as it were, always
interlocked. For that reason some of the manifestations and properties of the
super-ego can be more easily detected in its behaviour in the cultural community
than in the separate individual.

The cultural super-ego has developed its ideals and set up its demands. Among
the latter, those which deal with the relations of human beings to one another are
comprised under the heading of ethics. People have at all times set the greatest
value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce
especially important results. And it does in fact deal with a subject which can
easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. Ethics is thus to be
regarded as a therapeutic attempt — as an endeavour to achieve, by means of a
command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by
means of any other cultural activities. As we already know, the problem before
us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization — namely, the
constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another;
and for that very reason we are especially interested in what is probably the most
recent of the cultural commands of the super-ego, the commandment to love
one’s neighbour as oneself. In our research into, and therapy of, a neurosis, we
are led to make two reproaches against the super-ego of the individual. In the
severity of its commands and prohibitions it troubles itself too little about the
happiness of the ego, in that it takes insufficient account of the resistance against
obeying them — of the instinctual strength of the id [in the first place], and of the
difficulties presented by the real external environment [in the second].

Consequently we are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the
super-ego, and we endeavour to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections
can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does
not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human
beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to
obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man’s ego is psychologically capable of
anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id.
This is a mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be
controlled beyond certain limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be
produced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy. The commandment,
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ the strongest defence against human
aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological proceedings of
the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an
enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty.
Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder
it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who
follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a
disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to
civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much
unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! ‘Natural’ ethics, as it is called, has nothing
to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself
better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its
promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth,
ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in
the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this
direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among
socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh
idealistic misconception of human nature.

I believe the line of thought which seeks to trace in the phenomena of cultural
development the part played by a super-ego promises still further discoveries. I
hasten to come to a close. But there is one question which I can hardly evade. If
the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the
development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not
be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges,
some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of
mankind — have become ‘neurotic’? An analytic dissection of such neuroses
might lead to therapeutic recommendations which could lay claim to great
practical interest. I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho-
analysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless.
But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only
dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with
concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been
evolved. Moreover, the diagnosis of communal neuroses is faced with a special
difficulty. In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast
that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be
‘normal’. For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same
disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere.
And as regards the therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the
use of the most correct analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses
authority to impose such a therapy upon the group? But in spite of all these
difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a
pathology of cultural communities.

For a wide variety of reasons, it is very far from my intention to express an
opinion upon the value of human civilization. I have endeavoured to guard
myself against the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the
most precious tiling that we possess or could acquire and that its path will
necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection. I can at least listen without
indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of
cultural endeavour and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the
conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of
it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate. My
impartiality is made all the easier to me by my knowing very little about all these
things. One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgements of
value follow directly his wishes for happiness — that, accordingly, they are an
attempt to support his illusions with arguments. I should find it very
understandable if someone were to point out the obligatory nature of the course
of human civilization and were to say, for instance, that the tendencies to a
restriction of sexual life or to the institution of a humanitarian ideal at the
expense of natural selection were developmental trends which cannot be averted
or turned aside and to which it is best for us to yield as though they were
necessities of nature. I know, too, the objection that can be made against this, to
the effect that in the history of mankind, trends such as these, which were
considered unsurmountable, have often been thrown aside and replaced by other
trends. Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a
prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at
bottom that is what they are all demanding — the wildest revolutionaries no less
passionately than the most virtuous believers.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to
what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance
of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.
It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special
interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that
with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the
last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest,
their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that
the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert
himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee
with what success and with what result?