English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Freud's Civilization and
Its Discontents: Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Freud's late effort, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), is the text that most compellingly links its author to the tradition of Victorian cultural analysis that we have been studying. In this work, Freud immediately distances himself from the Sphinx riddle of metaphysics and religion: "what is the purpose of life?" Instead, he proposes to take for his standard the more practical question, "[what do] men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives[?]" (25) In a way, Freud as psychoanalyst depicts himself as something of a utilitarian and a scientist--he will dismiss all grand commentary on still grander intellectual narratives, preferring rather to take his clues from mundane phenomena like child development and the actual, occasionally pathological, behavior of adults and groups. Although some of Freud's own accounts, replete with terms like "pleasure principle" and "instinct for survival," may sound disappointingly Victorian, our disillusionment with his orthodoxy will not withstand close reading of the increasingly complex later chapters of his book. We shall see that this writer's Sherlock Holmesian pursuit of the causes behind humanity's failure to live peaceably and according to reason lead him well beyond the nineteenth-century formulations we have been examining. True enough, Freud begins by cautiously investigating the virtues of Eros, or love, as a force with which to unite and satisfy human couples and bind them into a larger cultural unity, but his speculations soon lead him straight to that nefarious Doctor Moriarty of the psyche, the Death Instinct. This instinct must shortly become our main concern, too. We need first, however, to reconstruct Freud's study of Eros in Civilization and Its Discontents. In Chapter Two, Freud suggests that the love instinct, when allowed sufficient sway in human affairs, offers men and women their strongest hope of attaining happiness. Why so? Faced with grave threats from external nature, their own decaying bodies, and even their social arrangements, says Freud, people have always had to renounce the immediate satisfaction of their innate desire for happiness. So powerful are these threats, he says, that by and large individuals who must subsist within a community have had to sacrifice their adherence to the "pleasure principle" in favor of the "reality principle." The ego, that is, must accommodate itself to the world around it and to other egos; it must mediate between an ungiving externality and the world-consuming need for gratification of the id, that sector of the ego which, infant-like, will brook no distinction between itself and the world of objects. In this state of affairs, Freud explains, humanity has found it necessary to take up a kind of rearguard action with respect to pleasure. Instead of trying to attain what our favorite Utilitarians would call "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," civilized individuals and groups have been forced to settle for the most expedient means of avoiding pain. These means, as Freud describes them, involve either the extirpation or deadening of instinctual impulses or the shifting (i.e. "sublimation") of them into channels appropriate to the work of civilization. Sublimation is, of course, an extremely important mechanism for Freud, one that is responsible for art and higher thought, those jewels in the crown of civilization. Nonetheless, he argues, the various means of avoiding confrontation with nature and other beings are all, to some extent, unsatisfactory. In the end. nothing but love lies in the path of frustration. What, then, does Eros have to offer by way of satisfying human needs? Love, says Freud, offers not just avoidance of pain but real pleasure, and it makes this offer without, like the various delusions and intoxicants he has already discussed, having to turn away from the world outside. Love goes so far as to appropriate the desired object and to try to unite with it. The devil is never out of range when Freud says something optimistic, however, so presently we must renounce our unbounded faith in love. Freud will return to the subject, he promises, but meantime we are left with the unpleasant fact that in embracing his object, the lover makes himself as abjectly dependent on that object as anyone could imagine. Civilization is not such easy prey as this; it will not be taken by the pleasure principle unawares, and so--at least for now--the last word on individual happiness is left to that wily authoritarian Frederick the Great: in my State every man can be saved after his own fashion" (34). As in Prussia, so in Freud's "civilization"; happiness is "a problem of the economics of the individual's libido," which means that the pleasure-seeking citizen must build his own sand-castle paradise within the constraints of the larger group that sustains him. If Freud's opening move as a cultural analyst was to jettison religious propositions about ultimate meaning in favor of examining the curiously limited happiness-potential of Eros, his treatment of the Victorian faith in progress is just as summary. Freud's comments on civilization as the bearer of human perfectibility are little gems of acerbic Jewish wisdom; they do away with the nineteenth and early-twentieth century's wide-eyed trust in scientific progress as decisively as the absurdities of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss demolished Enlightenment optimism. "Noses were made to bear spectacles," the doctor had said, "and therefore we have spectacles" (Candide). Similarly, the infantile pleasure we take from our status as prosthetic gods, declares Freud, has all the logical integrity of "the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again" (40). Technology, in other words, solves only the problems it itself creates, so there is no use putting our hopes for satisfaction in the circular operations of "progress." Freud's witticisms aside, however, there are still deeper reasons for humankind's dissatisfaction with civilized life. In Chapter Three, Freud sets down what he believes to be the defining characteristics of his object: control over nature, the desire for cleanliness and order, the higher intellectual pursuits (philosophy, religious systems, scientific thought, the arts, ideals of self- and communal perfection), and, most important of all, the management of social and sexual relations. This last attribute, of course, is perfectly necessary if humans are to avoid what the Renaissance philosophers called "the state of nature" or, to use Thomas Hobbes' cutting extension of the phrase, "the war of all against all." Freud simply does not believe that men and women can return to a primitivist's paradise in which, according to some pre-psychoanalytic theorists, peace and harmony reigned. Regulation of sexuality is, nevertheless, also the most obvious cause of hostility between the individual and the clan or state that claims him as a member. In sum, the community asserts itself as the Right or the Law with respect to which the innately rebellious subject can only do wrong. In the form of justice, then, the power of the community unseats the power of the individual, and the question at once becomes, "how can the individual's selfish claims to happiness be accommodated to the larger, utilitarian aims of the group?" Freud's answer to this question is, as we might have guessed, quite ambivalent; the good doctor is no utopian cut from nineteenth-century cloth. So far, he himself admits, he has told us nothing new with his musty tale of communal usurpation; the whole story has been well known for centuries. Freud overcomes his humility, though. by adding to the story something entirely new: the idea that the development of civilization can be likened to the normal maturation process, or libidinal development, of a human being. The relevant factors here, he explains, are formation of certain character traits, sublimation of instinctual aims, and, ominously, outright renunciation of those powerful aims, resulting in great hostility on the part of the individual toward civilization itself. If Freud is correct to maintain that civilization "grew up" in a manner resembling the growth of a normal child, his next move must be to determine just what it might have been that spurred on this maturation. Freud's task brings him back round to his promised further exploration of Eros, or the love instinct, which, set to work by Ananke ("Necessity," or the exigencies of survival), has for its aim the binding of ever-larger numbers of people into one great cultural entity. This time, Freud configures his narrative as a tale about the formation of a primitive family unit. Early in human prehistory, he writes, the male's need for genital satisfaction stopped its former animal-like comings and goings and became a permanent desire. Love, as W.B. Yeats wrote, had "pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement," and insistently so. This constant desire led the male to keep his female love object near him at all times, and the female, prompted by love for her offspring, came to prefer the strongest male as their permanent guardian. So far, we see that the erotic instinct has bound an individual male and female into long-term mates. Into this primitive idyll, though, Freud introduces the brutal, irreversible Hobbesian fact that this mate, the father of the woman's children, is an arbitrary and terrible fellow, to say the least. If isolated couples are to join together into anything like a real society, the power of the father must be restricted. The result of this pressing need is what Freud calls "Totemic culture": the father's male children band together as brothers and kill their progenitor, thus discovering the power of the collectivity over mere individuals. Their bloody act, nonetheless, brings to light the need to prevent any one of them from in turn assuming the father's unlimited authority. The brothers' renunciation makes possible the banding together of couples into larger groups, but that banding, once achieved, leads to a virtual orgy of further restrictions on powerful innate desires. The taboo rears its menacing head: incest, adultery, sodomy come into being and are proscribed at one stroke, and even children's attempts to express their sexuality, along with sex for pure enjoyment, are strictly forbidden by primitive, but puritanical, Totemic culture. To make things still more repressive, the family unit is by no means bursting at the seams to conjoin with the other couples who make up the societal whole. In Chapter Five, Freud conjectures that Eros follows the logic of the English metaphysical poet John Donne, whose speaker in "The Canonization" describes his sexual relationship with the line, "She is all states, all princes I." Eros tries to unite its worshipers into one entity, and is quite satisfied in making the four walls of a lover's hideaway the universe. The family's libidinal bonds, by their very strength, that is, tend to isolate its members from everyone outside its immediate confines. Even admitting this self-limiting quality of human love, says Freud, we still might be able to imagine a state of affairs in which a vast number of libidinally satisfied couples would be free to connect with all others via work and common interests. That utopian vision, however, Freud instantly shatters, taking it as too good to be true. No, civilization is not content with this easy proposition; it will be making the most excessive demands on the limited supply of "capital" to hand within the family's libidinal economy. Civilization enjoins its subjects not only to bind as couples but to bind erotically with all other members of the community: what else can the all-embracing command to "love thy neighbor" and even "thine enemies" mean? asks Freud. He finds this latter demand especially absurd and impossible to obey. After all, he says, the poet Heinrich Heine was no less than honest when he declared that "one must, it is true, forgive one's enemies--but not before they have been hanged" (68). It would appear, therefore, that the persistent Freud has discovered an instinctual rat in the very grain-sack of idealism. If we are enjoined with the greatest irrationality to "love our neighbor and our enemy," it must be because this enjoinder's real aim is to sabotage an extremely compelling countermand: humans are, Freud says ruefully, "creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness" (68). At this point in his text (Chapter Five), Freud's use of the term "aggression" makes his analysis appear deceptively similar to the warnings of Darwin and Huxley about the need to curb humanity's selfish, destructive instincts and balance them over against the needs of the wider communal entity. Even at this Victorian-seeming level, Freud is able to say that what he calls "aggressiveness" is in fact responsible not only for impossibly idealistic commands like "love thine enemies" but also for the various sexual restrictions he has already examined. Then, too, Freud's remarks allow him to strike what he considers a telling blow against all brands of communism. How, he asks, can communists think they will eliminate human hostility just by abolishing private property? Surely, he reasons, such hostility predates market-based object relations. Even supposing that some utopian communist society were to be erected, Freud claims, human aggressivity would in no way be banished; rather, it would only be turned outward more ferociously than ever against all individuals hapless enough to be excluded from the ideal, rational society. When Freud attacks communism, it should be remembered, he is not arguing that we must give up trying to change the relations humans have toward property. On the contrary, he implies, we should do everything we can to ensure that people live agreeably and free of material want. Freud is no Herbert Spencer--he has no callous social-Darwinist conviction that man's wolfishness to man is part of some grand evolutionary scheme in the service of bourgeois ethics. This meliorist tone notwithstanding, the closing point of Freud's fifth chapter on civilization is that "there are difficulties . . . which will not yield to any attempt at reform" (74). Whatever the aggressive instinct is, it will never be extirpated from the human organism. There will be no return to paradise because in truth, there never was such paradise; only the menacing, arbitrary father and his cowering, scheming sons await us there. With this insight, Freud bids farewell to all utopian, Enlightenment-derived cultural schemes and moves on to clear away any illusions we may have been harboring about his modernity. As we might have suspected. more lies behind Freud's concept of aggression than he has been giving us to understand. In Chapter Six, Freud profoundly alters his definition of civilized life. He explains that early in his career, he had cast his theory of the instincts in the borrowed terms of Friedrich Schiller's poetry: hunger and love, or rather "self-preservation" (ego-instinct) and "libido" (object-instinct), were put forth as the driving forces in all human behavior. Soon, though, he began to consider this formulation more deeply, and concluded that libido was not some kind of "instinctual energy in general," akin to the vitalistic life force hypothesized by Victorians trying to replace a disappearing god with consoling natural substitutes. No, Freud guessed, this libidinal energy was not the sole determinant of human life. As he explains, 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. (77) We are dealing here not simply with an ameliorable conflict between the individual's selfish desires and the altruistic needs of the community, but with something much darker and more primal. The human psyche itself is deeply split into a pair of tendencies--life and death-seeking impulsions--as hostile to one another as the Persian combatants Ahura-Mazda and Ahrimanes, those mythological figures who were said to be battling constantly for the victory of either good or evil in the universe. This is assuredly a troubling thought, and to no one more so than Freud. It must be, he reasoned, that the greater portion of human aggressivity is a manifestation of the death drive, part of which, apparently, can be diverted from its quiescence-making task outward toward things external to the human organism. The death drive is extremely powerful, and always prone to lash out in destructive fury at the world in general. Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all about the death instinct, according to Freud, is that it is inaccessible to direct observation and, therefore, to the kind of visually-based narratives he himself spins now and then to clarify his psychoanalytic theories. The shadowy death drive has forced Freud's gaze more sharply than ever into the harsh light of linguistic incapacity. The European continent's Herbert Spencers may see no wrong in stacking up layers of concentric analogies from the great hub of the universe to the smallest posse of schoolboys. Freud, however, since 1920, has been quite uneasy about providing his readers with visual, spatial metaphors, or indeed with anything that purports to serve as an accurate description of unrepresentable psychic processes. Consequently, in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that we must glimpse the operations of the death instinct only through the red refracting glass of Eros. Thanatos "itself" is never available to the theorist; it can be grasped structurally in its effects upon the love instinct that is host and home to it, and in no other way. Sadism and masochism, then, provide the main vantage points for the theorist's observations of the death drive because in these otherwise erotic phenomena, humans' destructiveness is either aimed inward or projected outward onto some sexual object.
As if all this bad news about the death impulse were not enough, Freud's concentration on sadism leads him to state clearly the most threatening aspect of all about his fully developed theory of the drives: "the two kinds of drive [Eros and Thanatos] 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 judgment" (78). This, we might say, is the final blow to any ideas about the power of Eros to smooth the road to human happiness. The love instinct may appear to be in charge, and it is in fact very powerful, but the destructive impulse toward death is, Freud reveals, "the greatest impediment to civilization" (81). Freud's final definition of human society can now be set down: [T]he meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the drive of life and the drive 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. (82) What does a cultural critic do after having made such a sweeping statement? Freud certainly cannot have recourse to any lullaby of his own. Instead, he makes some careful conjectures about the manner in which civilization inhibits outbursts of the death drive. In order to justify his remarks, Freud says, he must take one more stab at developmental narrative, this time regarding the formation of human conscience and guilt. The first version Freud offers has to do with infantile experience. A baby is forced by external (parental) authority to give up certain satisfactions, and so his aggressive feelings are roused. The repression does not stop there; the aggressive instinct, too, must be renounced, forcing the child to internalize his hostile emotions toward the father who has proscribed his pleasure. The internalizing of aggression results in the setting aside of a portion of the ego as super-ego, which promptly dons its jackboots and punishes the always-offending ego. By now, Freud says, the child no longer requires the lash of external disapproval--his own super-ego is a harsher judge by far of his persistent desire to transgress than real parents could be. There is simply no hiding from the power of conscience, which punishes one even in the absence of any overt wrongdoing. Guilt, apparently, is the tension between the ego and the super-ego. Its power lies in the fact that it takes hold of its victim not because he has actually done something and now fears the loss of the parent's love consequent on the deed, but rather because he has caught himself desiring to do wrong. In this latter case, renunciation, according to Freud, is no longer enough; punishment must follow the bad thoughts. Conscience, then, is human society's main bastion against the aggressive manifestations of the death instinct. Phylogenetically (that is, in terms of cultural or species development), Freud says, this tale of conscience-formation can be recounted as the psychic aftermath of the brothers' successful murder of their father. The Oedipus complex holds that the males of the tribe would kill their father because he has prevented them from acting out their erotic desires toward their mother. Yet, the moment they do so, they feel great remorse; after all, though they hated the father, they loved him at the same time. Culturally, the setting up of a grand super-ego is an act of identification with and homage to this father. Eros, Freud explains, has erected this mass conscience by way of preventing the brothers from taking the father's position and thereby compelling them to a repetition of the original parricide. Nonetheless, the hostile wishes of the brothers persist, and so their guilt becomes more and more profound with each advance in civilized renunciation. Ultimately, guilt expresses the tension between Eros and Thanatos, part of the latter having always to be inhibited from lashing out at the cultural Father. Guilt, it seems, is the price we pay for civilization; it is the only way we know of keeping the death instinct in check long enough to let us fulfill the dictates of Eros.
Finally, we must comment on the conclusion of Civilization and Its Discontents. What is Freud's advice to all who must exist within civilization? He emphasizes again that in spite of his pessimistic assumptions about the death instinct, we must still endeavor to arrive at a satisfactory accommodation between the individual's needs and those of the community. The two aims--personal pleasure or self-preservation and social binding--may come from different sources and so be at odds, but that disagreement, at least, admits of negotiation. Should we not do all in our control to mitigate the harshness of the cultural super-ego and, through the agency of the psychoanalyst, that of the individual conscience as well? We should, insists Freud. Moreover, we might well have a close look at our relationships with objects. Perhaps something can be done to improve matters there. When all is said, however, Freud offers us not a Huxleyan peroration but a steadfast refusal to "express an opinion on the value of human civilization" (110). His is no prophetic or consoling voice. Indeed, the way he ends Civilization and Its Discontents may well remind the Victorianist of that scathing pronouncement on Thomas Carlyle's cultural project: "He led us into the wilderness and left us there." Freud's parting words in his treatise on civilization are, "it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers' will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can see with what success and with what result?" (112) Peter Gay, editor of Freud's book and author of a fine biography entitled Freud: A Life for Our Time, informs us that the very last sentence was added in 1931, when Nazi thugs were already battling in the streets and spreading the anti-Semitic rubbish that was to help Hitler become Chancellor of Germany in April, 1933. Six years after this fateful event, in 1939, Freud, by then dying of oral cancer, reluctantly emigrated from his native country and so narrowly escaped the German takeover of Austria. He passed away that year, halfway through the twelve-year reign of Thanatos. It is a pity that Heine's god did not grant Freud the pleasure of seeing his enemies hanged.
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