Beyond the Pleasure Principle (23 page)

Psychoanalysis has been accused on countless occasions of failing to concern itself with man's higher, moral, suprapersonal side. This accusation is doubly unjust: unjust in
historical
terms because we argued from the very beginning that the ego's moral and aesthetic tendencies are the driving force behind repression; unjust with regard to
method
because our accusers refused to recognize that – unlike some tidy philosophical system – psychoanalytical research could not come bounding onto the stage with a complete and fully fashioned set of doctrines, but had to forge its way step by step towards an understanding of the complexities of the psyche by means of painstaking analysis of both normal and abnormal phenomena. We had no need to share the tremulous anxiety of others as to the precise location of the ‘higher element’ in human beings so long as we were busily studying the workings of the repressed in their inner souls.
⁵⁵
But now that we are venturing to analyse the ego, we can say to all those who, shaken to the very core of their moral consciousness, have pleaded that there must surely be a higher presence in man: ‘There is indeed, and this higher presence is the ego-ideal or super-ego, the representamen
⁵⁶
of our relationship to our parents. As little children we knew, admired and feared these higher presences, and later assimilated them into our own selves.’

The ego-ideal is thus heir to the Oedipus complex, and as such an expression of the id's most powerful impulses and most important libidinal experiences. By erecting the ego-ideal, the ego asserted control over the Oedipus complex – and simultaneously subordinated itself to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially a representative of the world without, of reality, the super-ego is contraposed to it as advocate of the world within, of the id. As of course we have meanwhile come to expect, conflicts between the ego and the ideal are ultimately going to reflect the antithesis of ‘the objective’ and ‘the psychical’ – the world without, and the world within.

By forming an ideal, the ego takes unto itself everything in the id that has been created by biology or left behind by the travails of the human race, and re-experiences it on an individual level. As a result of the way it is formed, the ego-ideal has the most abundant links to the phylogenetic acquest, the archaic inheritance, that is intrinsic to everyone. Thanks to the forming of an ideal, those elements within the individual psyche that once belonged to the deepest depths become – in terms of our scheme of values – the very loftiest aspects of the human soul. It would be a futile undertaking, however, to seek to
localize
the ego-ideal in anything like the way that we have done in respect of the ego, or to make it fit any of the metaphors and images that we have used in our efforts to delineate the relationship between the ego and the id.

It is easy to demonstrate that the ego-ideal meets all the expectations that we tend to have of the ‘higher presence’ in man. As a surrogate for the individual's longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The sense of inadequacy we feel when comparing our ego with our ideal gives rise to that religious feeling of humility that the yearning believer depends on.
As each child grows up, the role of the father is taken over by teachers and other authority figures, whose commandments and prohibitions remain powerfully alive in the ego-ideal – and in due course exercise moral censorship in the guise of
conscience
. The tension between what our conscience demands and what our ego actually does is experienced as
guilt feeling
. Our social feelings rest on identifications with other people on the basis of the same ego-ideal.

Religion, morality and a social sense – these chief constituents of man's higher nature
⁵⁷
– were originally one and the same. According to the hypothesis I set forth in
Totem and Taboo
, they were acquired phylogenetically as a result of the father-complex – religion and moral restraint deriving from the process of overcoming
⁵⁸
the Oedipus complex itself, and social feelings arising from the need to overcome the rivalry still remaining amongst the members of the younger generation. The male sex appears to have led the way in the acquisition of all these moral attributes, cross inheritance then transmitting them to females as well. Even today, social feelings develop within individuals as a construct serving to overbuild their jealous feelings of rivalry
vis-à-vis
their siblings.
⁵⁹
Since their hostile impulses cannot be gratified, an identification with their erstwhile rival comes into being. Evidence gained from observing mild cases of homosexuality lends support to the supposition that this identification, too, is a surrogate for an affectionate object-choice, and has taken the place of the earlier stance of aggression and hostility.
⁶⁰

The mention of phylogenesis, however, raises new problems so challenging that one is tempted to choose discretion over valour and avoid them altogether. But we don't really have any choice: we must venture to resolve them, even though we fear that in the process the inadequacy of our entire enterprise may stand revealed. The question is this: was it the
ego
of primitive man that at some point acquired religion and morality as a consequence of the father-complex, or was it his
id
? If it was the ego, then why not simply describe the hereditary process as operating
within
the ego itself? If it was the id, how does that accord with the character of the id? Or are we wrong to suppose that the ego, super-ego and id became
differentiated at such an early stage? Or shouldn't we admit in all honesty that our whole conception of the ego and its processes contributes nothing to our understanding of phylogenesis, and is altogether irrelevant to it?

Let us attempt the easiest answers first. We are obliged to attribute the differentiation of ego and id not merely to primitive man, but to organisms that are far simpler still, since it is a necessary manifestation of the influence exerted by the external world. As for the super-ego, we described it as having its very origins in the experiences that led to totemism; the question whether it was the ego or the id that underwent those experiences and acquired moral attributes quickly proves to be pointless. The next consideration that presents itself to our mind is that the id cannot experience or undergo any external pattern of events except via the
ego
, the sole representative of the external world that it possesses. None the less, we cannot in fact claim that there is a hereditary process operating directly within the
ego
. What we encounter here is the yawning gulf between actual individuals, and our notion of the species. Furthermore, we must not view the difference between the ego and the id in unduly rigid terms; we must not forget that the ego is part of the id, albeit differentiated from it in a special way.
⁶¹
The ego's experiences seem to be lost to heredity to begin with; however, if they recur often and strongly enough in numerous successive generations of individuals, they transform themselves so to speak into id experiences, and their impact is then preserved through heredity. The heritable id accordingly harbours within it remnants of countless numbers of previous egos, and when an individual ego evolves its super-ego from the id it is perhaps merely bringing older ego forms back to light, and back to life.

The manner in which the super-ego comes into being makes it readily comprehensible that early conflicts of the ego with the object-cathexes of the id can be continued later on in conflicts with their successor, the super-ego. If the ego has botched the task of overcoming the Oedipus complex, then its
⁶²
energy-cathexis, which derives from the id, will reassert itself in the reaction-formation of the ego-ideal. The abundant communication between the ego-ideal
and these
Ucs
drive-impulses serves to explain the puzzling fact that the ideal itself can remain largely unconscious, and inaccessible to the ego. The battle that had previously raged in the nether depths, but had never come to any final resolution through a rapid process of sublimation and identification, is now carried on at a higher level, rather as in Kaulbach's painting of the Battle of Châlons.
⁶³

We have already made the point that our proposed division of the psyche into an id, an ego and a super-ego can only signify a real advance in our knowledge if it also proves to be the means to a deeper understanding and more accurate description of the dynamic relations at work in the life of the psyche. We have also come to appreciate that the ego is particularly subject to the influence of perception, and that in broad terms one can say that perceptions have the same significance for the ego that drives have for the id. At the same time, however, the ego is also susceptible to the influence of drives, just like the id – of which, of course, it is but part, albeit a specially modified one.

On the subject of drives, I have recently (in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
) elaborated a view that I shall first recapitulate, and then use as the basis for the next stages of the argument. On this view, we need to distinguish two types of drives, one of which – the
sexual drives
, or
Eros
– is far more conspicuous, and far more accessible to our knowledge and understanding. It includes not only the uninhibited sexual drive itself and the goal-inhibited and hence sublimated drive-impulses deriving from it, but also the self-preservation drive that we perforce ascribe to the ego, and that at the very outset of our psychoanalytical work we had good reason to regard as contrasting sharply with the sexual object-drives. Demonstrating this second type of drive caused us considerable difficulty; our solution in the end was to regard sadism as representative of it. On the basis of theoretical considerations underpinned by biology, we posited a
death drive
charged with the task of causing animate organisms to revert to an inanimate state, whereas Eros pursues the
goal of maximizing the complexity of life – and thereby of course preserving it – by an ever more catholic combination of the particles into which living matter had been fragmented. In pursuing their respective goals both drives behave in a strictly conservative manner, in that they seek the restoration of a state that was disrupted by the emergence of life. According to this view, the emergence of life is therefore the cause both of the urge to carry on living and, simultaneously, of the urge for death, while life itself is a battle and constant compromise between these two urges. Considered thus, the question as to the origin of life remains a cosmological one, while the question as to the purpose and intention of life is answered in
dualistic
terms.
⁶⁴

A particular physiological process is attributable – so the argument goes – to each of the two types of drive (anabolism and catabolism
⁶⁵
); both drives are active in each and every piece of living substance, albeit in varying proportions, with the result that any such substance is capable of taking on the role of Eros.

Precisely
how
drives of the two types connect, combine and blend with each other remains entirely unimaginable – but
that
such a thing happens, routinely and on a very large scale, is a postulate crucial to our whole framework of ideas. We can hypothesize that as a consequence of the fusion of unicellular elementary organisms into multicellular organisms, the death drive in the individual cell was successfully neutralized, and its destructive impulses diverted to the external world through the mediation of a special organ, to wit the musculature; the death drive accordingly now finds expression – though in all probability only in part – as a
destruction drive
directed against the external world and other organisms.

Once we have accepted the notion of a merging of the two types of drives, we are then also confronted by the possibility of a - more or less complete –
de-mergence
of them. I would suggest that in the sadistic component of the sexual drive we see a classic example of a purposive
merging
of drives, while in sadism
qua
autonomous perversion we see an exemplary instance of
de-mergence
, albeit not one where the process has been taken to extremes.
⁶⁶
This in its turn affords us fresh insight into a large mass of facts that have not
previously been considered in this light. We can readily see that, in order to effect release, the
destruction drive
is routinely put at the service of Eros; we suspect that epileptic fits are produced by, and indicative of, a de-mergence of drives; and we are beginning to realize that amongst the effects achieved by certain serious neuroses, e.g. the obsessional neuroses, the de-mergence of drives and the appearance of the death drive deserve special consideration. By way of a rapid generalization: we are inclined to think that libido regressions, for instance regression from the genital to the sadistic-anal phase, are rooted essentially in a de-mergence of drives, and that, inversely, progression from the early to the definitive genital phase is dependent on an accession of erotic components. The question also arises whether ordinary
ambivalence
– which we so often find to be particularly marked in those who are constitutionally disposed to neurosis – should not be regarded as the result of a de-mergence; this latter process is so primal, however, that it must rate instead as a merging of drives that remained incomplete.

Our interest quite naturally turns to two particular questions: first, whether we shall not perhaps discover revealing connections between the structures we have postulated – the ego, super-ego and id – on the one hand, and the two types of drives on the other; second, whether we shall be able to show that the pleasure principle, the mechanism that controls psychic processes, stands in a firm and clear relationship to the two types of drives, and to the forms into which the psyche has differentiated. Before we enter upon this discussion, however, we need to deal with a doubt that challenges the very formulation of the question itself. While there can be no doubt about the pleasure principle, and whilst our division of the ego is soundly based on clinical evidence, yet our grounds for distinguishing between the two types of drives seem not altogether strong enough, and it seems quite possible that facts evinced by clinical analysis might rob them of all credibility.