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Sigmund Freud* From "Civilization and its discontents" The bit of truth behind all this -one as eagerly denied- is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures, creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked , but that a powerful measure of desire for aggresion has to be reckoned as part of their instictual endowment... Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through the primary hostility of men towards one another... The tendency to aggresion is an innate, independent, instinctual disp;osition in man. ...it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture. And now, it seems to me, the meaning of evolution of culture is no longer a riddle to us. It must present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and and so the evolution lf civilization may be simply described as the struggle of the human species for existence. And is is this battle of the Titans that our nurses and governesses try to compose with their lullaby-song of Heaven. So in every individual the two trends, one of personal happiness and the other towards unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other. I have no concern with any economic criticism of the communistic system; but I am able to recognize that psychologically it is founded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggresion of one of its instruments; a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly no the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggresiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. The different religions have never overlooked the part played by by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim... to save mankind from the sense of guilt, which they call sin. From "Moses and Monotheism" The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even illtreats them. We have learned from from the psychology of the individual whence comes this need of the masses. It is the longing for the father that lives in each of us from his childhood days, for the same father whom the hero of legend boasts of having overcome. From "New Introductory notes on Psychology" The doctrine is that the universe was created by a being similar to man, but greater in every respect, in power, wisdom, and strength of passion, in fact by an idealized superman. This God-creator is op;enly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child. The religious man's picture of the creation of the universe is the same as his picture of his own creation... He therefore looks back on the memory-image of the overrrated father of his childhood, exalts it into a Deity, and brings it into the present and into reality. The emotional strength of this memory image and the lasting nature of his need for protection are the two supports of his belief in God. Religion is an attempt to get control of the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological neccesities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parellel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. We may suppose that the final aim of the destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state. For this reason we call it the death instinct. When the superego begins to be formed, considerable amounts of the aggresive instinct become fixated within the ego and operate there in a self-destructive fashion. This is one of the dangers to health in which mankind becomes subject on the path to cultural development. The holding back of agressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness. Confession enters into analysis, as its introduction, as it were. But it is far from being the same thing as analysis, and it cannot serve to explain its effect. In confession the sinner tells what he knows, in analysis the neurotic must tell more. Besides, we have no knowledge that the system of confession has developed the power to get rid of direct symptons of illness. Letter to Albert Einstein, September, 1932. Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by the recourse to violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which man can not claim exclusion; nevertheless, men are also prone to conflicts of op;inion, touching on occasion, the loftiest peaks of abstract thought, which seem to call for settlement by quite another method. Now, for the first time, with the coming of weapons, superior brains began to oust brute force, but the object of the conflict remained the same; one party was to be constrained, by the injury done him or impairment of his strength, to retract a claim or a refusal. This end is most effectively gained when the opponent is definitively put out of action -in other words, is killed. This procedure has two advantges: the enemy cannot renew hostilities, and, secondly, his fate deters others from following his example. Moreover the slaughter of a foe gratifies an instinctive craving. We may define "right" (i.e., law) as the might of a community. Yet, it, too, is nothing else than violence... it is the communal, not individual, violence that has its way. There is but one sure way of aending war and that is the establishment, by common consent, of a central control which shall have the last word in every coflict of interests. For this, two things are needed: first, the creation of such a supreme court of judicature; secondly, its investment with adequate executive force. Unless the second requirement be fulfilled, the first is unavailing. We assume that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, which we call "erotic" (in the meaning Plato gives to Eros in his Symposium) or else "sexual" (explicitly extending the popular connotation of sex); and secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggresive or destructive instincts. These are, as you perceive, the well-known opposites, Love and Hate. Transformed into theoretical entities, they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which falls within your province. There is no likelihood of of our being able to suppress humanity's aggresive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggresive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare. N.Y. Times magazine, May 6, 1956 A neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and the id, the person is at war with himself. A psychosis is the outcome of similar distrubance in the relation between the ego and the outside world. Quoted by Dr. Ernest Jones, "The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2. Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us. The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shall not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours. Love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder.
"The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundations stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and and wiser humanity" - Thomas Mann, N.Y. Times, June 21, 1939
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