Civilization And Its Discontents

When faced with their own aggression and destruction, humans often internalize the instinct—or send it “back where it came from, i.e., directed against the ego” (65). The result is “conscience,” which “exercises the same propensity to harsh aggressiveness against the ego that the ego would have liked to enjoy against others” (65). Conscience manifests as a “sense of guilt” and “the need for punishment” (66). This is a chief function of the super-ego, the part of the mind that, on behalf of society, watches over the ego "like a garrison in a conquered city” (66).

Society wants individual egos to recognize certain thoughts and actions as evil. Not every such act will be bad for a given ego: “[O]n the contrary, it can also be something that it desires, that would give it pleasure” (66). A person learns to avoid certain behaviors for a simple reason: “If he loses the love of others on whom he is dependent, he will forfeit also their protection against many dangers” (66) and may also be subject to punishment. Even thinking of doing something bad gives rise to pangs of conscience, as intent can also be cause for rejection and punishment.

A child fears retribution merely as a form of “social anxiety” and might otherwise try to get away with the prohibited act, but most adults thoroughly internalize cultural norms until they, too, perceive anti-social acts as evil. The most virtuous person, when things go wrong, “holds an inquisition within, discovers his sin, heightens the standards of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances” (68).

For many people and societies, misfortune is taken as punishment: “Fate is felt to be a substitute for the agency of the parents: adversity means that one is no longer loved by this highest power of all” (69), who must therefore be appeased with acts of contrition. The Jews, for example, suffer God’s punishments, and “out of their sense of guilt they constructed the stringent commandments of their priestly religion” (69). A primitive man, on the other hand, will simply blame “his fetish, who has plainly not done his duty by him, and he belabours it instead of punishing himself” (69).

The super-ego’s stern oversight has a drawback: “a lasting inner unhappiness, the tension of a sense of guilt” (70). In other words, “[t]he aggressiveness of conscience carries on the aggressiveness of authority” (70), and this can be debilitating, as the process can feed on itself. “Renunciation (externally imposed) gives rise to conscience, which then demands further renunciations” (71).

The first stirrings of the sense of guilt that informs conscience arise when children act out aggressively, are punished, and internalize the punishing authority figure, “which then becomes the super-ego and comes into possession of all the aggressiveness which the child would gladly have exercised against it” (71). Every subsequent suppression of an aggressive impulse strengthens the conscience imposed by the super-ego. The instinctual desire to supersede or kill the father can lead to pangs of remorse once the aggressive instinct has been sated and the old feelings of love for the parent resurface. However, a sense of conscience must already be in place for feelings of remorse to occur. Only a child’s love for its parent can generate the guilt of remorse; thus, “guilt is the expression of the conflict of ambivalence, the eternal struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct” (76). Later, as the child grows up and enters into relationships with group members outside the family, the sense of conscience extends to them.