Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents (Chap. 4) lyrics

THIS task seems too big a one; one may well confess oneself diffident. Here follows what little I have been able to elicit about it. Once primitive man had made the discovery that it lay in his own hands——speaking literally ——to improve his lot on earth by working, it cannot have been a matter of indifference to him whether another man worked with him or against him. The other acquired the value of a fellow-worker, and it was advantageous to live with him. Even earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had adopted the habit of forming families: his first helpers were probably themembers of his family. One may suppose that the founding of families was in some way connected with the period when the need for genital satisfaction, no longer appearing like an occasional guest who turns up suddenly and then vanishes without letting one hear anything of him for long intervals, had settled down with each man like a permanent lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or rather, his s**ual objects, near him; while the female, who wanted not to be separated from her helpless young, in their interests, too, had to stay by the stronger male. 14 In this primitive family one essential feature of culture is lacking; the will of the father, the head of it, was unfettered. I have endeavoured in Totem and Taboo to show how the way led from this family-life to the succeeding phase of communal existence in the form of a band of brothers. By overpowering the father, the sons had discovered that several men united can be stronger than a single man. The totemic stage of culture is founded upon the restrictions that the band were obliged to impose on one another in order to maintain the new system. These taboos were the first right or law. The life of human beings in common therefore had a twofold foundation, i. e., the compulsion to work, created by external necessity, and the power of love, causing the male to wish to keep his s**ual object, the female, near him, and the female to keep near her that part of herself which has become detached from her, her child. Eros and Ananke were the parents of human culture, too. The first result of culture was that a larger number of human beings could then live together in common. And since the two great powers were here cooperating together, one might have expected that further cultural evolution would have proceeded smoothly towards even greater mastery over the external world, as well as towards greater extension in the numbers of men sharing the life in common. Nor is it easy to understand how this culture can be felt as anything but satisfying by those who partake of it. Before we go on to enquire where the disturbances in it arise, we will let ourselves digress from the point that love was one of the founders of culture and so fill a gap left in our previous discussion. We said that man, having found by experience that s**ual (genital) love afforded him his greatest gratification, so that it became in effect a prototype of all happiness to him. must have been thereby impelled to seek his happiness further along the path of s**ual relations, to make genital erotism the central point of his life. We went on to say that in so doing he becomes to a very dangerous degree dependent on a part of the outer world, namely, on his chosen love-object, and this exposes him to most painful sufferings if he is rejected by it or loses it through d**h or defection. The wise men of all ages have consequently warned us emphatically against this way of life; but in spite of all it retains its attraction for a great number of people. A small minority are enabled by their constitution, nevertheless, to find happiness along the path of love; but far-reaching mental transformations of the erotic function are necessary before this is possible. These people make themselves independent of their object''s acquiescence by transferring the main value from the fact of being loved to their own act of loving; they protect themselves against loss of it by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all men equally, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its s**ual aim and modifying the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim. The state which they induce in themselves by this process——an unchangeable, undeviating, tender attitude——has little superficial likeness to the stormy vicissitudes of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived. It seems that Saint Francis of Assisi may have carried this method of using love to produce an inner feeling of happiness as far as anyone; what we are thus characterizing as one of the procedures by which the pleasure-principle fulfils itself has in fact been linked up in many ways with religion; the connection between them may lie in those remote fastnesses of the mind where the distinctions between the ego and objects, and between the various objects, become matters of indifference. From one ethical standpoint, the deeper motivation of which will later become clear to us, this inclination towards an all-embracing love of others and of the world at large is regarded as the highest state of mind of which man is capable Even at this early stage in the discussion. I will not withhold the two principal objections we have to raise against this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to us to lose some of its own value, since it does an injustice to its object. And secondly, not all men are worthy of love. The love that instituted the family still retains its power; in its original form it does not stop short of direct s**ual satisfaction, and in its modified form, as aim-inhibited friendliness, it influences our civilization. In both these forms it carries on its task of binding men and women to one another, and it does this with greater intensity than can be achieved through the interest of work in common. The casual and undifferentiated way in which the word love is employed by language has its genetic justification. In general usage, the relation between a man and a woman whose genital desires have led them to found a family is called love; but the positive attitude of feeling between parents and children, between brothers and sisters in a family, is also called love, although to us this relation merits the description of aim-inhibited love or affection. Love with an inhibited aim was indeed originally full sensual love and in men''s unconscious minds is so still. Both of them, the sensual and the aim-inhibited forms, reach out beyond the family and create new bonds with others who before were strangers. Genital love leads to the forming of new families; aim- inhibited love to friendships, which are valuable culturally because they do not entail many of the limitations of genital love—— for instance, its exclusiveness. But the interrelations between love and culture lose their simplicity as development proceeds. On the one hand, love opposes the interests of culture; on the other, culture menaces love with grievous restrictions. This rift between them seems inevitable; the cause of it is not immediately recognizable. It expresses itself first in a conflict between the family and the larger community to which the individual belongs. We have seen already that one of culture''s principal endeavours is to cement men and women together into larger units. But the family will not give up the individual. The closer the attachment between the members of it, the more they often tend to remain aloof from others, and the harder it is for them to enter into the wider circle of the world at large. That form of life in common which is phylogenetically older, and is in childhood its only form, resists being displaced by the type that becomes acquired later with culture. Detachment from the family has become a task that awaits every adolescent, and often society helps him through it with pubertal and initiatory rites. One gets the impression that these difficulties form an integral part of every process of mental evolution——and indeed, at bottom, of every organic development, too. The next discord is caused by women, who soon become antithetical to cultural trends and spread around them their conservative influence——the women who at the beginning laid the foundations of culture by the appeal of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and s**ual life; the work of civilization has become more and more men''s business; it confronts them with ever harder tasks, compels them to sublimations of instinct which women are not easily able to achieve. Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy at his disposal, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage. What he employs for cultural purposes he withdraws to a great extent from women and his s**ual life; his constant a**ociation with men and his dependence on his relations with them even estrange him from his duties as husband and father. Woman finds herself thus forced into the background by the claims of culture, and she adopts an inimical attitude towards it. The tendency of culture to set restrictions upon s**ual life is no less evident than its other aim of widening its sphere of operations. Even the earliest phase of it, the totemic, brought in its train the prohibition against incestuous object-choice, perhaps the most maiming wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life of man. Further limitations are laid on it by taboos, laws, and customs, which touch men as well as women. Various types of culture differ in the lengths to which they carry this; and the material structure of the social fabric also affects the measure of s**ual freedom that remains. We have seen that culture obeys the laws of psychological economic necessity in making the restrictions, for it obtains a great part of the mental energy it needs by subtracting it from s**uality. Culture behaves towards s**uality in this respect like a tribe or a section of the population which has gained the upper hand and is exploiting the rest to its own advantage. Fear of a revolt among the oppressed then becomes a motive, for even stricter regulations. A high-water mark in this type of development has been reached in our Western European civilization. Psychologically it is fully justified in beginning by censuring any manifestations of the s**ual life of children, for there would be no prospect of curbing the s**ual desires of adults if the ground had not been prepared for it in childhood. Nevertheless, there is no sort of justification for the lengths beyond this to which civilized society goes in actually denying the existence of these manifestations, which are not merely demonstrable but positively glaring. Where s**ually mature persons are concerned, object-choice is further narrowed down to the opposite s** and most of the extra-genital forms of satisfaction are interdicted as perversions. The standard which declares itself in these prohibitions is that of a s**ual life identical for all; it pays no heed to the disparities in the inborn and acquired s**ual constitutions of individuals and cuts off a considerable number of them from s**ual enjoyment, thus becoming a cause of grievous injustice. The effect of these restrictive measures might presumably be that all the s**ual interest of those who are normal and not constitutionally handicapped could flow without further forfeiture into the channel left open to it. But the only outlet not thus censured, heteros**ual genital love, is further circumscribed by the barriers of legitimacy and monogamy. Present-day civilization gives us plainly to understand that s**ual relations are permitted only on the basis of a final, indissoluble bond between a man and woman; that s**uality as a source of enjoyment for its own sake is unacceptable to it; and that its intention is to tolerate it only as the hitherto irreplaceable means of muliplying the human race. This, of course, represents an extreme. Everyone knows that it has proved impossible to put it into execution, even for short periods. Only the weaklings have submitted to such comprehensive interference with their s**ual freedom, and stronger natures have done so only under one compensatory condition, of which mention may be made later. Civilized society has seen itself obliged to pa** over in silence many transgressions which by its own ordinances it ought to have penalized. This does not justify anyone, however, in leaning towards the other side and a**uming that, because it does not achieve all it aims at, such an attitude on the part of society is altogether harmless. The s**ual life of civilized man is seriously disabled, whatever we may say; it sometimes makes an impression of being a function in process of becoming atrophied, just as organs like our teeth and our hair seem to be. One is probably right in supposing that the importance of s**uality as a source of pleasurable sensations, i. e., as a means of fulfilling the purpose of life, has perceptibly decreased. 15 Sometimes one imagines one perceives that it is not only the oppression of culture, but something in the nature of the function itself that denies us full satisfaction and urges us in other directions. This may be an error; it is hard to decide. 16 Footnotes: 14 The organic periodicity of the s**ual process has persisted, it is true, but its effect on mental s**ual excitation has been almost reversed. This change is connected primarily with the diminishing importance of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual process produced s**ual excitement in the mind of the male. Their function was taken over by visual stimuli, which could operate permanently, instead of intermittently like the olfactory ones. The taboo of menstruation has its origin in this organic repression, which acted as a barrier against a phase of development that had been surpa**ed; all its other motivations are probably of a secondary nature. (Cf. C. D. Daly, ““Hindumythologie und Kastrationskomplex, ““ Imago, Vol. XIII, 1927. ) This process is repeated on a different level when the gods of a foregone cultural epoch are changed into demons in the next. The diminution in importance of olfactory stimuli seems itself, however, to be a consequence of man''s erecting himself from the earth, of his adoption of an upright gait, which made his genitals, that before had been covered, visible and in need of protection and so evoked feelings of shame. Man''s erect posture, therefore, would represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution. The chain of development would run from this onward, through the diminution in the importance of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of women at their periods, to a time when visual stimuli became paramount, the genitals became visible, further till s**ual excitation became constant and the family was founded, and so to the threshold of human culture. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to be worth checking carefully by the conditions obtaining among the animals closely allied to man. There is an unmistakable social factor at work in the impulse of civilization towards cleanliness, which has been subsequently justified by considerations of hygiene but had nevertheless found expression before they were appreciated. The impulse towards cleanliness originates in the striving to get rid of excretions which have become unpleasant to the sense-perceptions. We know that things are different in the nursery. Excreta arouse no aversion in children; they seem precious to them, as being parts of their own bodies which have been detached from them. The training of children is very energetic in this particular; its object is to expedite the development that lies ahead of them, according to which the excreta are to become worthless, disgusting, horrible, and despicable to them. Such a reversal of values would be almost impossible to bring about, were it not that these substances expelled from the body are destined by their strong odours to share the fate that overtook the olfactory stimuli after man had erected himself from the ground. an*l erotism, therefore, is from the first subjected to the organic repression which opened up the way to culture. The social factor which has been active in the further modifications of an*l erotism comes into play with the fact that in spite of all man''s evolutionary progress the smell of his own excretions is scarcely disagreeable to him yet, but so far only that of the evacuations of others. The man who is not clean, i. e.. who does not eliminate his excretions, therefore offends others, shows no consideration for them——a fact which is exemplified in the commonest and most forcible terms of abuse. It would be incomprehensible, too, that man should use as an abusive epithet the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world, if dogs did not incur the contempt of men through two of their characteristics, i. e., that they are creatures of smell and have no horror of excrement, and, secondly, that they are not ashamed of their s**ual functions. 15 There is a short story, which I valued long ago, by a highly sensitive writer, the Englishman, John Galsworthy, who today enjoys general recognition; it is called ““The Apple Tree. ““ It shows in a very moving and forcible way how there is no longer any place in present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings. 16 The following considerations would support the view expressed above. Man, too, is an animal with an unmistakably bis**ual disposition. The individual represents a fusion of two symmetrical halves, of which, according to many authorities, one is purely male, the other female. It is equally possible that each half was originally hermaphroditic. Sex is a biological fact which is hard to evaluate psychologically, although it is of extraordinary importance in mental life. We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs, and attributes, but the characteristics of what is male and female can only be demonstrated in anatomy, and not in psychology. Where the latter is concerned, the antithesis of s** fades away into that of activity and pa**ivity, and we far too readily identify activity with masculinity and pa**ivity with femininity, a statement which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal world. The theory of bis**uality is still very obscure, and in psycho-an*lysis we must be painfully aware of the disadvantage we are under as long as it still remains unconnected with the theory of instincts. However this may be, if we a**ume it to be a fact that each individual has both male and female desires which need satisfaction in his s**ual life, we shall be prepared for the possibility that these needs will not both be gratified on the same object, and that they will interfere with each other, if they cannot be kept apart so that each impulse flows into a special channel suited for it. Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that so often a measure of direct aggressiveness is coupled with an erotic relationship, over and above its inherent sadistic components. The love-object does not always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance manifested by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, because he had not beaten her for a week. The conjecture which leads furthest, however, is that ——and here we come back to the remarks in footnote 14——the whole of s**uality, and not merely an*l erotism, is threatened with falling a victim to the organic repression consequent upon man''s adoption of the erect posture and the lowering in value of the sense of smell; so that since that time the s**ual function has been a**ociated with a resistance not susceptible of further explanation, which puts obstacles in the way of full satisfaction and forces it away from its s**ual aim towards sublimations and displacements of libido. I am aware that Bleuler (in ““Der Sexual-widerstand, ““ Jahrbuch fur psychoan*lytische und psy-chopathologische Forschungen, Vol. V, 1913) once pointed out the existence of a fundamental tendency of this kind towards rejecting s**ual life. All neurotics, and many others too, take exception to the fact that inter urinas et faeces nascimur [We are born among urine and faeces]. The genitals, too, excite the olfactory sense strongly in a way that many people cannot tolerate and which spoils s**ual intercourse for them. Thus we should find, as the deepest root of the s**ual repression that marches with culture, the organic defence of the new form of life that began with the erect posture against the earliest type of animal existence——-a result of scientific researches that coincides in a curious way with often expressed vulgar prejudices. At the present time, nevertheless, these results are but unconfirmed possibilities, not yet scientifically substantiated. Nor should we forget that, in spite of the undeniable diminution in the importance of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in Europe races who prize highly as aphrodisiacs the strong genital odours so objectionable to us and who will not renounce them. (Cf. the reports of folkloristic information obtained by Iwan Bloch''s ““Questionnaire. ““ appearing under the title of ““Uber den Geruchssinn in der vita s**ualis”” in various volumes of Friedrich S. Krauss'' Anthropophyteia.)