eading Freud clear version in English

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 753 groups'. This danger is most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of its members with one another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the impor- tance that should fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods. s VI * * * * * * Of all the slowly developed parts of analytic theory,. the theory of the instincts is the one that has felt its way the most painfully forward. And yet that theory was so indispensable to the whole structure that something had to be put in its place. In what was at first my utter perplexity, I took as my starting-point a saying of the poet-philosopher, Schiller, that 'hunger and love are what moves the world'. Hunger could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief function, favoured in every way by nature, is the preservation of the species. Thus, to begin with, ego-instincts and object-instincts confronted each other. * * * Every analyst will admit that even to-day this view has not the sound of a long-discarded error. Nevertheless, alterations in it became essential, as our enquiries advanced from the repressed to the repressing forces, from the object-instincts to the ego. The decisive step forward was the introduction of the concept of narcissism-that is to say, the discovery that the ego itself is cathected with libido, that the ego, indeed, is the libido's original home, and remains to some extent its headquarters. This narcissistic libido turns towards objects, and thus becomes object- libido; and it can change back into narcissistic libido once more. The concept of narcissism made it possible to obtain an analytic understand- ing of the traumatic neuroses and of many of the affections bordering on the psychoses, as well as of the latter themselves. It was not necessary to give up our interpretation of the transference neuroses as attempts made by the ego to defend itself against sexuality; but the concept of libido was endangered. Since the ego-instincts, too, were libidinal, it seemed for a time inevitable that we should make libido coincide with instinctual energy in general, as C. C. Jung had already advocated earlier. Nevertheless, there still remained in me a kind of conviction, for which I was not as yet able to find reasons, that the instincts could not all be of the same kind. My next step was taken in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), when the compulsion to repeat and the con- B. {A gratuitous observation which once again exhibits Freud's persistent and unreasoning anti-Ameri- canism. On this point, see Gay, Freud, pp. 553-70.}

754 THE LAST CHAPTER servative 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 sub- stance 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. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts. It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggres- siveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding. • • • The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an original bi-polarity in its own nature. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work. I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly al- loyed with erotism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. (The desire for destruction when it is directed inwards mostly eludes our perception, of course, unless it is tinged with erotism.) I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it. That others should have shown, and still show, the same attitude of rejection surprises me less. For 'little children do not like it'9 when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to 'badness', to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants 9. ['[)enn die Kindlein, sie hOren es nicht geme.' A quotation from Goethe's poem 'Die Ballade vom vertriebenen und heimgekehrten Grafen'.]

CIVIUZA TION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 755 to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil-despite the protestations of Christian Science-with His all- powerfulness or His all-goodness. The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies. In view of these difficulties, each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it. I The name 'libido' can once more be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros in order to distinguish them from the energy of the death instinct. It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros, and it escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed with Eros. It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an ex- traordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its present- ing the ego with a fulfilment of the latter's old wishes for omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed. and, as it were, inhib- ited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. Since the assumption of the existence of the instinct is mainly based on theoreti- cal grounds, we must also admit that it is not entirely proof against theo- reticalobjections. But this is how things appear to us now, in the present state of our knowledge; future research and reflection will no doubt bring further light which will decide the matter. In all that follows I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why I. In Goethe's Mephistopheles {Faust's eloquent stroyed, and that what Faust calls sin or destruc- antagonist in Faust} we have a quite exceptionally tion, \"in short evil,\" is his \"proper element.\" In convincing identification of the principle of evil contrast, the devil's true adversary is the power of with the destructive instinct. {And Freud then nature to create and produce-uthat is, Eros,\" See quotes Mephistopheles' lines arguing that every- Faust, part I, scene 3.} thing that has been created is worth being de-

756 THE LAST CHAPTER this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct 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. 2 VII * * * * * * What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? We have already become acquainted with a few of these meth- ods, but not yet with the one that appears to be the most important. This we can study in the history of the development of the individual. What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? Something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from- that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of 'conscience', is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punish- ment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dan- gerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. As to the origin of the sense of guilt, the analyst has different views from other psychologists; but even he does not find it easy to give an account of it. To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (devout people would say 'sinful') when he has done some- 2. ['Eiapopeia vom Himmel.' A quotation from Heine's poem Deutschland, Caput I {using a nonsense word familiar in German-speaking nurseries}.]

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 757 thing which he knows to be 'bad'. But then we notice how little this answer tells us. Perhaps, after some hesitation, we shall add that even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only rec- ognized in himself an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal to the deed. Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already recognized that what is bad is reprehensible, is something that must not be carried out. How is this judgement arrived at? We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something which is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good or bad. Since a person's own feelings would not have led him along this path, he must have had a motive for submitting to this extraneous influence. Such a motive is easily discovered in his helplessness and his dependence on other people, and it can best be designated as fear of loss of love. If he loses the love of another person upon whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. Above all, he is exposed to the danger that this stronger person will show his superiority in the form of punishment. At the beginning, therefore, what is bad is whatever causes one to be threatened with loss of love. For fear of that loss, one must avoid it. This, too, is the reason why it makes little difference whether one has already done the bad thing or only intends to do it. In either case the danger only sets in if and when the authority discovers it, and in either case the authority would behave in the same way. This state of mind is called a 'bad conscience'; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, 'social' anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community. Consequently, such people habitually allow them- selves to do any bad thing which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out. Present-day society has to reckon in general with this state of mind. A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt. At this point, too, the fear of being found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation from a real point of view has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we know

758 THE LAST CHAPTER of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world. At this second stage of development, the conscience exhibits a pe- culiarity which was absent from the first stage and which is no longer easy to account for. For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its behaviour, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness. This means that virtue forfeits some part of its promised reward; the docile and continent ego does not enjoy the trust of its mentor, and strives in vain, it would seem, to acquire it. The objection will at once be made that these difficulties are artificial ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more vigilant conscience is precisely the hallmark of a moral man. Moreover, when saints call themselves sinners, they are not so wrong, considering the temptations to instinctual satisfaction to which they are exposed in a specially high degree-since, as is well known, temptations are merely increased by constant frustra- tion, whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for the time being. The field of ethics, which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely that ill-luck-that is, external frustration-so greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and 3 punishes himself with penances. Whole peoples have behaved in this way, and still do. This, however, is easily explained by the original infantile stage of conscience, which, as we see, is not given up after the introjection into the super-ego, but persists alongside of it and behind it. Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and, threatened by such a loss oflove, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego--a representative whom, in his days of good fortune, he was ready to neglect. This becomes especially clear where Fate is looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else than an expression of the Divine Will. The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favourite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down upon this people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them 3. This enhancing of morality as a consequence public readings. After he had given out the title, of ill-luck has been illustrated by Mark Twain in he stopped and asked himself as though he was in a delightful little story, The First Melon I ever Stole. doubt: 'Was it the first?' With this, everything had The first melon happened to be unripe. I heard been said. The first melon was evidently not the Mark Twain tell the story himself in one of his only one.

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 759 or questioned his power or righteousness. Instead, they produced the prophets, who held up their sinfulness before them; and out of their sense of guilt they created the over-strict commandments of their priestly religion. It is remarkable how differently a primitive man behaves. If he has met with a misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and he gives it a thrashing instead of punishing himself. Thus we know of two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfac- tions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed from the super-ego. We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego--the demands of conscience-is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. We now see in what relationship the renunciation of instinct stands to the sense of guilt. Originally, re- nunciation of instinct was the result of fear of an external authority: one renounced one's satisfactions in order not to lose its love. If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain. But with fear of the super-ego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. This constitutes a great economic disadvantage in the erection of a super-ego, or, as we may put it, in the formation of a conscience. Instinctual renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect; virtuous continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness--loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority-has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt. These interrelations are so complicated and at the same time so im- portant that, at the risk of repeating myself, I shall approach them from yet another angle. The chronological sequence, then, would be as fol- lows. First comes renunciation of instinct owing to fear of aggression by the external authority. (This is, of course, what fear of the loss of love amounts to, for love is a protection against this punitive aggression.) After that comes the erection of an internal authority, and renunciation of instinct owing to fear of it-owing to fear of conscience. In this second situation bad intentions are equated with bad a~tions, and hence come a sense of guilt and a need for punishment. The aggressiveness of conscience keeps up the aggressiveness of the authority. So far things have no doubt been made clear; but where does this leave room for the reinforcing influence of misfortune (of renunciation imposed from with- out), and for the extraordinary severity of conscience in the best and most tractable people? We have already explained both these peculiarities

760 THE LAST CHAPTER of conscience, but we probably still have an impression that those ex- planations do not go to the bottom of the matter, and leave a residue still unexplained. And here at last an idea comes in which belongs entirely to psycho-analysis and which is foreign to people's ordinary way of thinking. This idea is of a sort which enables us to understand why the subject-matter was bound to seem so confused and obscure to us. For it tells us that conscience (or more correctly, the anxiety which later becomes conscience) is indeed the cause of instinctual renunciation to begin with, but that later the relationship is reversed. Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter's severity and intolerance. If we could only bring it better into harmony with what we already know about the history of the origin of conscience, we should be tempted to defend the paradoxical statement that conscience is the result of instinctual re- nunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from with- out) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renun- ciation. The contradiction between this statement and what we have previously said about the genesis of conscience is in point of fact not so very great, and we see a way of further reducing it. In order to make our exposition easier, let us take as our example the aggressive instinct, and let us assume that the renunciation in question is always a renunciation of aggression. (This, of course, is only to be taken as a temporary assump- tion.) The effect of instinctual renunciation on the conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter's aggressiveness (against the ego). This does not harmonize well with the view that the original aggressiveness of conscience is a continuance of the severity of the external authority and therefore has nothing to do with renunciation. But the discrepancy is removed if we postulate a different derivation for this first instalment of the super-ego's aggressivity. A considerable amount of aggressiveness must be developed in the child against the authority which prevents him from having his first, but none the less his most important, satisfactions, whatever the kind of instinctual dep- rivation that is demanded of him may be; but he is obliged to renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness. He finds his way out of this economically difficult situation with the help of familiar mech- anisms. By means of identification he takes the unattackable authority into himself. The authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child's ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the authority-the father-who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the [real] situation is reversed: 'If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.' The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real rela- tionships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external object.

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 761 That is typical, too. But the essential difference is that the original severity of the super-ego does not--()r does not so much-represent the severity which one has experienced from it [the object], or which one attributes to it; it represents rather one's own aggressiveness towards it. If this is correct, we may assert truly that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse, and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions of the same kind. Which of these two views is correct? The earlier one, which genetically seemed so unassailable, or the newer one, which rounds off the theory in such a welcome fashion? Clearly, and by the evidence, too, of direct observations, both are justified. They do not contradict each other, and they even coincide at one point, for the child's revengeful aggressiveness will be in part determined by the amount of punitive aggression which he expects from his father. Experience shows, however, that the severity of the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the 4 severity of treatment which he has himself met with. The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of the latter. A child who has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence; it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also exert a strong influence on the formation of the child's super-ego. What it amounts to is that in the formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a conscience innate constitutional factors and influences from the real environment act in combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary, it is a universal aetiological condition for all such pro- cesses. 5 It can also be asserted that when a child reacts to his first great instinctual frustrations with excessively strong aggressiveness and with a correspondingly severe super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond the response that would be currently justified; for the father of prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may be attributed to him. Thus, if one shifts over from individual to phylogenetic development, the differences be- tween the two theories of the genesis of conscience are still further diminished. On the other hand, a new and important difference makes its appearance between these two developmental processes. We cannot get away from the assumption that man's sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together. On that occasion an act of aggression was not suppressed but carried out; but it was the same act of aggression whose 4. As has rightly been emphasized by Melanie study of delinquency [Wayward Youth, 1925J. The Klein and by other English writers. 'unduly lenient and indulgent father' is the cause 5. The two main types of pathogenic methods of of children's forming an over-severe super-ego, be- upbringing-overstrictness and spoiling-have cause, under the impression of the love that they been accurately assessed by Franz Alexander in his receive, they have no other outlet for their ag- book The Psychoanalysis of the Total Personality gressiveness but turning it inwards, • • • (1927) in connection with {August} Aichhom's

762 THE LAST CHAPTER suppression in the child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt. At this point I should not be surprised if the reader were to exclaim angrily: 'So it makes no difference whether one kills one's father or not- one gets a feeling of guilt in either case! We may take leave to raise a few doubts here. Either it is not true that the sense of guilt comes from suppressed aggressiveness, or else the whole story of the killing of the father is a fiction and the children of primaeval man did not kill their fathers any more often than children do nowadays. Besides, if it is not fiction but a plausible piece of history, it would be a case of something happening which everyone expects to happen-namely, of a person feeling guilty because he really has done something which cannot be justified. And of this event, which is after all an everyday occurrence, psycho-analysis has not yet given any explanation.' That is true, and we must make good the omission. Nor is there any great secret about the matter. When one has a sense of guilt after having committed a misdeed, and because of it, the feeling should more properly be called remorse. It relates only to a deed that has been done, and, of course, it presupposes that a conscience--the readiness to feel guilty- was already in existence before the deed took place. Remorse of this sort can, therefore, never help us to discover the origin of conscience and of the sense of guilt in general. What happens in these everyday cases is usually this: an instinctual need acquires the strength to achieve sat- isfaction in spite of the conscience, which is, after all, limited in its strength; and with the natural weakening of the need owing to its having been satisfied, the former balance of power is restored. Psycho-analysis is thus justified in excluding from the present discussion the case of a sense of guilt due to remorse, however frequently such cases occur and however great their practical importance. But if the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, that was after all a case of 'remorse'. Are we to assume that [at that time] a conscience and a sense of guilt were not, as we have pre- supposed, in existence before the deed? If not, where, in this case, did the remorse come from? There is no doubt that this case should explain the secret of the sense of guilt to us and put an end to our difficulties. And I believe it does. This remorse was the result of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. His sons hated him, but they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satisfied by their act of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. It set up the super-ego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father's power, as though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended to prevent a repetition of the deed. And since the incli- nation to aggressiveness against the father was repeated in the following generations, the sense of guilt, too, persisted, and it was reinforced once more by every piece of aggressiveness that was suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, I think, we can at last grasp two things

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 763 perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the origin of conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has killed one's father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is bound to feel guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death. This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living together. So long as the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever- increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then-as a result of the inborn conflict arising from ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death-there is inextri- cably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. * * * VII Having reached the end of his journey, the author must ask his readers' forgiveness for not having been a more skilful guide and for not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome detours. There is no doubt that it could have been done better. I will attempt, late in the day, to make some amends. In the first place, I suspect that the reader has the impression that our discussions on the sense of guilt disrupt the framework of this essay: that they take up too much space, so that the rest of its subject-matter, with which they are not always closely connected, is pushed to one side. This may have spoilt the structure of my paper; but it corresponds faithfully to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization and to show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt. 6 Anything that still sounds strange about this statement, which is the final conclusion to our in- 6, Thus conscience does make cowards of us the aggressiveness of which they are destined to all . become the objects. In sending the young out into That the education of young people at the pres- life with such a false psychological orientation, ent day conceals from them the part which sex- education is behaving as though one were to equip uality will play in their lives is not the only people starting on a Polar expedition with summer reproach which we are obliged to make against it. clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. • • • Its other sin is that it does not prepare them for

764 THE LAST CHAPTER vestigation, can probably be traced to the quite peculiar relationship- as yet completely unexplained-which the sense of guilt has to our consciousness. In the common case of remorse, which we regard as normal, this feeling makes itself clearly enough perceptible to con- sciousness. Indeed, we are accustomed to speak of a 'consciousness of guilt' instead of a '{consciousness} of guilt'. Our study of the neuroses, to which, after all, we owe the most valuable pointers to an understanding of normal conditions, brings us up against some contradictions. In one of those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture and the patient's life as well, and it hardly allows anything else to appear alongside of it. But in most other cases and forms of neurosis it remains completely unconscious, without on that account producing any less important effects. Our patients do not believe us when we attribute an 'unconscious sense of guilt\" to them. In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them, we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression. But its connection with a particular form of neurosis must not be over-estimated. Even in obsessional neu- rosis there are types of patients who are not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety, if they are prevented from carrying out certain actions. It ought to be possible eventually to understand these things; but as yet we cannot. Here perhaps we may be glad to have it pointed out that the sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides completely with fear of the super-ego. And the relations of anxiety to consciousness exhibit the same extraordinary variations. Anx- iety is always present somewhere or other behind every symptom; but at one time it takes noisy possession of the whole of consciousness, while at another it conceals itself so completely that we are obliged to speak of unconscious anxiety or, if we want to have a clearer psychological conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance simply a feeling, of possibilities of anxiety. Consequently it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, 7 a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations. Religions, at any rate, have never overlooked the part played in civilization by a sense of guilt. Furthermore-a point which I failed to appreciate elsewhere- they claim to redeem mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the manner in which, in Christianity, this redemption is achieved-by the sacrificial death of a single person, who in this manner takes upon himself a guilt that is common to everyone-we have been able to infer what the first occasion may have been on which this primal guilt, which was also the beginning of civilization, was acquired. 7. {Freud here uses the word Unbehagen, which might argue that malaise would have been equally the translators. when they encountered it in the felicitous, perhaps even more felicitous.} title of this essay, rendered as \"discontents,\" One

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 765 Though it cannot be of great importance, it may not be superfluous to elucidate the meaning of a few words such as 'super-ego', 'conscience', 'sense of guilt', 'need for punishment' and 'remorse', which we have often, perhaps, used too loosely and interchangeably. They all relate to the same state of affairs, but denote different aspects of it. The super- ego is an agency which has been inferred by us, and conscience is a function which we ascribe, among other functions, to that agency. This function consists in keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship. The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the whole relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct towards internal destruction present in the ego, employed for forming an erotic attachment to the super-ego. We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego is demonstrably present. As to a sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence before the super-ego, and therefore before conscience, too. At that time it is the immediate expression of fear of the external authority, a recognition of the tension between the ego and that authority. It is the direct derivative of the conflict between the need for the authority's love and the urge towards instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition pro- duces the inclination to aggression. The superimposition of these two strata of the sense of guilt-one coming from fear of the external au- thority, the other from fear of the internal authority-has hampered our insight into the position of conscience in a number of ways. Remorse is a general term for the ego's reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It contains, in little altered form, the sensory material of the anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and can include the need for punishment. Thus remorse, too, can be older than conscience. Nor will it do any harm if we once more review the contradictions which have for a while perplexed us during our enquiry. Thus, at one point the sense of guilt was the consequence of acts of aggression that had been abstained from; but at another point-and precisely at its historical beginning, the killing of the father-it was the consequence of an act of aggression that had been carried out. But a way out of this difficulty was found. For the institution of the internal authority, the super-ego, altered the situation radically. Before this, the sense of guilt coincided with remorse. (We may remark, incidentally, that the term 'remorse' should be reserved for the reaction after an act of aggression has actually been carried out.) After this, owing to the omniscience of the super-ego, the difference between an aggression intended and an

766 THE LAST CHAPTER aggression carried out lost its force. Henceforward a sense of guilt could be produced not only by an act of violence that is actually carried out (as all the world knows), but also by one that is merely intended (as psycho-analysis has discovered). Irrespectively of this alteration in the psychological situation, the conflict arising from ambivalence-the con- flict between the two primal instincts-leaves the same result behind. We are tempted to look here for the solution of the problem of the varying relation in which the sense of guilt stands to consciousness. It might be thought that a sense of guilt arising from remorse for an evil deed must always be conscious, whereas a sense of guilt arising from the perception of an evil impulse may remain unconscious. But the answer is not so simple as that. Obsessional neurosis speaks energetically against it. The second contradiction concerned the aggressive energy with which we suppose the super-ego to be endowed. According to one view, that energy merely carries on the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive in the mind; while, according to another view, it consists, on the contrary, of one's own aggressive energy which has not been used and which one now directs against that inhibiting authority. The first view seemed to fit in better with the history, and the second with the theory, of the sense of guilt. Closer reflection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable contradiction almost too completely; what re- mained as the essential and common factor was that in each case we were dealing with an aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards. Clinical observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources for the aggressiveness which we attribute to the super-ego; one or the other of them exercises the stronger effect in any given case, but as a general rule they operate in unison. * • * In the most recent analytic literature a predilection is shown for the idea that any kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satis- faction, results, or may result, in a heightening of the sense of guilt. 8 A great theoretical simplification will, I think, be achieved if we regard this as applying only to the aggressive instincts, and little will be found to contradict this assumption. For how are we to account, on dynamic and economic grounds, for an increase in the sense of guilt appearing in place of an unfulfilled erotic demand? This only seems possible in a round-about way-if we suppose, that is, that the prevention of an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego. I am convinced that many processes will admit of a simpler and clearer exposition if the findings of psycho-analysis with regard to the derivation of the sense of guilt are restricted to the aggressive 8. This view is taken in particular by Ernest Jones. Susan Isaacs and Melanie Klein; and also, I understand, by {Theodor} Reik and {Franz} Alexander.

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 767 instincts. Examination of the clinical material gives us no unequivocal answer here, because, as our hypothesis tells us, the two classes of instinct hardly ever appear in a pure form, isolated from each other; but an investigation of extreme cases would probably point in the direction I anticipate. I am tempted to extract a first advantage from this more restricted view of the case by applying it to the process of repression. As we have learned, neurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfac- tions for unfulfilled sexual wishes. In the course of our analytic work we have discovered to our surprise that perhaps every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment. It now seems plau- sible to formulate the following proposition. When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt. Even if this prop- osition is only an average approximation to the truth, it is worthy of our interest. Some readers of this work may further have an impression that they have heard the formula of the struggle between Eros and the death instinct too often. It was alleged to characterize the process of civilization which mankind undergoes but it was also brought into connection with the development of the individual, and, in addition, it was said to have revealed the secret of organic life in general. We cannot, I think, avoid going into the relations of these three processes to one another. The repetition of the same formula is justified by the consideration that both the process of human civilization and of the development of the indi- vidual are also vital processes-which is to say that they must share in the most general characteristic of life. On the other hand, evidence of the presence of this general characteristic fails, for the very reason of its general nature, to help us to arrive at any differentiation [between the processes], so long as it is not narrowed down by special qualifications. We can only be satisfied, therefore, if we assert that the process of civilization is a modification which the vital process experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by Eros and instigated by Ananke- by the exigencies of reality; and that this task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties. When, however, we look at the relation between the process of human civili- zation and the developmental or educative process of individual human beings, we shall conclude without much hesitation that the two are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of object. The process of the civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the individual and it is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue analogies to an obsessional extreme; but in view of the similarity between the aims of the two processes-in the one case

768 THE LAST CHAPTER the integration of a separate individual into a human group, and in the other case the creation of a unified group out of many individuals-we cannot be surprised at the similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena. In view of its exceptional importance, we must not long postpone the mention of one feature which distinguishes between the two processes. In the developmental processes of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness can be achieved. If it could be done without that condition, it would perhaps be preferable. To put it in other words, the development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we usually call 'egoistic', and the urge towards union with others in the community, which we call 'altruistic'. Neither of these descriptions goes much below the surface. In the process of individual development, as we have said, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic urge (or the urge towards happiness); while the other urge, which may be de- scribed as a 'cultural' one, is usually content with the role of imposing restrictions. But in the process of civilization things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual. The devel- opmental process of the individual can thus be expected to have special features of its own which are not reproduced in the process of human civilization. It is only in so far as the first of these processes has union with the community as its aim that it need coincide with the second process. Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of de- velopment of mankind at the same time as he pursues his own path in life. But to our dull eyes the play of forces in the heavens seems fixed in a never-changing order; in the field of organic life we can still see how the forces contend with one another, and how the effects of the conflict are continually changing. So, also, the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings, must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground. But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction-probably an irreconcilable one-be- tween the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the

CiVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 769 economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the dis- tribution of libido between ego and objects; and it does admit of an eventual accommodation in the individual, as, it may be hoped, it will also do in the future of civilization, however much that civilization may oppress the life of the individual to-day. The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of in- dividual development may be extended in an important respect. It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds. It would be a tempting task for anyone who has a knowledge of human civilizations to follow out this analogy in detail. I will confine myself to bringing forward a few striking points. The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders-men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided, expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime these figures were-often enough, even if not always-mocked and maltreated by others and even despatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence. The most arresting example of this fateful conjunction is to be seen in the figure of Jesus Christ-if, indeed, that figure is not a part of mythology, which called it into being from an obscure memory of that primal event. Another point of agree- ment between the cultural and the individual super-ego is that the former, just like the latter, sets up strict ideal demands, disobedience to which is visited with 'fear of conscience'. Here, indeed, we come across the remarkable circumstance that the mental processes concerned are actually more familiar to us and more accessible to consciousness as they are seen in the group than they can be in the individual man. In him, when tension arises, it is only the aggressiveness of the super-ego which, in the form of reproaches, makes itself noisily heard; its actual demands often remain unconscious in the background. If we bring them to conscious knowledge, we find that they coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego. At this point the two processes, that of the cultural development of the group and that of the cultural de- velopment of the individual, are, as it were, always interlocked. For that reason some of the manifestations and properties of the super-ego can be more easily detected in its behaviour in the cultural community than in the separate individual. The cultural super-ego has developed its ideals and set up its demands. Among the latter, those which deal with the relations of human beings to one another are comprised under the heading of ethics. People have at all times set the greatest value on ethics, as though they expected that it in particular would produce especially important results. And it does

770 THE LAST CHAPTER in fact deal with a subject which can easily be recognized as the sorest spot in every civilization. Ethics is thus to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt-as an endeavour to achieve, by means of a command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by means of any other cultural activities. As we already know, the problem before us is how to get rid of the greatest hindrance to civilization-namely, the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another; and for that very reason we are especially interested in what is probably the most recent of the cultural commands of the super-ego, the commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself. In our research into, and therapy of, a neurosis, we are led to make two reproaches against the super-ego of the individual. In the severity of its commands and prohibitions it troubles itself too little about the happiness of the ego, in that it takes insufficient account of the resistances against obeying them-of the instinctual strength of the id [in the first place], and of the difficulties presented by the real external environment [in the sec- ond]. Consequently we are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavour to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man's ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be controlled beyond certain limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be prod uced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy. The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself, is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological proceedings of the cultural super-ego. The command- ment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disad- vantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among

CIVILIZATION AND ITs DISCONTENTS 771 socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature. I believe the line of thought which seeks to trace in the phenomena of cultural development the part played by a super-ego promises still further discoveries. I hasten to come to a close. But there is one question which I can hardly evade. If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization-possibly the whole of mankind-have become 'neurotic'? An analytic dissection of such neuroses might lead to therapeutic recommendations which could lay claim to great practical interest. I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho- analysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved. Moreover, the diagnosis of communal neuroses is faced with a special difficulty. In an individual neurosis we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be 'normal'. For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere. And as regards the therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most correct analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group? But in spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities. For a wide variety of reasons, it is very far from my intention to express an opinion upon the value of human civilization. I have endeavoured to guard myself against the enthusiastic prejudice which holds that our civilization is the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire and that its path will necessarily lead to heights of unimagined perfection. I can at least listen without indignation to the critic who is of the opinion that when one surveys the aims of cultural endeavour and the means it employs, one is bound to come to the conclusion that the whole effort is not worth the trouble, and that the outcome of it can only be a state of affairs which the individual will be unable to tolerate. My impartiality is made all the easier to me by my knowing very little about all these things. One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, ac- cordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. I should find it very understandable if someone were to point out the obligatory nature of the course of human civilization and were to say,

772 THE LAST CHAPTER for instance, that the tendencies to a restriction of sexual life or to the institution of a humanitarian ideal at the expense of natural selection were developmental trends which cannot be averted or turned aside and to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of nature. I know, too, the objection that can be made against this, to the effect that in the history of mankind, trends such as these, which were considered unsurmountable, have often been thrown aside and replaced by other trends. Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow- men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding-the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers. The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggres- sion and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers', eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adver- sary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result? Letter to the Burgomaster of Pfibor This touching autobiographical document, which Freud composed and his daughter Anna read out in his behalf, is a vivid and eloquent reminder of Freud's childhood happiness. In this letter, he briefly recalls his \"first in- delible impressions from this air, from this soil\" in, and around, his birth- place, Freiberg in Moravia. By the time the seventy-five-year-old Freud wrote it, Freiberg had become Pfibor (as the Czechs already called the place in his youth) in Czechoslovakia. The occasion was the festive unveiling, on October 25, 1931, of a plaque at the house in which Freud had been born on May 6, 1856. I offer my thanks to the Burgomaster of the town of PHbor-Freiberg, to the organizers of this celebration and to all those who are attending it, for the honour they have done me in marking the house of my birth with this commemorative tablet from an artist's hand-and this during my lifetime and while the world around us is not yet agreed in its estimate of my work. I left Freiberg at the age of three and visited it when I was sixteen,

ANXIETY AND INSTINCfUAL LIFE 773 during my school holidays, as a guest of the Fluss family,l and I have never returned to it again. Since that time much has befallen me; my labours have been many, I have experienced some suffering and hap- piness as well, and I have had a share of success-the common medley of human life. At seventy-five it is not easy for me to put myself back into those early times; of their rich experiences but few relics remain in my memory. But of one thing I can feel sure: deeply buried within me there still lives the happy child of Freiberg, the first-born son of a youthful mother, who received his first indelible impressions from this air, from this soil. Thus I may be allowed to end my words of thanks with a heartfelt wish for the happiness of this place and of those who live in it. Lecture XXXII Anxiety and Instinctual Life In 1932, as the psychoanalytic publishing house in Vienna was in deep financial troubles once again-it had been struggling for years-Freud, its surest drawing card, decided to help out by writing a series of general introductory papers that would not be actually delivered but would be in the form oflectures. He had taken a strong paternal interest in this publishing venture for years, and, to appeal to the educated general public, he designed these \"lectures\" to resemble, and ostensibly follow upon, the celebrated, widely read introductory lectures he had delivered, and published, during the years of the First World War. Among these new presentations, which took full account of the revisions Freud had undertaken in his theories during the 1920s, one offers a detailed survey of his new views on anxiety, which he had first published in a book of 1926, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In his early writings on anxiety predating this work, Freud had seen it as transformed libido: \"Neurotic anxiety,\" he had written in a note of 1920 to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, \"arises out of libido ... is a transformation of it, and ... is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine\" (SE VII, 224). By this theory, repression produces anxiety. But in 1926, he reversed field and argued instead that anxiety produces repression; it is a signal, whether appropriate or inappropriate, realistic or neurotic, of danger ahead. The ego is issuing a warning that there is some traumatic situation that will need to be coped with. Freud suggested that the first situation producing anxiety is the trauma of birth, but unlike his one-time follower Otto Rank, who, in his much debated book The Trauma of Birth (1924), devalued the Oedipus complex and took the birth trauma to be the most significant of all anxiety-producing experiences, Freud developed a schedule of anxieties that succeed-or, rather, pile upon-one another. In his book of 1926, I. {Emil Fluss was one of Freud's schoolmates. fondness for Emil and Gisela's charming and hos- and his sister Gisela was brieRy the target of his pitable mother. Freud had already exploited his adolescent infatuation. which. as he freely con- memories of these years in \"Screen Memories\" (see fessed, was really a displacement of his immense above, pp. 117-26).}

774 THE LAST CHAPTER Freud had stated his new views forcefully but, at the same time, rather diffusely. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety is a most useful book, but it is most interesting when it deals with defensive stratagems. The present paper summarizes Freud's revised ideas on anxiety just as forcefully and, in many ways, more manageably. See also above, pp. 661-66. Ladies and gentlemen, * * * I devoted a lecture (the twenty-fifth) to anxiety in my previous series; and I must briefly recapitulate what I said in it. We described anxiety as an affective state-that is to say, a combination of certain feelings in the pleasure-un pleasure series with the corresponding innervations of discharge and a perception of them, but probably also the precipitate of a particular important event, incorporated by inheritance-something that may thus be likened to an individually acquired hysterical attack. The event which we look upon as having left behind it an effective trace of this sort is the process of birth, at the time of which effects upon the heart's action and upon respiration characteristic of anxiety were expe- dient ones. The very first anxiety would thus have been a toxic one. We then started off from a distinction between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety, of which the former was a reaction, which seemed intelligible to us, to a danger-that is, to an expected injury from outside-while the latter was completely enigmatic, and appeared to be pointless. In an analysis of realistic anxiety we brought it down to the state of increased sensory attention and motor tension which we describe as 'preparedness for anxiety'. It is out of this that the anxiety reaction develops. Here two outcomes are possible. Either the generation of anxiety-the repetition of the old traumatic experience-is limited to a signal, in which case the remainder of the reaction can adapt itself to the new situation of danger and can proceed to flight or defence; or the old situation can retain the upper hand and the total reaction may consist in no more than a generation of anxiety, in which case the affective state becomes paralysing and will be inexpedient for present purposes. We then turned to neurotic anxiety and pointed out that we observe it under three conditions. We find it first as a freely floating, general apprehensiveness, ready to attach itself temporarily, in the form of what is known as 'expectant anxiety', to any possibility that may freshly arise- as happens, for instance, in a typical anxiety neurosis. Secondly, we find it firmly attached to certain ideas in the so-called 'phobias', in which it is still possible to recognize a relation to external danger but in which we must judge the fear exaggerated out of all proportion. Thirdly and lastly, we find anxiety in hysteria and other forms of severe neurosis, where it either accompanies symptoms or emerges independently as an

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE 775 attack or more persistent state, but always without any visible basis in an external danger. We then asked ourselves two questions: 'What are people afraid of in neurotic anxiety?' and 'How are we to bring it into relation with realistic anxiety felt in the face of external dangers?' Our investigations were far from remaining unsuccessful: we reached a few important conclusions. In regard to anxious expectation clinical experience revealed that it had a regular connection with the libidinal economics of sexual life. The commonest cause of anxiety neurosis is unconsummated excitation. Libidinal excitation is aroused but not sat- isfied, not employed; apprehensiveness then appears instead of this libido that has been diverted from its employment. I even thought I was justified in saying that this unsatisfied libido was directly changed into anxiety. This view found support in some quite regularly occurring phobias of small children. Many of these phobias are very puzzling to us, but others, such as the fear of being alone and the fear of strangers, can be explained with certainty. Loneliness as well as a strange face arouse the child's longing for his familiar mother; he is unable to control this libidinal excitation, he cannot hold it in suspense but changes it into anxiety. This infantile anxiety must therefore be regarded not as of the realistic but as of the neurotic kind. Infantile phobias and the expectation of anxiety in anxiety neurosis offer us two examples of one way in which neurotic anxiety originates: by a direct transformation of libido. * * * For we consider that what is responsible for the anxiety in hysteria and other neuroses is the process of repression. We believe it is possible to give a more complete account of this than before, if we separate what happens to the idea that has to be repressed from what happens to the quota of libido attaching to it. It is the idea which is subjected to repression and which may be distorted to the point of being unrecog- nizable; but its quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety- and this is so whatever the nature of the affect may be, whether it is aggressiveness or love. It makes no essential difference, then, for what reason a quota of libido has become unemployable: whether it is on account of the infantile weakness of the ego, as in children's phobias, or on account of somatic processes in sexual life, as in anxiety neurosis, or owing to repression, as in hysteria. Thus in reality the two mechanisms that bring about neurotic anxiety coincide. In the course of these investigations our attention was drawn to a highly significant relation between the generation of anxiety and the formation of symptoms--namely, that these two represent and replace each other. For instance, an agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a restriction of the ego's functioning, and by means of it he spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this if we interfere in the for- mation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, with obsessions. If we

776 THE LAST CHAPTER prevent a patient from carrying out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been protected by his symptom. And it seems, indeed, that the generation of anxiety is the earlier and the formation of symptoms the later of the two, as though the symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias-states in which we see so clearly how an initial generation of anxiety is replaced by the later formation of a symptom; we get an impression that it is from these interrelations that we shall best obtain access to an understanding of neurotic anxiety. And at the same time we have also succeeded in answering the question of what it is that a person is afraid of in neurotic anxiety and so in establishing the connection between neurotic and realistic anxiety. What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido. The difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized. In phobias it is very easy to observe the way in which this internal danger is transformed into an external one-that is to say, how a neurotic anxiety is changed into an apparently realistic one. In order to simplify what is often a very complicated business, let us suppose that the ago- raphobic patient is invariably afraid of feelings of temptation that are aroused in him by meeting people in the street. In his phobia he brings about a displacement and henceforward is afraid of an external situation. What he gains by this is obviously that he thinks he will be able to protect himself better in that way. One can save oneself from an external danger by flight; fleeing from an internal danger is a difficult enterprise. At the conclusion of my earlier lecture on anxiety I myself expressed the opinion that, although these various findings of our enquiry were not mutually contradictory, somehow they did not fit in with one an- other. Anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger; anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become unemployable and it also arises during the process of repression; it is replaced by the formation of a symptom, is, as it were, psychically bound-one has a feeling that something is missing here which would bring all these pieces together into a whole. Ladies and Gentlemen, the dissection of the mental personality into a super-ego, an ego and an id, which I put before you in my last lecture, has obliged us to take our bearings afresh in the problem of anxiety as well. With the thesis that the ego is the sole seat of anxiety-that the ego alone can produce and feel anxiety-we have established a new and stable position from which a number of things take on a ~ew aspect. And indeed it is difficult to see what sense there would be in speaking

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE 777 of an 'anxiety of the id' or in attributing a capacity for apprehensiveness to the super-ego. On the other hand, we have welcomed a desirable element of correspondence in the fact that the three main species of anxiety, realistic, neurotic and moral, can be so easily connected with the ego's three dependent relations-to the external world, to the id and to the super-ego. Along with this new view, moreover, the function of anxiety as a signal announcing a situation of danger (a notion, inciden- tally, not unfamiliar to us) comes into prominence, the question of what the material is out of which anxiety is made loses interest, and the relations between realistic and neurotic anxiety have become surprisingly clarified and simplified. It is also to be remarked that we now understand the apparently complicated cases of the generation of anxiety better than those which were considered simple. For we have recently been examining the way in which anxiety is generated in certain phobias which we class as anxiety hysteria, and have chosen cases in which we were dealing with the typical repression of wishful impulses arising from the Oedipus complex. We should have expected to find that it was a libidinal cathexis of the boy's mother as object which, as a result of repression, had been changed into anxiety and which now emerged, expressed in symptomatic terms, attached to a substitute for his father. I cannot present you with the detailed steps of an investigation such as this; it will be enough to say that the surprising result was the opposite of what we expected. It was not the repression that created the anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression. But what sort of anxiety can it have been? Only anxiety in the face of a threatening external danger-that is to say, a realistic anxiety. It is true that the boy felt anxiety in the face of a demand by his libido-in this instance, anxiety at being in love with his mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic anxiety. But this being in love only appeared to him as an internal danger, which he must avoid by renouncing that object, because it conjured up an external situation of danger. And in every case we examine we obtain the same result. It must be confessed that we were not prepared to find that internal instinctual danger would turn out to be a determinant and preparation for an external, real, situation of danger. But we have not made any mention at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid of as a result of being in love with his mother. The danger is the punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether cas- tration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child believes in it. He has some ground for this, for people threaten him often enough with cutting off his penis during the phallic phase, at the time of his early masturbation,

778 THE LAST CHAPTER and hints at that punishment must regularly find a phylogenetic rein- forcement in him. It is our suspicion that during the human family's primaeval period castration used actually to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so frequently plays a part in puberty rites among primitive peoples, is a clearly recognizable relic of it. Weare aware that here we are diverging widely from the general opinion; but we must hold fast to the view that fear of castration is one of the commonest and strongest motives for repression and thus for the formation of neuroses. The analysis of cases in which circumcision, though not, it is true, castration, has been carried out on boys as a cure or punishment for masturbation (a far from rare occurrence in Anglo-American society) has given our conviction a last degree of certainty. It is very tempting at this point to go more deeply into the castration complex, but I will stick to our subject. Fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of the infant's anxiety if it finds its mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs a~d is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension. Do not reject the idea that these determinants of anxiety may at bottom repeat the situation of the original anxiety at birth, which, to be sure, also represented a separation from the mother. Indeed, if you follow a train of thought suggested by Ferenczi, you may add the fear of castration to this series, for a loss of the male organ results in an inability to unite once more with the mother (or a substitute for her) in the sexual act. I may mention to you incidentally that the very frequent phantasy of returning into the mother's womb is a substitute for this wish to copulate. There would be many interesting things and surprising connections to tell you at this point, but I cannot go outside the framework of an introduction to psycho-analysis. I will only draw your attention to the fact that here psychological researchers trench upon the facts of biology. Otto Rank, to whom psycho-analysis is indebted for many excellent contributions, also has the merit of having expressly emphasized the significance of the act of birth and of separation from the mother. Nevertheless we have all found it impossible to accept the extreme inferences which he has drawn from this factor as bearing on l'-le theory of the neuroses and even on analytic therapy. The core of his theory- that the experience of anxiety at birth is the model of all later situations of danger-he found already there. If we dwell on these situations of danger for a moment, we can say that in fact a particular determinant of anxiety (that is, situation of danger) is allotted to every age of devel- opment as being appropriate to it. The danger of psychical helplessness

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE 779 fits the stage of the ego's early immaturity; the danger of loss of an object (or loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in the first years of child- hood; the danger of being castrated fits the phallic phase; and finally fear of the super-ego, which assumes a special position, fits the period of latency. In the course of development the old determinants of anxiety should be dropped, since the situations of danger corresponding to them have lost their importance owing to the strengthening of the ego. But this only occurs most incompletely. Many people are unable to surmount the fear of loss of love; they never become sufficiently independent of other people's love and in this respect carry on their behaviour as infants. Fear of the super-ego should normally never cease, since, in the form of moral anxiety, it is indispensable in social relations, and only in the rarest cases can an individual become independent of human society. A few of the old situations of danger, too, succeed in surviving into later periods by making contemporary modifications in their determinants of anxiety. Thus, for instance, the danger of castration persists under the mark of syphilidophobia. It is true that as an adult one knows that castration is no longer customary as a punishment for the indulgence of sexual desires, but on the other hand one has learnt that instinctual liberty of that kind is threatened by serious diseases. There is no doubt that the people we describe as neurotics remain infantile in their attitude to danger and have not surmounted obsolete determinants of anxiety. We may take this as a factual contribution to the characterization of neurotics; it is not so easy to say why it should be so. I hope you have not lost the thread of what I am saying and remember that we are investigating the relations between anxiety and repression. In the course of this we have learnt two new things: first, that anxiety makes repression and not, as we used to think, the other way round, and [secondly) that the instinctual situation which is feared goes back ultimately to an external situation of danger. The next question will be: how do we now picture the process of a repression under the influence of anxiety? The answer will, I think, be as follows. The ego notices that the satisfaction of an emerging instinctual demand would conjure up one of the well-remembered situations of danger. This instinctual ca- thexis must therefore be somehow suppressed, stopped, made powerless. We know that the ego succeeds in this task if it is strong and has drawn the instinctual impulse concerned into its organization. But what hap- pens in the case of repression is that the instinctual impulse still belongs to the id and that the ego feels weak. The ego thereupon helps itself by a technique which is at bottom identical with normal thinking. Thinking is an experimental action carried out with small amounts of energy, in the same way as a general shifts small figures about on a map before setting his large bodies of troops in motion. Thus the ego anticipates the satisfaction of the questionable instinctual impulse and permits it to bring about the reproduction of the unpleasurable feelings at the begin- ning of the feared situation of danger. With this the automatism of the

780 THE LAST CHAPTER pleasure-unpleasure principle is brought into operation and now carries out the repression of the dangerous instinctual impulse. 'Stop a moment!' you will exclaim; 'we can't follow you any further there!' You are quite right; I must add a little more before it can seem acceptable to you. First, I must admit that I have tried to translate into the language of our normal thinking what must in fact be a process that is neither conscious nor preconscious, taking place between quotas of energy in some unimaginable substratum. But that is not a strong ob- jection, for it cannot be done in any other way. What is more important is that we should distinguish clearly what happens in the ego and what happens in the id when there is a repression. We have just said what the ego does: it makes use of an experimental cathexis and starts up the pleasure-unpleasure automatism by means of a signal of anxiety. After that, several reactions are possible or a combination of them in varying proportions. Either the anxiety attack is fully generated and the ego withdraws entirely from the objectionable excitation; or, in place of the experimental cathexis it opposes the excitation with an anticathexis, and this combines with the energy of the repressed impulse to form a symp- tom; or the anticathexis is taken up into the ego as a reaction-formation, as an intensification of certain of the ego's dispositions, as a permanent alteration of it. The more the generation of anxiety can be restricted to a mere signal, so much the more does the ego expend on actions of defence which amount to the psychical binding of the repressed [im- pulse], and so much the closer, too, does the process approximate to a normal working-over of it, though no doubt without attaining to it. Incidentally, here is a point on which we may dwell for a moment. You yourselves have no doubt assumed that what is known as 'character', a thing so hard to define, is to be ascribed entirely to the ego. We have already made out a little of what it is that creates character. First and foremost there is the incorporation of the former parental agency as a super-ego, which is no doubt its most important and decisive portion, and, further, identifications with the two parents of the later period and with other influential figures, and similar identifications formed as pre- cipitates of abandoned object-relations. And we may now add as con- tributions to the construction of character which are never absent the reaction-formations which the ego acquires-to begin with in making its repressions and later, by a more normal method, when it rejects unwished-for instinctual impulses. Now let us go back and turn to the id. It is not so easy to guess what occurs during repression in connection with the instinctual impulse that is being fought against. The main question which our interest raises is as to what happens to the energy, to the libidinal charge, of that exci- tation-how is it employed? You recollect that the earlier hypothesis was that it is precisely this that is transformed by repression into anxiety. We no longer feel able to say that. The modest reply will rather be that what happens to it is probably not always the same thing. There is

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE 781 probably an intimate correspondence which we ought to get to know about between what is occurring at the time in the ego and in the id in connection with the repressed impulse. For since we have decided that the pleasure-unpleasure principle, which is set in action by the signal of anxiety, plays a part in repression, we must alter our expectations. That principle exercises an entirely unrestricted dominance over what happens in the id. We can rely on its bringing about quite profound changes in the instinctual impulse in question. We are prepared to find that repression will have very various consequences, more or less far- reaching. In some cases the repressed instinctual impulse may retain its libidinal cathexis, and may persist in the id unchanged, although subject to constant pressure from the ego. In other cases what seems to happen is that it is totally destroyed, while its libido is permanently diverted along other paths. I expressed the view that this is what happens when the Oedipus complex is dealt with normally-in this desirable case, therefore, being not simply repressed but destroyed in the id. Clinical experience has further shown us that in many cases, instead of the customary result of repression, a degradation of the libido takes place- a regression of the libidinal organization to an earlier ~tage. This can, of course, only occur in the id, and if it occurs it will be under the influence of the same conflict which was introduced by the signal of anxiety. The most striking example of this kind is provided by the ob- sessional neurosis, in which libidinal regression and repression operate together. I fear, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you will find this exposition hard to follow, and you will guess that I have not stated it exhaustively. I am sorry to have had to rouse your displeasure. But I can set myself no other aim than to give you an impression of the nature of our findings and of the difficulties involved in working them out. The deeper we penetrate into the study of mental processes the more we recognize their abundance and complexity. A number of simple formulas which to begin with seemed to meet our needs have later turned out to be in- adequate. We do not tire of altering and improving them. In my lecture on the theory of dreams [the first in the present series] I introduced you to a region in which for fifteen years there has scarcely been a new discovery. Here, where we ate dealing with anxiety, you see everything in a state of flux and change. These novelties, moreover, have not yet been thoroughly worked through and perhaps this too adds to the dif- ficulties of demonstrating them. But have patience! We shall soon be able to take leave of the subject of anxiety. I cannot promise that it will have been settled to our satisfaction, but it is to be hoped that we shall have made a little bit of progress. And in the meantime we have made all sorts of new discoveries. Now, for instance, our study of anxiety leads us to add a new feature to our description of the ego. We have said that the ego is weak in comparison with the id, that it is its loyal servant, eager to carry out its orders and to fulfil its demands. We have no

782 THE LAST CHAPTER intention of withdrawing this statement. But on the other hand this same ego is the better organized part of the id, with its face turned towards reality. We must not exaggerate the separation between the two of them too much, and we must not be surprised if the ego on its part can bring its influence to bear on the processes in the id. I believe the ego exercises this influence by putting into action the almost omnipotent pleasure- unpleasure principle by means of the signal of anxiety. On the other hand, it shows its weakness again immediately afterwards, for by the act of repression it renounces a portion of its organization and has to allow the repressed instinctual impulse to remain permanently withdrawn from its influence. And now, only one more remark on the problem of anxiety. Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger. But we cannot stop there, we must take another step-though it will be a step backward. We ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind. It is plainly not the injury to the subject as judged objectively, for this need be of no significance psychologically, but something brought about by it in the mind. Birth, for instance, our model for an anxiety state, can after all scarcely be regarded on its own account as an injury, although it may involve a danger of injuries. The essential thing about birth, as about every situation of danger, is that it callls up in mental experience a state of highly tense excitation, which is felt as unpleasure and which one is not able to master by discharging it. Let us call a state of this kind, before which the efforts of the pleasure principle break down, a 'traumatic' moment. Then, if we take in succes- sion neurotic anxiety, realistic anxiety and the situation of danger, we arrive at this simple proposition: what is feared, what is the object of the anxiety, is invariably the emergence of a traumatic moment, which cannot be dealt with by the normal rules of the pleasure principle. We understand at once that our endowment with the pleasure principle does not guarantee us against objective injuries but only against a particular injury to our psychical economics. It is a long step from the pleasure principle to the self-preservative instinct; the intentions of the two of them are very far from coinciding from the start. But we see something else besides; perhaps it is the solution we are in search of. Namely, that in all this it is a question of relative quantities. It is only the magnitude of the sum of excitation that turns an impression into a traumatic mo- ment, paralyses the function of the pleasure principle and gives the situation of danger its significance. And if that is how things are, if these puzzles can be solved so prosaically, why should it not be possible for similar traumatic moments to arise in mental life without reference to hypothetical situations of danger-traumatic moments, then, in which anxiety is not aroused as a signal but is generated anew for a fresh reason. Clinical experience declares decidedly that such is in fact the case. It is only the later repressions that exhibit the mechanism we have described,

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 783 in which anxiety is awakened as a signal of an earlier situation of danger. The first and original repressions arise directly from traumatic moments, when the ego meets with an excessively great libidinal demand; they construct their anxiety afresh, although, it is true, on the model of birth. The same may apply to the generation of anxiety in anxiety neurosis owing to somatic damage to the sexual function. We shall no longer maintain that it is the libido itself that is turned into anxiety in such cases. But I can see no objection to there being a twofold origin of anxiety-one as a direct consequence of the traumatic moment and the other as a signal threatening a repetition of such a moment. • • • Lecture XXXV The Question of a Weltanschauung It is highly significant that Freud reserved the concluding \"lecture\" of his New Introductory Lectures for the question of a Weltanschauung-the ques- tion of just what fundamental view of the world is appropriate to psycho- analysis. Freud's English editors observe (SE XXII, 4) that this lecture, like several others in that series, is \"only indirectly related to psychoanalysis,\" though they concede that it is interesting. That view is, I submit, unduly narrow, unduly technical. In actuality, this paper on a Weltanschauung sums up a lifetime of Freud's reflections on the relation of scientific to religious thinlcing and of the place that psychoanalysis may claim among the sciences. The point Freud wants to make, and make emphatically, is that his creation, psychoanalysis, is one among the sciences and neither needs, nor could generate, a world view of its own. Ladies and Gentlemen,-At our last meeting we were occupied with little everyday concems--putting our own modest house in order, as it were. I propose that we should now take a bold leap and venture upon answering a question which is cO:1stantly being asked in other quarters: does psycho-analysis lead to a particular Weltanschauung and, if so, to which? 'Weltanschauung'is, I am afraid, a specifically German concept, the translation of which into foreign languages might well raise difficulties. If I try to give you a definition of it, it is bound to seem clumsy to you. In my opinion, then, a Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of this lcind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it

----~-- --------- 784 THE LAsT CHAPTER one can feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most expediently with one's emotions and interests. If that is the nature of a Weltanschauung, the answer as regards psycho- analysis is made easy. As a specialist science, a branch of psychology- a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious-it is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one. But the Weltanschauung of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the ex- planation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfilment of which is relegated to the future. Apart from this it is marked by negative characteristics, by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable and by its sharp rejection of certain elements that are alien to it. It asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations- in other words, what we call research-and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination. It seems as though this view came very near to being generally recognized in the course of the last few centuries that have passed; and it has been left to our century to discover the presumptuous objection that a Weltanschauung like this is alike paltry and cheerless, that it overlooks the claims of the human intellect and the needs of the human mind. This objection cannot be too energetically repudiated. It is quite without a basis, since the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as any nonhuman things. Psycho- analysis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung at this point, since it cannot be reproached with having neglected what is mental in the picture of the universe. Its contribution to science lies precisely in having extended research to the mental field. And, inci- dentally, without such a psychology science would be very incomplete. If, however, the investigation of the intellectual and emotional functions of men (and of animals) is included in science, then it will be seen that nothing is altered in the attitude of science as a whole, that no new sources of knowledge or methods of research have come into being. Intuition and divination would be such, if they existed; but they may safely be reckoned as illusions, the fulfilments of wishful impulses. It is easy to see, too, that these demands upon a Weltanschauung are only based on emotion. Science takes notice of the fact that the human mind produces these demands and is ready to examine their sources; but it has not the slightest reason to regard them as justified. On the contrary it sees this as a warning carefully to separate from knowledge everything that is illusion and an outcome of emotional demands like these. This does not in the least mean that these wishes are to be pushed contemptuously on one side or their value for human life under- estimated. We are ready to trace out the fulfilments of them which they have created for themselves in the products of art and in the systems of religion and philosophy; but we cannot nevertheless overlook the fact

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 785 that it would be illegitimate and highly inexpedient to allow these de- mands to be transferred to the sphere of knowledge. For this would be to lay open the paths which lead to psychosis, whether to individual or group psychosis, and would withdraw valuable amounts of energy from endeavours which are directed towards reality in order, so far as possible, to find satisfaction in it for wishes and needs. From the standpoint of science one cannot avoid exercising one's critical faculty here and proceeding with rejections and dismissals. It is not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others, at least its equal in value, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two: that they all have an equal claim to be true and that everyone is at liberty to choose from which he will draw his convictions and in which he will place his belief. A view of this kind is regarded as particularly superior, tolerant, broad-minded and free from illiberal prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable and shares all the pernicious features of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and is equivalent to one in practice. It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it. Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion. Except for a few people who are spoken of as being 'possessed' by art, it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent, though one which is bound to collapse with every fresh advance in our knowledge. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations and by accepting other sources of knowledge such as intuition. * * * But philosophy has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else. On the other hand, religion is an immense power which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service. It is well known that at an earlier date it comprised every- thing that played an intellectual part in men's lives, that it took the place of science when there was scarcely yet such a thing as science, and that it constructed a Weltanschauung, consistent and self-contained to an unparalleled degree, which, although it has been profoundly shaken, persists to this day. If we are to give an account of the grandiose nature of religion, we must bear in mind what it undertakes to do for human beings. It gives

786 THE LAST CHAPTER them information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays down with its whole authority. Thus it fulfils three functions. With the first of them it satisfies the human thirst for knowl- edge; it does the same thing that science attempts to do with its means, and at that point enters into rivalry with it. It is to its second function that it no doubt owes the greatest part of its influence. Science can be no match for it when it soothes the fear that men feel of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, when it assures them of a happy ending and offers them comfort in unhappiness. It is true that science can teach us how to avoid certain dangers and that there are some sufferings which it can successfully combat; it would be most unjust to deny that it is a powerful helper to men; but there are many situations in which it must leave a man to his suffering and can only advise him to submit to it. In its third function, in which it issues precepts and lays down prohi- bitions and restrictions, religion is furthest away from science. For sci- ence is content to investigate and to establish facts, though it is true that from its application rules and advice are derived on the conduct of life. In some circumstances these are the same as those offered by religion, but, when this is so, the reasons for them are different. * * * You know how hard it is for anything to die away when once it has achieved psychical expression. So you will not be surprised to hear that many of the utterances of animism have persisted to this day, for the most part as what we call superstition, alongside of and behind religion. But more than this, you will scarcely be able to reject a judgement that the philosophy of today has retained some essential features of the an- imistic mode of thought-the overvaluation of the magic of words and the belief that the real events in the world take the course which our thinking seeks to impose on them. It would seem, it is true, to be an animism without magical actions. On the other hand, we may suppose that even in those days there were ethics of some sort, precepts upon the mutual relations of men; but nothing suggests that they had any intimate connection with animistic beliefs. They were probably the direct expression of men's relative powers and of their practical needs. * * This being the prehistory of the religious Weltanschauung, let us turn now to what has happened since then and to what is still going on before our eyes. The scientific spirit, strengthened by the observation of natural processes, has begun, in the course of time, to treat religion as a human affair and to submit it to a critical examination. Religion was not able to stand up to this. What first gave rise to suspicion and scepticism were

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 787 its tales of miracles, for they contradicted everything that had been taught by sober observation and betrayed too clearly the influence of the activity of the human imagination. After this its doctrines explaining the origin of the universe met with rejection, for they gave evidence of an ignorance which bore the stamp of ancient times and to which, thanks to their increased familiarity with the laws of nature, people knew they were superior. The idea that the universe came into existence through acts of copulation or creation analogous to the origin of individual people had ceased to be the most obvious and self-evident hypothesis since the distinction between animate creatures with a mind and an inanimate Nature had impressed itself on human thought-a distinction which made it impossible to retain belief in the original animism. Nor must we overlook the influence of the comparative study of different religious systems and the impression of their mutual exclusiveness and intol- erance. Strengthened by these preliminary exercises, the scientific spirit gained enough courage at last to venture on an examination of the most im- portant and emotionally valuable elements of the religious Weltan- schauung. People may always have seen, though it was long before they dared to say so openly, that the pronouncements of religion promising men protection and happiness if they would only fulfil certain ethical requirements had also shown themselves unworthy of belief. It seems not to be the case that there is a Power in the universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending. On the contrary, the destinies of mankind can be brought into harmony neither with the hypothesis of a Universal Benevolence nor with the partly contradictory one of a Universal Justice. * * * Obscure, unfeeling and unloving powers determine men's fate; the system of rewards and punishments which religion ascribes to the government of the universe seems not to exist. Here once again is a reason for dropping a portion of the animistic theory which had been rescued from animism by religion. The last contribution to the criticism of the religious Weltanschauung was effected by psycho-analysis, by showing how religion originated from the helplessness of children and by tracing its contents to the survival into maturity of the wishes and needs of childhood. This did not precisely mean a contradiction of religion, but it was nevertheless a necessary rounding-off of our knowledge about it, and in one respect at least it was a contradiction, for religion itself lays claim to divine origin. And, to be sure, it is not wrong in this, provided that our interpretation of God is accepted. In summary, therefore, the judgement of science on the religious Weltanschauung is this. While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, our view is that the question of the truth of religious beliefs may be left altogether

788 THE LAST CHAPTER on one side. Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion seeks to lay stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with re- ligious faith. It we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of mankind, it appears not as a permanent acquisition but as a coun- terpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity. * The struggle of the scientific spirit against the religious Weltan- schauung is, as you know, not at an end: it is still going on to-day under our eyes. Though as a rule psycho-analysis makes little use of the weapon of controversy, I will not hold back from looking into this dispute. In doing so I may perhaps throw some further light on our attitude to Weltanschauung. You will see how easily some of the arguments brought forward by the supporters of religion can be answered, though it is true that others may evade refutation. The first objection we meet with is to the effect that it is an imper- tinence on the part of science to make religion a subject for its inves- tigations, for religion is something sublime, superior to any operation of the human intellect, something which may not be approached with hair-splitting criticisms. In other words, science is not qualified to judge religion: it is quite serviceable and estimable otherwise, so long as it keeps to its own sphere. But religion is not its sphere, and it has no business there. If we do not let ourselves be put off by this brusque repulse and enquire further what is the basis of this claim to a position exceptional among all human concerns, the reply we receive (if we are thought worthy of any reply) is that religion cannot be measured by human measurements, for it is of divine origin and was given us as a revelation by a Spirit which the human spirit cannot comprehend. One would have thought that there was nothing easier than the refutation of this argument: it is a clear case of petitio principii, of 'begging the question'!-I know of no good German equivalent expression. The ac- tual question raised is whether there is a divine spirit and a revelation by it; and the matter is certainly not decided by saying that this question cannot be asked, since the deity may not be put in question. The position here is what it occasionally is during the work of analysis. If a usually J. [In English in the original.]

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 789 sensible patient rejects some particular suggestion on specially foolish grounds, this logical weakness is evidence of the existence of a specially strong motive for the denial-a motive which can only be of an affective nature, an emotional tie. We may also be given another answer, in which a motive of this kind is openly admitted: religion may not be critically examined because it is the highest, most precious, and most sublime thing that the human spirit has produced, because it gives expression to the deepest feelings and alone makes the world tolerable and life worthy of men. We need not reply by disputing this estimate of religion but by drawing attention to another matter. What we do is to emphasize the fact that what is in question is not in the least an invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought. Whatever may be the value and importance of religion, it has no right in any way to restrict thought-no right, there- fore, to exclude itself from having thought applied to it. Scientific thinking does not differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features: it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate, tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors and affective influences; it examines more strictly the trustworthiness of the sense- perceptions on which it bases its conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied. Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality-that is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call 'truth'. It remains the aim of scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out of account. When, therefore, religion asserts that it can take the place of science, that, because it is beneficent and elevating, it must also be true, that is in fact an invasion which must be repulsed in the most general interest. It is asking a great deal of a person who has learnt to conduct his ordinary affairs in ac- cordance with the rules of experience and with a regard to reality, to suggest that he shall hand over the care of what are precisely his most intimate interests to an agency which claims as its privilege freedom from the precepts of rational thinking. And as regards the protection which religion promises its believers, I think none of us would be so much as prepared to enter a motor-car if its driver announced that he drove, unperturbed by traffic regulations, in accordance with the im- pulses of his soaring imagination. The prohibition against thought issued by religion to assist in its self- preservation is also far from being free from danger either for the in-

790 THE LAST CHAPTER dividual or for human society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like this, even if it is originally limited to a particular field, tends to widen out and thereafter to become the cause of severe inhi- bitions in the subject's conduct oflife. This result may be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by the religious inhibition of thought in the life stories of nearly all eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intel- lect-or let us call it by the name that is familiar to us, reason-is among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying influence on men-on men who are held together with such difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule. It may be imagined how impossible human society would be, merely if everyone had his own multiplication table and his own private units of length and weight. Our best hope for the future is that intellect- the scientific spirit, reason-may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give man's emotional impulses and what is determined by them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like religion's prohibition against thought, opposes such a development, is a danger for the future of mankind. * * * So the struggle is not at an end. The supporters of the religious Weltanschauung act upon the ancient dictum: the best defence is attack. 'What', they ask, 'is this science which presumes to disparage our reli- gion-our religion which has brought salvation and consolation to mil- lions of people over many thousands of years? What has it accomplished so far? What can we expect from it in the future? On its own admission it is incapable of bringing consolation and exaltation. Let us leave them on one side then, though that is no light renunciation. But what about its theories? Can it tell us how the universe came about and what fate lies before it? Can it even draw us a coherent picture of the universe, or show us where we are to look for the unexplained phenomena of life or how the forces of the mind are able to act upon inert matter? If it could do this we should not refuse it our respect. But none of these, no problem of this kind, had been solved by it hitherto. It gives us fragments of alleged discovery, which it cannot bring into harmony with one another; it collects observations of uniformities in the course of events which it dignifies with the name of laws and submits to its risky inter- pretations. And consider the small degree of certainty which it attaches to its findings! Everything it teaches is only provisionally true: what is praised to-day as the highest wisdom will be rejected to-morrow and replaced by something else, though once more only tentatively The

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 791 latest error is then described as the truth. And for this truth we are to sacrifice our highest good!' * * \"' * \"' * The path of science is indeed slow, hesitating, laborious. This fact cannot be denied or altered. No wonder the gentlemen in the other camp are dissatisfied. They are spoilt: revelation gave them an easier time. Progress in scientific work is just as it is in an analysis. We bring expectations with us into the work, but they must be forcibly held back. By observation, now at one point and now at another, we come upon something new; but to begin with the pieces do not fit together. We put forward conjectures, we construct hypotheses, which we withdraw if they are not confirmed, we need much patience and readiness for any eventuality, we renounce early convictions so as not to be led by them into overlooking unexpected factors, and in the end our whole expen- diture of effort is rewarded, the scattered findings fit themselves together, we get an insight into a whole section of mental events, we have com- pleted our task and now we are free for the next one. In analysis, however, we have to do without the assistance afforded to research by experiment. Moreover, there is a good deal of exaggeration in this criticism of science. It is not true that it staggers blindly from one experiment to another, that it replaces one error by another. It works as a rule like a sculptor at his clay model, who tirelessly alters his rough sketch, adds to it and takes away from it, till he has arrived at what he feels is a satisfactory degree of resemblance to the object he sees or imagines. Besides, at least in the older and more mature sciences, there is even to-day a solid ground-work which is only modified and improved but no longer demolished. Things are not looking so bad in the business of science. And what, finally, is the aim of these passionate disparagements of science? In spite of its present incompleteness and of the difficulties attaching to it, it remains indispensable to us and nothing can take its place. It is capable of undreamt-of improvements, whereas the religious Weltanschauung is not. This is complete in all essential respects; if it was a mistake, it must remain one for ever. No belittlement of science can in any way alter the fact that it is attempting to take account of our dependence on the real external world, while religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses. \"' \"' The first of {other} Weltanschauungen is as it were a counterpart to political anarchism, and is perhaps a derivative of it. There have certainly been intellectual nihilists of this kind in the past, but just now the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their head. They start out from science, indeed, but they contrive to force it into

792 THE LAsT CHAPTER self-abrogation, into suicide; they set it the task of getting itself out of the way by refuting its own claims. One often has an impression in this connection that this nihilism is only a temporary attitude which is to be retained until this task has been performed. Once science has been disposed of, the space vacated may be filled by some kind of mysticism or, indeed, by the old religious Weltanschauung. According to the an- archist theory there is no such thing as truth, no assured knowledge of the external world. What we give out as being scientific truth is only the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance under changing external conditions: once again, they are illusion. Funda- mentally, we find only what we need and see only what we want to see. We have no other possibility. Since the criterion of truth-correspon- dence with the external world-is absent, it is entirely a matter of in- difference what opinions we adopt. All of them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error. A person of an epistemological bent might find it tempting to follow the paths-the sophistries-by which the anarchists succeed in enticing such conclusions from science. No doubt we should come upon situ- ations similar to those derived from the familiar paradox of the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars.2 But I have neither the desire nor the capacity for going into this more deeply. All I can say is that the anarchist theory sounds wonderfully superior so long as it relates to opinions about abstract things: it breaks down with its first step into practical life. Now the actions of men are governed by their opinions, their knowledge; and it is the same scientific spirit that speculates about the structure of atoms or the origin of man and that plans the construction of a bridge capable of bearing a load. If what we believe were really a matter of indifference, if there were no such thing as knowledge distin- guished among our opinions by corresponding to reality, we might build bridges just as well out of cardboard as out of stone, we might inject our patients with a decagram of morphine instead of a centigram, and might use tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether. But even the intellectual anarchists would violently repudiate such practical applications of their theory. The other opposition has to be taken far more seriously, and in this instance I feel the liveliest regret at the inadequacy of my information. I suspect that you know more about this business than I do and that you took up your position long ago in favour of Marxism or against it. Karl Marx's investigations into the economic structure of society and into the influence of different economic systems upon every department of human life have in our days acquired an undeniable authority. How far his views in detail are correct or go astray, I cannot of course tell. I understand that this is not an easy matter even for others better instructed 2. [The simplest form of this paradox (known as the 'Epimenidei) is provided by a man who says 'I am lying'. If he is lying, he is speaking the truth; and if he is speaking the truth, he is lying. J

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 793 than I am. There are assertions contained in Marx's theory which have struck me as strange: such as that the development of forms of society is a process of natural history, or that the changes in social stratification arise from one another in the manner of a dialectical process. I am far from sure that I understand these assertions aright; nor do they sound to me 'materialistic' but, rather. like a precipitate of the obscure Hegelian philosophy in whose school Marx graduated. I do not know how I can shake off my lay opinion that the class structure of society goes back to the struggles which, from the beginning of history, took place between human hordes only slightly differing from each other. Social distinc- tions, so I thought, were originally distinctions between clans or races. Victory was decided by psychological factors, such as the amount of constitutional aggressiveness, but also by the firmness of the organization within the horde, and by material factors, such as the possession of superior weapons. Living together in the same area, the victors became the masters and the vanquished the slaves. There is no sign to be seen in this of a natural law or of a conceptual [dialectical] evolution. On the other hand the influence exercised upon the social relations of mankind by progressive control over the forces of Nature is unmistakable. For men always put their newly acquired instruments of power at the service of their aggressiveness and use them against one another. The introduction of metals-bronze and iron-made an end to whole epochs of civilization and their social institutions. I really believe that it was gunpowder and fire-arms that abolished chivalry and aristocratic rule, and that the Russian despotism was already doomed before it lost the War, because no amount of inbreeding among the ruling families of Europe could have produced a race of Tsars capable of withstanding the explosive force of dynamite. * I am almost ashamed to comment to you on a subject of such im- portance and complexity with these few inadequate remarks, and I know too that I have told you nothing that is new to you. I merely want to draw your attention to the fact that the relation of mankind to their control over Nature, from which they derive their weapons for fighting their fellow-men, must necessarily also affect their economic arrange- ments. We seem to have come a long way from the problem of a Weltanschauung, but we shall very soon be back to it. The strength of Marxism clearly lies, not in its view of history or the prophecies of the future that are based on it, but in its sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes. A number of connections and implications were thus uncovered, which had previously been almost totally overlooked. But it cannot be assumed that economic motives are the only ones that determine the behaviour of human beings in society. The undoubted fact that different individuals, races and nations behave

794 THE LAST CHAPTER differently under the same economic conditions is alone enough to show that economic motives are not the sole dominating factors. It is altogether incomprehensible how psychological factors can be overlooked where what is in question are the reactions of living human beings; for not only were these reactions concerned in establishing the economic con- ditions, but even under the domination of those conditions men can only bring their original instinctual impulses into play-their self- preservative instinct, their aggressiveness, their need to be loved, their drive towards obtaining pleasure and avoiding un pleasure. In an earlier enquiry I also pointed out the important claims made by the super-ego, which represents tradition and the ideals of the past and will for a time resist the incentives of a new economic situation. And finally we must not forget that the mass of human beings who are subjected to economic necessities also undergo the process of cultural development-of civi- lization as other people may say-which, though no doubt influenced by all the other factors, is certainly independent of them in its origin, being comparable to an organic process and very well able on its part to exercise an influence on the other factors. It displaces instinctual aims and brings it about that people become antagonistic to what they had previously tolerated. Moreover, the progressive strengthening of the sci- entific spirit seems to form an essential part of it. If anyone were in a position to show in detail the way in which these different factors-the general inherited human disposition, its racial variations and its cultural transformations-inhibit and promote one another under the conditions of social rank, profession and earning capacity-if anyone were able to do this, he would have supplemented Marxism so that it was made into a genuine social science. For sociology too, dealing as it does with the behaviour of people in society, cannot be anything but applied psy- chology. Strictly speaking there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science. The newly achieved discovery of the far-reaching importance of eco- nomic relations brought with it a temptation not to leave alterations in them to the course of historical development but to put them into effect oneself by revolutionary action. Theoretical Marxism, as realized in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the energy and the self-contained and exclusive character of a Weltanschauung, but at the same time an un- canny likeness to what it is fighting against. Though originally a portion of science and built up, in its implementation, upon science and tech- nology, it has created a prohibition of thought which is just as ruthless 1S was that of religion in the past. Any critical examination of Marxist theory is forbidden, doubts of its correctness are punished in the same way as heresy was once punished by the Catholic Church. The writings of Marx have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as a source of revelation, though they would seem to be no more free from contra- dictions and obscurities than those older sacred books. And although practical Marxism has mercilessly cleared away all ideal-

THE QUESTION OF A WELTANSCHAUUNG 795 istic systems and illusions, it has itself developed illusions which are no less questionable and unprovable than the earlier ones. It hopes in the course of a few generations so to alter human nature that people will live together almost without friction in the new order of society, and that they will undertake the duties of work without any compulsion. Meanwhile it shifts elsewhere the instinctual restrictions which are es- sential in society; it diverts the aggressive tendencies which threaten all human communities to the outside and finds support in the hostility of the poor against the rich and of the hitherto powerless against the former rulers. But a transformation of human nature such as this is highly improbable. The enthusiasm with which the mass of the people follow the Bolshevist instigation at present, so long as the new order is incom- plete and is threatened from outside, gives no certainty for a future in which it would be fully built up and in no danger. In just the same way as religion, Bolshevism too must compensate its believers for the suf- ferings and deprivations of their present life by promises of a better future in which there will no longer be any unsatisfied need. This Paradise, however, is to be in this life, instituted on earth and thrown open within a foreseeable time. But we must remember that the Jews as well, whose religion knows nothing of an after-life, expected the arrival of a Messiah on earth, and that the Christian Middle Ages at many times believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand. There is no doubt of how Bolshevism will reply to these objections. It will say that so long as men's nature has not yet been transformed it is necessary to make use of the means which affect them to-day. It is impossible to do without compulsion in their education, without the prohibition of thought and without the employment of force to the point of bloodshed; and if the illusions were not awakened in them, they could not be brought to acquiesce in this compulsion. And we should be politely asked to say how things could be managed differently. This would defeat us. I could think of no advice to give. I should admit that the conditions of this experiment would have deterred me and those like me from undertaking it; but we are not the only people concerned. There are men of action, unshakable in their convictions, inaccessible to doubt, without feeling for the sufferings of others if they stand in the way of their intentions. We have to thank men of this kind for the fact that the tremendous experiment of producing a new order of this kind is now actually being carried out in Russia. At a time when the great nations announce that they expect salvation only from the maintenance of Christian piety, the revolution in Russia-in spite of all its disagreeable details-seems none the less like the message of a better future. Unluckily neither our scepticism nor the fanatical faith of the other side gives a hint as to how the experiment will turn out. The future will tell us; perhaps it will show that the experiment was undertaken prematurely, that a sweeping alteration of the social order has little prospect of success until new discoveries have increased our control over the forces of Nature

796 THE LAsT CHAPTER and so made easier the satisfaction of our needs. Only then perhaps may it become possible for a new social order not only to put an end to the material need of the masses but also to give a hearing to the cultural demands of the individual. Even then, to be sure, we shall still have to struggle for an incalculable time with the difficulties which the un- tameable character of human nature presents to every kind of social community. Ladies and Gentlemen,-Allow me in conclusion to sum up what had to say of the relation of psycho-analysis to the question of a Weltanschauung. Psycho-analysis, in my opinion, is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own. It does not need one; it is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung. This, how- ever, scarcely deserves such a grandiloquent title, for it is not all- comprehensive, it is too incomplete and makes no claim to being self- contained and to the construction of systems. Scientific thought is still very young among human beings; there are too many of the great prob- lems which it has not yet been able to solve. A Weltanschauung erected upon science has, apart from its emphasis on the real external world, mainly negative traits, such as submission to the truth and rejection of illusions. Any of our fellow-men who is dissatisfied with this state of things, who calls for more than this for his momentary consolation, may look for it where he can find it. We shall not grudge it him, we cannot help him, but nor can we on his account think differently. Postscript With his flat affirmation, written down in 1932 and published the year after, that psychoanalysis shares the world view of natural science, Freud as it were shut up shop. He was seventy-seven; the threat of Hitler in neighboring Germany and the unsettled conditions of Austria were continuing worries, as was his health. Yet he continued writing. In the summer of 1934, he completed a draft of a speculative little book he then called The Man Moses, A Historical Novel, which was to haunt him the rest of the five years he still had to live: the final, complete version was published in late 1938 under the more neutral title Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. It was just one more provocative work from the pen of a man who had spent his life being provocative. Freud argued that the Moses known to readers of the Old Testament had not been a Jew at all but an Egyptian who had tried to press his severe monotheism on the primitive ancient Hebrews. He was assassinated for his pains, and the Jews did not adopt his religion until several centuries later, when another figure, taking the name of Moses, finally brought them under the yoke of a strict, demanding single deity. The book brought outcries of rage and despair from Jewish scholars and little sympathy from gentile ones. Yet Freud insisted on publishing it-he had spent his life following the lead of his ideas and he would not give up on that now.

POSTSCRIPT 797 Then, in 1937, he wrote a rather somber paper on technique, \"Analysis Terminable and Interminable,\" and began, in the summer of 1938, a terse and by no means elementary Outline of Psychoanalysis, a fascinating frag- ment that was not published until 1940, the year after his death. By the time he began work on the outline, he and most of his family were safe in England. After the Anschluss to Germany in early March 1938 and the enthusiastic welcome of the German Nazi invaders on the part of most Austrians, even Freud, unwilling to move before, was persuaded that it was time to leave. He came to England in June 1938, \"to die in freedom,\" as he put it, and died on September 23, 1939, in freedom, as he had hoped.



Selected Bibliography It hardly needs saying that the literature about Freud is vast and steadily growing. Here I can only suggest the most interesting titles, many of which have sizable bibliographies of their own. L BIOGRAPHIES AND GENERAL ASSESSMENTS The standard biography has long been, and for some purposes remains, Ernest Jones, The Life and Worlt of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953-57; one-volume abridgment by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, 1961), by one of Freud's closest collaborators. Ronald W. Clark's Freud: The Man and the Cauu (1980) is diligently researched but derivative on the ideas. Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) unites life and work and is based on much hitherto unpublished materials, with a substantial and combative bibliographical essay. William J. McGrath, Freud's DUcovery of P$}'Choanalyris: The Politics of Hyrterid (1986) has much valuable material and interpretation on Freud's younger years. Sigmund Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words, eds. Ernst Freud, Lucie Freud, and lise Grubrich-Simitis (1976; tr. Christine Trollope, 1978) offers a bouquet of unhackneyed illustrations. Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying (1972), by Freud's personal phyrician, himself a psychoanalyst, is informed and illuminating. Richard Wollheim, Freud (1971) is a compact, brilliant biography of Freud's ideas. See also Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959; paperback ed., 1%1), an intelligent essay. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis's sensitive \"Einleitung\" to Sigmund Freud, 'Sellntdarste1Iung,' 7- 33, deserves translation. Hanns Sachs, one of Freud's closest and wittiest followers, has some unique and touching reminiscences in Freud: Master and Friend (1945); Didier Anzieu, Freud's Self-Analysis (2nd ed., 1975; tr. Peter Graham, 1986), carefully examines Freud's dreams to light up his early life. Martin Freud's affectionate memoir of his father, Sigmund Freud: Man and Father (1958), has valuable and intimate domestic details. - The international authority of the twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of the Complete PO)'- chological Worn of Sigmund Freud, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (1953-75), remains, with its extensive notes, despite some cavils, assured. The most exciting recent discovery, the draft of one of the meta psychological papers Freud destroyed, was discovered and authoritatively edited and introduced by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis: A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Trans- ference Neurom (1985; trans. Axel and Peter T. Hoffer, 1987). Among special treatments illuminating Freud's life, I single out K. R. Eissler's Sigmund Freud und die Wiener Universitdt: Ober die Pseudo-WiBBenschaftlichkeit der iiingsten Wiener Freud- Biographik (1966), which proves that Freud's academic advancement was indeed held up for years. Edmund Engelman's photographs, collected in Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (1976), amply document Freud's bourgeois conventional tastes. II. THE DEBATE OVER THE STATUS OF FREUD'S IDEAS The most careful (and sympathetic) study of Freud's claims for psychoanalysis is Paul Kline, Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory (1972; 2nd ed., 1981). Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg's Tire Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy (1977) is less positive but informative; to be supplemented by the same authors' evenhanded anthology, Tire Scientific Evaluation of Freud's Theories and Therapy (1978). See also Joseph Masling, ed., Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, 2 vols. (1983-85), with interesting material on experimental work by such psychoanalytic researchers as Hartvig DahL For a highly critical (but to my mind unacceptable if tenaciously argued) philosophical assessment, see Adolf Griinbaum, Tire Foun- dations of psychoanalyris: A Philosophical Critique (1984). For a criticism of that book, Edwin R. Wallace IV, ''The Scientific Status of Psychoanalysis: A Review of Griinbaum's The Foun- dations ofpsychoanalysis,\" Tire Tournai of NervoUB and Mental Disease, CLXXIV (1986),379- 86. Another critical appraisal of psychoanalysis by a philosopher is B. A. Farrell, The Standing

800 SELECI'ED BIBLIOGRAPHY ofP,ychoanalytic Theory (1981). An important philosophical collection is Richard Wollheim and 1. Hopkins, Philorophical Essay, on Freud (1983). IlL STUDIES OF FREUD'S CASE HISTORIES AND TECHNIQUE Mark Kanzer and Jules Glenn, eds., Freud and His Patients (1980), present a compendious collection of essays on all his major analysands, with a full bibliography. Other informative treatments of Freud's case histories include Patrick 1. Mahony, Cries of the Wolf Man (1984), and the same author's Freud and the Rat Man (1986). The most carefully researched analysis of the Schreber case is Han Israels, Schreber, Father and Son, tr. from the Dutch Original by H. S. Lake (1981), which places the famous paranoid into his family context. The book modifies but does not wholly supersede William G. Niederland, The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality (1974). For the Wolf Man see (in addition to Mahony), Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man (1971), which includes the Wolf Man's reminiscences. There is as yet no book-length study of \"Little Hans.\" \"Anna 0.,\" Josef Breuer's famous hysterical patient and in many respects the founding patient of psychoanalysis has been thoroughly explored in Albrecht Hirschmuller, Physiologie und Psychoanalyse im Leben und Werk lose{Breuers (1978). Most writings on psychoanalytic technique after Freud lean heavily on his work. In the absence of a specific study exclusively devoted to his papers, these remain quite helpfuL The best texts are Edward Glover, Technique of Psycho-Analysis (1955); Karl Menninger, Theory af Psychoan- alytic Technique (1958); Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation: An Examination of Its De- velopment and Essential Nature (1%1); Ralph R. Greenson, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, voL I (1967), the only to appear. There are also important discussions on technique in the collection of Phyllis Greenacre's papers, Emotional Growth: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Gifted and a Great Variety of Other Individuals, 2 vols. (1971). I should add Janet Malcolm's amusing, brilliant introduction to contemporary psychoanalytic technique--and politics, Psycho- analy.is: The Impossible Profession (1981). IV. APPLIED PSYCHOANALYSIS By far the best overview of Freud's aesthetic theories is Jack J. Spector, The Amhetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Arl (1972). There are interesting discussions in Harry Trosman, Freud and the Imaginative World (1985). Among other psychoanalysts' ventures into this field, see Eduard Hitschmann, Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies (1957), and also Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birlh of the Hero (1909; tr. F. Robbins and Smith Ely JeIliffe, 1914) remains an interesting effort. Rank's huge study of incest in literature, Da. Inust-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912; 2nd ed., 1926) is a valiant compendium. Another instance of (somewhat flat though far from tedious) Freudian psychobiography is Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (1933; tr. John Rodker, 1949). More recent work has been rich. See Gilbert J. Rose, The Power of Form: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetic Form (1980); D. W. Winnicott's perceptive and immensely suggestive papers, gathered in Playing and Reality (1971); Robert Waelder, Psychoanalytic Avenu .. to Art (I %5); and John E. Cedo, Poltraits of the Arlist: Psychoanalysi$ ofCreativity and Its Vicissitudes (1983), which ventures into a field from which Freud himself shied away. On Freud's paper on Leonardo da Vinci, see especially Meyer Schapiro, \"Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study,\" Tournai of the Historyafldeas, XVII (1956),147-78; K. R, Ei5sler's response, Leonardo da Vinci: Psycho-Analytic Notes on the Enigma (1961), suffers from overkill but has interesting thoughts on psychoanalysis and art. On Totem and Taboo, see Edwin R. Wallace IV's lucid Freud and Anthropology: A History and a Reappraisal (1983). The best defense of Freud's controversial speculative venture into prehistory is Derek Freeman, \"Totem and Taboo: A Reap- praisal,\" in Man and His Culture: Psychoanalytic Anthropology after 'Totem and Taboo', ed. Warner Muensterberger (1970), 53-78. V. PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE MAKING AND IN COMBAT The several collections of Freud's immense correspondence are of varying value, but they all, even the highly selected ones, throw significant light on the making of Freud's thought, on its development, and on Freud's battle with the world and with his followers. By far the most revealing collection of these letters is The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887- 1904, ed. and tr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1985). A close second is The Freud/Tung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G.Tung, ed. William McGuire and Wolfgang Sauerlander, tr. Ralph Manheim (Freud's letters) and R. F. C. Hull (lung's); the first edition of 1974 has been slightly revised in the third (1987). Among others, do not neglect Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, A Psychoanalytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham,

SELECI'ED BmLIOGRAPHY 801 1907-1926, ed., Hilda Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, tr. Bernard Marsh and Hilda Abraham (1965); Sigmund Freud, Lou Andreas-Salome, Letters, ed., Ernst Pfeiffer, tr. William and Elaine Robson-Scott (1972); Sigmund Freud, Oscar Pfister, Psychoanalysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and OBkar Pfister, ed. Ernst L. Freud and Heinrich Meng, tr. William and Elaine Robson-Scott (1970). On the evolution of Freud's ideas, there is Kenneth Levin, Freud's Early Psychology of the Neuroses: A Historical Perspective (1978). Henri F. Ellenberger's vast The Discovery of the Un- conscious: The History and Emlution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970) puts Freud into a large historical context. For Freud's theory of dreams and his own dreams on which he drew so freely, see, in addition to Anzieu, Alexander Crinstein, On Sigmund Freud's Dreams (1968; 2nd ed., 1980). Ernest Jones has some interesting early papers on dream theory, collected in Papers on Psycho-Analysis (3rd ed., 1923, and later editions). Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Crotjahn have edited Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), a generally useful but still very uneven collection surveying Freud's early followers. The only book-length, far from adequate biography of Karl Abraham is Hilda Abraham, Karl Abraham: An Unfinished Biography (1974). E. James Lieberman's Acts ofWil/: The Life and Work of Otto Rank (1985) is superior but, to my mind, too favorable. Ernest Jones's unfinished autobiography, Fr.., Associations: Memories of a Psycho-Analyst (1959), shows Jones opinionated but well-informed and informative. On Freud's decisive paper on narcissism, see Sydney Pulver, \"Narcissism: The Term and the Concept,\" Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, XVIII (1970), 319-41, and, among a large literature, Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975). The emergence of aggression as an independent drive in Freud's system is economically traced in Paul E. Stepansky, A History of Aggression in Freud (1977), to be supplemented by Anna Freud, \"Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development: Normal and Pathological,\" Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, IIIIIV (1949), 37-42, and Beata Rank, \"Aggression,\" ibid., 43-48. For the contentious literature on Freud's theories oHemale sexuality, see two illuminating surveys by Zenia Odes Fliegel, \"Feminine Psychosexual Development in Freudian Theory: A Historical Reconstruction,\" Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XLII (1973), 385-408; and \"Half a Century Later: Current Status of Freud's Controversial Views on Women,\" Psychoanalytic Review, LXIX (1982), 7-28. There is a useful anthology of articles in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Female Psychology: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Views, ed., Harold P. Blum (1977). For Freud's views on matters of faith--Jewishness in particular and religion in general-see Peter Cay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Athei.m, and the Makillli of Psychoanalysis (1987). As for Freud (and psychoanalysis) on politics: a really authoritative study is still wanted. Meanwhile there is the interesting long essay by Robert Bocock, Freud and Modem Society: An Outline and AnalY8is of Freud's Sociology (1976). See also J. C. Flugel, Man, Moral. and Society: A Psycho-Analytic Study (1945); R. E. Money-Kyrle, Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Contribution to the Psychology of Politics and Morals (1951).