It is critical to distinguish between Freud’s profound insight into the existence of the repressed unconscious on the one hand, and his specific metapsychological explanation of the phenomenon on the other. What must be incorporated into a significant social theory of the self is the character of peremptory demand, impersonality, archaic preservation, irrationality, and continuous assault that distinguishes the phenomenological id. But we neither understand nor effectively alter this condition if we do not trace its origin back to the condition of social domination that constitute its cause. An adequate account of self-estrangement is the subject of another work; we must content ourselves with the following brief suggestions toward a satisfactory theory:
1. It is necessary to avoid personalizing the various regions of the self. It is not only that nothing is gained by imagining various selves in the guise of ego-self, id-self, and superego-self contending with each other like antagonistic family members. Even more, once we begin to speak of the superego as an observer and critic of the self, it becomes very difficult to avoid the image of one “person” passing judgment upon another. To add that the superego is made up of the internalized commands of one’s parents contributes nothing to our understanding on the level of inquiry in which we are presently engaged. For we are not asking about the contents of the superego’s commands but about the structure of its constitution. And the notion of “internalization” is merely a metaphor without explanatory power. Parents are not literally within one’s self. But even more important, since the only speaker is the self, the voices that are heard are also the voices that are spoken, and the problem remains how the speaker can discourse with itself in such a way as to fail to recognize itself as its own agent.
2. That aspect of the self which is split off from the central, selfconscious agent—the, self which then becomes repressed or
colonialized—is buried in perpetuity in the condition in which it existed at the time of its interment. This is one of Freud’s most valuable insights about the repressed unconscious. Paradoxically, however, it is an insight that permits us to dispense with Freud’s ontology. For if we consider that die most drastic acts of repression occur in early childhood, before the child is fully formed, we can understand that the content of the repressed unconscious will be constructed out of the most rudimentary remnants of the self—out of those aspects of its existence formed at stages that are relatively primitive compared with the organization of a mature individual. These are characteristics that approximate Freud’s reification of the id.
Parts of the self become idlike because they are cut off from the continued growth of the conscious agent. They persist in rudimentary form, dated, as it were, at the primitive stage of their segregation. What is really valuable in Freud’s insight then is not his view of psychic regions but his understanding of the reification of genetic development, or simply put, of fixation. On the ground of this insight we can eliminate Freud's theory of dual regions of the self, and proceed quite adequately with a single self which has been sedimented along its way, with the result that it continues to reproduce itself according to both the dictates of its present reality and its past level of disorganization. T he advantage we derive from this'reconceptualization is not merely that it permits us to dispense with an unnecessary ontological realm but rather that it makes it possible to understand how' the self can become lost to its own purview and power, and how j it can liberate itself from this condition of imposed but self-generated tyranny.
A full Marxist account of the self is perfectly capable of integrating what is valid in the works of Piaget, Mahler, Jacobson, Loevinger, Spitz, etc. At the same time, it is crucial in learning from the work of traditional writers in the field that we carefully scrutinize the tendency toward reification that continuously impregnates much of their theory and systematically attributes to a universal process of development what is in fact strongly influenced by specific social factors. This is particularly true of accounts of the “mature” or “autonomous” self which derive from various forms of ego and object-relation theories. For these accounts reflect much more than their authors realize the specific forms of the atomized, competitive, performance-oriented selfhood that is the particular paradigm of contemporary capitalist society. Apparently innocent terms like “narcissism,” “ego-boundaries,” and “compentence” bear a great deal of the ideology of bourgeois culture. Therefore, in the very process of incorporating the insights of genetic psychology, it is imperative that we simultaneously hold these theories up to social scrutiny.
3. Although I will not undertake any account of the specific childhood development of the self in this study, it is reasonably safe to say
something quite general which will still prove useful at this stage of our analysis.
a. The critical dialectic at the formative stage of individual development is between language and desire. The child’s conceptual-linguistic structure gains maturity in degree as does its capacity to articulate and integrate desire into a total characterological framework. Conceptualization presents desire with its object and structural channels; desire presents thought with the motive of its articulation. The deformation of either affects the other. Both of these processes are obviously aborted by the intervention of repression. The child becomes incapable of conceptualizing itself in the world and, consequently, of formulating the structures of its demands, drives, needs, desires, and wishes—that is, the heirarchy of stages from compelling biophysical requirements like the demand for breath, up to the wish for imaginative integration.
As Freud discovered, the child’s self-understanding is disfigured. Some aspect of its own internal text is so censored that it becomes unintelligible to its bearer. This text is, however, the very fabric of the self, so that the content of its understanding and its ability to understand are sacrificed in one blow. And, as desire is always elaborated through judgment, it is simultaneously rendered unintelligible. But the result is not mere negation, the absence of mature understanding; it is rather the continued reproduction of such conceptual categories and primitive structures of desire as have been formed at the time of repression. And this consideration indicates that the rudimentary schemata that form the self will persist in the unconscious and exert their alien power in precisely these ancient, archaic modes. Repressed as primitive, the unconscious self persists as primitive.
Since on the basis of cognitive considerations alone it is plausible to hold that fundamental notions of time, space, causality, object constancy and the larger forms of global comprehension are all achieved in stages, we must speculate that the repressed self will function with only such a set of primitive conceptual structures as have been developed at the time of its self-dissociation. We are consequently in a position to replace Freud’s mystified assertions about the peculiar illogic of the Ucs-id with the more plausible consideration that the aberrations of judgment which Freud selected as one of the principle features of the dynamic unconscious do not belong to its topography but to the particular stage of arrested development which is the content of repression. For example, it is no longer necessary to postulate a psychic realm free of temporal judgment. It is far more intelligible to hold that such distortions of the awareness of time as distinguish the unconscious owe their existence to the inchoate forms of temporal comprehension that exist in the child at the moment it undergoes repression. So, we dereify the proposal of a
distinct timeless realm (a view impossible to understand and which Freud himself violates on numerous occasions) and replace it with the assertion that the repressed sell bears in its internment such a degree of temporal competence or incompetence as it had developed us to the point of its dissociation. We can thereby reconceptualize two processes Freud noted without being bound to his reified metapsychology. First, we can understand both the similarities and differences between conscious and unconscious time, and second, we can grasp why desire, articulated through an inchoate temporal structure, will possess so isolated and fragmentary a nature.
b. In a full account of the development of the self it would be important to distinguish between the “normal” and “pathological” conditions that prevail at the time of repression. Since repression is not likely to occur through a single traumatic episode but rather through the steady imposition of portentious and insatiable demands, the child is likely to have suffered the ravages of oppressive authority over the course of a long development. Whatever situation of terror, hatred, vulnerability, or stifling constraint has led to the need for dissociation will become slowly fixed as a permanent ritual in the mind. In short, since repression disrupts the self, the repressed self is usually also a disfigured, or pathological, self.
But accompanying this perverse condition will be the stage of normal development which is “appropriately” inchoate at the time of burial. Memory, for example, which is always problematic in regard to childhood, is particularly open to distortion. This is in part because even its normal operation is highly vulnerable. Schachtel has some particularly cogent comments on the general difficulty of remembering childhood experience:
The categories (or schemata) of adult memory are not suitable receptacles for early childhood experiences and therefore not fit to preserve these experiences and enable their recall. The functional capacity of the conscious, adult memory is usually limited to those types of experience which the adult consciously is aware of and is capable of having.
It is not merely the repression of a specific content, such as early sexual experience, that accounts for the general childhood amnesia; the biologically, culturally and socially influenced process of memory organization results in the formation of categories (schemata) of memory which are not suitable vehicles to receive and reproduce experiences of the quality and intensity typical of early childhood. I he world of modern Western civilization has no use for this type of experience. 4,1
Now, the condition to which Schachtel refers might be regarded as normal only in the sense that it is the normal pathology of “modern Western civilization.” Nevertheless, it is a condition that is endemic to
this culture. It is not a matter of specific content, but, as Schachtel notes, the general mode of cognitive organization:
The adult is usually not capable of experiencing what the child experiences; more often than not he is not even capable of imagining what the child experiences. It should not be surprising then, that he should be incapable of recalling his own childhood experiences since his whole mode of experiencing has changed. 46
If we impose on the fragility of normal childhood memory the factors which led to pathologicl denial, we can more easily understand how the alienation of the self—the thinglike quality of repressed unconscious—comes into being. For though it is our experience that is severed from our grasp, it is experience in a form that does not accommodate to the structures of our present life. It is our self in a form that is alien to our present categories. We therefore have the sense of being lived through as by an alien figure. But like Marx’s “self-conscious and self-acting commodity,” this figure has some human form, however grotesque, and the form is of us, if not fully ourselves. The id therefore retains its similarities and continuity with our present self as well as its uncanny strangeness.
Only such an interpretation makes it possible to understand how the self can be healed in any act of therapy, however understood. For if the id were as Freud described it—everything the ego is not—its integration into the ego would remain unintelligible. On our account, it is our own exiled self which we welcome back into our current selves. The act of therapeutic reintegration is always an act of redemption in which what was previously undergone and discarded is welcomed into the current order of the living self. But there is reciprocity, too, and the child in one’s self which has been abandoned returns only when its previous needs can be currently embraced.
c. Desire, as well as cognition, develops genetically; and, of course, the two are dialectically related. Since comprehension and self-comprehension are not merely means to the development of the self, but are constitutive of its being, the child’s comparative inability to understand its place in the world and converse adequately with itself will certainly affect the coherence of its structure. It’s life is fragmentary and limited at best, and under conditions of repression the dissociated self will continue to fester out of sight—which not only robs the self of an aspect of its being but requires, as Freud significantly noted, the application of constant intervention to reproduce the original denial. This is a vital point: Insofar as the act of repression must be continuously recreated, the self must continue to act at the level of its original intervention.
At this point the archeological analogy breaks down. Fossil remains
simply exist; they do not participate in their continued recreation. But both the act of repression and the tendency of the repressed self to satisfy its original desire appear, like Descartes’s universe, to require constant recreation. The continuous repressive effort of the self is carried on in the present, so that while the repressed and repressing self is comparatively primitive, the task must be accomplished with current labor. The fetishism of the past is therefore an “accomplishment” of the present self, which thereby mortgages its emerging future to the limited strictures of its original powerlessness.
d. Because the point is so consistently ignored by psychoanalysis, it is important to make explicit the social context of these processes of selfalienation. Nor does the extension of Freud’s paradigm to contemporary theories of object-relations, family systems, and network therapy adequately approach a social dimension. One cannot begin with Freud’s account and then simplv add layers of social contact, for the problem with Freud's paradigm is that it begins at the wrong point and moves in the wrong direction. It views the interpersonal transactions of childhood solelv as the agency of the child; others represent merely the objectterminus of an originally prescribed instinctual pattern. Parents receive the child’s activity, but they are not codeterminers of its being. And because Freud views society as essentially constituted out of such unilateral childhood interactions and their vicissitudes, he wholly ignores the manner in which the family acts as the mediation of larger socialhistorical processes. Freud lacks any category of social totality. This is not an error that can be corrected by enlarging the scope of inquiry to include mobs, armies, churches, and other institutions. The modality of the explanation remains inverted in Freud’s explanation, so that the social order is continually reduced to variations of the individual’s perennial struggle with a fixed, repressive order. Nothing can be gained here without inverting the vector of explanation and locating the growth of the child in the context of its socially mediated existence.
Whatever we have previously said about the inchoate, fragmentary development of the self must consequently be translated into a statement of the developmental level of the child’s relation to others-in-the-world. Repression is not merely of the self, but of the self in its relationships. With the child’s self-immolation the other is simultaneously sacrificed. But everything depends on not being seduced by the image of internalization, which is so pervasive in the psychoanalytic literature. For internalization contains, in distilled form, the entire system of bourgeois confusions which mark off the ideology of psychoanalytic theory.
First, what psychoanalysis conceived of as internalized is rarely viewed in a context more extensive than the biological family. Every larger social pattern is consequently eliminated, with the inevitable result that the historical being of the family is totally mystified. Second, the
spatial-biological metaphor is overwhelming. The prevailing paradigm seems to be the incorporation of the mother’s body by the child. But a breast is taken into the mouth in a rather straightforward sense which only confuses our understanding of how the parents’ character is transmitted to the child. Once the spatial image becomes paramount, the notion of introducing objects into an empty box becomes almost unavoidable. And each box is separate from the others. I he child is seen as possessing a vacant interior into which is placed the contents of parental influence. In this conceptual procedure the bourgeois view of privacy is reified, and the contemporary capitalist sense of an atomized subject facing an alienated public realm is ontologized.
However, while the distinctiveness of self is a universal feature of personal existence, privacy, as we assume it, is a social creation. What is fixed by nature is the fact that I cannot become directly aware of your experience, nor you of mine. But this in itself tells us little about whether the pattern of our social life will tend to define our selves in a common convergence toward collective values or scatter us beyond each other s reach. There is a necessary dialectic between “internality” and "externality,” between the “personal,” “private” dimension of the self and its relation to other human beings in the “public” realm. In the collectivity of primitive societies our form of privacy or internality is incomprehensible; and in our form of atomized mass society it is unavoidable.
This leads us to the third defect implicit in the idea of internalization. For the spatial analogy, misleading as it is, merely covers a functional confusion. The self is formed in process—that is, in its movement in and through the world. The child becomes a person in discourse with other persons at the point of their meeting. To become a person, however formed or malformed, is, as Mead noted, a matter of reciprocally identifying one’s self as the referrent of the personal acknowledgment of other persons. This process is, again, dialectical. I come to recognize myself as a person in the process of coming to understand that I am so defined by others. But I can come to define myself in relation to the other’s act of definition only by coming to recognize the other as a person. In short, I can come to recognize myself as a particular human being only because I can recognize that other human beings have defined me as human. It would make as much sense to call this a process of externalization as internalization. Both terms are inadequate.
The emergence of the self is best defined as a reciprocal, social act of establishing the lived and presented forms of selfhood in the course of human relationships. The neglect of the concept of social reciprocity in Freudian thought is what joins the limitations of form and content—the misleading notion of internalization and the reified content of social interaction. For it is only when our relationships are taken seriously that the specific historical, Social aspects of these relationships will be noted.
And although there is often an impressive overture in regard to social factors in some psychoanalytic works, the promise is rarely fulfilled. I take this fact to indicate that the acknowledgment of social reality is both more ritual than real and represents what might be viewed as a form of theoretical splitting, one of a number of political defense mechanisms useful to the protection of the status quo.
e. These considerations lead to practical and theoretical consequences. The privatization of psychoanalytic theory is closely related to the prevailing form of its practice. I will return to this theme more fully in the last chapter, but I wish to note in passing that when we take the social context of repression seriously we have to shift our focus from the dominant paradigm of projection and transference to an emphasis on the reproduction of social relations, in both their normal and pathological forms. Since what the child represses is not some private part of its exclusively personal being, but some form of its relatedness to others, its continued development will be marked by the reproduction of its earlier interpersonal patterns. In other words, it will continue to illicit from others the predominant forms of relatedness that constituted its original development. As Wachtel has noted:
If one does look closely from a somewhat different perspective, it is usually possible to see how the desires and conflicts which may dominate a person’s life can be understood as following from, as well as causing the way he or she lives that life. Consider, for example, the patient who seems compulsively to go out of his w'ay to be active, independent, and responsible for others. Often such individuals are found to long unconsciously for dependent gratification, and to fear the extent of their passive yearnings. We need not, however, assume that the conscious attitudes are simply a defense against desires from the past. We may valuably examine how this very pattern of compulsive activity and responsibility creates the so-called oral needs: by constantly taking on excessive burdens and simultaneously denying himself almost any opportunity to manifest normal dependence, such a person is kept continually yearning for dependence to an unusual degree (as he also continues to pursue an excessively independent way of life because, in large part, of the frightening strength of these continually created longings). 47
There is an important implication of this perspective shift for therapeutic practice. In the orthodox formulation, transference is encouraged and clarified by the constancy of the therapist’s response, who by the adoption of a neutral stance forces the client into the major responsibility for the patterns that are imposed on the therapeutic transaction. If the analyst were to concretely intervene, so the traditional view maintains, it would be possible to attribute the client s response to the therapist’s action, a procedure that would minimize the possibility of using the session to reveal and transcend the past. Wachtel comments:
From an interpersonal perspective, however, the series of increasingly primitive and bizarre reactions in the course of an analysis would appear not as an exposure, through regression, of ‘layers of the personality,’ but rather as a view of the hierarchy of reactions this person has to this particular kind of frustration. One doesn’t elude the limits of participant observation, or, so to speak, undo the Heisenberg principle, by being constant. One merely limits one’s direct observations about the patient to his way of dealing with one kind of situation only. The analyst is cautioned not to gratify the patient’s transference demands, or, in behavioral terms, to reinforce the patient’s initial efforts in the situation. Not surprisingly, meeting with little reward for his first efforts, the patient resorts to others lower on his hierarchy of responses for that situation, until he has displayed his most desperately irrational efforts at trying to get some response from the person he has turned to for help. 48
f. Now, we can extend this insight to what Schatzman has called “trans-personal” defenses. 49 These are operations designed not merely to change my own experience and to disaffiliate it from my consciousness, but to protect myself against the reminder of what I have repressed in myself by eliminating its vestiges in the behavior of others—by a procedure which may require my eliminating in others the thoughts and feelings which would lead them to their distressing behavior.
Behavior reflects experience; therefore, if one needs or wishes to make oneself even safer, one should prevail upon the others not even to know such events do, ever did, or even could, occur in their minds. 50
In this manner, defenses are not merely intrapersonal but transpersonal;
A person (often a parent) orders another person (often a child) to forget thoughts, feelings, or acts that the first person cannot or will not allow in the other ... If the first person’s aim is to protect himself from experience of which he fears the other may remind him, if the other experiences too much, the order serves as a transpersonal defense ... a transpersonal defense can be an attack on another person’s experience, against which the other may in turn need to build a defense. 51
In the course of this chapter we have continually moved outward from the individual as a point of origin. And, once again, the scope of the dialectic of interpersonal defenses has been extended. It is true that one’s act of self-repression is often the result of an attempt to defend one’s self against the transpersonal defense adopted by another and imposed by an act of interpersonal oppression. But, of course, these transactions are not merely interpersonal, but institutional. The procedures adopted by parents are repeated in the remainder of social institutions with important variations around a common theme. Schools, media, work, family, leisure, etc., recapitulate the patterns of subservi
ence and powerlessness, alienation and mystification that have been set down in childhood. The implication of this recurrence is that those who repress the child and force the adoption of its defenses are themselves disfigured through their own social oppression. So that the aspects of the self that are disaffiliated from the individual are so divorced as a result of relationships with others who are themselves unable to bear the revelation of those specific characteristics. Since we only develop in response to the recognition of others, what is unavailable to them cannot be recognized by them, nor therefore elicited from us.
g. The whole course of the previous argument moves toward one basic realization: The defense mechanisms are intrinsically social. Not in Freud’s sense of universal compromise formations between instinct and repression, but in the rich and variable sense that the specific historicalsocial situation determines what is to be defended against, by whom, for what purpose, against which authority, and in what particular manner. As in many other instances we have noted, Freud occasionally acknowledges the fact, but not its general significance:
The people of Israel had believed themselves to be the favorite child of God, and when the great Father caused misfortune after misfortune to rain down on these people of his, they were never shaken in their belief in his relationship to them 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 misf ortune, 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. 52
It is this very “remarkable difference” which seems to me the most significant aspect of Freud’s account, for it indicates nothing less than a striking disparity between people in regard to the manner in which they constitute their selfhood through their relation to nature. Nor can these differences be viewed simply as a difference in the content of defenses, for clearly, a very different process is ingredient in the manner in which the boundaries of the primitive self are established; differences in boundaries which constitute a difference in the selves which are bound.
The very least that must be acknowledged is that different defenses will predominate in different historical periods and among different social classes, genders, ethnic groups, and occupational divisions. Since, on my argument, the id is constructed out of the dissociated aspects ol the self through the mechanisms of defense, the id will be differentially constituted in different social contexts. What is beyond consciousness will be dialectically related to what is within consciousness and even the possibility of reintegration will vary depending on the manner in which
the original disaffiliation was carried out. So much seems to me to be implied in the following reflection by Fenichel:
Perhaps the fact that sexual impulses very often are repressed, whereas aggressive impulses are more often the subject of other defense mechanisms, is due to the circumstance that education frequently handles the subject of sex by simply not mentioning it, whereas the existence of aggressiveness is acknowledged but is designated as bad. . . . The consistency of present-day education, uncertain as to which instinctual claims to permit and which to suppress, resulting in initial permission and in subsequent sudden, unexpected (and therefore frequently more cruel) deprivation, favors the use of defense mechanisms other than repression. 53
The fact that educational practices have changed as much as they have in twenty-five years gives a certain forcefulness to the passage beyond its original intention. It throws a particularly vivid light on Fenichel’s important insight into the selectivity of defense mechanisms. We need to take this point somewhat further, however. The contradiction Fenichel rightly notes between permission and deprivation not only extends to aggressiveness itself—which is decried in rhetoric and admired in practice—but is a particular hallmark of liberal education and the ideological requirements of capitalism. It even suggests that the ego and superego will be differently formed in the varying social circumstances in which one form of defense comes to prevail over another. Consider the following comments of Fanon’s:
We understand now why the black man cannot take pleasure in his insularity. For him there is only one way out, and it leads into the white world. Whence his constant preoccupation with attracting the attention of the white man, his concern with being powerful like the white man, his determined effort to acquire protective qualities—that is, the proportion of being or having what enters into the composition of an ego.
Ego-withdrawal as a successful defense mechanism is impossible for the Negro. 54
Ego-withdrawal is impossible because the black psyche has been permeated by the criteria of the white world. To withdraw is to move away from the ultimate principles of confirmation toward a void in which mere animality is the ultimate terror. “The composition of the ego,” its “proportion of being or having,” are differently formed. For the heart of the issue is not merely the pragmatic consideration of choosing the convenience of one defense mechanism over another, but of “choosing” one self over another, in accordance with one set of normative principles (or “superego constraints”) which define humanity in the world.
If we continue to use Freud’s topographical or structural divisions of the psyche, we will have to recognize them as socially demarcated aspects of a single, social-self. Let us return to Fenichel’s observation regarding
the provisional granting and ultimate withdrawal of selected permissions. The superego of a self formed in this context will bear the imprint of an entirely different ideological structure from that of a self that has been educated to consistent criteria, no matter how oppressively imposed. For ingrained in the self-reflectiveness of the first ambivalent context will be contained not only the implicit structures of class conflict and ideological contradiction of that social order but the self-obfuscating rule that such contradictions are not to be acknowledged, and, in fact, do not exist. In the culture of capitalism the structural discrepancy between reality and ideal—aggressiveness and cooperation—must be located within the individual self, because the ideology of the system is incompatible with a recognition that prevailing capitalist structure denies the explicit value of cooperation and that capitalist exploitation destroys the promise of human dignity. The instrumental mechanization of nature robs us of the capacity to ascribe responsibility to a fetish, while the atomistic competitiveness of the society from which this immense productivity emenates, forces the locus of agency back upon the individualized self; the victim is once again forced into his or her own selfimmolation. So we can return to the problem we raised earlier—the unconscious nature of the defense mechanisms. The origin of repression lies in the contradictions of the social order. The mechanisms of defense are individually unconscious, because the actual nature of capitalist oppression must be kept from the oppressed, and because the isolated individual must bear the burden.
From a social perspective the traditional psychoanalytic theme of ego vs. drive takes on a new meaning. For the drives, or instincts, that originate in the id are the product of a society that requires their contribution but cannot acknowledge their existence. Hostility and envy are obvious examples. The id does not and cannot develop, 55 because there is no acknowledged social terminus toward which its energy can be directed. Since it is constructed precisely in order to be hidden, there is nothing here to surprise us. But this fact is reified in psychoanalytic theory as in Anna Freud’s reference to “the ego’s primary antagonism to instinct—its dread of the strength of the instincts,” manifested by “the innate hostility between the ego and the instincts, which is indiscriminate, primal y and primitive.” 56
The argument is all of one piece when the same author goes on to note:
All through childhood a maturation process is at work which, in the service of an increasing knowledge and adaptation to reality, aims at perfecting (ego) functions and rendering them more and more objective and independent of the emotions until they can become as accurate and reliable as a mechanical apparatus [emphasis added].' 7
Of course, this “mechanical apparatus,” which sets the measure of realiability, objectivity, “knowledge,” and “adaptation,” is the mechanical instrumentality of capitalist exploitation, whose pervasive intrusion into the heart of the self is inadvertently acknowledged. What needs to be addressed here is the precise nature of such emotions as require such ego independence. For, since as Rapaport has noted, the most autonomous ego is that of the obsessional, a characterological trait particularly useful in a highly bureaucratized society, we are moved to inquire into the emotional pattern created to sustain an ego of such dissociated isolation.
It is only because the drives and emotions are socially created as socially antagonistic that a “strong” ego must be pitted against them. But the dualism of asocial impulse controlled and channeled by an “objective and reliable mechanical apparatus” is a paradigm of capitalist domination. Freud could never move beyond the view that self and society are intrinsically antagonistic, a position which as late as Civilization and Its Discontents was expressed in the opposition between individual happiness and altruism:
The development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge toward happiness, which we usually call “egoistic,” and the urge toward union with others in the community, which we call “altruistic.” 58
Of course, since Freud regards altruism as a reaction formation against saidsm it is little wonder that the urge toward “union with others” must be viewed with considerable suspicion.
These reflections permit us to return to an issue to which I previously alluded, the conflicting views of the ego as the highest psychic system on the one hand, and as essentially contentless on the other. But this duality is the expression of an even deeper conflict between two theories of the ego which have divided psychoanalytic writers. According to the view of the ego psychologists, their own contribution to Freud's theory represents the progression he himself would have achieved had time permitted his endeavor. Their own insistence on the “reality ego” simply represents the logical conclusion of Freud’s fundamental position. But this view is challenged by a group for whom Jones can be taken as the spokesman, which insists that Freud presented two separate theories which are basically incompatible.
According to the first school, represented here by Hartman, “as early as in the nineties. . . Freud speaks of an ego. . . . However, the closer elaboration of this part of his work had to be postponed.” 59 For Jones, however, “when Freud wrote his important metapsychological essays in the spring of 1915 he felt he had completed his life work.” 60 Later theoretical developments produced a wholly new addition to a pre
viously well-completed position. Applebaum sums up the dispute in the following passage:
The “reality ego" emphasizes the ego’s temporizing, compromising function—as a busy mediator between the demands of the reality and ol the drives. The “defense ego” is a more active principle, having superordinate goals of its own, before which both reality and the drives must yield. The ego psychologists think of the reality ego as Freud s basic conception throughout his work. The opposing view is that while the reality ego was an integral part of Freud’s early model, it was supplanted in his later model by the defense ego. B1
In Freud’s earlier writings the ego and instincts are viewed as antagonistic. it is for that reason that the two basic instincts are those of sexuality and self-preservation. For sexuality represents the demands of die species and self-preservation the resistance of the discrete individual.
The ego’s resistance to instinct was taken for granted, being seen as much like the natural resistance of a host organism to invading organisms. 1 he instincts were assumed to conflict in a very immediate way with pride, selfrespect, even "noblemindedness, and, above all, with the demands of objective reality, that is, with the need to act and feel appropriately and properly.'’ 2
But in his later writings Freud began to implicate the ego in the pathological onslaught of the drives against the self. The notion of an "ego instinct”—and instinct of self-preservation—disappears, and is subsumed under the new' dualism of eros and thanatos. And in this latei conceptualization, the ego can be viewed as much the representation ol self-destructiveness as of the tendency to form larger and more comprehensive social totalities. The ego becomes bound up with the id, for better or worse, though the specific reasons for the transformation ol the theory seem more closely linked to despair than to hope.
This debate between defense and reality theories of the ego seems to me to obscure the real issue: that the primary reality which faces the ego is the contradiction between the claims of ideology and the actual sti ucture of social power. This is simply another way of saying that in dealing with the superego Freud remained oblivious to its essential contradictions. It is not possible to choose between the ego’s need for adaptation to reality on the one hand, or defense against instinct on the other, because the two are dialectically related. The primary feature of reality to which the ego must adapt is the system of structural contradictions that so elaborates the “instincts” that they must be experienced as destructive of the self. For, as we have noted on several occasions, the imperatives of capitalist culture create drives that cannot be gratified by any available set of social relations; first, because these relations are in fact absent, and second, because they are in principle required to be so
208 The Transcendence of Psychoanalysis
absent by the contradictions inherent in capitalism between its actual structures and its rhetorical directives.
In short, the basic reality that faces the individual in capitalist society is the need to defend one’s self against socially constructed antagonisms. The “defensive ego” and “reality ego” are revealed as one and the same.
A primary task of the individual’s “ego functions” is to reconcile reality and ideology. But each realm is self-contradictory and conflicts with the other. What is deemed by ego-psychologists the “conflict-free” realm of the ego, is the elaboration by the individual of the pretense that social reality is conflict-free. The set of skills that reproduce this illusion require the simultaneous capacity to navigate the phenomonological forms of everyday domination under the rubric of bourgeois illusions of freedom and individual autonomy. The fundamental and unheralded competence which all individuals must acquire in an alienated, classdominated society is the ability to negotiate the requirements of imposed power through the use of such concepts as are constitutive of this realm, while simultaneously categorizing their experience of power through the conceptual structures of justificatory ideology. The fundamental social skill obtained in bourgeois society is the ability to function bilingually, as it were—conversant in two dimensions and in the competence to relate them to each other while keeping their schema bifurcated in consciousness.
So, as Freud rightly noted, the defense mechanisms are central to the self, and so fundamentally constitutive of our nature that it is impossible to imagine what we would be like in a society that did not make such contradictory demands upon us. Freud was, of course, unwilling to grant that a nonrepressive society was conceivable, but we have sufficient reason to find the grounds of his judgment unpersuasive.
In drawing this discussion of Freud’s metapsychology to a close I wish to refer in passing to the role of the superego. Two of its features which Freud noted, but never satisfactorily explained, could well serve as the focus of a separate study: (1) the tendency for moderate, liberal parents to raise children with severe superegos, and (2) the relationship between the superego and the id. The second connection is of no surprise from the vantage point of the analysis of this chapter. The id is articulated out of the requirements society imposes on the individual through the mediation of the individual superego. Freud inverts the relationship because his energic model requires him to account for the activity of the superego in terms of the origin of its force. The only source he can locate on his own terms is the id, so that the actual relationship through which the imposition of unattainable superego demands forms an insatiable, peremptory id is mistaken for the need of the id to bind its own excess through the aid of the superego.
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This reflection leads immediately to Freud’s observation that liberal parents often produce children whose superegos seem to exceed the punitiveness that has been imposed upon them. His explanation, that the child is robbed ot an object of its natural hostility and so internalizes its hatred, reflects Freud’s persistent tendency to absolve parents of responsibility in the formation of their children. Because Freud understands the term ' liberal" in the phrase "liberal parent” in the sense in which the bourgeoisie understands it, that is, ideologically, he is piecluded from raising any relevant question in regard to the destructiveness the “liberal" ideal serves to mask. He takes the benign apparance of liberal parents at face value, though in instances like the Schreber case and the case of little Hans, contradictory material is readily available and even indicated by Freud himself.
I will turn to the connection between liberalism and therapy once more in the conclusion of this work. In drawing this chaptei to a close we can note the dialectic that arises between the clinical practice and metaphysical theory that Freud elaborated. Though they are different levels of theoretical practice, both participate in a common perspective; they reify the human condition and render social change more difficult.