NO NOBEL PRIZE 1917,” Freud jotted in his calendar, in April of that year. He would never receive that distinction, though in 1928, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, and Thomas Mann supported his nomination. In 1930, Freud would receive the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize. Often it is said that the Goethe Prize acknowledged Freud’s literary and not his scientific contributions, but although it bears a writer’s name, the award always had broad scope. Formal recognition aside, Freud achieved the status he had aspired to from his earliest years. He was a great man, a position he would occupy with some grace.
Freud had, for example, scant interest in mass-media celebrity. In 1924, when the teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb went on trial for the crime of the decade—they had committed a random murder Raskolnikov-style—the newspaper magnates Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst each independently proposed chartering a steamer to bring Freud to America to analyze the boys. Freud declined. Months later, Samuel Goldwyn came to Europe ready to offer Freud a hundred grand to consult on questions of love, for the movies. Freud was then charging twenty dollars an hour as an analyst. Reportedly, he responded in a single sentence: “I do not intend to see Mr. Goldwyn.”
Freud had grander aspirations. His work in his final decades addressed ultimate questions. Why do we suffer? What shall we believe? Can we govern ourselves? Can we live in peace? Freud’s addition to the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, the structural perspective, can be seen as a step in the assumption of this new role, as social critic and philosopher. En route to consolidating his thinking, in The Ego and the Id, Freud had previewed his concepts, introjection and the superego, in a paper on mass psychology. Freud hoped to illuminate issues that the World War had brought to the fore, the tendency of individuals to behave poorly in groups and to accord leaders blind obedience.
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, published in 1921, is an amplification of what was then the definitive book on the subject, Gustav Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds. Le Bon’s goal was to explain a peculiar phenomenon, the substitution of a collective mind for individual intelligences. Writing in 1895, he answered in terms of the unconscious and the peculiar fit between the group, whose critical faculty has been diminished, and certain leaders who have a quality Le Bon called prestige.
Le Bon’s writing underscores the prevalence, in the late nineteenth century, of belief in the active operation of unconscious forces. He writes of “the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence…The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.” Though admiring overall, Freud actually finds Le Bon unoriginal on such subjects as the unconscious and the “group mind.”
Freud wants to improve on Le Bon by recasting his account in psychoanalytic terms. The key to mass psychology, Freud believes, is an understanding of the self-judging structure of the mind. He relies again on his belief that a prehistoric patricide continues to shape the modern psyche, in the form of guilt and ambivalent love toward a lost father. Our prehistory leaves us disposed to identify with a leader, overestimate his worth, and set him in place of our ego ideal. The process goes beyond metaphor. The selected and exalted leader is taken inside as an aspect of our mind, our conscience. A group is simply “a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal.” The individuals are temporarily buoyed up by their tie to a being they have idealized, but they have ceded their independent judgment.
In a sense, Freud merely restates the problem—the dissolution of individual will in the crowd, the loss of the critical faculty. He does so by supplementing reasonable sociology with fantastic anthropology. But as usual, the questionable details do not negate the forceful main effect.
For Freud, individuality is a historical development, at odds with our nature as tribal creatures. Moreover, we are chauvinists and narcissists, with a tendency to pick leaders who resemble us. In Freudian terms, “In many individuals the separation between the ego and the ego ideal is not very advanced.” The result is that—via identification, projection, and introjection—we enter into the excesses of mass behavior. Others were earlier than Freud in predicting the dangers of nationalism, modern dictatorship, and total war. Still, Group Psychology contains a warning that can only be called prescient, about the totalitarianism, fueled by bigotry, that would dominate the remainder of the century.
In the late 1920s, Freud would revisit this territory, most notably in Civilization and Its Discontents. Here, Freud turns directly to the benefits and limitations of culture, a word he used interchangeably with civilization. The form of Freud’s argument serves to place him historically. Though he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents in response to modern technology and ideological movements, the book might well be considered the last document of the Enlightenment. Thomas Hobbes grounded his political philosophy on a myth of primitive man protected by the social contract from the war of all against all. Jean-Jacques Rousseau employed an opposing myth, of the noble savage corrupted by culture. Freud’s work is of this sort, political theorizing arising from his “just-so story” about the origins of society.
Freud’s central question is an odd one, coming from him. He asks why, if we are governed by the pleasure principle, we achieve so little enjoyment. Ten years earlier, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he had answered this question, when he wrote that humans have inherited an unpleasure principle under which the aim of all life is death, not joy. But then, the unpleasure principle was principally Freud’s way of acknowledging the importance of aggression. In Civilization, Freud begins by deemphasizing our inborn penchant for pain so that he can assert that happiness is our exclusive aim. He then asks why culture serves that aim so poorly.
Freud splits the difference with Hobbes and Rousseau. By nature, we are both aggressive and erotic. Freud takes a grand view of these forces. Eros, in particular, extends far beyond sex to represent a general urge for synthesis. Eros governs single-celled organisms’ evolution into multicelled animals. It also serves an anthropological function, impelling the formation of ever larger social groups. But sex and aggression remain developmental drives in human children and motivations in adults. Since group life demands the channeling of instincts, Eros as the force behind culture conflicts with Eros as lust.
Freud gives these musings a modern cast, spinning an amusing account of the mixed blessings of technology. The telephone informs us that our children have arrived safely on their journey, but without the steamship, they would not have left home. Among civilization’s clearer benefits, Freud numbers “beauty, cleanliness, and order.” (Soap is high on his list of beneficial inventions.) But no blessing is unalloyed.
Consider cleanliness. Young children take pleasure in excretion, the pleasure Freud calls anal erotism. At later ages, humans sublimate, diverting this instinctual energy into art, science, and business. But any inhibition represents a loss of direct, sexual fulfillment. Why have we made these compromises? Either civilization causes repression or else something repressive in our nature inspires civilization.
As regards sex, the evidence is mixed. Sex, Freud writes, is the template for all happiness. But in part because of man’s need to secure a particular woman, sex leads to love, which leads to families—which conflict with larger groups. Women resent the impingement of society on the family and become hostile toward civilization, especially since women are ill equipped to transform their instincts into cultural achievements. (“The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable.”) The attachments, such as group loyalty, that form the basis for broader society lead to inhibitions of promiscuous libidinal pleasure. Inevitably, sex is rebellious and society is repressive.
But this account may be too one-sided. And here Freud turns to a theory that dates back to the years with Fliess, whose notions of periodicity were linked to the olfactory effects on men of women’s menstruation. With his assumption of an erect posture, man came to rely less on smell and more on vision as a sexual stimulus. He also acquired shame, at the exposure of his genitals. And as odors that had been stimulating became ineffectual or even disgusting, he lost intensity of sexual release. So repression and inhibition may predate society or arrive simultaneously with it. And here Freud adds another mystical hint about sex: “Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.” Sexual dissatisfaction is nature’s way of creating civilization.
Parenthetically, Freud’s odor theory is almost certainly wrong. As a result of living in trees for thirty million years, our monkey forbears evolved brains devoted ever more to sight and less to smell. In general, primates receive 80 percent of their information through vision. If there was a golden age of the renifleur, humans were not around to enjoy it.
It is not only good sex (and its benefit, freedom from neurosis) that is incompatible with culture. Freud has arrived at the point of considering aggression or the aggressive posture a primary pleasure. Men, he writes, “do not feel comfortable without it.” Our need for an aggressive stance gives rise to what Freud, quite wonderfully, calls “the narcissism of small differences,” as, for example, between the Spaniards and the Portuguese or the English and the Scots. (Freud’s commentary in this arena is too lighthearted to be called prophetic, though he does mention medieval pogroms against the Jews.) No form of social organization can tame the inclination to aggression. This much, Freud fears, is all too obvious—a misuse of paper, ink, and the printer’s work.
What makes Freud’s critique distinctive is his belief that our development and our nature cause us to bear within ourselves the sources of our unhappiness. The family structure entails ambivalence toward the father, which gives rise to the punitive superego. Our conscience punishes us for the very thoughts that would cause us to pursue pleasure. The superego demands a renunciation of instinct.
Would changes in parenting methods moderate the superego? Perhaps. But even spoiled children, Freud notes, can turn neurotic. The superego is largely inherited, on the basis of primordial patricide. And here Freud adds that it does not matter how often this murder actually took place: “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.” We need not be aware of this guilt. Even unconscious guilt will inhibit our pleasure. Perhaps, Freud speculates, it is not only individuals but also groups, like the Jews, who can be afflicted with an overactive superego. We cannot be happy, since genetics and culture alike require that we carry a repressive authority within.
Freud sees a benefit in repression. It reins in our tendency toward incest, rape, and murder. Discontent may be our fate, but we need civilization. In his peroration, Freud hints at a way out. He seems to equate Eros and civilization, as forces potentially arrayed against death and aggression. Sex and culture may allow us to survive, by the skin of our teeth. But then Freud mentions a new form of anxiety, over the prospect that we have gained the technological power to exterminate humankind altogether.
Civilization and Its Discontents stands as a demurrer against political utopianism. No form of social organization can make us happy, because group life requires the inhibition of instinct. At the same time, no attempt at suppressing the aggressive instinct is likely to succeed, so no government can make us secure.
Freud’s argument is peculiarly antiquated, political science grounded in a creation myth. At times Freud seems disturbingly off target. Yes, Karl Marx had his youthful utopian moments, but how central to the argument for socialism is the belief that it will leave us more sexually fulfilled and less guilt-ridden? Are we to believe that forms of government are irrelevant to human happiness? Forces already at work in Europe would soon prove otherwise.
And yet Freud’s strange reasoning contains its share of wisdom. His emphasis on conscience and introjection points in the direction of the advance self-censorship that arises in totalitarian regimes. If many specifics are wrong, Freud’s pessimism expresses attunement to the ominous overtones of the interwar years. And surely Freud’s overarching premise is correct, that we can expect only so much from political systems—relief from the worst suffering perhaps, but always at a price.