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+[[!meta title="Eros and Civilization"]]
+
+* Author: Hebert Marcuse
+* Some subjects covered (keywords): productivity, efficiency, labor, repression, domination, alienation, automation.
+
+## Snippets
+
+### From Pleasure Principle to Reality Principle
+
+The becoming of an organized ego:
+
+ The vicissitudes of the instincts are the vicissitudes of the mental apparatus
+ in civilization. The animal drives become human instincts under the influence
+ of the external reality. Their original "location" in the organism and their
+ basic direction remain the same, but their objectives and their manifestations
+ are subject to change. All psychoanalytic concepts (sublimation ,
+ identification, projection, repression, introjection) connote the mutability of
+ the instincts. But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their
+ needs and satisfaction is a socio-historical world. The animal man becomes a
+ human being only through a fundamental transformation of his nature, affecting
+ not only the instinctual aims but also the instinctual "values" -- that is, the
+ principles that govern the attainment of the aims. The change in the governing
+ value system may be tentatively defined as follows:
+
+ from: to:
+ immediate satisfaction delayed satisfaction
+ pleasure restraint of pleasure
+ joy (play) toil (work)
+ receptiveness productiveness
+ absence of repression security
+
+ Freud described this change as the transformation of the pleasure principle
+ into the reality principle. The interpretation of the "mental apparatus" in
+ terms of these two principles is basic to Freud' s theory and remains so in
+ spite of all modifications of the dualistic conception. It corresponds largely
+ (but not entirely) to the distinction between unconscious and conscious
+ processes. The individual exists, as it were, in two different dimensions,
+ characterized by different mental processes and principles.
+
+ The difference between these two dimensions is a genetic-historical as well as
+ a structural one: the unconscious, ruled by the pleasure principle, comprises
+ "the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which
+ they were the only kind of mental processes." They strive for nothing but for
+ "gaining pleasure; from any operation which might arouse unpleasantness (`
+ pain') mental activity draws back." 1 But the unrestrained pleasure principle
+ comes into conflict with the natural and human environment . The individual
+ comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his
+ needs is impossible. And after this experience of disappointment, a new
+ principle of mental functioning gains ascendancy. The reality principle
+ supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain,
+ and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but "assured" pleasure. 2
+ Because of this lasting gain through renunciation and restraint, according to
+ Freud, the reality principle "safeguards " rather than "dethrones," "modifies "
+ rather than denies, the pleasure principle.
+
+### Civilized Introjection: the self-repression
+
+ The effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed
+ not by nature but by man. The primal father, as the archetype of domination,
+ initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced
+ domination which marks the history of civilization. But ever since the first ,
+ prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression
+ from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree
+ individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental
+ apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man
+ , as the self- repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression
+ in turn sustains his masters and their institutions. It is this mental dynamic
+ which Freud unfolds as the dynamic of civilization.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Scarcity ( Lebensnot, Ananke) teaches men that they cannot freely gratify their
+ instinctual impulses, that they cannot live under the pleasure principle.
+ Society's motive in enforcing the decisive modification of the instinctual
+ structure is thus "economic; since it has not means enough to support life for
+ its members without work on their part, it must see to it that the number of
+ these members is restricted and their energies directed away from sexual
+ activities on to their work." 4
+
+ [...]
+
+ According to Freud's conception the equation of freedom and happiness tabooed
+ by the conscious is upheld by the unconscious. Its truth, although repelled by
+ consciousness, continues to haunt the mind; it preserves the memory of past
+ stages of individual development at which integral gratification is obtained.
+ And the past continues to claim the future: it generates the wish that the
+ paradise be re-created on the basis of the achievements of civilization.
+
+### Eros and Thanatos
+
+At first it sounds like The Force from Star Wars...
+
+ The pleasure principle, then., is a tendency operating in the service of a
+ function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from
+ excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as
+ low as possible. We cannot yet decide with certainty in favour of any of these
+ ways of putting it. 5
+
+ But more and more the inner logic of the conception asserts itself. Constant
+ freedom from excitation has been finally abandoned at the birth of life; the
+ instinctual tendency toward equilibrium thus is ultimately regression behind
+ life itself. The primary processes of the mental apparatus, in their striving
+ for integral gratification, seem to be fatally bound to the "most universal
+ endeavour of all living substance -- namely to return to the quiescence of the
+ inorganic world." 6 The instincts are drawn into the orbit of death. "If it is
+ true that life is governed by Fechner's principle of constant equilibrium, it
+ consists of a continuous descent toward death." 7 The Nirvana principle now
+ emerges as the "dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life
+ in general." And the pleasure principle appears in the light of the Nirvana
+ principle -- as an "expression" of the Nirvana principle: . . the effort to
+ reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the
+ "Nirvana Principle".. )... finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our
+ recognition of this fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the
+ existence of death instincts. 8
+
+ However, the primacy of the Nirvana principle, the terrifying convergence of
+ pleasure and death, is dissolved as soon as it is established. No matter how
+ universal the regressive inertia of organic life, the instincts strive to
+ attain their objective in fundamentally different modes. The difference is
+ tantamount to that of sustaining and destroying life. Out of the common nature
+ of instinctual life develop two antagonistic instincts. The life instincts
+ (Eros) gain ascendency over the death instincts. They continuously counteract
+ and delay the "descent toward death": "fresh tensions are introduced by the
+ claims of Eros, of the sexual instincts, as expressed in instinctual needs." 9
+ They begin their life-reproducing function with the separation of the germ
+ cells from the organism and the coalescence of two such cell bodies, 10
+ proceeding to the establishment and preservation of "ever greater unities" of
+ life. 11
+
+ They thus win, against death, the "potential immortality" of the living
+ substance. 12 The dynamic dualism of instinctual life seems assured. However,
+ Freud at once harks back to the original common nature of the instincts. The
+ life instincts "are conservative in the same sense as the other instincts in
+ that they bring back earlier states of the living substance" -- although they
+ are conservative "to a higher degree." 13 Sexuality would thus ultimately obey
+ the same principle as the death instinct. Later, Freud, in order to illustrate
+ the regressive character of sexuality, recalls Plato's "fantastic hypothesis"
+ that "living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into
+ small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the
+ sexual instincts." 14 Does Eros, in spite of all the evidence, in the last
+ analysis work in the service of the death instinct, and is life really only one
+ long "detour to death"? 15 But the evidence is strong enough, and the detour is
+ long enough to warrant the opposite assumption. Eros is defined as the great
+ unifying force that preserves all life. 16 The ultimate relation between Eros
+ and Thanatos remains obscure.
+
+ If Eros and Thanatos thus emerge as the two basic instincts whose ubiquitous
+ presence and continuous fusion (and de-fusion) characterize the life process,
+ then this theory of instincts is far more than a reformulation of the preceding
+ Freudian concepts.
+
+ [...]
+
+ However, the discovery of the common "conservative nature" of the instincts
+ militates against the dualistic conception and keeps Freud's late
+ metapsychology in that state of suspense and depth which makes it one of the
+ great intellectual ventures in the science of man. The quest for the common
+ origin of the two basic instincts can no longer be silenced. Fenichel pointed
+ out 20 that Freud himself made a decisive step in this direction by assuming a
+ "displaceable energy, which is in itself neutral, but is able to join forces
+ either with an erotic or with a destructive impulse" -- with the life or the
+ death instinct. Never before has death been so consistently taken into the
+ essence of life; but never before also has death come so close to Eros.
+ Fenichel raises the decisive question whether the antithesis of Eros and death
+ instinct is not the "differentiation of an originally common root." He suggests
+ that the phenomena grouped together as the death instinct may be taken as
+ expression of a principle "valid for all instincts," a principle which, in the
+ course of development, "might have been modified.. by external influences ."
+ Moreover, if the "regression-compulsion " in all organic life is striving for
+ integral quiescence, if the Nirvana principle is the ground of the pleasure
+ principle, then the necessity of death appears in an entirely new light. The
+ death instinct is destructiveness not for its own sake, but for the relief of
+ tension. The descent toward death is an unconscious flight from pain and want.
+ It is an expression of the eternal struggle against suffering and repression.
+ And the death instinct itself seems to be affected by the historical changes
+ which affect this struggle. Further explanation of the historical character of
+ the instincts requires placing them in the new concept of the person which
+ corresponds to the last version of Freud's theory of instincts.
+
+### A person
+
+* The main "layers" of the mental structure are now designated as id, ego, and superego.
+* The id is free from the forms.
+* Ego: the "mediator" between the id and the external world.
+
+Superego:
+
+ This development, by which originally conscious struggles with the demands of
+ reality (the parents and their successors in the formation of the superego) are
+ transformed into unconscious automatic reactions, is of the utmost importance
+ for the course of civilization. The reality principle asserts itself through a
+ shrinking of the conscious ego in a significant direction: the autonomous
+ development of the instincts is frozen, and their pattern is fixed at the
+ childhood level. Adherence to a status quo ante is implanted in the
+ instinctual structure. The individual becomes instinctually re-actionary -- in
+ the literal as well as the figurative sense.
+
+### Biological and historical processes
+
+ (a) Surplus-repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination.
+ This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the "modifications " of the
+ instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization.
+
+ (b) Performance principle: the prevailing historical form of the reality principle.
+
+ Behind the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (
+ Lebensnot), which means that the struggle for existence takes place in a world
+ too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint,
+ renunciation, delay. In other words, whatever satisfaction is possible
+ necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the
+ procurement of the means for satisfying needs. For the duration of work, which
+ occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is
+ "suspended" and pain prevails.
+
+ However, this argument, which looms large in Freud' s metapsychology, is
+ fallacious in so far as it applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually
+ is the consequence of a specific organization of scarcity, and of a specific
+ existential attitude enforced by this organization.
+ The prevalent scarcity has, throughout civilization (although in very different
+ modes), been organized in such a way that it has not been distributed
+ collectively in accordance with individual needs, nor has the procurement of
+ goods for the satisfaction of needs been organized with the objective of best
+ satisfying the developing needs of the individuals.
+ Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming it,
+ the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals -- first by mere
+ violence, subsequently by a more rational utilization of power.
+ Domination differs from rational exercise of authority. The latter, which is
+ inherent in any societal division of labor, is derived from knowledge and
+ confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for the
+ advancement of the whole. In contrast, domination is exercised by a particular
+ group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged
+ position.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Moreover, while any form of the reality principle demands a considerable degree
+ and scope of repressive control over the instincts, the specific historical
+ institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination
+ introduce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civilized
+ human association. These additional controls arising from the specific
+ institutions of domination are what we denote as surplus-repression.
+
+### Primeval revolutions and counter-revolutions: the return of the repressed
+
+ The role of the women gains increasing importance . "A good part of the power
+ which had become vacant through the father' s death passed to the women; the
+ time of the matriarchate followed." 11 It seems essential for Freud' s
+ hypothesis that in the sequence of the development toward civilization the
+ matriarchal period is preceded by primal patriarchal despotism: the low degree
+ of repressive domination, the extent of erotic freedom, which are traditionally
+ associated with matriarchy appear, in Freud's hypothesis, as consequences of
+ the overthrow of patriarchal despotism rather than as primary "natural"
+ conditions. In the development of civilization, freedom becomes possible only
+ as liberation. Liberty follows domination -- and leads to the reaffirmation of
+ domination. Matriarchy is replaced by a patriarchal counter-revolution, and the
+ latter is stabilized by the institutionalization of religion.
+
+ Male gods at first appear as sons by the side of the great mother-deities, but
+ gradually they assume the features of the father; polytheism cedes to
+ monotheism, and then returns the "one and only father deity whose power is
+ unlimited." 13 Sublime and sublimated, original domination becomes eternal,
+ cosmic, and good, and in this form guards the process of civilization. The
+ "historical rights" of the primal father are restored.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Must not their sense of guilt include guilt about the betrayal and denial of
+ their deed? Are they not guilty of restoring the repressive father, guilty of
+ self-imposed perpetuation of domination? The question suggests itself if
+ Freud's phylogenetic hypothesis is confronted with his notion of the
+ instinctual dynamic. As the reality principle takes root, even in its most
+ primitive and most brutally enforced form, the pleasure principle becomes
+ something frightful and terrifying; the impulses for free gratification meet
+ with anxiety, and this anxiety calls for protection against them. The
+ individuals have to defend themselves against the specter of their integral
+ liberation from want and pain, against integral gratification. And the latter
+ is represented by the woman who, as mother, has once, for the first and last
+ time, provided such gratification. These are the instinctual factors which
+ reproduce the rhythm of liberation and domination.
+
+ [...]
+
+ If we follow this train of thought beyond Freud, and connect it with the
+ twofold origin of the sense of guilt, the life and death of Christ would appear
+ as a struggle against the father -- and as a triumph over the father. 21 The
+ message of the Son was the message of liberation: the overthrow of the Law
+ (which is domination) by Agape (which is Eros). This would fit in with the
+ heretical image of Jesus as the Redeemer in the flesh, the Messiah who came to
+ save man here on earth. Then the subsequent transubstantiation of the Messiah,
+ the deification of the Son beside the Father, would be a betrayal of his
+ message by his own disciples -- the denial of the liberation in the flesh, the
+ revenge on the redeemer. Christianity would then have surrendered the gospel of
+ Agape-Eros again to the Law; the father-rule would be restored and
+ strengthened. In Freudian terms, the primal crime could have been expiated,
+ according to the message of the Son, in an order of peace and love on earth. It
+ was not; it was rather superseded by another crime -- that against the Son.
+ With his transubstantiation, his gospel too was transubstantiated; his
+ deification removed his message from this world. Suffering and repression were
+ perpetuated.
+
+ [...]
+
+ We have seen that Freud's theory is focused on the recurrent cycle
+ "domination-rebellion-domination." But the second domination is not simply a
+ repetition of the first one; the cyclical movement is progress in domination.
+ From the primal father via the brother clan to the system of institutional
+ authority characteristic of mature civilization, domination becomes
+ increasingly impersonal, objective, universal, and also increasingly rational,
+ effective, productive. At the end, under the rule of the fully developed
+ performance principle, subordination appears as implemented through the social
+ division of labor itself (although physical and personal force remains an
+ indispensable instrumentality).
+
+ [...]
+
+ The development of a hierarchical system of social labor not only rationalizes
+ domination but also "contains" the rebellion against domination. At the
+ individual level, the primal revolt is contained within the framework of the
+ normal Oedipus conflict. At the societal level, recurrent rebellions and
+ revolutions have been followed by counterrevolutions and restorations. From the
+ slave revolts in the ancient world to the socialist revolution, the struggle of
+ the oppressed has ended in establishing a new, "better" system of domination;
+ progress has taken place through an improving chain of control. Each revolution
+ has been the conscious effort to replace one ruling group by another; but each
+ revolution has also released forces that have "overshot the goal," that have
+ striven for the abolition of domination and exploitation. The ease with which
+ they have been defeated demands explanations. The ease with which they have
+ been defeated demands explanations. Neither the prevailing constellation of
+ power, nor immaturity of the productive forces, nor absence of class
+ consciousness provides an adequate answer. In every revolution, there seems to
+ have been a historical moment when the struggle against domination might have
+ been victorious -- but the moment passed. An element of self-defeat seems to
+ be involved in this dynamic (regardless of the validity of such reasons as the
+ prematurity and inequality of forces ). In this sense, every revolution has
+ also been a betrayed revolution.
+
+### Technics
+
+ Technics provide the very basis for progress; technological rationality sets
+ the mental and behaviorist pattern for productive performance, and "power over
+ nature" has become practically identical with civilization. Is the
+ destructiveness sublimated in these activities sufficiently subdued and
+ diverted to assure the work of Eros? It seems that socially useful
+ destructiveness is less sublimated than socially useful libido. To be sure, the
+ diversion of destructiveness from the ego to the external world secured the
+ growth of civilization. However, extroverted destruction remains destruction:
+ its objects are in most cases actually and violently assailed, deprived of
+ their form, and reconstructed only after partial destruction; units are
+ forcibly divided, and the component parts forcibly rearranged. Nature is
+ literally "violated." Only in certain categories of sublimated aggressiveness
+ (as in surgical practice) does such violation directly strengthen the life of
+ its object. Destructiveness, in extent and intent, seems to be more directly
+ satisfied in civilization than the libido.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Then, through constructive technological destruction, through the constructive
+ violation of nature, the instincts would still operate toward the annihilation
+ of life. The radical hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle would stand:
+ the instincts of self-preservation, self-assertion, and mastery, in so far as
+ they have absorbed this destructiveness, would have the function of assuring
+ the organism' s "own path to death."
+
+ [...]
+
+ The growing mastery of nature then would, with the growing productivity of
+ labor, develop and fulfill the human needs only as a by-product: increasing
+ cultural wealth and knowledge would provide the material for progressive
+ destruction and the need for increasing instinctual repression.
+
+ [...]
+
+ However, the very progress of civilization tends to make this rationality a
+ spurious one. The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied
+ to the requirements of domination; they themselves become instruments of
+ repression. The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalized
+ repression since its inception, weakens as man 's knowledge and control over
+ nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil.
+ The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due
+ chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources but to the manner in
+ which they are distributed and utilized.
+
+ This difference may be irrelevant to politics and to politicians but it is of
+ decisive importance to a theory of civilization which derives the need for
+ repression from the "natural" and perpetual disproportion between human desires
+ and the environment in which they must be satisfied. If such a "natural"
+ condition, and not certain political and social institutions, provides the
+ rationale for repression, then it has become irrational. The culture of
+ industrial civilization has turned the human organism into an ever more
+ sensitive, differentiated, exchangeable instrument, and has created a social
+ wealth sufficiently great to transform this instrument into an end in itself.
+ The available resources make for a qualitative change in the human needs.
+ Rationalization and mechanization of labor tend to reduce the quantum of
+ instinctual energy channeled into toil (alienated labor), thus freeing energy
+ for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties.
+
+ Technology operates against the repressive utilization of energy in so far as
+ it minimizes the time necessary for the production of the necessities of life,
+ thus saving time for the development of needs beyond the realm of necessity
+ and of necessary waste.
+
+ But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the
+ constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for
+ maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of
+ domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a
+ world which could be free. If society cannot use its growing productivity for
+ reducing repression (because such usage would upset the hierarchy of the status
+ quo), productivity must be turned against the individuals; it becomes itself
+ an instrument of universal control. Totalitarianism spreads over late
+ industrial civilization wherever the interests of domination prevail upon
+ productivity, arresting and diverting its potentialities. The people have to be
+ kept in a state of permanent mobilization, internal and external. The
+ rationality of domination has progressed to the point where it threatens to
+ invalidate its foundations; therefore it must be reaffirmed more effectively
+ than ever before. This time there shall be no killing of the father, not even a
+ "symbolic" killing -- because he may not find a successor.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Note: 20 In his paper on "The Delay of the Machine Age," Hanns Sachs made an
+ interesting attempt to demonstrate narcissism as a constitutive element of the
+ reality principle in Greek civilization. He discussed the problem of why the
+ Greeks did not develop a machine technology although they possessed the skill
+ and knowledge which would have enabled them to do so. He was not satisfied with
+ the usual explanations on economic and sociological grounds. Instead, he
+ proposed that the predominant narcissistic element in Greek culture prevented
+ technological progress: the libidinal cathexis of the body was so strong that
+ it militated against mechanization and automatization. Sachs' paper appeared in
+ the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, II (1933) , 42off.
+
+### Repression due to exogenous factors: the central argument
+
+ Therefore, if the historical process tended to make obsolete the institutions
+ of the performance principle, it would also tend to make obsolete the
+ organization of the instincts -- that is to say, to release the instincts from
+ the constraints and diversions required by the performance principle. This
+ would imply the real possibility of a gradual elimination of
+ surplus-repression, whereby an expanding area of destructiveness could be
+ absorbed or neutralized by strengthened libido. Evidently, Freud' s theory
+ precludes the construction of any psychoanalytical utopia. If we accept his
+ theory and still maintain that there is historical substance in the idea of a
+ non-repressive civilization, then it must be derivable from Freud's instinct
+ theory itself. His concepts must be examined to discover whether or not they
+ contain elements that require reinterpretation. This approach would parallel
+ the one used in the preceding sociological discussion.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Freud maintains that an essential conflict between the two principles is
+ inevitable; however, in the elaboration of his theory, this inevitability seems
+ to be opened to question. The conflict, in the form it assumes in civilization,
+ is said to be caused and perpetuated by the prevalence of Ananke, Lebensnot,
+ the struggle for existence. (The later stage of the instinct theory, with the
+ concepts of Eros and death instinct, does not cancel this thesis: Lebensnot
+ now appears as the want and deficiency inherent in organic life itself.) The
+ struggle for existence necessitates the repressive modification of the
+ instincts chiefly because of the lack of sufficient means and resources for
+ integral, painless and toilless gratification of instinctual needs. If this is
+ true, the repressive organization of the instincts in the struggle for
+ existence would be due to exogenous factors -- exogenous in the sense that
+ they are not inherent in the "nature" of the instincts but emerge from the
+ specific historical conditions under which the instincts develop.
+
+ [...]
+
+ According to Freud, this distinction is meaningless, for the instincts
+ themselves are "historical"; 1 there is no instinctual structure "outside" the
+ historical structure. However, this does not dispense with the necessity of
+ making the distinction -- except that it must be made within the historical
+ structure itself. The latter appears as stratified on two levels: (a) the
+ phylogenetic-biological level, the development of the animal man in the
+ struggle with nature; and (b) the sociological level, the development of
+ civilized individuals and groups in the struggle among themselves and with
+ their environment .
+
+ The two levels are in constant and inseparable interaction, but factors
+ generated at the second level are exogenous to the first and have therefore a
+ different weight and validity (although, in the course of the development, they
+ can "sink down" to the first level): they are more relative; they can change
+ faster and without endangering or reversing the development of the genus. This
+ difference in the origin of instinctual modification underlies the distinction
+ we have introduced between repression and surplus-repression; 2 the latter
+ originates and is sustained at the sociological level.
+
+ [...]
+
+ For his metapsychology, it is not decisive whether the inhibitions are imposed
+ by scarcity or by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity, by the struggle
+ for existence or by the interest in domination. And indeed the two factors --
+ the phylogenetic-biological and the sociological -- have grown together in the
+ recorded history of civilization. But their union has long since become
+ "unnatural" -and so has the oppressive "modification" of the pleasure principle
+ by the reality principle. Freud' s consistent denial of the possibility of an
+ essential liberation of the former implies the assumption that scarcity is as
+ permanent as domination -- an assumption that seems to beg the question. By
+ virtue of this assumption, an extraneous fact obtains the theoretical dignity
+ of an inherent element of mental life, inherent even in the primary instincts.
+ In the light of the long-range trend of civilization, and in the light of
+ Freud' s own interpretation of the instinctual development, the assumption must
+ be questioned. The historical piossibility of a gradual decontrolling of the
+ instinctual development must be taken seriously, perhaps even the historical
+ necessity -- if civilization is to progress to a higher stage of freedom.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The diagram sketches a historical sequence from the beginning of organic life
+ (stages 2 and 3), through the formative stage of the two primary instincts (5),
+ to their "modified " development as human instincts in civilization (6-7). The
+ turning points are at stages 3 and 6. They are both caused by exogenous factors
+ by virtue of which the definite formation as well as the subsequent dynamic of
+ the instincts become "historically acquired." At stage 3, the exogenous factor
+ is the " unrelieved tension " created by the birth of organic life; the
+ "experience" that life is less "satisfactory," more painful, than the preceding
+ stage generates the death instinct as the drive for relieving this tension
+ through regression. The working of the death instinct thus appears as the
+ result of the trauma of primary frustration: want and pain, here caused by a
+ geological-biological event.
+
+ The other turning point, however, is no longer a geological-biological one: it
+ occurs at the threshold of civilization. The exogenous factor here is Ananke,
+ the conscious struggle for existence. It enforces the repressive controls of
+ the sex instincts (first through the brute violence of the primal father, then
+ through institutionalization and internalization), as well as the
+ transformation of the death instinct into socially useful aggression and
+ morality. This organization of the instincts (actually a long process) creates
+ the civilized division of labor, progress, and law and order"; but it also
+ starts the chain of events that leads to the progressive weakening of Eros and
+ thereby to the growth of aggressiveness and guilt feeling. We have seen that
+ this development is not "inherent" in the struggle for existence but only in
+ its oppressive organization, and that at the present stage the possible
+ conquest of want makes this struggle ever more irrational.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the biological-geological conditions which Freud assumed for the living
+ substance as such, no such change can be envisaged; the birth of life continues
+ to be a trauma, and thus the reign of the Nirvana principle seems to be
+ unshakable. However, the derivatives of the death instinct operate only in
+ fusion with the sex instincts; as long as life grows, the former remain
+ subordinate to the latter; the fate of the destrudo (the "energy" of the
+ destruction instincts) depends on that of the libido. Consequently, a
+ qualitative change in the development of sexuality must necessarily alter the
+ manifestations of the death instinct.
+
+ Thus, the hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization must be theoretically
+ validated first by demonstrating the possibility of a nonrepressive development
+ of the libido under the conditions of mature civilization. The direction of
+ such a development is indicated by those mental forces which, according to
+ Freud, remain essentially free from the reality principle and carry over this
+ freedom into the world of mature consciousness. Their re-examination must be
+ the next step.
+
+### Detours to death: death instinct and negentropy
+
+ Our re-examination must therefore begin with Freud's analysis of the death
+ instinct. We have seen that, in Freud's late theory of the instincts, the
+ "compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things
+ which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of
+ external disturbing forces" 4 is common to both primary instincts: Eros and
+ death instinct. Freud regards this retrogressive tendency as an expression of
+ the "inertia" in organic life, and ventures the following hypothetical
+ explanation: at the time when life originated in inanimate matter, a strong
+ "tension" developed which the young organism strove to relieve by returning to
+ the inanimate condition. 5 At the early stage of organic life, the road to the
+ previous state of inorganic existence was probably very short, and dying very
+ easy; but gradually "external influences " lengthened this road and compelled
+ the organism to take ever longer and more complicated "detours to death."
+
+[[!img detours-to-death.png link="no"]]
+
+### Phantasy
+
+ Phantasy plays a most decisive function in the total mental structure: it links
+ the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of
+ consciousness (art), the dream with the reality; it preserves the archetypes of
+ the genus, the perpetual but repressed ideas of the collective and individual
+ memory, the tabooed images of freedom.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The recognition of phantasy (imagination) as a thought process with its own
+ laws and truth values was not new in psychology and philosophy; Freud' s
+ original contribution lay in the attempt to show the genesis of this mode of
+ thought and its essential connection with the pleasure principle. The
+ establishment of the reality principle causes a division and mutilation of the
+ mind which fatefully determines its entire development. The mental process
+ formerly unified in the pleasure ego is now split: its main stream is channeled
+ into the domain of the reality principle and brought into line with its
+ requirements. Thus conditioned, this part of the mind obtains the monopoly of
+ interpreting, manipulating, and altering reality -- of governing remembrance
+ and oblivion, even of defining what reality is and how it should be used and
+ altered. The other part of the mental apparatus remains free from the control
+ of the reality principle -- at the price of becoming powerless,
+ inconsequential, unrealistic.
+ Whereas the ego was formerly guided and driven by the whole of its mental
+ energy, it is now to be guided only by that part of it which conforms to the
+ reality principle. This part and this part alone is to set the objectives,
+ norms, and values of the ego; as reason it becomes the sole repository of
+ judgment, truth, rationality; it decides what is useful and useless, good and
+ evil. 2 Phantasy as a separate mental process is born and at the same time
+ left behind by the organization of the pleasure ego into the reality ego.
+ Reason prevails: it becomes unpleasant but useful and correct; phantasy remains
+ pleasant but becomes useless, untrue -- a mere play, daydreaming. As such, it
+ continues to speak the language of the pleasure principle, of freedom from
+ repression, of uninhibited desire and gratification -- but reality proceeds
+ according to the laws of reason, no longer committed to the dream language.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for
+ retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung.
+
+## Unsublimated pleasure
+
+ Smell and taste give, as it were, unsublimated pleasure per se (and unrepressed
+ disgust). They relate (and separate) individuals immediately, without the
+ generalized and conventionalized forms of consciousness, morality, aesthetics.
+ Such immediacy is incompatible with the effectiveness of organized domination,
+ with a society which "tends to isolate people, to put distance between them,
+ and to prevent spontaneous relationships and thènatural' animal -like
+ expressions of such relations."
+
+### Art
+
+ Still, within the limits of the aesthetic form, art expressed, although in an
+ ambivalent manner , the return of the repressed image of liberation; art was
+ opposition. At the present stage, in the period of total mobilization, even
+ this highly ambivalent opposition seems no longer viable. Art survives only
+ where it cancels itself , where it saves its substance by denying its
+ traditional form and thereby denying reconciliation: where it becomes
+ surrealistic and atonal. 6 Otherwise, art shares the fate of all genuine human
+ communication : it dies off.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In a less sublimated form, the opposition of phantasy to the reality principle
+ is more at home in such sub-real and surreal processes as dreaming,
+ daydreaming, play, the "stream of consciousness."
+
+ [...]
+
+ The surrealists recognized the revolutionary implications of Freud' s
+ discoveries: "Imagination is perhaps about to reclaim its rights."
+ 13 But when they asked, "Cannot the dream also be applied to the solution of
+ the fundamental problems of life?" 14 they went beyond psychoanalysis in
+ demanding that the dream be made into reality without compromising its content.
+ Art allied itself with the revolution. Uncompromising adherence to the strict
+ truth value of imagination comprehends reality more fully. That the
+ propositions of the artistic imagination are untrue in terms of the actual
+ organization of the facts belongs to the essence of their truth: The truth that
+ some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital
+ truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses the "great refusal" which
+ is its primary characteristic. 15 This Great Refusal is the protest against
+ unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom -- "to
+ live without anxiety." 16 But this idea could be formulated without punishment
+ only in the language of art. In the more realistic context of political theory
+ and even philosophy, it was almost universally defamed as utopia.
+
+### Utopia
+
+ The relegation of real possibilities to the no-man's land of utopia is itself
+ an essential element of the ideology of the performance principle. If the
+ construction of a nonrepressive instinctual development is oriented, not on the
+ subhistorical past, but on the historical present and mature civilization, the
+ very notion of utopia loses its meaning. The negation of the performance
+ principle emerges not against but with the progress of conscious rationality;
+ it presupposes the highest maturity of civilization. The very achievements of
+ the performance principle have intensified the discrepancy between the archaic
+ unconscious and conscious processes of man, on the one hand, and his actual
+ potentialities, on the other. The history of mankind seems to tend toward
+ another turning point in the vicissitudes of the instincts. And, just as at the
+ preceding turning points, the adaptation of the archaic mental structure to the
+ new environment would mean another "castrophe" -- an explosive change in the
+ environment itself. However, while the first turning point was, according to
+ the Freudian hypothesis, an event in geological history, and while the second
+ occurred at the beginning of civilization, the third turning point would be
+ located at the highest attained level of civilization. The actor in this event
+ would be no longer the historical animal man but the conscious, rational
+ subject that has mastered and appropriated the objective world as the arena of
+ his realization. The historical factor contained in Freud' s theory of
+ instincts has come to fruition in history when the basis of Ananke ( Lebensnot)
+ -- which, for Freud, provided the rationale for the repressive reality
+ principle -- is undermined by the progress of civilization.
+
+ Still, there is some validity in the argument that, despite all progress,
+ scarcity and immaturity remain great enough to prevent the realization of the
+ principle "to each according to his needs." The material as well as mental
+ resources of civilization are still so limited that there must be a vastly
+ lower standard of living if social productivity were redirected toward the
+ universal gratification of individual needs: many would have to give up
+ manipulated comforts if all were to live a human life. Moreover, the prevailing
+ international structure of industrial civilization seems to condemn such an
+ idea to ridicule. This does not invalidate the theoretical insistence that the
+ performance principle has become obsolescent. The reconciliation between
+ pleasure and reality principle does not depend on the existence of abundance
+ for all. The only pertinent question is whether a state of civilization can be
+ reasonably envisaged in which human needs are fulfilled in such a manner and to
+ such an extent that surplus-repression can be eliminated.
+
+ Such a hypothetical state could be reasonably assumed at two points, which lie
+ at the opposite poles of the vicissitudes of the instincts: one would be
+ located at the primitive beginnings of history, the other at its most mature
+ stage. The first would refer to a non-oppressive distribution of scarcity (as
+ may, for example, have existed in matriarchal phases of ancient society). The
+ second would pertain to a rational organization of fully developed industrial
+ society after the conquest of scarcity. The vicissitudes of the instincts would
+ of course be very different under these two conditions, but one decisive
+ feature must be common to both: the instinctual development would be
+ non-repressive in the sense that at least the surplus-repression necessitated
+ by the interests of domination would not be imposed upon the instincts. This
+ quality would reflect the prevalent satisfaction of the basic human needs (most
+ primitive at the first, vastly extended and refined at the second stage),
+ sexual as well as social: food, housing, clothing, leisure. This satisfaction
+ would be (and this is the important point) without toil -- that is, without the
+ rule of alienated labor over the human existence. Under primitive conditions,
+ alienation has not yet arisen because of the primitive character of the needs
+ themselves, the rudimentary (personal or sexual) character of the division of
+ labor, and the absence of an institutionalized hierarchical specialization of
+ functions. Under the "ideal" conditions of mature industrial civilization,
+ alienation would be completed by general automatization of labor, reduction of
+ labor time to a minimum , and exchangeability of functions. Since the length
+ of the working day is itself one of the principal repressive factors imposed
+ upon the pleasure principle by the reality principle, the reduction of the
+ working day to a point where the mere quantum of labor time no longer arrests
+ human development is the first prerequisite for freedom. Such reduction by
+ itself would almost certainly mean a considerable decrease in the standard of
+ living prevalent today in the most advanced industrial countries. But the
+ regression to a lower standard of living, which the collapse of the performance
+ principle would bring about, does not militate against progress in freedom.
+
+ The argument that makes liberation conditional upon an ever higher standard of
+ living all too easily serves to justify the perpetuation of repression. The
+ definition of the standard of living in terms of automobiles , television sets,
+ airplanes, and tractors is that of the performance principle itself. Beyond the
+ rule of this principle, the level of living would be measured by other
+ criteria: the universal gratification of the basic human needs, and the freedom
+ from guilt and fear -- internalized as well as external, instinctual as well as
+ rrational." "La vraie civilization. . n' est pas dans le gaz, ni dans la
+ vapeur, ni dans les tables tournantes. Elle est dans la diminution des traces
+ du pêché originel" 17 -- this is the definition of progress beyond the rule of
+ the performance principle.
+
+ Under optimum conditions, the prevalence, in mature civilization, of material
+ and intellectual wealth would be such as to allow painless gratification of
+ needs, while domination would no longer systematically forestall such
+ gratification. In this case, the quantum of instinctual energy still to be
+ diverted into necessary labor (in turn completely mechanized and rationalized)
+ would be so small that a large area of repressive constraints and
+ modifications, no longer sustained by external forces , would collapse.
+
+### The Aesthetic Dimension
+
+ Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), written largely
+ under the impact of the Critique of Judgment, aim at a remaking of civilization
+ by virtue of the liberating force of the aesthetic function: it is envisaged as
+ containing the possibility of a new reality principle.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Since it was civilization itself which "dealt modern man this wound," only a
+ new mode of civilization can heal it. The wound is caused by the antagonistic
+ relation between the two polar dimensions of the human existence. Schiller
+ describes this antagonism in a series of paired concepts: sensuousness and
+ reason, matter and form (spirit), nature and freedom, the particular and the
+ universal.
+
+ Each of the two dimensions is governed by a basic impulse: the "sensuous
+ impulse " and the "form-impulse." 20 The former is essentially passive,
+ receptive, the latter active, mastering, domineering . Culture is built by the
+ combination and interaction of these two impulses. But in the established
+ civilization, their relation has been an antagonistic one: instead of
+ reconciling both impulses by making sensuousness rational and reason sensuous,
+ civilization has subjugated sensuousness to reason in such a manner that the
+ former, if it reasserts itself , does so in destructive and "savage" forms
+ while the tyranny of reason impoverishes and barbarizes sensuousness. The
+ conflict must be resolved if human potentialities are to realize themselves
+ freely. Since only the impulses have the lasting force that fundamentally
+ affects the human existence, such reconciliation between the two impulses must
+ be the work of a third impulse. Schiller defines this third mediating impulse
+ as the play impulse, its objective as beauty, and its goal as freedom.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The quest is for the solution of a "political" problem : the liberation of man
+ from inhuman existential conditions. Schiller states that, in order to solve
+ the political problem, "one must pass through the aesthetic, since it is beauty
+ that leads to freedom." The play impulse is the vehicle of this liberation. The
+ impulse does not aim at playing "with" something ; rather it is the play of
+ life itself, beyond want and external compulsion -- the manifestation of an
+ existence without fear and anxiety, and thus the manifestation of freedom
+ itself.
+
+ Man is free only where he is free from constraint, external and internal,
+ physical and moral -- when he is constrained neither by law nor by need. 21 But
+ such constraint is the reality. Freedom is thus, in a strict sense, freedom
+ from the established reality: man is free when the "reality loses its
+ seriousness" and when its necessity "becomes light" ( leicht). 22 "The greatest
+ stupidity and the greatest intelligence have a certain affinity with each other
+ in that they both seek only the real"; however, such need for and attachment to
+ the real are "merely the results of want."
+
+ In contrast, "indifference to reality" and interest in "show" (dis-play,
+ Schein) are the tokens of freedom from want and a "true enlargement of
+ humanity." 23 In a genuinely humane civilization, the human existence will be
+ play rather than toil, and man will live in display rather than need.
+
+ These ideas represent one of the most advanced positions of thought. It must be
+ understood that the liberation from the reality which is here envisaged is not
+ transcendental, "inner," or merely intellectual freedom (as Schiller explicitly
+ emphasizes 24 ) but freedom in the reality. The reality that "loses its
+ seriousness" is the inhumane reality of want and need, and it loses its
+ seriousness when wants and needs can be satisfied without alienated labor.
+ Then, man is free to "play" with his faculties and potentialities and with
+ those of nature, and only by "playing" with them is he free. His world is then
+ display ( Schein), and its order is that of beauty.
+
+ Because it is the realization of freedom, play is more than the constraining
+ physical and moral reality: ". . man is only serious with the agreeable, the
+ good, the perfect; but with beauty he plays." 25 Such formulations would be
+ irresponsible "aestheticism" if the realm of play were one of ornament, luxury,
+ holiday, in an otherwise repressive world. But here the aesthetic function is
+ conceived as a principle governing the entire human existence, and it can do so
+ only if it becomes "universal."
+
+ [...]
+
+ If we reassemble its main elements, we find:
+
+ (1) The transformation of toil (labor) into play, and of repressive
+ productivity into "display" -- a transformation that must be preceded by the
+ conquest of want (scarcity) as the determining factor of civilization. 43
+
+ (2) The self-sublimation of sensuousness (of the sensuous impulse) and the
+ de-sublimation of reason (of the form-impulse) in order to reconcile the two
+ basic antagonistic impulses.
+
+ (3) The conquest of time in so far as time is destructive of lasting
+ gratification.
+
+ These elements are practically identical with those of a reconciliation between
+ pleasure principle and reality principle. We recall the constitutive role
+ attributed to imagination (phantasy) in play and display: Imagination preserves
+ the objectives of those mental processes which have remained free from the
+ repressive reality principle; in their aesthetic function, they can be
+ incorporated into the conscious rationality of mature civilization. The play
+ impulse stands for the common denominator of the two opposed mental processes
+ and principles.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Non-repressive order is essentially an order of abundance: the necessary
+ constraint is brought about by "superfluity" rather than need. Only an order of
+ abundance is compatible with freedom. At this point, the idealistic and the
+ materialistic critiques of culture meet. Both agree that nonrepressive order
+ becomes possible only at the highest maturity of civilization, when all basic
+ needs can be satisfied with a minimum expenditure of physical and mental energy
+ in a minimum of time.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Possession and procurement of the necessities of life are the prerequisite,
+ rather than the content, of a free society. The realm of necessity, of labor,
+ is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by
+ objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free
+ play of human faculties and desires.
+ The optimum in this realm is therefore to be defined by standards of
+ rationality rather than freedom -- namely, to organize production and
+ distribution in such a manner that the least time is spent for making all
+ necessities available to all members of society. Necessary labor is a system of
+ essentially inhuman, mechanical, and routine activities; in such a system,
+ individuality cannot be a value and end in itself. Reasonably, the system of
+ societal labor would be organized rather with a view to saving time and space
+ for the development of individuality outside the inevitably repressive
+ work-world. Play and display, as principles of civilization, imply not the
+ transformation of labor but its complete subordination to the freely evolving
+ potentialities of man and nature.
+
+## Regression into progress
+
+ The processes that create the ego and superego also shape and perpetuate
+ specific societal institutions and relations. Such psychoanalytical concepts as
+ sublimation, identification, and introjection have not only a psychical but
+ also a social content: they terminate in a system of institutions, laws,
+ agencies, things, and customs that confront the individual as objective
+ entities. Within this antagonistic system, the mental conflict between ego and
+ superego, between ego and id, is at one and the same time a conflict between
+ the individual and his society.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Therefore, the emergence of a non-repressive reality principle involving
+ instinctual liberation would regress behind the attained level of civilized
+ rationality. This regression would be psychical as well as social: it would
+ reactivate early stages of the libido which were surpassed in the development
+ of the reality ego, and it would dissolve the institutions of society in which
+ the reality ego exists. In terms of these institutions, instinctual liberation
+ is relapse into barbarism. However, occurring at the height of civilization, as
+ a consequence not of defeat but of victory in the struggle for existence, and
+ supported by a free society, such liberation might have very different results.
+ It would still be a reversal of the process of civilization, a subversion of
+ culture -- but after culture had done its work and created the mankind and the
+ world that could be free.
+
+### Work, toil and play
+
+ Freud's suggestions in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego do more
+ than reformulate his thesis of Eros as the builder of culture; culture here
+ rather appears as the builder of Eros -- that is to say, as the "natural"
+ fulfillment of the innermost trend of Eros. Freud's psychology of civilization
+ was based on the inexorable conflict between Ananke and free instinctual
+ development. But if Ananke itself becomes the primary field of libidinal
+ development, the contradiction evaporates. Not only would the struggle for
+ existence not necessarily cancel the possibility of instinctual freedom (as we
+ suggested in Chapter 6); but it would even constitute a "prop" for instinctual
+ gratificaiton. The work relations which form the base of civilization, and thus
+ civilization itself, would be "propped" by non-desexualized instinctual energy.
+ The whole concept of sublimation is at stake .
+
+ The problem of work, of socially useful activity, without (repressive)
+ sublimation can now be restated. It emerged as the problem of a change in the
+ character of work by virtue of which the latter would be assimilated to play --
+ the free play of human faculties. What are the instinctual preconditions for
+ such a transformation? The most far -reaching attempt to answer this question
+ is made by Barbara Lantos in her article "Work and the Instincts." 26 She
+ defines work and play in terms of the instinctual stages involved in these
+ activities. Play is entirely subject to the pleasure principle: pleasure is in
+ the movement itself in so far as it activates erotogenic zones. "The
+ fundamental feature of play is, that it is gratifying in itself, without
+ serving any other purpose than that of instinctual gratification."
+
+ [...]
+
+ The genital organization of the sexual instincts has a parallel in the
+ work-organization of the ego-instincts. 27
+
+ Thus it is the purpose and not the content which marks an activity as play or
+ work. 28 A transformation in the instinctual structure (such as that from the
+ pregenital to the genital stage) would entail a change in the instinctual value
+ of the human activity regardless of its content. For example, if work were
+ accompanied by a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism, it would
+ tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work content. Now it is
+ precisely such a reactivation of polymorphous eroticism which appeared as the
+ consequence of the conquest of scarcity and alienation. The altered societal
+ conditions would therefore create an instinctual basis for the transformation
+ of work into play. In Freud's terms , the less the efforts to obtain
+ satisfaction are impeded and directed by the interest in domination, the more
+ freely the libido could prop itself upon the satisfaction of the great vital
+ needs.
+
+ [...]
+
+ But while the psychoanalytical and anthropological concepts of such an order
+ have been oriented on the prehistorical and precivilized past, our discussion
+ of the concept is oriented on the future, on the conditions of fully mature
+ civilization. The transformation of sexuality into Eros, and its extension to
+ lasting libidinal work relations, here presuppose the rational reorganization
+ of a huge industrial apparatus, a highly specialized societal division of
+ labor, the use of fantastically destructive energies, and the co-operation of
+ vast masses.
+
+ The idea of libidinal work relations in a developed industrial society finds
+ little support in the tradition of thought, and where such support is
+ forthcoming it seems of a dangerous nature. The transformation of labor into
+ pleasure is the central idea in Fourier's giant socialist utopia.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Fourier insists that this transformation requires a complete change in the
+ social institutions: distribution of the social product according to need,
+ assignment of functions according to individual faculties and inclinations,
+ constant mutation of functions, short work periods, and so on. But the
+ possibility of "attractive labor" ( travail attrayant) derives above all from
+ the release of libidinal forces . Fourier assumes the existence of an
+ attraction indnstrielle which makes for pleasurable co-operation. It is based
+ on the attraction passionnée in the nature of man , which persists despite the
+ opposition of reason, duty, prejudice.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Fourier comes closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the
+ dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation. However, in his detailed
+ blueprint for the realization of this idea, he hands it over to a giant
+ organization and administration and thus retains the repressive elements . The
+ working communities of the phalanstère anticipate "strength through joy"
+ rather than freedom, the beautification of mass culture rather than its
+ abolition. Work as free play cannot be subject to administration; only
+ alienated labor can be organized and administered by rational routine. It is
+ beyond this sphere, but on its basis, that non-repressive sublimation creates
+ its own cultural order.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt
+ to make oneself feel valuable even though there is no particular need for one'
+ s working. 37
+
+### Superid
+
+ It has been pointed out that the superego, as the mental representative of
+ morality, is not unambiguously the representative of the reality principle,
+ especially of the forbidding and punishing father. In many cases, the superego
+ seems to be in secret alliance with the id, defending the claims of the id
+ against the ego and the external world. Charles Odier therefore proposed that a
+ part of the superego is "in the last analysis the representative of a primitive
+ phase, during which morality had not yet freed itself from the pleasure
+ principle." [superid]
+
+ [...]
+
+ The psychical phenomenon which, in the individual, suggests such a pregenital
+ morality is an identification with the mother, expressing itself in a
+ castration-wish rather than castration-threat. It might be the survival of a
+ regressive tendency: remembrance of the primal Mother-Right, and at the same
+ time a "symbolic means against losing the then prevailing privileges of the
+ woman." According to Odier, the pregenital and prehistorical morality of the
+ superid is incompatible with the reality principle and therefore a neurotic
+ factor .
+
+### Time, memory and death
+
+ The flux of time is society' s most natural ally in maintaining law and order,
+ conformity, and the institutions that relegate freedom to a perpetual utopia;
+ the flux of time helps men to forget what was and what can be: it makes them
+ oblivious to the better past and the better future.
+
+ This ability to forget -- itself the result of a long and terrible education by
+ experience -- is an indispensable requirement of mental and physical hygiene
+ without which civilized life would be unbearable; but it is also the mental
+ faculty which sustains submissiveness and renunciation. To forget is also to
+ forgive what should not be forgiven if justice and freedom are to prevail. Such
+ forgiveness reproduces the conditions which reproduce injustice and
+ enslavement: to forget past suffering is to forgive the forces that caused it
+ --without defeating these forces . The wounds that heal in time are also the
+ wounds that contain the poison. Against this surrender to time, the restoration
+ of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is one of the noblest
+ tasks of thought.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Nietzsche saw in the training of memory the beginning of civilized morality --
+ especially the memory of obligations, contracts, dues. 10 This context reveals
+ the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization: the faculty was chiefly
+ directed toward remembering duties rather than pleasures; memory was linked
+ with bad conscience, guilt, and sin. Unhappiness and the threat of punishment ,
+ not happiness and the promise of freedom, linger in memory.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Still, this defeat of time is artistic and spurious; remembrance is no real
+ weapon unless it is translated into historical action. Then, the struggle
+ against time becomes a decisive moment in the struggle against domination: The
+ conscious wish to break the continuum of history belongs to the revolutionary
+ classes in the moment of action. This consciousness asserted itself during the
+ July Revolution. In the evening of the first day of the struggle,
+ simultaneously but independently at several places, shots were fired at the
+ time pieces on the towers of Paris. 11
+
+ It is the alliance between time and the order of repression that motivates the
+ efforts to halt the flux of time, and it is this alliance that makes time the
+ deadly enemy of Eros.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Every sound reason is on the side of law and order in their insistence that the
+ eternity of joy be reserved for the hereafter, and in their endeavor to
+ subordinate the struggle against death and disease to the never-ceasing
+ requirements of national and international security.
+
+ The striving for the preservation of time in time, for the arrest of time, for
+ conquest of death, seems unreasonable by any standard, and outright impossible
+ under the hypothesis of the death instinct that we have accepted. Or does this
+ very hypothesis make it more reasonable? The death instinct operates under the
+ Nirvana principle: it tends toward that state of "constant gratification" where
+ no tension is felt -- a state without want. This trend of the instinct implies
+ that its destructive manifestations would be minimized as it approached such a
+ state. If the instinct's basic objective is not the termination of life but
+ of pain -- the absence of tension -- then paradoxically, in terms of the
+ instinct, the conflict between life and death is the more reduced, the closer
+ life approximates the state of gratification. Pleasure principle and Nirvana
+ principle then converge.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Death would cease to be an instinctual goal. It remains a fact, perhaps even an
+ ultimate necessity -- but a necessity against which the unrepressed energy of
+ mankind will protest, against which it will wage its greatest struggle. In
+ this struggle, reason and instinct could unite. Under conditions of a truly
+ human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of
+ ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a "natural" death after a fulfilled
+ life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy.
+ Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those
+ who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization.
+
+ They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the
+ painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes
+ all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad
+ conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death
+ instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent "professional
+ agreement" with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most
+ widespread expressions of the death instinct -- or, rather, of its social
+ usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of
+ repression. Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme
+ sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces
+ an element of surrender into life from the beginning -- surrender and
+ submission.
+
+### Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory
+
+ Fromm has devoted an admirable paper to "The Social Conditions of
+ Psychoanalytic Therapy," in which he shows that the psychoanalytic situation
+ (between analyst and patient) is a specific expression of liberalist toleration
+ and as such dependent on the existence of such toleration in the society. But
+ behind the tolerant attitude of the "neutral" analyst is concealed "respect for
+ the social taboos of the bourgeoisie."
+ 7 Fromm traces the effectiveness of these taboos at the very core of Freudian
+ theory, in Freud' s position toward sexual morality. With this attitude, Fromm
+ contrasts another conception of therapy, first perhaps formulated by Ferenczi,
+ according to which the analyst rejects patricentric-authoritarian taboos and
+ enters into a positive rather than neutral relation with the patient. The new
+ conception is characterized chiefly by an "unconditional affirmation of the
+ patient' s claim for happiness" and the "liberation of morality from its
+ tabooistic features ." 8
+
+ [...]
+
+ in a repressive society, individual happiness and productive development are in
+ contradiction to society; if they are defined as values to be realized within
+ this society, they become themselves repressive.
+
+ [...]
+
+ while psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is
+ ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization,
+ psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to
+ function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering to it altogether.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Theoretically, the difference between mental health and neurosis lies only in
+ the degree and effectiveness of resignation: mental health is successful,
+ efficient resignation -- normally so efficient that it shows forth as
+ moderately happy satisfaction. Normality is a precarious condition. "Neurosis
+ and psychosis are both of them an expression of the rebellion of the id against
+ the outer world, of its ` pain,' unwillingness to adapt itself to necessity --
+ to ananke, or, if one prefers, of its incapacity to do so." 9
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the long run, the question is only how much resignation the individual can
+ bear without breaking up. In this sense, therapy is a course in resignation: a
+ great deal will be gained if we succeed in "transforming your hysterical misery
+ into everyday unhappiness," which is the usual lot of mankind. 11
+
+ [...]
+
+ The autonomous personality, in the sense of creative "uniqueness" and fullness
+ of its existence, has always been the privilege of a very few. At the present
+ stage, the personality tends toward a standardized reaction pattern established
+ by the hierarchy of power and functions and by its technical, intellectual, and
+ cultural apparatus.
+
+ The analyst and his patient share this alienation, and since it does not
+ usually manifest itself in any neurotic symptom but rather as the hallmark of
+ "mental health," it does not appear in the revisionist consciousness.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Fromm writes: Genuine love is rooted in productiveness and may properly be
+ called, therefore, "productive love." Its essence is the same whether it is the
+ mother's love for the child, our love for man , or the erotic love between two
+ individuals. . certain basic elements may be said to be characteristic of all
+ forms of productive love. These are care, responsibility, respect, and
+ knowledge. 35
+
+ Compare with this ideological formulation Freud' s analysis of the instinctual
+ ground and underground of love, of the long and painful process in which
+ sexuality with all its polymorphous perversity is tamed and inhibited until it
+ ultimately becomes susceptible to fusion with tenderness and affection -- a
+ fusion which remains precarious and never quite overcomes its destructive
+ elements .
+
+ [...]
+
+ According to Freud, love, in our culture, can and must be practiced as
+ "aim-inhibited sexuality," with all the taboos and constraints placed upon it
+ by a monogamic-patriarchal society. Beyond its legitimate manifestations, love
+ is destruetive and by no means conducive to productiveness and constructive
+ work. Love, taken seriously, is outlawed: "There is no longer any place in
+ present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings,"
+ 37 But to the revisionists, productiveness, love, happiness, and health merge
+ in grand hannony; civilization has not caused any conflicts between them which
+ the mature person could not solve without serious damage .
+
+ [...]
+
+ Freud had established a substantive link between human freedom and happiness on
+ the one hand and sexuality on the other: the latter provided the primary source
+ for the former and at the same time the ground for their necessary restriction
+ in civilization. The revisionist solution of the conflict through the
+ spiritualization of freedom and happiness demanded the weakening of this link .
+
+ [...]
+
+ Fromm 's ideological interpretation of the Oedipus complex implies acceptance
+ of the unhappiness of freedom, of its separation from satisfaction; Freud' s
+ theory implies that the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile protest against
+ this separation -- protest not against freedom but against painful , repressive
+ freedom. Conversely, the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile desire for the
+ archetype of freedom: freedom from want. And since the (unrepressed) sex
+ instinct is the biological carrier of this archetype of freedom, the Oedipus
+ wish is essentially "sexual craving." Its natural object is, not simply the
+ mother qua mother, but the mother qua woman -- female principle of
+ gratification. Here the Eros of receptivity, rest, painless and integral
+ satisfaction is nearest to the death instinct (return to the womb), the
+ pleasure principle nearest to the Nirvana principle. Eros here fights its first
+ battle against everything the reality principle stands for: against the father,
+ against domination, sublimation, resignation. Gradually then, freedom and
+ fulfillment are being associated with these paternal principles; freedom from
+ want is sacrificed to moral and spiritual independence. It is first the "sexual
+ craving" for the mother-woman that threatens the psychical basis of
+ civilization; it is the "sexual craving" that makes the Oedipus conflict the
+ prototype of the instinctual conflicts between the individual and his society.
+ If the Oedipus wish were in essence nothing more than the wish for protection
+ and security ("escape from freedom"), if the child desired only impermissible
+ security and not impermissible pleasure, then the Oedipus complex would indeed
+ present an essentially educational problem. As such, it can be treated without
+ exposing the instinctual danger zones of society.
+
+### Misc
+
+ But, again, Freud shows that this repressive system does not really solve the
+ conflict. Civilization plunges into a destructive dialectic: the perpetual
+ restrictions on Eros ultimately weaken the life instincts and thus strengthen
+ and release the very forces against which they were "called up" -- those of
+ destruction.
+
+ [...]
+
+ For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are
+ determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which
+ they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which
+ individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the
+ more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives
+ but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill
+ their own needs and faculties but work in alienation. Work has now become
+ general, and so have the restrictions placed upon the libido: labor time, which
+ is the largest part of the individual' s life time, is painful time, for
+ alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure
+ principle. Libido is diverted for socially useful performances in which the
+ individual works for himself only in so far as he works for the apparatus,
+ engaged in activities that mostly do not coincide with his own faculties and
+ desires.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The work of repression pertains to the death instinct as well as the life
+ instinct. Normally, their fusion is a healthy one, but the sustained severity
+ of the superego constantly threatens this healthy balance. "The more a man
+ checks his aggressive tendencies toward others the more tyrannical, that is
+ aggressive, he becomes in his ego-ideal.. the more intense become the
+ aggressive tendencies of his ego-ideal against his ego." 57 Driven to the
+ extreme, in melancholia, "a pure culture of the death instinct" may hold sway
+ in the superego
+
+ [...]
+
+ It is in this context that Freud's metapsychology comes face to face with the
+ fatal dialectic of civilization: the very progress of civilization leads to the
+ release of increasingly destructive forces. In order to elucidate the
+ connection between Freud's individual psychology and the theory of
+ civilization, it will be necessary to resume the interpretation of the
+ instinctual dynamic at a different level -- namely, the phylogenetic one.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Note: 45 To be sure, every form of society, every civilization has to exact
+ labor time for the procurement of the necessities and luxuries of life. But not
+ every kind and mode of labor is essentially irreconcilable with the pleasure
+ principle. The human relations connected with work may "provide for a very
+ considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic,
+ aggressive, and even erotic." ( Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 34 note.)
+ The irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros
+ (pleasure principle), but between alienated labor (performance principle) and
+ Eros. The notion of non-alienated, libidinal work will be discussed below.
+
+ [...]
+
+ It is the end result of long historical processes which are congealed in the
+ network of human and institutional entities making up society, and these
+ processes define the personality and its relationships. Consequently, to
+ understand them for what they really are, psychology must unfreeze them by
+ tracing their hidden origins. In doing so, psychology discovers that the
+ determining childhood experiences are linked with the experiences of the
+ species -- that the individual lives the universal fate of mankind. The past
+ defines the present because mankind has not yet mastered its own history.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The basic work in civilization is non-libidinal, is labor; labor is
+ "unpleasantness," and such unpleasantness has to be enforced.
+
+ [...]
+
+ To be sure, there is a mode of work which offers a high degree of libidinal
+ satisfaction, which is pleasurable in its execution. And artistic work, where
+ it is genuine, seems to grow out of a non-repressive instinctual constellation
+ and to envisage non-repressive aims -- so much so that the term sublimation
+ seems to require considerable modification if applied to this kind of work.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The "automatization" of the superego 25 indicates the defense mechanisms by
+ which society meets the threat. The defense consists chiefly in a strengthening
+ of controls not so much over the instincts as over consciousness, which, if
+ left free, might recognize the work of repression in the bigger and better
+ satisfaction of needs. The manipulation of consciousness which has occurred
+ throughout the orbit of contemporary industrial civilization has been described
+ in the various interpretations of totalitarian and "popular cultures":
+ co-ordination of the private and public existence, of spontaneous and required
+ reactions. The promotion of thoughtless leisure activities, the triumph of
+ anti- intellectual ideologies, exemplify the trend.
+
+ [...]
+
+ But these personal father-images have gradually disappeared behind the
+ institutions. With the rationalization of the productive apparatus, with the
+ multiplication of functions, all domination assumes the form of administration.
+ At its peak, the concentration of economic power seems to turn into anonymity:
+ everyone, even at the very top, appears to be powerless before the movements
+ and laws of the apparatus itself. Control is normally administered by offices
+ in which the controlled are the employers and the employed.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Most of the clichés with which sociology describes the process of
+ dehumanization in presentday mass culture are correct; but they seem to be
+ slanted in the wrong direction. What is retrogressive is not mechanization and
+ standardization but their containment, not the universal co-ordination but its
+ concealment under spurious liberties, choices, and individualities. The high
+ standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a
+ concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy
+ control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the
+ commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor
+ but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive
+ control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations -- and have
+ private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different
+ world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens
+ of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable
+ choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them
+ occupied and divert their attention from the real issue -- which is the
+ awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and
+ satisfactions.
+
+ The ideology of today lies in that production and consumption reproduce and
+ justify domination. But their ideological character does not change the fact
+ that their benefits are real. The repressiveness of the whole lies to a high
+ degree in its efficacy: it enhances the scope of material culture, facilitates
+ the procurement of the necessities of life, makes comfort and luxury cheaper,
+ draws ever-larger areas into the orbit of industry -- while at the same time
+ sustaining toil and destruction. The individual pays by sacrificing his time,
+ his consciousness, his dreams; civilization pays by sacrificing its own
+ promises of liberty, justice, and peace for all.
+
+ The discrepancy between potential liberation and actual repression has come to
+ maturity: it permeates all spheres of life the world over. The rationality of
+ progress heightens the irrationality of its organization and direction.
+ Social cohesion and administrative power are sufficiently strong to protect the
+ whole from direct aggression, but not strong enough to eliminate the
+ accumulated aggressiveness. It turns against those who do not belong to the
+ whole, whose existence is its denial. This foe appears as the archenemy and
+ Antichrist himself : he is everywhere at all times ; he represents hidden and
+ sinister forces, and his omnipresence requires total mobilization.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Being is essentially the striving for pleasure. This striving becomes an "aim"
+ in the human existence: the erotic impulse to combine living substance into
+ ever larger and more durable units is the instinctual source of civilization.
+ The sex instincts are life instincts: the impulse to preserve and enrich life
+ by mastering nature in accordance with the developing vital needs is originally
+ an erotic impulse.
+ Ananke is experienced as the barrier against the satisfaction of the life
+ instincts, which seek pleasure, not security. And the "struggle for existence"
+ is originally a struggle for pleasure: culture begins with the collective
+ implementation of this aim. Later, however, the struggle for existence is
+ organized in the interest of domination: the erotic basis of culture is
+ transformed. When philosophy conceives the essence of being as Logos, it is
+ already the Logos of domination -- commanding, mastering, directing reason, to
+ which man and nature are to be subjected Freud' s interpretation of being in
+ terms of Eros recaptures the early stage of Plato's philosophy, which conceived
+ of culture not as the repressive sublimation but as the free
+ self-development of Eros. As early as Plato, this conception appears as an
+ archaic-mythical residue. Eros is being absorbed into Logos, and Logos is
+ reason which subdues the instincts.
+ The history of ontology reflects the reality principle which governs the world
+ ever more exclusively: The insights contained in the metaphysical notion of
+ Eros were driven underground. They survived, in eschatological distortion, in
+ many heretic movements, in the hedonistic philosophy. Their history has still
+ to be written -- as has the history of the transformation of Eros in Agape. 29
+ Freud's own theory follows the general trend: in his work, the rationality of
+ the predominant reality principle supersedes the metaphysical speculations on
+ Eros.
+
+ [...]
+
+ As an isolated individual phenomenon , the reactivation of narcissistic libido
+ is not culture-building but neurotic: The difference between a neurosis and a
+ sublimation is evidently the social aspect of the phenomenon . A neurosis
+ isolates; a sublimation unites.