Civilization And Its Discontents

Culture is “the sum of the achievements and institutions which differentiate our lives from those of our animal forebears” (29) and that protect people and regulate their interactions. Culture is the central force that binds together individuals into larger groups; it imposes its rules in the form of the super-ego. The main challenge of culture is to control people’s natural aggressiveness so that they may learn to cooperate and not damage or kill each other.

Along with a creative life instinct, called libido or Eros, humans possess a destructive death instinct that focuses on obstacles to personal desires. Left unchecked, it takes the form of aggression, which society must actively suppress for the good of the group. Sometimes a culture is so successful at suppressing individual aggression that the destructive instinct turns inward and damages the person.

The ego is the sense of self, the feeling of control, the decision-maker within each individual. The ego navigates the daily challenges of meeting the mind’s instinctual needs, diverting some of those energies into constructive work and cooperation with others. Perched atop the ego is the super-ego, the rules imposed by society and adopted as part of a person’s own code of conduct. The ego’s conflict with both the super-ego and the buried, unconscious energies of the id cause the ego to experience anxiety and guilt. The ego’s struggle can affect the person’s character traits, sometimes in unhealthy ways.

Guilt is a painful feeling imposed by the super-ego onto the mind as punishment for antisocial behaviors. Without a fully functioning super-ego, young children don’t yet feel guilt but instead fear punishment only. Later, under full command of the super-ego, adults effectively punish themselves whenever they commit, or even think of committing, a social wrong.

Although we experience the self, or the ego, as “an independent unitary thing” (5), it actually rests upon a foundation of “an unconscious mental entity” (5), or the id. The ego plays the role of the id’s mask and cannot exercise unlimited power over the id; the id is the seat of “instinctual cravings” (86).

In the Freudian system, libido is the creative life force of an individual; it consists of sexual energy that either finds direct outlet in sexual behavior or sublimates itself into constructive work and generalized affection for others. Often, libido is simply repressed, whereupon it finds outlet in odd behaviors, habits, tics, and neuroses.

A neurosis is a failed attempt by the ego to control the energies of the id, which leak out in symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, anxiety, depression, phobias, and personality disorders such as narcissism and sociopathy. “The symptoms of neurosis, as we have learned, are essentially substitutive gratifications for unfulfilled sexual wishes” (82).

The pleasure-principle is the instinctive search for pleasure and avoidance of pain that motivates the id and its libidinous energies. The ego can sublimate and re-channel this principle into socially beneficial activities.

The reality-principle, which regards the outside world as a resource that can be exploited rationally, is what the ego uses in its quest for satisfaction. The ego transmutes the energies of the id and its pleasure-principle into a search for happiness based on realistic assessments of the world.