THE BLACK CAT
839
peratives with which instinct, in its revolt against society's constraints,
opposes the categorical injunctions of morality so that, at times,
criminals or delinquents commit their misdeeds or crimes, feeling
they fulfil an imperative duty. 2 Since the instincts and their wild
and savage components form the primitive subsoil of the human
psyche Poe was right in asserting "perverseness"-here meant the
compulsion to gratify the instincts- to be one of our prime, basic
endowments, .and to swear it by his similarly endowed soul.
As
we know, however, the genital function was too repressed in
Poe for us to find it openly expressed in his perversity. Poe's per–
verseness is never other than erotized aggression, whether directed
outwards against others or inwards against himself: it is always
sadism or masochism. In
The Imp of the Perverse,
written some two
years later than this tale and, doubtless, also between drinking bouts,
the protagonist, by means of a poisoned candle, succeeds in killing
a greybeard and sort of John Allan, whose heir he is. For some time
he remains undetected, enjoying the fruits of his crime and
his
feeling
of immunity, while convinced that the deed was done, not at the
urge of the Imp of the Perverse but coldly, "rationally." Finally, how–
ever, the fatal Demon one day attacks him in the street, whereupon,
moved by some irresistible impulse he cries, "I am safe- I am safe!"
and, then, immediately confesses his crime to the crowd. The reader
will recognize here that confessional urge which has attracted the
notice of psychoanalysts
3
and which appears to be motivated by two
apparently opposite trends: the pressure of conscience which de–
mands punishment for our sins, and our instinctual urges towards
criminal activities, which may even reach the exhibitionism we find
here. Confessions of crime, we must remember, gratify the criminal's
exhibitionist urges and we know how murderers like to boast of their
deeds.
4
Thus, if the urge to commit guilty and forbidden deeds will even
borrow its compulsive character from the external morality primarily
derived from those who taught us and, later, from our imperative
super-egos or moral consciences, the confessional urge, which might,
at first sight, seem only dictated by remorse and conscience, displays,
in its turn, many of the instinctual features of the id, that primitive,
bottomless reservoir of our most savage instincts. Thus, there is a
constant interchange between these two psychic systems. Before,
