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tracing of its evolutionary presence throughout the course of our
experiences. I think it should be noted that an unstated, positively
correlated state probably accompanies each of these structural
transformations of anxiety . Freud does indeed observe that "mental
health very much depends on the superego's being normally
developed-that is , on its having become sufficiently impersonal."
And that has not happened with people who suffer from neuroses;
"their super-ego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a
child; and their morality operates in a primitive fashion in that the
ego gets itself punished by the super-ego. "
It
is to be presumed that a
similar process of evolution might be observed in culture as well.
That is true for Freud in some degree; in some other degree it is less
than true; and, in another sense entirely, it is not true at all.
The degree to which it is true for Freud is suggested in this
passage from
The Future of an Illusion (1927):
It is not true that the human mind has undergone no develop–
ments since the earliest times and that , in contrast to the
advances of science and technology, it is the same today as it was
at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these mental
advances at once .
It
is in keeping with the course of human
development that external coercion gradually becomes inter–
nalized; for a special mental agency, man's super-ego, takes it
over. . . . Every child presents this process of transformation to
us; only by that means does it become a moral and social being.
This process is, Freud concludes, "a most precious cultural asset."
The degree to which it may be less than true is expressed in his last
great work,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930). In this work Freud
asks the single major question "Why is man unhappy?" and he then
proceeds to supply himself and the reader with a superabundance of
answers.
These answers divide into two categories . First, we are
unhappy because we "cannot tolerate the amounts of frustration
which society imposes . . . in the service of its cultural ideals." That
frustration expresses itself most fully in civilized humanity's sexual
life, which, Freud writes, beginning with the prohibition against an
incestuous choice of object, has undergone "the most drastic
mutilation." Additional taboos , laws and customs ordaining still
further restrictions have followed, and although not all societies are
equally severe in the constraints they impose, the society of Western
civilization has gone the farthest in restrictively prescribing
