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legalized, permanent, heterosexual, monogamous, genital sexuality
as the single norm for every grown person.
Nevertheless, he concludes, the sexual life of civilized man
remains "severely impaired; it sometimes gives the impression of
being in process of involution as a function .... One is probably
justified in assuming that its importance as a source of feelings of
happiness, and therefore in the fulfillment of our aim in life, has
sensibly diminished." Half a century has passed since Freud made
these statements. In that interval the sexual life of part of Western
culture has begun to undergo a series of qualitative changes, in both
attitudes and behavior, that are neither foreseen nor made room for
in Freud's assertions. Whether his statement about sexuality's
decrease as a source of feelings of happiness holds or must also be
modified remains, in my opinion, an arguable question.
The second great source of man's unhappiness is his instinctive
aggressiveness . This force expresses itself directly enough in
collective, organized human history, but it also makes itself felt in
the sacrifices that civilization exacts from each individual's original
will to Hobbesian undertakings. The centrality of the aggressive
instinct in Freud's later writings can hardly be excessively estimated .
It
constitutes for the later Freud "the greatest impediment to
civilization ." And civilization deals with this threat by introjecting
and internalizing it in each one of us, by sending that aggressiveness
back to where it came from and directing it towards our own egos.
I am left with an abiding sentiment of contradiction. On the
one hand, the intellectual construction itself is massive, logical and,
once one has entered into it, formidably difficult to disengage from,
if it is not entirely escape-proof.
It
is virtually claustral in the way it
closes down one alley of possibility after another and leaves
progressively decreasing scope for mitigation and alleviation. On the
other hand, the psychic reality that it purports to exemplify is itself
contradictory in nature. Not only is it grounded in indissolubly
opposed impulses; its fundamental character is constituted in
conflicting conceptual terms. And it anticipates no ending to either
discord, contestations, or contradictions. The superego is itself one
of the central sites of such antagonisms . It is the most latterly
developed of the three primary institutions of the mental apparatus;
it consists of portions of the experienced world that have been
internalized and differentially transmuted; it remains open to
alterations throughout the course of life, and is itself a register in
each individual person of cultural development. Yet it is also, in
