404
PARTISAN REVIEW
But why does the officer present this awful realization as he
does? To him it seems not the most terrible point of an agonizing
ordeal, but a moment so tempting that he finally offers his own body
to the Harrow . The officer's attitude makes it clear that the torture
machine, and indeed the whole penal colony, embodies a powerful
masochistic fantasy. The workings of the machine dramatize what
Freud calls "moral masochism," and show how closely it is related to
the more obviously erotic perversion.
The moral masochist, who has a sadistic conscience, continu–
ally seeks punishment, either from the outside world or within
himself in the form of guilt. Although this is a familiar pattern in life
and in literature, it's difficult to see how the superego's sadism
toward the ego could be pleasurable, even in an unconscious way .
But in "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud tells us of the
superego:
... [it
1
is as much a representative of the id as of the external
world . It came into being through the introjection into the ego of
the first objects of the id's libidinal impulses-namely, the two
parents . In this process the relation to those objects was desex–
ualized ....
In
moral masochism, however, "morality becomes sexualized once
more, the Oedipus-complex is revived and the way is opened for a
regression from morality to the Oedipus complex." That is, the
moral masochist unknowingly seeks in the feeling of guilt the
libidinal gratificatioris of the Oedipus complex .
The torture fantasy is a graphic illustration of this regression.
For the guilt machine is also a sexual image: the details of its opera–
tion suggest an exciting and terrifying act containing the most
significant motifs of infantile sexuality.
That is, the machine, in its overdetermined symbolism, is the
expression of a number of unconscious ideas. At one level the
machine represents the workings of guilt, a partly conscious phe–
nomenon in the moral life of the adult. But viewed from a slightly
different angle, the machine also reveals the unconscious ideas
enacted in the conscious phenomenon, the sources of the adult's self–
inflicted moral pain in the psychosexual experience of the child.
Thus the torture machine contains and dramatizes a whole
psychological history, both past and present, cause and effect, in a
single complex and self-confirming expression.
