70
PARTISAN REVLEW
the physics of his time, he reflected much of its social conservatism. He
saw the energies of the mind as something to be exploited and con–
trolled in a methodical and energy-conserving fashion. He also shared, as
we shall see, the conservative skepticism that pervaded modern society.
What Freud did not share was the relatively uncritical attitude
of
conservative nineteenth-century politics and economics. Freud was
relentlessly self-critical in his work, one could almost say too self-critical,
in that his view of his own work was tinged with skepticism and often
kept him from making imaginative leaps. But for all his self-awareness (or
perhaps because of it), Freud remained conservative in his attitude toward
the individual; he was fundamentally unsure that the rational side of man
could ever relax its grip once it achieved dominance over the passionate,
instinctual side. Thus, he saw the individual not as a source of values but
as a source of resistance to them.
In
Civilization aHd Its Discol1leHts,
Freud's doubts about the individual
ring their loudest and most characteristic note. The entire work is an at–
tempt to discover the extent to which men can achieve instinctual satis–
faction by uniting with other men and gaining control over some of the
suffering that is their common lot. Freud calls this binding together
"civilization." But he is deeply pessimistic about the civilizing process,
and the reasons for that pessimism lie, again, in his view of the psyche.
Where Marx would argue that man is a social animal who has not yet
fully recognized the need for a truly social - and therefore cooperative -
approach to existence, Freud claims just the opposite: Man is first and
foremost subject to his individual instinctual demands, and men have en–
tered into a social mode ofliving purely as a means of extending survival.
But it is a means with a price.
At one point in
Civilizatioll alld Its Disco
II
tell ts,
citing the need for
adversaries to unite a people in a common cause, Freud remarks:
... it is intelligible that the attempt to establish anew, communist
civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the
persecution of the bourgeois.
And at another point he says:
I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist
system.... But I am able to recognize that the psychological
premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In
abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression
of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not
the strongest: but we have in no way altered the difference in power
