Freud - Complete Works (724 page)

   No, our science is no illusion.
But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot
give us we can get elsewhere.

4462

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

(1930)

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4464

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

I

It is impossible to escape the impression that
people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek
power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others,
and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet,
in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of
forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.
There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold
admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and
achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of
the multitude. One might easily be inclined to suppose that it is
after all only a minority which appreciates these great men, while
the large majority cares nothing for them. But things are probably
not as simple as that, thanks to the discrepancies between
people’s thoughts and their actions, and to the diversity of
their wishful impulses.

   One of these exceptional few
calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had sent him my
small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered
that he entirely agreed with my judgement upon religion, but that
he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of
religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar
feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds
confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in
millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a
sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something
limitless, unbounded - as it were, ‘oceanic’. This
feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of
faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but
it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by
the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into
particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may,
he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this
oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every
illusion.

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   The views expressed by the friend
whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of
illusion in a poem,¹ caused me no small difficulty. I cannot
discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not
easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to
describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible -
and I am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of
characterization - nothing remains but to fall back on the
ideational content which is most readily associated with the
feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly, he means the same
thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat
eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted
death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world.’² That
is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one
with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me this
seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception,
which is not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but
only such as would be present with any other act of thought of
equal range. From my own experience I could not convince myself of
the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me no right to
deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only question
is whether it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought
to be regarded as the
fons et origo
of the whole need for
religion.

  
¹
Liluli
. Since the publication of his
two books
La vie de Ramakrishna
and
La vie de
Vivekananda
, I need no longer hide the fact that the friend
spoken of in the text is Romain Rolland.

  
²
Christian Dietrich Grabbe,
Hannibal
:
‘Ja, aus der Welt werden wir nicht fallen. Wir sind einmal
darin.’

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   I have nothing to suggest which
could have a decisive influence on the solution of this problem.
The idea of men’s receiving an intimation of their connection
with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is
from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits
in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified
in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic -
explanation of such a feeling. The following line of thought
suggests itself. Normally, there is nothing of which we are more
certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego
appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off
distinctly from everything else. That such an appearance is
deceptive, and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards,
without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity
which we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of
façade - this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic
research, which should still have much more to tell us about the
relation of the ego to the id. But towards the outside, at any
rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of
demarcation. There is only one state - admittedly an unusual state,
but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological - in which it
does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary
between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the
evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that
‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to
behave as if it were a fact. What can be temporarily done away with
by a physiological function must also, of course, be liable to be
disturbed by pathological processes. Pathology has made us
acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary
lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in
which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which
parts of a person’s own body, even portions of his own mental
life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to
him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which
he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in
his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it. Thus even the
feeling of our own ego is subject to disturbances and the
boundaries of the ego are not constant.

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   Further reflection tells us that
the adult’s ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the
beginning. It must have gone through a process of development,
which cannot, of course, be demonstrated but which admits of being
constructed with a fair degree of probability.¹ An infant at
the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external
world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He
gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. He
must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of
excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs,
can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other
sources evade him from time to time - among them what he desires
most of all, his mother’s breast - and only reappear as a
result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the
first time set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the
form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is
only forced to appear by a special action. A further incentive to a
disengagement of the ego from the general mass of sensations - that
is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external
world - is provided by the frequent, manifold and unavoidable
sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal and avoidance of
which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its
unrestricted domination. A tendency arises to separate from the ego
everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it
outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a
strange and threatening ‘outside’. The boundaries of
this primitive pleasure-ego cannot escape rectification through
experience. Some of the things that one is unwilling to give up,
because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object;
and some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be
inseparable from the ego in virtue of their internal origin. One
comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction
of one’s sensory activities and through suitable muscular
action, one can differentiate between what is internal - what
belongs to the ego - and what is external - what emanates from the
outer world. In this way one makes the first step towards the
introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future
development. This differentiation, of course, serves the practical
purpose of enabling one to defend oneself against sensations of
unpleasure which one actually feels or with which one is
threatened. In order to fend off certain unpleasurable excitations
arising from within, the ego can use no other methods than those
which it uses against unpleasure coming from without, and this is
the starting-point of important pathological disturbances.

  
¹
Cf. the many writings on the topic of
ego-development and ego-feeling, dating from Ferenczi’s paper
on ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality’
(1913) to Federn’s contributions of 1926, 1927 and
later.

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   In this way, then, the ego
detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more
correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it
separates off an external world from itself. Our present
ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more
inclusive - indeed, an all-embracing - feeling which corresponded
to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If
we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this
primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it
would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply
demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to
it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would
be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe
- the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the
‘oceanic’ feeling.

   But have we a right to assume the
survival of something that was originally there, alongside of what
was later derived from it? Undoubtedly. There is nothing strange in
such a phenomenon, whether in the mental field or elsewhere. In the
animal kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed
species have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we find all the
simple forms still in existence to-day. The race of the great
saurians is extinct and has made way for the mammals; but a true
representative of it, the crocodile, still lives among us. This
analogy may be too remote, and it is also weakened by the
circumstance that the lower species which survive are for the most
part not the true ancestors of the present-day more highly
developed species. As a rule the intermediate links have died out
and are known to us only through reconstruction. In the realm of
the mind, on the other hand, what is primitive is so commonly
preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen
from it that it is unnecessary to give instances as evidence. When
this happens it is usually in consequence of a divergence in
development: one portion (in the quantitative sense) of an attitude
or instinctual impulse has remained unaltered, while another
portion has undergone further development.

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   This brings us to the more
general problem of preservation in the sphere of the mind. The
subject has hardly been studied yet; but it is so attractive and
important that we may be allowed to turn our attention to it for a
little, even though our excuse is insufficient. Since we overcame
the error of supposing that the forgetting we are familiar with
signified a destruction of the memory-trace - that is, its
annihilation - we have been inclined to take the opposite view,
that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish -
that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable
circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough)
it can once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this
assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field. We
will choose as an example the history of the Eternal City.¹
Historians tell us that the oldest Rome was the
Roma
Quadrata
, a fenced settlement on the Palatine. Then followed
the phase of the
Septimontium
, a federation of the
settlements on the different hills; after that came the city
bounded by the Servian wall; and later still, after all the
transformations during the periods of the republic and the early
Caesars, the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded with his
walls. We will not follow the changes which the city went through
any further, but we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we
will suppose to be equipped with the most complete historical and
topographical knowledge, may still find left of these early stages
in the Rome of to-day. Except for a few gaps, he will see the wall
of Aurelian almost unchanged. In some places he will be able to
find sections of the Servian wall where they have been excavated
and brought to light. If he knows enough - more than present-day
archaeology does - he may perhaps be able to trace out in the plan
of the city the whole course of that wall and the outline of the
Roma Quadrata
. Of the buildings which once occupied this
ancient area he will find nothing, or only scanty remains, for they
exist no longer. The best information about Rome in the republican
era would only enable him at the most to point out the sites where
the temples and public buildings of that period stood. Their place
is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later
restorations made after fires or destruction. It is hardly
necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are
found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has
grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is
certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of
the city or beneath its modern buildings. This is the manner in
which the past is preserved in historical sites like Rome.