Jonah Bossewitch	November 16, 1995

PSY 365	Professor Sugarman

Civilization and its Discontents (7-8)

After giving us his analysis of the discontent that Civilization creates Freud turns to the question of how civilization actually manages to control the aggressive tendencies that threaten to tear it apart. Freud attributes the survival of civilization to the development of perhaps the most powerful authority of all - guilt. Guilt is the most powerful authority of all since its source is internal. By harnessing the power of an individuals own will he is (usually) opposed by a force equal to the original. Freud "reject(s) the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad." (This position is not as obvious as Freud would have us believe - many philosophers have argued for the existence of moral qualities in the external world.) He must therefore give us an explanation of how this sense of guilt develops. Freud finds "two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on, from fear of the superego." As he has argued previously, Freud traces the development of the super-ego to the Oedipus complex, whether or not the father is actually killed. Of course, being true to his slippery nature, Freud claims that "the severity of the super-ego which a child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has himself met with." In the end, Freud concedes that he has no answers to the problems of civilization, even after he likens mankind to a neurotic organism. Perhaps what society really needs is 20 years of collective psychoanalysis.