Civilization
{"WorkMasterId":6362,"WpPageId":281644,"ParentWpPageId":193819,"Slug":"civilization","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/john-stuart-mill/civilization/","RelativeUrl":"theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/john-stuart-mill/civilization/","HasFullText":true,"RawHtmlLength":185484,"CleanHtmlLength":130733,"Kicker":"Philosophy Work","Title":"Civilization","Deck":"Mill examines civilization as social coordination, progress, power, public opinion, and the moral costs of modern collective life.","BackLink":{"Text":"Back to John Stuart Mill","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/john-stuart-mill/"},"AuthorCard":{"Label":"Author","Title":"John Stuart Mill","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/john-stuart-mill/","MediaHref":"","ImageSrc":"https://chrisdeasy.com/wp-content/uploads/john-stuart-mill-01-london-stereoscopic-c1870-portrait-1.jpg","ImageAlt":"John Stuart Mill by the London Stereoscopic Company, c. 1870","FilterTerra":"Western Europe","ClickText":"John Stuart Mill","ClickHref":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/philosophers/john-stuart-mill/","Copies":["1806 CE – 1873 CE","Pentonville, London","English liberal utilitarian philosopher of liberty, individuality, higher pleasures, inductive logic, political economy, representative government, women\u0027s equality, religious skepticism, and empiricist method."]},"ContextCards":[{"Label":"Period","Key":"Period:4","Title":"Modern History","DateText":"1800 CE – 1944 CE","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/eras-of-thought/philosophers-of-modern-history/"},{"Label":"Era","Key":"Era:11","Title":"Long 19th Century","DateText":"1870 CE – 1913 CE","Url":"https://chrisdeasy.com/theos/humanities/philosophy/eras-of-thought/philosophers-of-modern-history/philosophers-of-the-long-19th-century/"},{"Label":"Composition","Title":"1836 CE","Url":"","DateText":""}],"DateNote":"Displayed as 1836 CE for the published essay.","GeoCards":[{"Label":"Region","Key":"Region:1"},{"Label":"Terra Avita","Key":"TerraAvita:1"},{"Label":"Terra Avita Region","Key":"TerraAvitaRegion:2"},{"Label":"Modern Country","Key":"Country:GBR:1"}],"OriginalTitle":"Civilization","Language":"English","DisciplineCards":[{"Label":"Primary Discipline","Key":"Discipline:political-philosophy"},{"Label":"Secondary Discipline","Key":"Discipline:ethics"}],"Tradition":"British empiricism; liberal utilitarianism; associationism; political economy; social reform","FullText":{"Title":"Full Text","Copy":"Full text from Marxists Internet Archive: Eros and Civilization .","Url":"","Label":"","Kicker":"","Cards":[]},"CoreThesis":["Mill examines civilization as social coordination, progress, power, public opinion, and the moral costs of modern collective life."],"Classification":{"AlternateTitles":"Civilization essay","KeyConcepts":"civilization; progress; public opinion; social power; reform; individuality","Methodology":"Direct Mill work-cluster record based on SEP, IEP, Britannica, OLL Collected Works, Gutenberg/Wikisource surfaces, catalog records, and scholarship. No full text is imported.","Structure":"One work-cluster page with explicit integer display year, date note, evidence note, discipline mapping, and public source evidence. Serial publication and posthumous publication notes are documented without importing full text."},"Arguments":["Mill examines civilization as social coordination, progress, power, public opinion, and the moral costs of modern collective life."],"Influence":{"InfluencedBy":"James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Harriet Taylor Mill, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Auguste Comte, Coleridge, associationist psychology, British empiricism, and nineteenth-century reform politics.","InfluenceOn":""},"Significance":["Accepted as a direct Mill essay through OLL Collected Works and scholarship evidence.","Mill remains central for liberty, utilitarian ethics, rights, democracy, public reason, induction, scientific method, women\u0027s equality, political economy, secular religion, and liberal social reform."],"EvidenceNote":["Accepted as a direct Mill essay through OLL Collected Works and scholarship evidence."],"MainSections":[{"Kind":"RawSection","Title":"Full Text","BodyHtml":"\u003cp class=\"dz-philo__section-copy dz-philo__full-text-source\"\u003eFull text from \u003ca href=\"https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/index.htm\"\u003eMarxists Internet Archive: Eros and Civilization\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n \u003carticle class=\"dz-philo__full-text-body\"\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003cH3\u003ePolitical Preface 1966\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression \u0026#8212; in other words, to learn the gay science (\u003cem\u003egaya sciencia\u003c/em\u003e) of how to use the social wealth for shaping man\u0026#8217;s world in accordance with his Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the purveyors of Death. This optimism was based on the assumption that the rationale for the continued acceptance of domination no longer prevailed, that scarcity and the need for toil were only \u0026#8220;artificially\u0026#8221; perpetuated \u0026#8212; in the interest of preserving the system of domination I neglected or minimized the fact that this \u0026#8220;obsolescent rationale had been vastly strengthened (if not replaced), by even more efficient forms of social control. The very forces which rendered society capable of pacifying the struggle for existence served to repress in the individuals the need for such a liberation. Where the high standard of living does not suffice for reconciling the people with their life and their rulers, the \u0026#8220;social engineering\u0026#8221; of the soul and the \u0026#8220;science of human relations\u0026#8221; provide the necessary libidinal cathexis. In the affluent society, the authorities are hardly forced to justify their dominion. They deliver the goods; they satisfy the sexual and the aggressive energy of their subjects. Like the unconscious, the destructive power of which they so successfully represent, they are this side of good and evil, and the principle of contradiction has no place in their logic.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs the affluence of society depends increasingly on the uninterrupted production and consumption of waste, gadgets, planned obsolescence, and means of destruction, the individuals have to be adapted to these requirements in more than the traditional ways. The \u0026#8220;economic whip,\u0026#8221; even in its most refined forms, seems no longer adequate to insure the continuation of the struggle for existence in today\u0026#8217;s outdated organization, nor do the laws and patriotism seem adequate to insure active popular support for the ever more dangerous expansion of the system. Scientific management of instinctual needs has long since become a vital factor in the reproduction of the system: merchandise which has to be bought and used is made into objects of the libido; and the national Enemy who has to be fought and hated is distorted and inflated to such an extent that he can activate and satisfy aggressiveness in the depth dimension of the unconscious. Mass democracy provides the political paraphernalia for effectuating this introjection of the Reality Principle; it not only permits the people (up to a point) to chose their own masters and to participate (up to a point) in the government which governs them \u0026#8212; it also allows the masters to disappear behind the technological veil of the productive and destructive apparatus which they control, and it conceals the human (and material) costs of the benefits and comforts which it bestows upon those who collaborate. The people, efficiently manipulated and organized, are free; ignorance and impotence, introjected heteronomy is the price of their freedom.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt makes no sense to talk about liberation to free men and we are free if we do not belong to the oppressed minority. And it makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before. But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the earth into hell. The inferno is still concentrated in certain far away places: Vietnam, the Congo, South Africa, and in the ghettos of the \u0026#8220;affluent society\": in Mississippi and Alabama, in Harlem. These infernal places illuminate the whole. It is easy and sensible to see in them only pockets of poverty and misery in a growing society capable of eliminating them gradually and without a catastrophe. This interpretation may even be realistic and correct. The question is: eliminated at what cost \u0026#8212; not in dollars and cents, but in human lives and in human freedom?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI hesitate to use the word \u0026#8212; freedom \u0026#8212; because it is precisely in the name of freedom that crimes against humanity are being perpetrated. This situation is certainly not new in history: poverty and exploitation were products of economic freedom; time and again, people were liberated all over the globe by their lords and masters, and their new liberty turned out to be submission, not to the rule of law but to the rule of the law of the others. What started as subjection by force soon became \u0026#8220;voluntary servitude,\u0026#8221; collaboration in reproducing a society which made servitude increasingly rewarding and palatable. The reproduction, bigger and better, of the same ways of life came to mean, ever more clearly and consciously, the closing of those other possible ways of life which could do away with the serfs and the masters, with the productivity of repression.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eToday, this union of freedom and servitude has become \u0026#8220;natural\u0026#8221; and a vehicle of progress. Prosperity appears more and more as the prerequisite an d by-product of a self-propelling productivity ever seeking new outlets for consumption and for destruction, in outer and inner space, while being restrained from \u0026#8220;overflowing\u0026#8221; into the areas of misery \u0026#8212; at home and abroad. As against this amalgam of liberty and aggression, production and destruction, the image of human freedom is dislocated: it becomes the project of the subversion of this sort of progress. Liberation of the instinctual needs for \u0026#8212; peace and quiet, of the \u0026#8220;asocial\u0026#8221; autonomous Eros presupposes liberation from repressive affluence: a reversal in the direction of progress.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was the thesis of Eros and Civilization, more fully developed in my One-Dimensional Man, that man could avoid the fate of a Welfare-Through-Warfare State only by achieving a new starting point where he could reconstruct the productive apparatus without that \u0026#8220;inner-worldly asceticism\u0026#8221; which provided the mental basis for domination and exploration. This image of man was the determinate negation of Nietzsche\u0026#8217;s superman: man intelligent enough and healthy enough to dispense with all heros and heroic virtues, man without the impulse to live dangerously, to meet the challenge; man with the good conscience to make life an end-in-itself, to live in joy a life without fear. \u0026#8220;Polymorphous sexuality\u0026#8221; was the term which I used to indicate that the new direction of progress would depend completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs: to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor. The old formula, the development of prevailing needs and faculties, seemed to be inadequate; the emergence of new, qualitatively different needs and faculties seemed to be the prerequisite, the content of liberation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe idea of such a new Reality Principle was based on the assumption that the material (technical) preconditions for its development were either established, or could be established, in the advanced industrial societies of our time. It was self-understood that the translation of technical capabilities into reality would mean a revolution. But the very scope and effectiveness of the democratic introjection have suppressed the historical subject, the agent of revolution: free people are not in need of liberation, and the oppressed are not strong enough to liberate themselves. These conditions redefine the concept of Utopia: liberation is the most realistic, the most concrete of all historical possibilities and at the same time the most rationally and effectively repressed \u0026#8212; the most abstract and remote possibility. No philosophy, no theory can undo the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects. When, in the more or less affluent societies, productivity has reached a level at which the masses participate in its benefits, and at which the opposition is effectively and democratically \u0026#8220;contained,\u0026#8221; then the conflict between master and slave is also effectively contained. Or rather it has changed its social location. It exists, and explodes, in the revolt of the backward countries against the intolerable heritage of colonialism and its prolongation by neo-colonialism. The Marxian concept stipulated that only those who were free from the blessings of capitalism could possibly change it into a free society: those whose existence was the very negation of capitalist property could become the historical agents of liberation. In the international arena, the Marxian concept regains its full validity. To the degree to which the exploitative societies have become global powers, to the degree to which the new independent nations have become the battlefield of their interests, the \u0026#8220;external\u0026#8221; forces of rebellion have ceased to be extraneous forces: they are the enemy within the system. This does not make these rebels the messengers of humanity. By themselves, they are not (as little as the Marxian proletariat was) the representatives of freedom. Here too, the Marxian concept applies according to which the international proletariat would get its intellectual armor from outside: the \u0026#8220;lightning of thought\u0026#8221; would strike the \u0026#8220;\u003cem\u003enaiven Volksboden.\u003c/em\u003e\u0026#8221; Grandiose ideas about the union of theory and practice do injustice to the feeble beginnings of such a union. Yet the revolt in the backward countries has found a response in the advanced countries where youth is in protest against repression in affluence and war abroad.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRevolt against the false fathers, teachers, and heroes solidarity with the wretched of the earth: is there any \u0026#8220;organic\u0026#8221; connection between the two facets of the protest? There seems to be an all but instinctual solidarity. The revolt at home against home seems largely impulsive, its targets hard to define: nausea caused by \u0026#8220;the way of life,\u0026#8221; revolt as a matter of physical and mental hygiene. The body against \u0026#8220;the machine\u0026#8221; \u0026#8212; not against the mechanism constructed to make life safer and milder, to attenuate the cruelty of nature, but against the machine which has taken over the mechanism: the political machine, the corporate machine, the cultural and educational machine which has welded blessing and curse into one rational whole. The whole has become too big, its cohesion too strong, its functioning too efficient \u0026#8212; does the power of the negative concentrate in still partly unconquered, primitive, elemental forces? The body against the machine: men, women, and children fighting, with the most primitive tools, the most brutal and destructive machine of all times and keeping it in check \u0026#8212; does guerilla warfare define the revolution of our time?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHistorical backwardness may again become the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress to another direction. Technical and scientific overdevelopment stands refuted when the radar-equipped bombers, the chemicals, and the \u0026#8220;special forces\u0026#8221; of the affluent society are let loose on the poorest of the earth, on their shacks, hospitals, and rice fields. The \u0026#8220;accidents\u0026#8221; reveal the substance: they tear the technological veil behind which the real powers are hiding. The capability to overkill and to overburn, and the mental behavior that goes with it are by-products of the development of the productive forces within a system of exploitation and repression; they seem to become More productive the more comfortable the system becomes to its privileged subjects. The affluent society has now demonstrated that it is a society at war; if its citizens have not noticed it, its victims certainly have.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe historical advantage of the late-comer, of technical backwardness, may be that of skipping the stage of the affluent society. Backward peoples by their poverty and weakness may be forced to forego the aggressive and wasteful use of science and technology, to keep the productive apparatus \u003cem\u003eà la mesure de l\u0027homme, \u003c/em\u003eunder his control, for the satisfaction and development of vital individual and collective needs.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor the overdeveloped countries, this chance would be tantamount to the abolition of the conditions under which man\u0026#8217;s labor perpetuates, as self-propelling power, his subordination to the productive apparatus, and, with it, the obsolete forms of the struggle for existence. The abolition of these forms is, just as it has always been, the task of political action, but there is a decisive difference in the present situation. Whereas previous revolutions brought about a larger and more rational development of the productive forces, in the overdeveloped societies of today, revolution would mean reversal of this trend: elimination of overdevelopment, and of its repressive rationality. The rejection of affluent productivity, far from being a commitment to purity, simplicity, and \u0026#8220;nature,\u0026#8221; might be the token (and weapon) of a higher stage of human development, based on the achievements of the technological society. As the production of wasteful and destructive goods is discontinued (a stage which would mean the end of capitalism in all its forms) \u0026#8212; the somatic and mental mutilations inflicted on man by this production may be undone. In other words, the shaping of the environment, the transformation of nature, may be propelled by the liberated rather than the repressed Life Instincts, and aggression would be subjected to their demands.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe historical chance of the backward countries is in the absence of conditions which make for repressive exploitative technology and industrialization for aggressive productivity. The very fact that the affluent warfare state unleashes its annihilating power on the backward countries illuminates the magnitude of the threat. In the revolt of the backward peoples, the rich societies meet, in an elemental and brutal form, not only a social revolt in the traditional sense, but also an instinctual revolt \u0026#8212; biological hatred. The spread of guerilla warfare at the height of the technological century is a symbolic event: the energy of the human body rebels against intolerable repression and throws itself against the engines of repression. Perhaps the rebels know nothing about the ways of organizing a society, of constructing a socialist society; perhaps they are terrorized by their own leaders who know something about it, but the rebels\u0026#8217; frightful existence is in total need of liberation, and their freedom is the contradiction to the overdeveloped societies.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWestern civilization has always glorified the hero, the sacrifice of life for the city, the state, the nation; it has rarely asked the question of whether the established city, state, nation were worth the sacrifice. The taboo on the unquestionable prerogative of the whole has always been maintained and enforced, and it has been maintained and enforced the more brutally the more the whole was supposed to consist of free individuals. The question is now being asked \u0026#8212; asked from without \u0026#8212; and it is taken up by those who refuse to play the game of the affluents \u0026#8212; the question of whether the abolition of this whole is not the precondition for the emergence of a truly human city, state, nation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe odds are overwhelmingly on the side of the powers that be. What is romantic is not the positive evaluation of the liberation movements in the backward countries, but the positive evaluation of their prospects. There is no reason why science, technology, and money should not again do the job of destruction, and then the job of reconstruction in their own image. The price of progress is frightfully high, but we shall overcome. Not only the deceived victims but also their chief of state have said so. And yet there are photographs that show a row of half naked corpses laid out for the victors in Vietnam: they resemble in all details the pictures of the starved, emasculated corpses of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Nothing and nobody can ever overcome these deeds, nor the sense of guilt which reacts in further aggression. But aggression can be turned against the aggressor. The strange myth according to which the unhealing wound can only be healed by the weapon that afflicted the wound has not yet been validated in history: the violence which breaks the chain of violence may start a new chain. And yet, in and against this continuum, the fight will continue. It is not the struggle of Eros against Thanatos, because the established society too has its Eros: it protects, perpetuates, and enlarges life. And it is not a bad life for those who comply and repress. But in the balance, the general presumption is that aggressiveness in defense of life is less detrimental to the Life Instincts than aggressiveness in aggression.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn defense of life: the phrase has explosive meaning in the affluent society. It involves not only the protest against neo-colonial war and slaughter, the burning of draft cards at the risk of prison, the fight for civil rights, but also the refusal to speak the dead language of affluence, to wear the clean clothes, to enjoy the gadgets of affluence, to go through the education for affluence. The new bohème, the beatniks and hipsters, the peace creeps \u0026#8212; all these \u0026#8220;decadents\u0026#8221; now have become what decadence probably always was: poor refuge of defamed humanity.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCan we speak of a juncture between the erotic and political dimension?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn and against the deadly efficient organization of the affluent society, not only radical protest, but even the attempt to formulate, to articulate, to give word to protest assume a childlike, ridiculous immaturity. Thus it is ridiculous and perhaps \u0026#8220;logical\u0026#8221; that the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley terminated in the row caused by the appearance of a sign with the four-letter word. It is perhaps equally ridiculous and right to see deeper significance in the buttons worn by some of the demonstrators (among them infants) against the slaughter in Vietnam: MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR. On the other side, against the new youth who refuse and rebel, are the representatives of the old order who can no longer protect its life without sacrificing it in the work of destruction and waste and pollution. They now include the representatives of organized labor \u0026#8212; correctly so to the extent to which employment within the capitalist prosperity depends on the continued defense of the established social system.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCan the outcome, for the near future, be in doubt? The people, the majority of the people in the affluent society, are on the side of that which is \u0026#8212; not that which can and ought to be. And the established order is strong enough and efficient enough to justify this adherence and to assure its continuation. However, the very strength and efficiency of this order may become factors of disintegration. Perpetuation of the obsolescent need for full-time labor (even in a very reduced form) will require the increasing waste of resources, the creation of ever more unnecessary jobs and services, and the growth of the military or destructive sector. Escalated wars, permanent preparation for war, and total administration may well suffice to keep the people under control, but at the cost of altering the morality on which the society still depends. Technical progress, itself a necessity for the maintenance of the established society, fosters needs and faculties which are antagonistic to the social organization of labor on which the system is built. In the course of automation, the value of the social product is to an increasingly smaller degree determined by the labor time necessary for its production. Consequently, the real social need for productive labor declines, and the vacuum must be filled with unproductive activities. An ever larger amount of the work actually performed becomes superfluous, expendable, meaningless. Although these activities can be sustained and even multiplied under total administration, there seems to exist an upper limit to their augmentation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis limit would be reached when the surplus value created by productive labor no longer suffices to pay for non-production work. A progressive reduction of labor seems to be inevitable, and for this eventuality, the system has to provide for occupation without work; it has to develop needs which transcend the market economy and may even be incompatible with it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe affluent society is in its own way preparing for this eventuality by organizing \u0026#8220;the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,\u0026#8221; the renewal of the\u0026#8221; contact with nature,\u0026#8221; the enrichment of the mind, and honors for \u0026#8220;creation for its own sake.\u0026#8221; The false ring of such proclamations is indicative \u0026#8212; of the fact that, within the established system, these aspirations are translated into administered cultural activities, sponsored by the government and the big corporations \u0026#8212; an extension of their executive arm into the soul of the masses. \u0026#8212; It is all but impossible to recognize in the aspirations thus defined those of Eros and its autonomous transformation of a repressive environment and a repressive existence. If these goals are to be satisfied without an irreconcilable conflict with the requirements of the market economy, they must be satisfied within the framework of commerce and profit. But this sort of satisfaction would be tantamount to denial, for the erotic energy of the Life Instincts cannot be freed under the dehumanizing conditions of profitable affluence. To be sure, the conflict between the necessary development of noneconomic needs which would validate the idea of the abolition of labor (life as an end in itself) on the one hand, and the necessity for maintaining the need for earning a living on the other is quite manageable (especially as long as the Enemy within and without can serve as propelling force behind the defense of the status quo). However, the conflict may become explosive if it is accompanied and aggravated by the prospective changes at the very base of advanced industrial society, namely, the gradual undermining of capitalist enterprise in the course of automation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the meantime, there are things to be done. The system has its weakest point where it shows its most brutal strength: in the escalation of its military potential (which seems to press for periodic actualization with ever shorter interruptions of peace and preparedness). This tendency seems reversible only under strongest pressure, and its reversal would open the danger spots in the social structure: its conversion into a \u0026#8220;normal\u0026#8221; capitalist system is hardly imaginable without a serious crisis and sweeping economic and political changes. Today, the opposition to war and military intervention strikes at the roots: it rebels against those whose economic and political dominion depends on the continued (and enlarged) reproduction of the military establishment, its \u0026#8220;multipliers,\u0026#8221; and the policies which necessitate this reproduction. These interests are not hard to identify, and the war against them does not require missiles, bombs, and napalm. But it does require something that is much harder to produce \u0026#8212; the spread of uncensored and unmanipulated knowledge, consciousness, and above all, the organized refusal to continue work on the material and intellectual instruments which are now being used against man \u0026#8212; for the defense of the liberty and prosperity of those who dominate the rest.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, \u003cem\u003eintellectual \u003c/em\u003eskills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action. That the idea appears utterly unrealistic does not reduce the political responsibility involved in the position and function of the intellectual in contemporary industrial society. The intellectual refusal may find support in another catalyst, the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. Their protest will continue because it is a biological necessity. \u0026#8220;By nature,\u0026#8221; the young are in the forefront of those who live and fight for Eros against Death, and against a civilization which strives to shorten the \u0026#8220;detour to death\u0026#8221; while controlling the means for lengthening the detour. But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the \u003cem\u003epolitical \u003c/em\u003efight.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#160;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003ch3\u003eIntroduction\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSigmund Freud\u0026#8217;s proposition that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts has been taken for granted. His question whether the suffering thereby inflicted upon individuals has been worth the benefits of culture has not been taken too seriously \u0026#8212; the less so since Freud himself considered the process to be inevitable and irreversible. Free gratification of man\u0026#8217;s instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#8220;Happiness,\u0026#8221; said Freud, \u0026#8220;is no cultural value.\u0026#8221; Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as fulltime occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sacrifice has paid off well: in the technically advanced areas of civilization, the conquest of nature is practically complete, and more needs of a greater number of people are fulfilled than ever before. Neither the mechanization and standardization of life, nor the mental impoverishment, nor the growing destructiveness of present-day progress provides sufficient ground for questioning the \u0026#8220;principle\u0026#8221; which has governed the progress of Western civilization. The continual increase of productivity makes constantly more realistic the promise of an even better life for all.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom. Throughout the world of industrial civilization, the domination of man by man is growing in scope and efficiency. Nor does this trend appear as an incidental, transitory regression on the road to progress. Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs are no \u0026#8220;relapse into barbarism,\u0026#8221; but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology, and domination. And the most effective subjugation and destruction of man by man takes place at the height of civilization, when the material and intellectual attainments of mankind seem to allow the creation of a truly free world.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese negative aspects of present-day culture may well indicate the obsolescence of established institutions and the emergence of new forms of civilization: repressiveness is perhaps the more vigorously maintained the more unnecessary it becomes. If it must indeed belong to the essence of civilization as such, then Freud\u0026#8217;s question as to the price of civilization would be meaningless \u0026#8212; for there would be no alternative.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut Freud\u0026#8217;s own theory provides reasons for rejecting his identification of civilization with repression. On the ground of his own theoretical achievements, the discussion of the problem must be reopened. Does the interrelation between freedom and repression, productivity and destruction, domination and progress, really constitute the principle of civilization? Or does this interrelation result only from a specific historical organization of human existence? In Freudian terms, is the conflict between pleasure principle and reality principle irreconcilable to such a degree that it necessitates the repressive transformation of man\u0026#8217;s instinctual structure? Or does it allow the concept of a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe notion of a non-repressive civilization will be discussed not as an abstract and utopian speculation. We believe that the discussion is justified on two concrete and realistic grounds: first, Freud\u0026#8217;s theoretical conception itself seems to refute his consistent denial of the historical possibility of a non-repressive civilization, and, second, the very achievements of repressive civilization seem to create the preconditions for the gradual abolition of repression. To elucidate these grounds, we shall try to reinterpret Freud\u0026#8217;s theoretical conception in terms of its own socio-historical content.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis procedure implies opposition to the revisionist Neo-Freudian schools. In contrast to the revisionists, I believe that Freud\u0026#8217;s theory is in its very substance \u0026#8220;sociological,\u0026#8221; and that no new cultural or sociological orientation is needed to reveal this substance. Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;biologism\u0026#8221; is social theory in a depth dimension that has been consistently flattened out by the Neo-Freudian schools. In shifting the emphasis from the unconscious to the conscious, from the biological to the cultural factors, they cut off the roots of society in the instincts and instead take society at the level on which it confronts the individual as his readymade \u0026#8220;environment,\u0026#8221; without questioning its origin and legitimacy. The Neo-Freudian analysis of this environment thus succumbs to the mystification of societal relations, and their critique moves only within the firmly sanctioned and well-protected sphere of established institutions. Consequently, the Neo-Freudian critique remains in a strict sense ideological: it has no conceptual basis outside the established system; most of its critical ideas and values are those provided by the system. Idealistic morality and religion celebrate their happy resurrection: the fact that they are embellished with the vocabulary of the very psychology that originally refuted their claim ill conceals their identity with officially desired and advertised attitudes. Moreover, we believe that the most concrete insights into the historical structure of civilization are contained precisely in the concepts that the revisionists reject. Almost the entire Freudian metapsychology, his late theory of the instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind belong to these concepts. Freud himself treated them as mere working hypotheses, helpful in elucidating certain obscurities, in establishing tentative links between theoretically unconnected insights \u0026#8212; always open to correction, and to be discarded if they no longer facilitated the progress of psychoanalytic theory and practice. In the post-Freudian development of psychoanalysis, this metapsychology has been almost entirely eliminated. As psychoanalysis has become socially and scientifically respectable, it has freed itself from compromising speculations. Compromising they were, indeed, in more than one sense: not only did they transcend the realm of clinical observation and therapeutic usefulness, but also they interpreted man in terms far more offensive to social taboos than Freud\u0026#8217;s earlier \u0026#8220;pan-sexualism\u0026#8221; \u0026#8212; terms that revealed the explosive basis of civilization. The subsequent discussion will try to apply the tabooed insights of psychoanalysis (tabooed even in psychoanalysis itself) to an interpretation of the basic trends of civilization.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe purpose of this essay is to contribute to the \u003cem\u003ephilosophy of \u003c/em\u003epsychoanalysis \u0026#8212; not to psychoanalysis itself. It moves exclusively in the field of theory, and it keeps outside the technical discipline which psychoanalysis has become. Freud developed a theory of man, a \u0026#8220;psycho-logy\u0026#8221; in the strict sense. With this theory, Freud placed himself in the great tradition of philosophy and under philosophical criteria. Our concern is not with a corrected or improved interpretation of Freudian concepts but with their philosophical and sociological implications. Freud conscientiously distinguished his philosophy from his science; the Neo-Freudians have denied most of the former. On therapeutic grounds, such a denial may be perfectly justified. However, no therapeutic argument should hamper the development of a theoretical construction which aims, not at curing individual sickness, but at diagnosing the general disorder.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA few preliminary explanations of terms are necessary:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#8220;Civilization\u0026#8221; is used interchangeably with \u0026#8220;culture\u0026#8221; \u0026#8212; as in Freud\u0026#8217;s Civilization and Its Discontents.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#8220;Repression,\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;repressive\u0026#8221; are used in the nontechnical sense to designate both conscious and unconscious, external and internal processes of restraint, constraint, and suppression.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#8220;Instinct,\u0026#8221; in accordance with Freud\u0026#8217;s notion of \u003cem\u003eTrieb, \u003c/em\u003erefers to primary \u0026#8220;drives\u0026#8221; of the human organism which are subject to historical modification; they find mental as well as somatic representation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#160;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003ch3\u003eCHAPTER ONE. The Hidden Trend in Psychoanalysis\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservation: they would destroy even where they unite. The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct. Their destructive force derives from the fact that they strive for a gratification which culture cannot grant: gratification as such and as an end in itself, at any moment. The instincts must therefore be deflected from their goal, inhibited in their aim. Civilization begins when the primary objective \u0026#8211; namely, integral satisfaction of needs \u0026#8211; is effectively renounced.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe vicissitudes of the instincts are the vicissitudes of the mental apparatus in civilization. The animal drives become human instincts under the influence of the external reality. Their original \u0026#8220;location\u0026#8221; in the organism and their basic direction remain the same, but their objectives and their manifestations are subject to change. All psychoanalytic concepts (sublimation, identification, projection, repression, introjection) connote the mutability of the instincts. But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their needs and satisfaction is a socio-historical world. The animal man becomes a human being only through a fundamental transformation of his nature, affecting not only the instinctual aims but also the instinctual \u0026#8220;values\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; that is, the principles that govern the attainment of the aims. The change in the governing value system may be tentatively defined as follows:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ctable width=\"60%\" align=\"center\"\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003e\u003cem\u003efrom:\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003e\u003cem\u003eto:\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003eimmediate satisfaction\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003edelayed satisfaction\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003epleasure\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003erestraint of pleasure\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003ejoy (play)\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003etoil (work)\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003ereceptiveness\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003eproductiveness\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd\u003eabsence of repression\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd\u003esecurity\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\n\u003c/table\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFreud described this change as the transformation of the \u003cem\u003epleasure principle \u003c/em\u003einto the \u003cem\u003ereality principle. \u003c/em\u003eThe interpretation of the \u0026#8220;mental apparatus\u0026#8221; in terms of these two principles is basic to Freud\u0026#8217;s theory and remains so in spite of all modifications of the dualistic conception. It corresponds largely (but not entirely) to the distinction between unconscious and conscious processes. The individual exists, as it were, in two different dimensions, characterized by different mental processes and principles. The difference between these two dimensions is a genetic-historical as well as a structural one: the unconscious, ruled by the pleasure principle, comprises \u0026#8220;the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.\u0026#8221; They strive for nothing but for \u0026#8220;gaining pleasure; from any operation which might arouse unpleasantness (\u0027pain\u0027) mental activity draws back.\u0026#8221; But the unrestrained pleasure principle comes into conflict with the natural and human environment. The individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible. And after this experience of disappointment, a new principle of mental functioning gains ascendancy. The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but \u0026#8220;assured\u0026#8221; pleasure. Because of this lasting gain through renunciation and restraint, according to Freud, the reality principle \u0026#8220;safeguards\u0026#8221; rather than \u0026#8220;dethrones,\u0026#8221; \u0026#8220;modifies\u0026#8221; rather than denies, the pleasure principle.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, the psychoanalytic interpretation reveals that the reality principle enforces a change not only in the form and timing of pleasure but in its very substance. The adjustment of pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibility with the established societal norms and relations, and, by that token, implies the transubstantiation of pleasure itself.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith the establishment of the reality principle, the human being which, under the pleasure principle, has been hardly more than a bundle of animal drives, has become an organized ego. It strives for \u0026#8220;what is useful\u0026#8221; and what can be obtained without damage to itself and to its vital environment. Under the reality principle, the human being develops the function of \u003cem\u003ereason: \u003c/em\u003eit learns to \u0026#8220;test\u0026#8221; the reality, to distinguish between good and bad, true and false, useful and harmful. Man acquires the faculties of attention, memory, and judgment. He becomes a conscious, thinking \u003cem\u003esubject, \u003c/em\u003egeared to a rationality which is imposed upon him from outside. Only one mode of thought-activity is \u0026#8220;split off\u0026#8221; from the new organization of the mental apparatus and remains free from the rule of the reality principle: \u003cem\u003ephantasy \u003c/em\u003eis \u0026#8220;\u003cem\u003eprotected \u003c/em\u003efrom cultural alterations\u0026#8221; and stays committed to the pleasure principle. Otherwise, the mental apparatus is effectively subordinated to the reality principle. The function of \u0026#8220;motor discharge,\u0026#8221; which, under the supremacy of the pleasure principle, had \u0026#8220;served to unburden the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli,\u0026#8221; is now employed in the \u0026#8220;appropriate alteration of reality\": it is converted into \u003cem\u003eaction.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe scope of man\u0026#8217;s desires and the instrumentalities for their gratification are thus immeasurably increased, and his ability to alter reality consciously in accordance with \u0026#8220;what is useful\u0026#8221; seems to promise a gradual removal of extraneous barriers to his gratification. However, neither his desires nor his alteration of reality are henceforth his own: they are now \u0026#8220;organized\u0026#8221; by his society. And this \u0026#8220;organization\u0026#8221; represses and transubstantiates his original instinctual needs. If absence from repression is the archetype of freedom, then civilization is the struggle against this freedom.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the great traumatic event in the development of man \u0026#8211; in the development of the genus (phylogenesis) as well as of. the individual (ontogenesis). According to Freud, this event is not unique but recurs throughout the history of mankind and of every individual. Phylogenetically, it occurs first in the \u003cem\u003eprimal horde, \u003c/em\u003ewhen the \u003cem\u003eprimal father \u003c/em\u003emonopolizes power and pleasure and enforces renunciation on the part of the sons. Ontogenetically, it occurs during the period of early childhood, and submission to the reality principle is enforced by the parents and other educators. But, both on the generic and on the individual level, submission is continuously reproduced. The rule of the primal father is followed, after the first rebellion, by the rule of the sons, and the brother clan develops into institutionalized social and political domination. The reality principle materializes in a system of institutions. And the individual, growing up within such a system, learns the requirements of the reality principle as those of law and order, and transmits them to the next generation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe fact that the reality principle has to be re-established continually in the development of man indicates that its triumph over the pleasure principle is never complete and never secure. In the Freudian conception, civilization does not once and for all terminate a \u0026#8220;state of nature.\u0026#8221; What civilization masters and represses \u0026#8211; the claim of the pleasure principle \u0026#8211; continues to exist in civilization itself. The unconscious retains the objectives of the defeated pleasure principle. Turned back by the external reality or even unable to reach it, the full force of the pleasure principle not only survives in the unconscious but also affects in manifold ways the very reality which has superseded the pleasure principle. The \u003cem\u003ereturn of the repressed \u003c/em\u003emakes up the tabooed and subterranean history of civilization. And the exploration of this history reveals not only the secret of the individual but also that of civilization. Freud\u0026#8217;s individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology. Repression is a historical phenomenon. The effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed not by nature but by man. The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization. But ever since the first, prehistoric restoration of domination following the first rebellion, repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions. It is this mental dynamic which Freud unfolds as the dynamic of civilization.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to Freud, the repressive modification of the instincts under the reality principle is enforced and sustained by the \u0026#8220;eternal primordial struggle for existence, … persisting to the present day.\u0026#8221; Scarcity \u003cem\u003e(Lebensnot, \u003c/em\u003eAnanke) teaches men that they cannot freely gratify their instinctual impulses, that they cannot live under the pleasure principle. Society\u0026#8217;s motive in enforcing the decisive modification of the instinctual structure is thus \u0026#8220;economic; since it has not means enough to support life for its members without work on their part, it must see to it that the number of these members is restricted and their energies directed away from sexual activities on to their work.\u0026#8221; \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis conception is as old as civilization and has always provided the most effective rationalization for repression. To a considerable extent, Freud\u0026#8217;s theory partakes of this rationalization: Freud considers the \u0026#8220;primordial struggle for existence\u0026#8221; as \u0026#8220;eternal\u0026#8221; and therefore believes that the pleasure principle and the reality principle are \u0026#8220;eternally\u0026#8221; antagonistic. The notion that a non-repressive civilization is impossible is a cornerstone of Freudian theory. However, his theory contains elements that break through this rationalization; they shatter the predominant tradition of Westem thought and even suggest its reversal. His work is characterized by an uncompromising insistence on showing up the repressive content of the highest values and achievements of culture. In so far as he does this, he denies the equation of reason with repression on which the ideology of culture is built. Freud\u0026#8217;s metapsychology is an ever-renewed attempt to uncover, and to question, the terrible necessity of the inner connection between civilization and barbarism, progress and suffering, freedom and unhappiness \u0026#8211; a connection which reveals itself ultimately as that between Eros and Thanatos. Freud questions culture not from a romanticist or utopian point of view, but on the ground of the suffering and misery which its implementation involves. Cultural freedom thus appears in the light of unfreedom, and cultural progress in the light of constraint. Culture is not thereby refuted: unfreedom and constraint are the price that must be paid.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut as Freud exposes their scope and their depth, he upholds the tabooed aspirations of humanity: the claim for a state where freedom and necessity coincide. Whatever liberty exists in the realm of the developed consciousness, and in the world it has created, is only derivative, compromised freedom, gained at the expense of the full satisfaction of needs. And in so far as the full satisfaction of needs is happiness, freedom in civilization is essentially antagonistic to happiness: it involves the repressive modification (sublimation) of happiness. Conversely, the unconscious, the deepest and oldest layer of the mental personality, is the drive for integral gratification, which is absence of want and repression. As such it is the immediate identity of necessity and freedom. According to Freud\u0026#8217;s conception the equation of freedom and happiness tabooed by the conscious is upheld by the unconscious. Its truth, although repelled by consciousness, continues to haunt the mind; it preserves the memory of past stages of individual development at which integral gratification is obtained. And the past continues to claim the future: it generates the wish that the paradise be re-created on the basis of the achievements of civilization.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf memory moves into the center of psychoanalysis as a decisive mode of \u003cem\u003ecognition, \u003c/em\u003ethis is far more than a therapeutic device; the therapeutic role of memory derives from the truth value of memory. Its truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which had once been fulfilled in his dim past and which are never entirely forgotten. The reality principle restrains the cognitive function of memory \u0026#8211; its commitment to the past experience of happiness which spurns the desire for its conscious re-creation. The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. Regression assumes a progressive function. The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present. Moreover, the restoration of memory is accompanied by the restoration of the cognitive content of phantasy. Psychoanalytic theory removes these mental faculties from the noncommittal sphere of daydreaming and fiction and recaptures their strict truths. The weight of these discoveries must eventually shatter the framework in which they were made and confined. The liberation of the past does not end in its reconciliation with the present. Against the self-imposed restraint of the discoverer, the orientation on the past tends toward an orientation on the future. The \u003cem\u003erecherche du temps perdu \u003c/em\u003ebecomes the vehicle of future liberation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe subsequent discussion will be focused on this hidden trend in psychoanalysis.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFreud\u0026#8217;s analysis of the development of the repressive mental apparatus proceeds on two levels:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(a) Ontogenetic: the growth of the repressed individual from early infancy to his conscious societal existence.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(b) Phylogenetic: the growth of repressive civilization from the primal horde to the fully constituted civilized state.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe two levels are continually interrelated. This interrelation is epitomized in Freud\u0026#8217;s notion of the return of the repressed in history: the individual re-experiences and re-enacts the great traumatic events in the development of the genus, and the instinctual dynamic reflects throughout the conflict between individual and genus (between particular and universal) as well as the various solutions of this conflict.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe shall first follow the ontogenetic development to the mature state of the civilized individual. We shall then return to the phylogenetic origins and extend the Freudian conception to the mature state of the civilized genus. The constant interrelation between the two levels means that recurrent cross-references, anticipations, and repetitions are unavoidable.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#160;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003ch3\u003eEPILOGUE. Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePsychoanalysis has changed its function in the culture of our time, in accordance with fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. The collapse of the liberal era and of its promises, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to counteract this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modern era: the individual. Freud demonstrated that constraint, repression, and renunciation are the stuff from which the \u0026#8220;free personality\u0026#8221; is made; he recognized the \u0026#8220;general unhappiness\u0026#8221; of society as the unsurpassable limit of cure and normality. Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory. Later, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed. The psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as \u0026#8220;reactionary;\u0026#8221; Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable. Then the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt might be tempting to speak of a split into a left and right wing. The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich\u0026#8217;s earlier writings. In his \u003cem\u003eEinbruch der Sexualmoral \u003c/em\u003e(1931), Reich oriented psychoanalysis on the relation between the social and instinctual structures. He emphasized the extent to which sexual repression is enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation, and the extent to which these interests are in turn reinforced and reproduced by sexual repression. However, Reich\u0026#8217;s notion of sexual repression remains undifferentiated; he neglects the historical dynamic of the sex instincts and of their fusion with the destructive impulses. (Reich rejects Freud\u0026#8217;s hypothesis of the death instinct and the whole depth dimension revealed in Freud\u0026#8217;s late metapsychology.) Consequently, sexual liberation \u003cem\u003eper se \u003c/em\u003ebecomes for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills. The problem of sublimation is minimized; no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of sexuality. The critical sociological insights contained in Reich\u0026#8217;s earlier writings are thus arrested; a sweeping primitivism becomes prevalent, foreshadowing the wild and fantastic hobbies of Reich\u0026#8217;s later years.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the \u0026#8220;right wing\u0026#8221; of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung\u0026#8217;s psychology soon became an obscurantist pseudo-mythology. The \u0026#8220;center\u0026#8221; of revisionism took shape in the cultural and interpersonal schools \u0026#8211; the most popular trend of psychoanalysis today. We shall try to show that, in these schools, psychoanalytic theory turns into ideology: the \u0026#8220;personality\u0026#8221; and its creative potentialities are resurrected in the face of a reality which has all but eliminated the conditions for the personality and its fulfillment. Freud recognized the work of repression in the highest values of Western civilization \u0026#8211; which presuppose and perpetuate unfreedom and suffering. The Neo-Freudian schools promote the very same values as cure against unfreedom and suffering as the triumph over repression. This intellectual feat is accomplished by expurgating the instinctual dynamic and reducing its part in the mental life. Thus purified, the psyche can again be redeemed by idealistic ethics and religion; and the psychoanalytic theory of the mental apparatus can be rewritten as a philosophy of the soul. In doing so, the revisionists have discarded those of Freud\u0026#8217;s psychological tools that are incompatible with the anachronistic revival of philosophical idealism \u0026#8211; the very tools with which Freud uncovered the explosive instinctual and social roots of the personality. Moreover, secondary factors and relationships (of the mature person and its cultural environment) are given the dignity of primary processes \u0026#8211; a switch in orientation designed to emphasize the influence of the social reality on the formation of the personality. However, we believe that the exact opposite happens \u0026#8211; that the impact of society on the psyche is weakened. Whereas Freud, focusing on the vicissitudes of the primary instincts, discovered society in the most concealed layer of the genus and individual man, the revisionists, aiming at the reified, readymade form rather than at the origin of the societal institutions and relations, fail to comprehend what these institutions and relations have done to the personality that they are supposed to fulfill. Confronted with the revisionist schools, Freud\u0026#8217;s theory now assumes a new significance: it reveals more than ever before the depth of its criticism, and \u0026#8211; perhaps for the first time \u0026#8211; those of its elements that transcend the prevailing order and link the theory of repression with that of its abolition.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe strengthening of this link was the initial impulse behind the revisionism of the cultural school. Erich Fromm\u0026#8217;s early articles attempt to free Freud\u0026#8217;s theory from its identification with present-day society; to sharpen the psychoanalytic notions that reveal the connection between instinctual and economic structure; and at the same time to indicate the possibility of progress beyond the \u0026#8220;patricentric-acquisitive\u0026#8221; culture. Fromm stresses the sociological substance of Freud\u0026#8217;s theory: psychoanalysis understands the socio-psychological phenomena as\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e… processes of active and passive adjustment of the instinctual apparatus to the socio-economic situation. The instinctual apparatus itself is \u0026#8211; in certain of its foundations \u0026#8211; a biological datum, but to a high degree modifiable; the economic conditions are the primary modifying factors.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnderlying the societal organization of the human existence are basic libidinal wants and needs; highly plastic and pliable, they are shaped and utilized to \u0026#8220;cement\u0026#8221; the given society. Thus, in what Fromm calls the \u0026#8220;patricentric-acquisitive\u0026#8221; society (which, in this study, is defined in terms of the rule of the performance principle), the libidinal impulses and their satisfaction (and deflection) are coordinated with the interests of domination and thereby become a stabilizing force which binds the majority to the ruling minority. Anxiety, love, confidence, even the will to freedom and solidarity with the group to which one belongs \u0026#8211; all come to serve the economically structured relationships of domination and subordination. By the same token, however, fundamental changes in the social structure will entail corresponding changes in the instinctual structure. With the historical obsolescence of an established society, with the growth of its inner antagonisms, the traditional mental ties are loosening:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLibidinal forces become free for new forms of utilization and thus change their social function. Now they no longer contribute to the preservation of society but lead to the building of new social formations; they cease, as it were, to be cement and instead become dynamite.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFromm followed up this conception in his article on \u0026#8220;The Socio-psychological Significance of the Theory of Matriarchy.\u0026#8221; Freud\u0026#8217;s own insights into the historical character of the modifications of the impulses vitiate his equation of the reality principle with the norms of patricentric-acquisitive culture. Fromm emphasizes that the idea of a matricentric culture \u0026#8211; regardless of its anthropological merit \u0026#8211; envisions a reality principle geared not to the interest of domination, but to gratified libidinal relations among men. The instinctual structure demands rather than precludes the rise of a free civilization on the basis of the achievements of patricentric culture, but through the transformation of its institutions:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSexuality offers one of the most elemental and strongest possibilities of gratification and happiness. If these possibilities were allowed within the limits set by the need for the productive development of the personality rather than by the need for the domination of the masses, the fulfillment of this one fundamental possibility of happiness would of necessity lead to an increase in the claim for gratification and happiness in other spheres of the human existence. The fulfillment of this claim requires the availability of the material means for its satisfaction and must therefore entail the explosion of the prevailing social order.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe social content of Freudian theory becomes manifest: sharpening the psychoanalytical concepts means sharpening their critical function, their opposition to the prevailing form of society. And this critical sociological function of psychoanalysis derives from the fundamental role of sexuality as a \u0026#8220;productive force;\u0026#8221; the libidinal claims propel progress toward freedom and universal gratification of human needs beyond the patricentric-acquisitive stage. Conversely, the weakening of the psychoanalytic conception, and especially of the theory of sexuality, must lead to a weakening of the sociological critique and to a reduction of the social substance of psychoanalysis. Contrary to appearance, this is what has happened in the cultural schools. Paradoxically (but only apparently paradoxically), such development was the consequence of the improvements in therapy. Fromm has devoted an admirable paper to \u0026#8220;The Social Conditions of Psychoanalytic Therapy,\u0026#8221; in which he shows that the psychoanalytic situation (between analyst and patient) is a specific expression of liberalist toleration and as such dependent on the existence of such toleration in the society. But behind the tolerant attitude of the \u0026#8220;neutral \u0026#8220;analyst is concealed\u0026#8221; respect for the social taboos of the bourgeoisie.\u0026#8221; Fromm traces the effectiveness of these taboos at the very core of Freudian theory, in Freud\u0026#8217;s position toward sexual morality. With this attitude, Fromm contrasts another conception of therapy, first perhaps formulated by Ferenczi, according to which the analyst rejects patricentric-authoritarian taboos and enters into a positive rather than neutral relation with the patient. The new conception is characterized chiefly by an \u0026#8220;unconditional affirmation of the patient\u0026#8217;s claim for happiness\u0026#8221; and the \u0026#8220;liberation of morality from its tabooistic features.\u0026#8221; \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, with these demands, psychoanalysis faces a fateful dilemma. The \u0026#8220;claim for happiness,\u0026#8221; if truly affirmed, aggravates the conflict with a society which allows only controlled happiness, and the exposure of the moral taboos extends this conflict to an attack on the vital protective layers of society. This may still be practicable in a social environment where toleration is a constitutive element of personal, economic, and political relationships; but it must endanger the very idea of \u0026#8220;cure\u0026#8221; and even the very existence of psychoanalysis when society can no longer afford such toleration. The affirmative attitude toward the claim for happiness then becomes practicable only if happiness and the \u0026#8220;productive development of the personality\u0026#8221; are redefined so that they become compatible with the prevailing values, that is to say, if they are internalized and idealized. And this redefinition must in turn entail a weakening of the explosive content of psychoanalytic theory as well as of its explosive social criticism. If this is indeed (as I think) the course that revisionism has taken, then it is because of the objective social dynamic of the period: in a repressive society, individual happiness and productive development are in contradiction to society; if they are defined as values to be realized within this society, they become themselves repressive.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe subsequent discussion is concerned only with the later stages of Neo-Freudian psychology, where the regressive features of the movement appear as predominant. The discussion has no other purpose than to throw into relief, by contrast, the critical implications of psychoanalytic theory emphasized in this study; the \u003cem\u003etherapeutic \u003c/em\u003emerits of the revisionist schools are entirely outside the scope of this discussion. This limitation is enforced not only by my own lack of competence but also by a discrepancy between theory and therapy inherent in psychoanalysis itself. Freud was fully aware of this discrepancy, which may be formulated (much oversimplified) as follows: while psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization, psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering to it altogether. The acceptance of the reality principle, with which psychoanalytic therapy ends, means the individual\u0026#8217;s acceptance of the civilized regimentation of his instinctual needs, especially sexuality. In Freud\u0026#8217;s theory, civilization appears as established in contradiction to the primary instincts and to the pleasure principle. But the latter survives in the id, and the civilized ego must permanently fight its own timeless past and forbidden future. Theoretically, the difference between mental health and neurosis lies only in the degree and effectiveness of resignation: mental health is successful, efficient resignation \u0026#8211; normally so efficient that it shows forth as moderately happy satisfaction. Normality is a precarious condition. \u0026#8220;Neurosis and psychosis are both of them an expression of the rebellion of the id against the outer world, of its \u0026#8216;pain,\u0026#8217; unwillingness to adapt itself to necessity \u0026#8211; to ananke, or, if one prefers, of its incapacity to do so.\u0026#8221; This rebellion, although originating in the instinctual \u0026#8220;nature\u0026#8221; of man, is a disease that has to be cured not only because it is struggling against a hopelessly superior power, but because it is struggling against \u0026#8220;necessity.\u0026#8221; Repression and unhappiness \u003cem\u003emust be \u003c/em\u003eif civilization is to prevail. The \u0026#8220;goal\u0026#8221; of the pleasure principle \u0026#8211; namely, to be happy \u0026#8211; \u0026#8220;is not attainable,\u0026#8221; although the effort to attain it shall not and cannot be abandoned. In the long run, the question is only how much resignation the individual can bear without breaking up. In this sense, therapy is a course in resignation: a great deal will be gained if we succeed in \u0026#8220;transforming your hysterical misery into every day unhappiness,\u0026#8221; which is the usual lot of mankind. This aim certainly does not (or should not) imply that the patient becomes capable of adjusting completely to an environment repressive of his mature aspirations and abilities. Still, the analyst, as a physician, must accept the social framework of facts in which the patient has to live and which he cannot alter. This irreducible core of conformity is further strengthened by Freud\u0026#8217;s conviction that the repressive basis of civilization cannot be changed anyway \u0026#8211; not even on the supra-individual, societal scale. Consequently, the critical insights of psychoanalysis gain their full force only in the field of theory, and perhaps particularly where theory is farthest removed from therapy \u0026#8211; in Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;metapsychology.\u0026#8221;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe revisionist schools obliterated this discrepancy between theory and therapy by assimilating the former to the latter. This assimilation took place in two ways. First, the most speculative and \u0026#8220;metaphysical\u0026#8221; concepts not subject to any clinical verification (such as the death instinct, the hypothesis of the primal horde, the killing of the primal father and its consequences) were minimized or discarded altogether. Moreover, in this process some of Freud\u0026#8217;s most decisive concepts (the relation between id and ego, the function of the unconscious, the scope and significance of sexuality) were redefined in such a way that their explosive connotations were all but eliminated. The depth dimension of the conflict between the individual and his society, between the instinctual structure and the realm of consciousness, was flattened out. Psychoanalysis was reoriented on the traditional consciousness psychology of pre-Freudian texture. The right to such reorientations in the interest of successful therapy and practice is not questioned here; but the revisionists have converted the weakening of Freudian theory into a new theory, and the significance of this theory alone will be discussed presently. The discussion will neglect the differences among the various revisionist groups and concentrate on the theoretical attitude common to all of them. It is distilled from the representative works of Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Clara Thompson is taken as a representative historian of the revisionists.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe chief objections of the revisionists to Freud may be summed up as follows: Freud grossly underrated the extent to which the individual and his neurosis are determined by conflicts with his environment. Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;biological orientation\u0026#8221; led him to concentrate on the phylogenetic and ontogenetic past of the individual: he considered the character as essentially fixed with the fifth or sixth year (if not earlier), and he interpreted the fate of the individual in terms of primary instincts and their vicissitudes, especially sexuality. In contrast, the revisionists shift the emphasis \u0026#8220;from the past to the present,\u0026#8221; from the biological to the cultural level, from the \u0026#8220;constitution\u0026#8221; of the individual to his environment. \u0026#8220;One can understand the biological development better if one discards the concept of libido altogether \u0026#8220;and instead interprets the different stages\u0026#8221; in terms of growth and of human relations.\u0026#8221; Then the subject of psychoanalysis becomes the \u0026#8220;total personality\u0026#8221; in its \u0026#8220;relatedness to the world;\u0026#8221; and the \u0026#8220;constructive aspects of the individual,\u0026#8221; his \u0026#8220;productive and positive potentialities,\u0026#8221; receive the attention they deserve. Freud was cold, hard, destructive, and pessimistic. He did not see that sickness, treatment, and cure are a matter of \u0026#8220;interpersonal relationships\u0026#8221; in which total personalities are engaged on both sides. Freud\u0026#8217;s conception was predominantly relativistic: he assumed that psychology can \u0026#8220;help us to understand the motivation of value judgments but cannot help in establishing the validity of the value judgments themselves.\u0026#8221; Consequently, his psychology contained no ethics or only his personal ethics. Moreover, Freud saw society as \u0026#8220;static\u0026#8221; and thought that society developed as a \u0026#8220;mechanism for controlling man\u0026#8217;s instincts,\u0026#8221; whereas the revisionists know \u0026#8220;from the study of comparative cultures\u0026#8221; that \u0026#8220;man is not biologically endowed with dangerous fixed animal drives and that the only function of society is to control these.\u0026#8221; They insist that society \u0026#8220;is not a static set of laws instituted in the past at the time of the murder of the primal father, but is rather a growing, changing, developing network of interpersonal experiences and behavior.\u0026#8221; To this, the following insights are added:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne cannot become a human being except through cultural experience. Society creates new needs in people. Some of the new needs lead in a constructive direction and stimulate further development. Of such a nature are the ideas of justice, equality and cooperation. Some of the new needs lead in a destructive direction and are not good for man. Wholesale competitiveness and the ruthless exploitation of the helpless are examples of destructive products of culture. When the destructive elements predominate, we have a situation which fosters war.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis passage may serve as a starting point to show the decline of theory in the revisionist schools. There is first the laboring of the obvious, of everyday wisdom. Then there is the adduction of sociological aspects. In Freud they are included in and developed by the basic concepts themselves; here they appear as incomprehended, external factors. There is furthermore the distinction between good and bad, constructive and destructive (according to Fromm: productive and unproductive, positive and negative), which is not derived from any theoretical principle but simply taken from the prevalent ideology. For this reason, the distinction is merely eclectic, extraneous to theory, and tantamount to the conformist slogan \u0026#8220;Accentuate the positive.\u0026#8221; Freud was right; life is bad, repressive, destructive \u0026#8211; but it isn\u0026#8217;t so bad, repressive, destructive. There are also the constructive, productive aspects. Society is not only this, but also that; man is not only against himself but also for himself.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese distinctions are meaningless and \u0026#8211; as we shall try to show even wrong unless the task (which Freud took upon himself) is fulfilled: to demonstrate how, under the impact of civilization, the two \u0026#8220;aspects\u0026#8221; are interrelated in the instinctual dynamic itself, and how the one inevitably turns into the other by virtue of this dynamic. Short of such demonstration, the revisionist \u0026#8220;improvement\u0026#8221; of Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;one-sidedness\u0026#8221; constitutes a blank discarding of his fundamental theoretical conception. However, the term \u003cem\u003eeclecticism \u003c/em\u003edoes not adequately express the substance of the revisionist philosophy. Its consequences for psychoanalytic theory are much graver: the revisionist \u0026#8220;supplementation\u0026#8221; of Freudian theory especially the adduction of cultural and environmental factors, consecrates a false picture of civilization and particularly of present-day society. In minimizing the extent and the depth of the conflict, the revisionists proclaim a false but easy solution. We shall give here only a brief illustration.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne of the most cherished demands of the revisionists is that the \u0026#8220;total personality\u0026#8221; of the individual \u0026#8211; rather than his early childhood, or his biological structure, or his psychosomatic condition \u0026#8211; must be made the subject of psychoanalysis:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe infinite diversity of personalities is in itself characteristic of human existence. By personality I understand the totality of inherited and acquired psychic qualities which are characteristic of one individual and which make the individual unique.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think it is clear that Freud\u0026#8217;s conception of counter-transference is to be distinguished from the present-day conception of analysis as an interpersonal process. In the interpersonal situation, the analyst is seen as relating to his patient not only with his distorted affects but with his healthy personality also. That is, the analytic situation is essentially a human relationship.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe preconception to which I am leading is this: personality tends toward the state that we call mental health or interpersonal adjustive success, handicaps by way of acculturation notwithstanding. The basic direction of the organism is forward.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAgain, the obvious (\u0026#8220;diversity of personalities;\u0026#8221; analysis as an \u0026#8220;interpersonal process\u0026#8221;), because it is not comprehended but merely stated and used, becomes a half-truth which is false since the missing half changes the content of the obvious fact.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe quoted passages testify to the confusion between ideology and reality prevalent in the revisionist schools. It is true that man appears as an individual who \u0026#8220;integrates\u0026#8221; a diversity of inherited and acquired qualities into a total personality, and that the latter develops in relating itself to the world (things and people) under manifold and varying conditions. But this personality and its development are pre-formed down to the deepest instinctual structure, and this pre-formation, the work of accumulated civilization, means that the diversities and the autonomy of individual \u0026#8220;growth\u0026#8221; are secondary phenomena. How much reality there is behind individuality depends on the scope, form, and effectiveness of the repressive controls prevalent at the given stage of civilization. The autonomous personality, in the sense of creative \u0026#8220;uniqueness\u0026#8221; and fullness of its existence, has always been the privilege of a very few. At the present stage, the personality tends toward a standardized reaction pattern established by the hierarchy of power and functions and by its technical, intellectual, and cultural apparatus.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe analyst and his patient share this alienation, and since it does not usually manifest itself in any neurotic symptom but rather as the hallmark of \u0026#8220;mental health,\u0026#8221; it does not appear in the revisionist consciousness. When the process of alienation is discussed, it is usually treated, not as the whole that it is, but as a negative aspect of the whole. To be sure, personality has not disappeared: it continues to flower and is even fostered and educated \u0026#8211; but in such a way that the expressions of personality fit and sustain perfectly the socially desired pattern of behavior and thought. They thus tend to cancel individuality. This process, which has been completed in the \u0026#8220;mass culture\u0026#8221; of late industrial civilization, vitiates the concept of interpersonal relations if it is to denote more than the undeniable fact that all relations in which the human being finds itself are either relations to other persons or abstractions from them. If, beyond this truism, the concept implies more \u0026#8211; namely, that \u0026#8220;two or more persons come to define an integrated situation\u0026#8221; which is made up of \u0026#8220;individuals\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; then the implication is fallacious. For the individual situations are the derivatives and appearances of the general fate, and, as Freud has shown, it is the latter which contains the clue to the fate of the individual. The general repressiveness shapes the individual and universalizes even his most personal features. Accordingly, Freud\u0026#8217;s theory is consistently oriented on early infancy \u0026#8211; the formative period of the universal fate in the individual. The subsequent mature relations \u0026#8220;re-create\u0026#8221; the formative ones. The decisive relations are thus those which are the least interpersonal. In an alienated world, specimens of the genus confront each other: parent and child, male and female, then master and servant, boss and employee; they are interrelated at first in specific modes of the universal alienation. If and when they cease to be so and grow into truly personal relations, they still retain the universal repressiveness which they surmount as their mastered and comprehended negative. Then, they do not require treatment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePsychoanalysis elucidates the universal in the individual experience. To that extent, and only to that extent, can psychoanalysis break the reification in which human relations are petrified. The revisionists fail to recognize (or fail to draw the consequences from) the actual state of alienation which makes the person into an exchangeable function and the personality into an ideology. In contrast, Freud\u0026#8217;s basic \u0026#8220;biologistic\u0026#8221; concepts reach beyond the ideology and its reflexes: his refusal to treat a reified society as a \u0026#8220;developing network of interpersonal experiences and behavior\u0026#8221; and an alienated individual as a \u0026#8220;total personality\u0026#8221; corresponds to the reality and contains its true notion. If he refrains from regarding the inhuman existence as a passing negative aspect of forward-moving humanity, he is more humane than the good-natured, tolerant critics who brand his \u0026#8220;inhuman\u0026#8221; coldness. Freud does not readily believe that the \u0026#8220;basic direction of the organism is forward.\u0026#8221; Even without the hypothesis of the death instinct and of the conservative nature of the instincts, Sullivan\u0026#8217;s proposition is shallow and questionable. The \u0026#8220;basic\u0026#8221; direction of the organism appears as a quite different one in the persistent impulses toward relief of tension, toward fulfillment, rest, passivity \u0026#8211; the struggle against the progress of time is intrinsic not only to the Narcissistic Eros. The sadomasochistic tendencies can hardly be associated with a forward direction in mental health, unless \u0026#8220;forward\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;mental health\u0026#8221; are redefined to mean almost the opposite of what they are in our social order \u0026#8211; \u0026#8220;a social order which is in some ways grossly inadequate for the development of healthy and happy human beings.\u0026#8221; Sullivan refrains from such a redefinition; he makes his concepts conform with conformity:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe person who believes that he voluntarily cut loose from his earlier moorings and by \u003cem\u003echoice \u003c/em\u003eaccepted new dogmata, in which he has diligently indoctrinated himself, is quite certain to be a person who has suffered great insecurity. He is often a person whose self-organization is derogatory and hateful. The new movement has given him group support for the expression of ancient personal hostilities that are now directed against the group from which he has come. The new ideology rationalizes destructive activity to such effect that it seems almost, if not quite, constructive. The new ideology is especially palliative of conflict in its promise of a better world that is to rise from the debris to which the present order must first be reduced. In this Utopia, he and his fellows will be good and kind \u0026#8211; for them will be no more injustice, and so forth. If his is one of the more radical groups, the activity of more remote memory in the synthesis of decisions and choice may be suppressed almost completely, and the activity of prospective revery channelled rigidly in the dogmatic pattern. In this case, except for his dealings with his fellow radicals, the man may act as if he had acquired the psychopathic type of personality discussed in the third lecture. He shows no durable grasp of his own reality or that of others, and his actions are controlled by the most immediate opportunism, without consideration of the probable future.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe passage illuminates the extent to which the interpersonal theory is fashioned by the values of the status quo. If a person has \u0026#8220;cut loose from his earlier moorings\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;accepted new dogmata,\u0026#8221; the presumption is that he has \u0026#8220;suffered great insecurity,\u0026#8221; that his \u0026#8220;self-organization is hateful and derogatory,\u0026#8221; that his new creed \u0026#8220;rationalizes destructive activity\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; in short, that he is the psychopathic type. There is no suggestion that his insecurity is rational and reasonable, that not his self-organization but the others\u0026#8217; is derogatory and hateful, that the destructiveness involved in the new dogma might indeed be constructive in so far as it aims at a higher stage of realization. This psychology has no other objective standards of value than the prevailing ones: health, maturity, achievement are taken as they are defined by the given society \u0026#8211; in spite of Sullivan\u0026#8217;s awareness that, in our culture, maturity is \u0026#8220;often no particular reflection on anything more than one\u0026#8217;s socioeconomic status and the like.\u0026#8221; Deep conformity holds sway over this psychology, which suspects all those who \u0026#8220;cut loose from their earlier moorings\u0026#8221; and become \u0026#8220;radicals\u0026#8221; as neurotic (the description fits all of them, from Jesus to Lenin, from Socrates to Giordano Bruno), and which almost automatically identifies the \u0026#8220;promise of a better world\u0026#8221; with \u0026#8220;Utopia,\u0026#8221; its substance with \u0026#8220;revery,\u0026#8221; and mankind\u0026#8217;s sacred dream of justice for all with the personal resentment (no more injustice \u0026#8220;for them\u0026#8221;) of maladjusted types. This \u0026#8220;operational\u0026#8221; identification of mental health with \u0026#8220;adjustive success\u0026#8221; and progress eliminates all the reservations with which Freud hedged the therapeutic objective of adjustment to an inhuman society and thus commits psychoanalysis to this society far more than Freud ever did.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBehind all the differences among the historical forms of society, Freud saw the basic inhumanity common to all of them, and the repressive controls which perpetuate, in the instinctual structure itself, the domination of man by man. By virtue of this insight Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;static concept of society\u0026#8221; is closer to the truth than the dynamic sociological concepts supplied by the revisionists. The notion that \u0026#8220;civilization and its discontent\u0026#8221; had their roots in the biological constitution of man profoundly influenced his concept of the function and goal of therapy. The personality which the individual is to develop, the potentialities which he is to realize, the happiness which he is to attain \u0026#8211; they are regimented from the very beginning, and their content can be defined only in terms of this regimentation. Freud destroys the illusions of idealistic ethics: the \u0026#8220;personality\u0026#8221; is but a \u0026#8220;broken\u0026#8221; individual who has internalized and successfully utilized repression and aggression. Considering what civilization has made of man, the difference in the development of personalities is chiefly that between an unproportional and a proportional share of that \u0026#8220;everyday unhappiness\u0026#8221; which is the common lot of mankind. The latter is all that therapy can achieve.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver and against such a \u0026#8220;minimum program,\u0026#8221; Fromm and the other revisionists proclaim a higher goal of therapy: an \u0026#8220;optimal development of a person\u0026#8217;s potentialities and the realization of his individuality.\u0026#8221; Now it is precisely this goal which is essentially unattainable \u0026#8211; not because of limitations in the psychoanalytic techniques but because the established civilization itself, in its very structure, denies it. Either one defines \u0026#8220;personality\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;individuality\u0026#8221; in terms of their possibilities \u003cem\u003ewithin \u003c/em\u003ethe established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of \u0026#8220;personality\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;individuality\u0026#8221; incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean \u0026#8220;curing\u0026#8221; the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr. The revisionist concept vacillates between the two definitions. Fromm revives all the time-honored values of idealistic ethics as if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformist and repressive features. He speaks of the productive realization of the personality, of care, responsibility, and respect for one\u0026#8217;s fellow men, of productive love and happiness \u0026#8211; as if man could actually practice all this and still remain sane and full of \u0026#8220;well-being\u0026#8221; in a society which Fromm himself describes as one of total alienation, dominated by the commodity relations of the \u0026#8220;market.\u0026#8221; In such a society, the self-realization of the \u0026#8220;personality\u0026#8221; can proceed only on the basis of a double repression: first, the \u0026#8220;purification\u0026#8221; of the pleasure principle and the internalization of happiness and freedom; second, their reasonable restriction until they become compatible with the prevailing unfreedom and unhappiness. As a result, productiveness, love, responsibility become \u0026#8220;values\u0026#8221; only in so far as they contain manageable resignation and are practiced within the framework of socially useful activities (in other words, after repressive sublimation); and then they involve the effective denial of free productiveness and responsibility \u0026#8211; the renunciation of happiness.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor example, productiveness, proclaimed as the goal of the healthy individual under the performance principle, must normally (that is, outside the creative, \u0026#8220;neurotic,\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;eccentric\u0026#8221; exceptions) show forth in good business, administration, service, with the reasonable expectation of recognized success. Love must be semi-sublimated and even inhibited libido, staying in line with the sanctioned conditions imposed on sexuality. This is the accepted, \u0026#8220;realistic\u0026#8221; meaning of productiveness and love. But the very same terms also denote the \u003cem\u003efree \u003c/em\u003erealization of man, or the idea of such realization. The revisionist usage of these terms plays on this ambiguity, which designates both the unfree and the free, both the mutilated and the integral faculties of man, thus vesting the established reality principle with the grandeur of promises that can be redeemed only \u003cem\u003ebeyond \u003c/em\u003ethis reality principle. This ambiguity makes the revisionist philosophy appear to be critical where it is conformist, political where it is moralistic. Often, the \u003cem\u003estyle \u003c/em\u003ealone betrays the attitude. It would be revealing to make a comparative analysis of the Freudian and Neo-Freudian styles. The latter, in the more philosophical writings, frequently comes close to that of the sermon, or of the social worker; it is elevated and yet clear, permeated with goodwill and tolerance and yet moved by an \u003cem\u003eesprit de sérieux \u003c/em\u003ewhich makes transcendental values into facts of everyday life. What has become a sham is taken as real. In contrast, there is a strong undertone of irony in Freud\u0026#8217;s usage of \u0026#8220;freedom,\u0026#8221; \u0026#8220;happiness,\u0026#8221; \u0026#8220;personality;\u0026#8221; either these terms seem to have invisible quotation marks, or their negative content is explicitly stated. Freud refrains from calling repression by any other name than its own; the Neo-Freudians sometimes sublimate it into its opposite.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut the revisionist combination of psychoanalysis with idealistic ethics is not simply a glorification of adjustment. The Neo-Freudian sociological or cultural orientation provides the other side of the picture \u0026#8211; the \u0026#8220;not only but also.\u0026#8221; The therapy of adjustment is rejected in the strongest terms; the \u0026#8220;deification\u0026#8221; of success is denounced.\u0026#8221; Present-day society and culture are accused of greatly impeding the realization of the healthy and mature person; the principle of \u0026#8220;competitiveness, and the potential hostility that accompanies it, pervades all human relationships.\u0026#8221; The revisionists claim that their psychoanalysis is in itself a \u003cem\u003ecritique \u003c/em\u003eof society:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe aim of the \u0026#8220;cultural school\u0026#8221; goes beyond merely enabling man to submit to the restrictions of his society; in so far as it is possible it seeks to free him from its irrational demands and make him more able to develop his potentialities and to assume leadership in building a more constructive society.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe tension between health and knowledge, normality and freedom, which animated Freud\u0026#8217;s entire work, here disappears; a qualifying \u0026#8220;in so far as it is possible\u0026#8221; is the only trace left of the explosive contradiction in the aim. \u0026#8220;Leadership in building a more constructive society\u0026#8221; is to be combined with normal functioning in the established society.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis philosophy is achieved by directing the criticism against surface phenomena, while accepting the basic premises of the criticized society. Fromm devotes a large part of his writing to the critique of the \u0026#8220;market economy\u0026#8221; and its ideology, which place strong barriers in the way of productive development. But here the matters rests. The critical insights do not lead to a transvaluation of the values of productiveness and the \u0026#8220;higher self\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; which are exactly the values of the criticized culture. The character of the revisionist philosophy shows forth in the assimilation of the positive and the negative, the promise and its betrayal. The affirmation absorbs the critique. The reader may be left with the conviction that the \u0026#8220;higher values\u0026#8221; can and should be practiced within the very conditions which betray them; and they can be practiced because the revisionist philosopher accepts them in their adjusted and idealized form \u0026#8211; on the terms of the established reality principle.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFromm, who has demonstrated the repressive features of internalization as few other analysts have done, revives the ideology of internalization. The \u0026#8220;adjusted\u0026#8221; person is blamed because he has betrayed the \u0026#8220;higher self,\u0026#8221; the \u0026#8220;human values\u0026#8221;; therefore he is haunted by \u0026#8220;inner emptiness and insecurity\u0026#8221; in spite of his triumph in the \u0026#8220;battle for success.\u0026#8221; Far better off is the person who has attained \u0026#8220;inner strength and integrity;\u0026#8221; though he may be less successful than his \u0026#8220;unscrupulous neighbor,\u0026#8221;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e… he will have security, judgment, and objectivity which will make him much less vulnerable to changing fortunes and opinions of others and will in many areas enhance his ability for constructive work.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe style suggests the Power of Positive Thinking to which the revisionist critique succumbs. It is not the values that are spurious, but the context in which they are defined and proclaimed: \u0026#8220;inner strength\u0026#8221; has the connotation of that unconditional freedom which can be practiced even in chains and which Fromm himself once denounced in his analysis of the Reformation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf the values of \u0026#8220;inner strength and integrity\u0026#8221; are supposed to be anything more than the character traits that the alienated society expects from any good citizen in his business (in which case they merely serve to sustain alienation), then they must pertain to a consciousness that has broken through the alienation as well as its values. But to such consciousness these values themselves become intolerable because it recognizes them as accessories to the enslavement of man. The \u0026#8220;higher self\u0026#8221; reigns over the domesticated impulses and aspirations of the individual, who has sacrificed and renounced his \u0026#8220;lower self\u0026#8221; not only in so far as it is incompatible with civilization but in so far as it is incompatible with repressive civilization. Such renunciation may indeed be an indispensable step on the road of human progress. However, Freud\u0026#8217;s question \u0026#8211; whether the higher values of culture have not been achieved at too great a cost for the individual \u0026#8211; should be taken seriously enough to enjoin the psychoanalytic philosopher from preaching these values without revealing their forbidden content, without showing what they have \u003cem\u003edenied \u003c/em\u003eto the individual. What this omission does to psychoanalytic theory may be illustrated by contrasting Fromm\u0026#8217;s idea of love with Freud\u0026#8217;s. Fromm writes:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGenuine love is rooted in productiveness and may properly be called, therefore, \u0026#8220;productive love.\u0026#8221; Its essence is the same whether it is the mother\u0026#8217;s love for the child, our love for man, or the erotic love between two individuals … certain basic elements may be said to be characteristic of all forms of productive love. These are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCompare with this ideological formulation Freud\u0026#8217;s analysis of the instinctual ground and underground of love, of the long and painful process in which sexuality with all its polymorphous perversity is tamed and inhibited until it ultimately becomes susceptible to fusion with tenderness and affection \u0026#8211; a fusion which remains precarious and never quite overcomes its destructive elements. Compare with Fromm\u0026#8217;s sermon on love Freud\u0026#8217;s almost incidental remarks in \u0026#8220;The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life\":\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e… we shall not be able to deny that the behavior in love of the men of present-day civilization bears in general the character of the psychically impotent type. In only very few people of culture are the two strains of tenderness and sensuality duly fused into one: the man almost always feels his sexual activity hampered by his respect for the woman and only develops full sexual potency when he finds himself in the presence of a lower type of sexual object … \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAccording to Freud, love, in our culture, can and must be practiced as \u0026#8220;aim-inhibited sexuality,\u0026#8221; with all the taboos and constraints placed upon it by a monogamic-patriarchal society. Beyond its legitimate manifestations, love is destructive and by no means conducive to productiveness and constructive work. Love, taken seriously, is outlawed: \u0026#8220;There is no longer any place in present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings.\u0026#8221; But to the revisionists, productiveness, love, happiness, and health merge in grand harmony; civilization has not caused any conflicts between them which the mature person could not solve without serious damage.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce the human aspirations and their fulfillment are internalized and sublimated to the \u0026#8220;higher self,\u0026#8221; the social issues become primarily spiritual issues, and their solution becomes a \u003cem\u003emoral\u003c/em\u003e task. The sociological concreteness of the revisionists reveals itself as surface: the decisive struggles are fought out in the \u0026#8220;soul\u0026#8221; of man. Present-day authoritarianism and the \u0026#8220;deification of the machine and of success\u0026#8221; threaten the \u0026#8220;most precious spiritual possessions\u0026#8221; of man.\u0026#8221; The revisionist minimization of the biological sphere, and especially of the role of sexuality, shifts the emphasis not only from the unconscious to consciousness, from the id to the ego, but also from the presublimated to the sublimated expressions of the human existence. As the repression of instinctual gratification recedes into the background and loses its decisive importance for the realization of man, the depth of societal repression is reduced. Consequently, the revisionist emphasis on the influence of \u0026#8220;social conditions\u0026#8221; in the development of the neurotic personality is sociologically and psychologically far more inconsequential than Freud\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;neglect\u0026#8221; of these conditions. The revisionist mutilation of the instinct theory leads to the traditional devaluation of the sphere of material needs in favor of spiritual needs. Society\u0026#8217;s part in the regimentation of man is thus played down; and in spite of the outspoken critique of some social institutions, the revisionist sociology accepts the foundation on which these institutions rest.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeurosis, too, appears as an essentially moral problem, and the individual is held responsible for the failure of his self-realization. Society, to be sure, receives a share of the blame, but, in the long run, it is man himself who is at fault:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLooking at his creation, he can say, truly, it is good. But looking at himself what can he say? … While we have created wonderful things we have failed to make of ourselves beings for whom this tremendous effort would seem worthwhile. Ours is a life not of brotherliness, happiness, contentment but of spiritual chaos and bewilderment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe disharmony between society and the individual is stated and left alone. Whatever society may do to the individual, it prevents neither him nor the analyst from concentrating on the \u0026#8220;total personality\u0026#8221; and its productive development. According to Horney, society creates certain typical difficulties which, \u0026#8220;accumulated, may lead to the formation of neuroses.\u0026#8221; According to Fromm, the negative impact of society upon the individual is more serious, but this is only a challenge to practice productive love and productive thinking. The decision rests with man\u0026#8217;s \u0026#8220;ability to take himself, his life and happiness seriously; on his willingness to face his and his society\u0026#8217;s moral problem. It rests upon his courage to be himself and to be for himself.\u0026#8221; In a period of totalitarianism, when the individual has so entirely become the subject-object of manipulation that, for the \u0026#8220;healthy and normal\u0026#8221; person, even the idea of a distinction between being \u0026#8220;for himself\u0026#8221; and \u0026#8220;for others\u0026#8221; has become meaningless, in a period when the omnipotent apparatus punishes real non-conformity with ridicule and defeat \u0026#8211; in such a situation the Neo-Freudian philosopher tells the individual to be himself and for himself. To the revisionist, the brute fact of societal repression has transformed itself into a \u0026#8220;moral problem\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; as it has done in the conformist philosophy of all ages. And as the clinical fact of neurosis becomes, \u0026#8220;in the last analysis, a symptom of moral failure,\u0026#8221; the \u0026#8220;psychoanalytic cure of the soul\u0026#8221; becomes education in the attainment of a \u0026#8220;religious\u0026#8221; attitude.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe escape from psychoanalysis to internalized ethics and religion is the consequence of this revision of psychoanalytic theory. If the \u0026#8220;wound\u0026#8221; in the human existence is not operative in the biological constitution of man, and if it is not caused and sustained by the very structure of civilization, then the depth dimension is removed from psychoanalysis, and the (ontogenetic and phylogenetic) conflict between pre-individual and supra-individual forces appears as a problem of the rational or irrational, the moral or immoral behavior of conscious individuals. The substance of psychoanalytic theory lies not simply in the discovery of the role of the unconscious but in the description of its specific instinctual dynamic, of the vicissitudes of the two basic instincts. Only the history of these vicissitudes reveals the full depth of the oppression which civilization imposes upon man. If sexuality does not play the constitutional role which Freud attributed to it, then there is no fundamental conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle; man\u0026#8217;s instinctual nature is \u0026#8220;purified\u0026#8221; and qualified to attain, without mutilation, socially useful and recognized happiness. It was precisely because he saw in sexuality the representative of the integral pleasure principle that Freud was able to discover the common roots of the \u0026#8220;general\u0026#8221; as well as neurotic unhappiness in a depth far below all individual experience, and to recognize a primary \u0026#8220;constitutional\u0026#8221; repression underlying all consciously experienced and administered repression. He took this discovery very seriously \u0026#8211; much too seriously to identify happiness with its efficient sublimation in productive love and other productive activities. Therefore he considered a civilization oriented on the realization of happiness as a catastrophe, as the end of all civilization. For Freud, an enormous gulf separated real freedom and happiness from the pseudo freedom and happiness that are practiced and preached in a repressive civilization. The revisionists see no such difficulty. Since they have spiritualized freedom and happiness, they can say that \u0026#8220;the problem of production has been virtually solved\u0026#8221;: \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNever before has man come so close to the fulfillment of his most cherished hopes as today. Our scientific discoveries and technical achievements enable us to visualize the day when the table will be set for all who want to eat … \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese statements are true \u0026#8211; but only in the light of their contradiction: precisely because man has never come so close to the fulfillment of his hopes, he has never been so strictly restrained from fulfilling them; precisely because we can visualize the universal satisfaction of individual needs, the strongest obstacles are placed in the way of such satisfaction. Only if the sociological analysis elucidates this connection does it go beyond Freud; otherwise it is merely an inconsequential adornment, purchased at the expense of mutilating Freud\u0026#8217;s theory of instincts.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFreud had established a substantive link between human freedom and happiness on the one hand and sexuality on the other: the latter provided the primary source for the former and at the same time the ground for their necessary restriction in civilization. The revisionist solution of the conflict through the spiritualization of freedom and happiness demanded the weakening of this link. Therapeutic findings may have motivated the theoretical reduction in the role of sexuality; but such a reduction was in any case indispensable for the revisionist philosophy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSexual problems, although they may sometimes prevail in the symptomatic picture, are no longer considered to be in the dynamic center of neuroses. Sexual difficulties are the effect rather than the cause of the neurotic character structure. Moral problems on the other hand gain in importance.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis conception does far more than minimize the role of the libido; it reverses the inner direction of Freudian theory. Nowhere does this become clearer than in Fromm\u0026#8217;s reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex, which tries to \u0026#8220;translate it from the sphere of sex into that of interpersonal relations.\u0026#8221; The gist of this \u0026#8220;translation\u0026#8221; is that the essence of the incest wish is not \u0026#8220;sexual craving\u0026#8221; but the desire to remain protected, secure \u0026#8211; a child. \u0026#8220;The foetus lives with and from the mother, and the act of birth is only one step in the direction of. freedom and independence.\u0026#8221; True but the freedom and independence to be gained are (if at all) afflicted with want, resignation, and pain; and the act of birth is the first and most terrifying step in the direction \u003cem\u003eaway from \u003c/em\u003esatisfaction and security. Fromm\u0026#8217;s ideological interpretation of the Oedipus complex implies acceptance of the unhappiness of freedom, of its separation from satisfaction; Freud\u0026#8217;s theory implies that the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile \u003cem\u003eprotest \u003c/em\u003eagainst this separation \u0026#8211; protest not against freedom but against painful, repressive freedom. Conversely, the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile desire for the archetype of freedom: freedom from want. And since the (unrepressed) sex instinct is the biological carrier of this archetype of freedom, the Oedipus wish is essentially \u0026#8220;sexual craving.\u0026#8221; Its natural object is, not simply the mother \u003cem\u003equa \u003c/em\u003emother, but the mother \u003cem\u003equa \u003c/em\u003ewoman \u0026#8211; female principle of gratification. Here the Eros of receptivity, rest, painless and integral satisfaction is nearest to the death instinct (return to the womb), the pleasure principle nearest to the Nirvana principle. Eros here fights its first battle against everything the reality principle stands for: against the father, against domination, sublimation, resignation. Gradually then, freedom and fulfillment are being associated with these paternal principles; freedom from want is sacrificed to moral and spiritual independence. It is first the \u0026#8220;sexual craving\u0026#8221; for the mother-woman that threatens the psychical basis of civilization; it is the \u0026#8220;sexual craving\u0026#8221; that makes the Oedipus conflict the prototype of the instinctual conflicts between the individual and his society. If the Oedipus wish were in essence nothing more than the wish for protection and security (\u0026#8220;escape from freedom\u0026#8221;), if the child desired only impermissible security and not impermissible pleasure, then the Oedipus complex would indeed present an essentially educational problem. As such, it can be treated without exposing the instinctual danger zones of society.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe same beneficial result is obtained by the rejection of the death instinct. Freud\u0026#8217;s hypothesis of the death instinct and its role in civilized aggression shed light on one of the neglected enigmas of civilization; it revealed the hidden unconscious tie which binds the oppressed to their oppressors, the soldiers to their generals, the individuals to their masters. The wholesale destruction marking the progress of civilization within the framework of domination has been perpetuated, in the face of its possible abolition, by the instinctual agreement with their executioners on the part of the human instruments and victims. Freud wrote, during the First World War:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThink of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty? \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut the impulses which this hypothesis assumes are incompatible with the moralistic philosophy of progress espoused by the revisionists. Karen Horney states succinctly the revisionist position:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFreud\u0026#8217;s assumption [of a Death Instinct] implies that the ultimate motivation for hostility or destructiveness lies in the impulse to destroy. Thus he turns into its opposite our belief that we destroy in order to live: we live in order to destroy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis rendering of Freud\u0026#8217;s conception is incorrect. He did not assume that we live in order to destroy; the destruction instinct operates either against the life instincts or in their service; moreover, the objective of the death instinct is not destruction \u003cem\u003eper se \u003c/em\u003ebut the elimination of the need for destruction. According to Horney, we wish to destroy because we \u0026#8220;are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused,\u0026#8221; because we want to defend\u0026#8221; our safety or our happiness or what appears to us as such.\u0026#8221; No psychoanalytic theory was necessary to arrive at these conclusions, with which individual and national aggression has been justified since times immemorial. Either our safety is really threatened, in which case our wish to destroy is a sensible and rational reaction; or we only \u0026#8220;feel\u0026#8221; it is threatened, in which case the individual and supra-individual reasons for this feeling have to be explored.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe revisionist rejection of the death instinct is accompanied by an argument that indeed seems to point up the \u0026#8220;reactionary\u0026#8221; implications of Freudian theory as contrasted with the progressive sociological orientation of the revisionists. Freud\u0026#8217;s assumption of a death instinct\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e… paralyzes any effort to search in the specific cultural conditions for reasons which make for destructiveness. It must also paralyze efforts to change anything in these conditions. If man is inherently destructive and consequently unhappy, why strive for a better future? \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe revisionist argument minimizes the degree to which, in Freudian theory, impulses are modifiable, subject to the \u0026#8220;vicissitudes\u0026#8221; of history. The death instinct and its derivatives are no exception. We have suggested that the energy of the death instinct does not necessarily \u0026#8220;paralyze\u0026#8221; the efforts to obtain a \u0026#8220;better future;\u0026#8221; on the contrary, such efforts are paralyzed by the systematic constraints which civilization places on the life instincts, and by their consequent inability to \u0026#8220;bind\u0026#8221; aggression effectively. The realization of a \u0026#8220;better future\u0026#8221; involves far more than the elimination of the bad features of the \u0026#8220;market,\u0026#8221; of the \u0026#8220;ruthlessness\u0026#8221; of competition, and so on; it involves a fundamental change in the instinctual as well as cultural structure. The striving for a better future is \u0026#8220;paralyzed\u0026#8221; not by Freud\u0026#8217;s awareness of these implications but by the revisionist \u0026#8220;spiritualization\u0026#8221; of them, which conceals the gap that separates the present from the future. Freud did not believe in prospective social changes that would alter human nature sufficiently to free man from external and internal oppression; however, his \u0026#8220;fatalism\u0026#8221; was not without qualification.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe mutilation of the instinct theory completes the reversal of Freudian theory. The inner direction of the latter was (in apparent contrast to the \u0026#8220;therapeutic program\u0026#8221; from id to ego) that from consciousness to the unconscious, from personality to childhood, from the individual to the generic processes. Theory moved from the surface to the depth, from the \u0026#8220;finished\u0026#8221; and conditioned person to its sources and resources. This movement was essential for Freud\u0026#8217;s critique of civilization: only by means of the \u0026#8220;regression\u0026#8221; behind the mystifying forms of the mature individual and his private and public existence did he discover their basic negativity in the foundations on which they rest. Moreover, only by pushing his critical regression back to the deepest biological layer could Freud elucidate the explosive content of the mystifying forms and, at the same time, the full scope of civilized repression. Identifying the energy of the life instincts as libido meant defining their gratification in contradiction to spiritual transcendentalism: Freud\u0026#8217;s notion of happiness and freedom is eminently critical in so far as it is materialistic \u0026#8211; protesting against the spiritualization of want.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Neo-Freudians reverse this inner direction of Freud\u0026#8217;s theory, shifting the emphasis from the organism to the personality, from the material foundations to the ideal values. Their various revisions are logically consistent: one entails the next. The whole may be summed up as follows: The \u0026#8220;cultural orientation\u0026#8221; encounters the societal institutions and relationships as finished products, in the form of objective entities \u0026#8211; given rather than made facts. Their acceptance in this form demands the shift in psychological emphasis from infancy to maturity, for only at the level of developed consciousness does the cultural environment become definable as determining character and personality over and above the biological level. Conversely, only with the playing down of biological factors, the mutilation of the instinct theory, is the personality definable in terms of objective cultural values divorced from the repressive ground which denies their realization. In order to present these values as freedom and fulfillment, they have to be purged of the material of which they are made, and the struggle for their realization has to be turned into a spiritual and moral struggle. The revisionists do not insist, as Freud did, on the enduring truth value of the instinctual needs which must be \u0026#8220;broken\u0026#8221; so that the human being can function in interpersonal relations. In abandoning this insistence, from which psychoanalytic theory drew all its critical insights, the revisionists yield to the negative features of the very reality principle which they so eloquently criticize.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026#160;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\r\n\n \u003c/article\u003e"},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Core Thesis","Paragraphs":["Mill examines civilization as social coordination, progress, power, public opinion, and the moral costs of modern collective life."]},{"Kind":"FieldSection","Title":"Classification","Fields":[{"Label":"Alternate Titles","Value":"Civilization essay"},{"Label":"Key Concepts","Value":"civilization; progress; public opinion; social power; reform; individuality"},{"Label":"Methodology","Value":"Direct Mill work-cluster record based on SEP, IEP, Britannica, OLL Collected Works, Gutenberg/Wikisource surfaces, catalog records, and scholarship. No full text is imported."},{"Label":"Structure","Value":"One work-cluster page with explicit integer display year, date note, evidence note, discipline mapping, and public source evidence. Serial publication and posthumous publication notes are documented without importing full text."}]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Arguments","Paragraphs":["Mill examines civilization as social coordination, progress, power, public opinion, and the moral costs of modern collective life."]},{"Kind":"FieldSection","Title":"Influence","Fields":[{"Label":"Influenced By","Value":"James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Harriet Taylor Mill, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Auguste Comte, Coleridge, associationist psychology, British empiricism, and nineteenth-century reform politics."},{"Label":"Influence On","Value":"Liberalism, utilitarian ethics, democratic theory, women\u0027s rights, political economy, empiricist logic, philosophy of science, social reform, analytic liberalism, and debates over liberty and individuality."}]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Significance","Paragraphs":["Accepted as a direct Mill essay through OLL Collected Works and scholarship evidence.","Mill remains central for liberty, utilitarian ethics, rights, democracy, public reason, induction, scientific method, women\u0027s equality, political economy, secular religion, and liberal social reform."]},{"Kind":"TextSection","Title":"Evidence Note","Paragraphs":["Accepted as a direct Mill essay through OLL Collected Works and scholarship evidence."]}],"SectionSequence":["Back Link","Work Title","Deck","Author","Period","Era","Composition","Date Note","Region","Terra Avita","Terra Avita Region","Modern Country","Original Title","Language","Primary Discipline","Secondary Discipline","Tradition","Full Text","Core Thesis","Classification","Arguments","Influence","Significance","Evidence Note"],"Counts":{"ContextCards":3,"GeoCards":4,"DisciplineCards":2,"Links":11,"Sections":24,"Styles":2,"Scripts":1}}