Conscience from the point of view of a psychoanalyst. Conscience is the “other side” of duty What is a calm conscience

Freud derived the phenomenon of conscience from the original sin committed by the great people - the murder of the primitive "father". The children's sexual rivalry with their father led them, at the beginning of the story, to decide to get rid of him. That's why the children killed the head of the family and then buried him. However, this act did not go unnoticed for them. A terrible crime aroused repentance. The children vowed never to do such things again. Thus happened, according to Freud, the birth of man from an animal. Repentance also gave rise to the phenomenon of culture as a means of overcoming obsessive visions.

But how could a feeling that had not previously been characteristic of a person manifest itself? Freud replies to this question: “I must assert, however paradoxical it may sound, that the feeling of guilt existed before the act .... These people could rightfully be called criminals due to the consciousness of guilt.” According to Freud, the dark sense of primordial guilt had its source in the Oedipus complex.

An innate unconscious attraction caused sin, which turned out to be a turning point in anthropogenesis, the prime mover of human history. Freud emphasized that "conscience, now a hereditary psychic force, has been acquired by mankind in connection with the Oedipus complex." Having committed a collective crime, the pra-humans co-organized into an exogamous genus, that is, they acquired the ability for social life, which contributed to the transformation of an animal into a person.

Perhaps Freud's desire to overcome the evolutionary-tool concept of cultural genesis deserves attention. He tries to approach this problem through the interpretation of the mental activity of a person as a being that does not have the phenomenon of conscience. Evolution, therefore, looks like a process in the course of which something radically different is revealed, although it is inherent in the progressive movement of living matter.

Freud believed that he succeeded in finding the source of social organization, moral norms and, finally, religion in the act of parricide. He understood by human culture everything by which human life rises above its animal conditions and by which it differs from the life of animals. Culture, in his opinion, demonstrates two sides of itself. On the one hand, it covers all the knowledge and skills acquired by people, which enable a person to master the forces of nature and receive material benefits from it to satisfy his needs. On the other hand, it includes all those institutions that are necessary for streamlining relationships among themselves, and especially for the distribution of achievable material goods.

Every culture, according to Freud, is created by coercion and suppression of instincts. At the same time, people have destructive, therefore, anti-social and anti-cultural tendencies. This psychological fact is of decisive importance for the evaluation of human culture. Cultural genesis, therefore, is conditioned by the imposition of prohibitions. Thanks to them, the culture of the unknown thousands of years ago began to separate from the primitive animal state.

We are talking about the primary urges of incest, cannibalism and passion for murder. The main task of culture, according to Freud, the real reason for its existence is to protect us from nature. Freud believed that religion had rendered great services to culture. She actively contributed to the taming of asocial urges.

Freud is trying to combine his own concept of cultural genesis with ideas about the tool-evolutionary nature of anthropogenesis. “Looking far enough into the past, we can say,” he writes, “that the first acts of culture were the use of tools, the taming of fire, the construction of dwellings. Among these achievements stands out as something extraordinary and unparalleled - the taming of fire, as for others, then with them a person embarked on the path that he has been continuously following since then: it is easy to guess about the motives that led to their discovery.

Let us now pose the question: is Freud's ethnographic version reliable in the first place? Ethnologists of that time - from W. Rivers to F. Boas, from A. Kroeber to B. Malinovsky rejected the hypothesis of the founder of psychoanalysis. They noted that totemism is not the oldest form of religion, that it is not universal, and far from all peoples have passed through the totemic stage, that among several hundred tribes Frazer found only four in which the ritual murder of the totem would be performed, etc. All this criticism made no impression either on Freud or on his followers.

Primitive sin Freud connects with the origin of the ambivalent psyche of social beings. But after all, if this ambivalent psyche did not exist before “sin”, then there would be no sin either, emphasizes Yu.M. Borodai. There would be just animals devouring each other "without a twinge of conscience." “Freud tried to genetically explain the social psyche of a person (conscience), but he completely remained inside the magic circles of this split psyche - self-consciousness, doomed to “go out of your way”, trying to unravel the tangle of warring desires, peep inside himself, oppose himself to himself as an external goals and suppress the inner enemy of this creation, fall back into chaos and be reborn again.”

The human psyche is still ambivalent at the animal stage. Freud emphasizes that we know nothing about the origin of this ambivalence. If so, it is not clear what is the real reason for those actions of the great man, which led to the emergence of the phenomenon of conscience. If it is not possible to explain the genesis of morality, then the theory of cultural genesis turns out to be abstract. After all, it is entirely built on the fact of the acquisition of conscience.

Freud connects the genesis of culture with the animality of man, with the fact that people are endowed with animal-like nature. At the same time, culture itself turns out to be a means of curbing animal instincts. However, even in the mainstream of psychoanalysis, in the legacy of Freud's students, this concept is disputed. In particular, Fromm points to the opposite trend: it was history and culture that revealed certain destructive potentialities in man. Therefore, the psychoanalytic version of cultural genesis looks unconvincing.

Many European philosophers and culturologists see the source of culture in a person's ability to play activities. The game in this sense is a prerequisite for the origin of culture. We find different versions of this concept in the works of G. Gadamer, E. Fink, J. Huizinga. In particular, G. Gadamer analyzed history and culture as a kind of game in the element of language, within which a person finds himself in a radically different role than that which he is able to fantasize.

Dutch cultural historian J. Huizinga in the book “HomoLudens” noted that many animals love to play. In his opinion, if we analyze any human activity to the very limits of our knowledge, it will seem nothing more than a game. That is why the author believes that human culture arises and unfolds in the game. The culture itself is playful. The game is considered in the book not as a biological function, but as a phenomenon of culture and is analyzed in the language of cultural thinking.

H what is conscience? The definition can be obtained on the basis of comprehension of the scientific experience of mankind. For many centuries, philosophers, religious figures, psychologists, educators and scientists have been concerned about the problem of conscience. It is required to consider in the context of, perhaps, the most important spheres of life of modern society, the meaning of the word conscience.

Conscience in religion

In the holy writings of Christians, Muslims, Hare Krishnas and Buddhists, the concept of conscientiousness appears. What is conscience? The definition obtained on the basis of the analysis of various religious scriptures sounds like this: a person's conscience is an internal rational ability that testifies to our value system.

Previously, a common trope in comedies and cartoons was the presence of an angel and a devil on a person's shoulder. The internal struggle of a person was personified by the presence of an angel representing conscience (on the right shoulder) and a devil representing temptation (on the left shoulder). This type of folklore imagery gave people the false impression that conscientiousness is like a room in which one could hear the voice of God (the presence of a value system) or the devil (the absence of one). The biblical view is to view the angel on the shoulder as a representative of the inner value system.

Conscientiousness is part of God's inner faculties, a critical inner awareness of man that testifies to the norms and values ​​that people recognize in determining right or wrong. The concept of conscience is not reduced to a judicial function - this is how the modern approach of Christians to this definition suggests.

According to the Bible, conscientiousness is evidence of what a person already knows. It can prompt an internal dialogue to talk about what everyone already knows, but more often than not, this presence is expressed through emotions. When people agree with the values ​​of their conscience, they feel pleasure or relief.

Conscience gnaws at you when you do evil to your neighbor. Conscience also informs you of the rightness or wrongness of an action before you do it. A dishonorable act will surely make the conscientiousness "scream". This is because, in the religious worldview, God commands all people to love their neighbor. How can conscience be cleansed according to religious canons? The answer is simple: to rely on God and his teachings means to live according to conscience in the religious sense.

Conscientiousness in jurisprudence

In jurisprudence, honor and conscience are fundamental concepts. They are used in many international documents, where the interpretation of these terms has not only internal moral, but also legal force.

What is conscience? The definition can be found in the English humanistic lawyers of the XVI-XVII centuries. They interpreted conscientiousness as a set of universal principles given to man by God at birth.

And the gradual reformation of the medieval Roman legal system through written statements, the use of juries, provoked concern about the concept of right and wrong. Thus, since then, the question of whether conscience is needed can already be answered from a legal perspective.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is part of customary international law, specifically writes about conscience in paras. 1 and 18. Similarly, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights refers to this concept in paragraph 18.1.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should interact in a spirit of brotherhood (paragraph 1).

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes the freedom to change one's religion or belief, alone or in community with others, and to publicly or privately manifest one's religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance (para. 18).

There is no specific answer to the question of what to do if your conscience torments you. These international documents only state that one must live according to one's conscience, but a person forms and interprets it independently. Unlike religious writings, honor and conscience in legal documentation are not manipulative concepts and a restraining mechanism.

This can be understood from the context of legal documents. How can conscientiousness be purified in the understanding of law? First of all, it is necessary to admit guilt before the court. Honor and conscience here depend solely on repentance “on paper”. Only consciousness, that is, the ability of a person to be aware of the legitimacy of his deed, can regulate his honor and conscience.

Conscience according to Freud

An alternative approach to conscience comes from Sigmund Freud. In his book "The Outline of Psychoanalysis" (1949), he wrote that the human psyche is inspired by powerful instinctive desires that require satisfaction, and outlined why a person needs a conscience.

These desires arise at our birth and are crucial to the behavior of a person under the age of 3 years. These basic desires and their satisfaction (e.g. food, comfort) set the id in motion. According to Freud, the id develops two broad categories of desires. Eros is a life instinct that gives people the desire for food, self-preservation and sex. Thanatos is the death instinct that stimulates the desire for dominance, aggression, violence and self-destruction. These two instincts are at war within the Id and must be moderated by ego restraints and conscientiousness.

From the first years children learn that the authorities in the world limit the degree of satisfaction of these desires. Therefore, people create an Ego that takes into account the realities of the world and society. Freud calls ego the reality principle, because a person's awareness of himself and others is crucial for his interaction with the outside world and is formed between the ages of 3 and 5 years.

Freud also argued that the superego develops from the age of 5, assimilating and reflecting the disapproval of the people around. Therefore, when our parents praise or blame us, frown and smile, we get a sense of shame in disapproval and pleasure in approval. Thus, the Superego prohibits certain actions and gives rise to feelings of guilt (pangs of conscience).

The superego develops into a life and power of its own, independent of the rational thinking of the individual: it is programmed into everyone by the reactions of other people. In fact, the superego limits the aggressive strong desires of people that would destroy them without control.

So what is conscience? Freud's definition says that this is a lever of pressure from the authorities.

Erich Fromm agrees with Freud. In his opinion, the problem of conscience has a reference to destructiveness. That is, the characteristic of conscience here comes from someone's interpretation, and not from the consciousness of the individual himself.

Conscience according to Erich Fromm

Since Eric Fromm experienced all the evils of Nazism, he described in his books how freedom with conscientiousness can be harmful even in the most civilized societies. To explain how, for example, Adolf Eichmann can beg for mercy for a massacre in 1961, with the excuse that he was only "keeping order" in making a final decision, it is available to refer to Fromm's idea of ​​an authoritarian conscience.

Eric Fromm was a child of the Holocaust and tried to explain how civilized people can descend to barbarism and why they felt no remorse after that. To do this, he coined the term conscientiousness of the authoritarian type.

What is conscience? The definition says: this is the voice of external power, something close to Freud's concept of the Superego, which has already been discussed above. This inner voice can be reinforced by fear of punishment or admired (or even be created because the person idolizes an authority figure, as was the case with Hitler's followers).

Note that the voice of an authoritarian conscience is respected not because it is good, but because it is in power. Thus, the Nazis also commit brutal evil, because they obey the voice that comes from outside, bypassing their own moral sense. The presence of an authority figure is necessary to strengthen and maintain this voice, otherwise it loses its power.

Unlike authoritarian conscience, its humanistic variety (also according to Fromm) is a voice that is present in every person and is independent of external sanctions and rewards. It is based on the fact that people have an intuitive knowledge that determines the human and the inhuman, improves life and destroys it. This sense of conscience serves our functioning as a human being. This is the voice that calls everyone to himself, to his humanity. Thus, remorse of the humanistic type determines consciousness. And such fundamental concepts in psychology and jurisprudence as honor and conscience (reason and conscience) constitute a unity.

Living according to humanistic canons, sincerely admitting one's own mistakes - this, according to Fromm, is the answer to the question of how to get rid of remorse.

Conscientiousness in ethics

This concept is one of the leading categories of ethics, a complex structural and functional formation. For many centuries, ethical indicators formed the definition of conscientiousness.

In the mythology of ancient Greece, she was associated with the goddesses of revenge Erin, whose task is to punish unscrupulous people. In the same era, stories appeared in ancient Greek literature where heroes (for example, Euripides) suffer not only from the revenge of the goddesses, but also from their own remorse, from the realization of what they have done.

The theoretical explanation of the category of conscience is closely connected with the philosophical and ethical positions of thinkers. In pre-Marxist ethical teachings, it is important to highlight the religious-idealistic approach to the nature of conscience. In it, the latter is that which comes from eternal, absolute ideas or a priori moral law, as that which God endowed man with.

Marxism substantiates the emergence of conscience only at a certain stage in the development of human society, and therefore its content is of a historical nature. Associating the nature of conscience with social entity man, Marxism emphasizes the class character of its content.

So, conscientiousness is a category of ethics, a characteristic of a person's ability to exercise self-control, to be aware of moral social duties, to demand from oneself their fulfillment and to make a self-assessment of committed actions. This is one of the manifestations of the moral self-awareness of the individual.

Conscientiousness means awareness of the psychological responsibility of the individual for his behavior, including moral self-esteem, volitional self-control from the standpoint of the ethics of the whole society.

Thus, the invasion of conscience spiritual world personality always includes a somewhat excessive concept, which exceeds the available possibilities of both external influence and internal development and comprehension within the framework of the system of representations of the situation. Embodying directly in individual experience the real burden of the existence of the human community, the imperatives of conscience are always maximalist, invariably demand more from a person than he is able to do now, aim at a creative and critical revision of the general attitude to the world. Therefore, if the conscience is tormented, this is its normal state. It also suggests that a person generally has a conscience.

Types of moral component

What is conscience, the definition of which is often vague? In philosophy, such types of conscience are distinguished as correct (true), erroneous, reliable (certain), doubtful, hidden. Many external and internal factors determine what conscience is. The fact is that conscientiousness is controlled by a certain lever that determines its vector. Some types of conscience are controlled by consciousness, while others are controlled by religious dogmas or legal documents.

Correct or true conscientiousness - this concept means that this moral component judges what is good, what is good, and what is bad and is considered evil, what it means to live according to conscience. This is the correct component, which, for example, says that theft and murder are bad and inhuman.

Erroneous, or false, conscientiousness - it is this mechanism that mistakenly believes that good is evil, and that evil can be acceptable. Often the complete absence of conscience is confused with its erroneous variety.

Erroneous conscientiousness, when the error is due to neglect or malice, is called "guilty". This is the component that believes that cheating is good, because it, for example, helps to pass the exam. And innocent conscientiousness, in turn, is generated by an honest mistake of a person. That is, in the first case, consciousness plays a role as an internal factor, and in the second - external causes.

Reliable conscientiousness is a subjective guarantee of the legality or illegality of any act. This definition of conscience can mean that a person is confident in his decision. But this concept is rather shaky. For example, police officers may be confident that killing is the best alternative on a self-defense basis, when such action is in fact not necessary. Many theologians believe that this type of conscience must be followed unquestioningly. After all, only being conscientious, you can maintain the integrity of the mind. The first and second constitute integrity in the context of religious teachings.

Doubting conscience - hesitant, unable to form a definite judgment about some action. It is necessary to deal with this conscientiousness before the action is performed. The function of this type of conscience is to help a person resolve a complex moral dilemma. In this context, the rule works: if conscience torments, it means that a person is moving along a false vector.

Hidden conscientiousness - this harsh type of moral component makes it so that people are extremely afraid to do evil. From conscience of any other type, this form is meticulous and requires irrefutable evidence before the actions taken. This type of remorse is extremely strong.

Why does a person need conscience?

Every fall is an opportunity to learn something new, to delve deeper into your gut, to take control of your life. But the frequent experience of feelings of disappointment due to their moral falls provokes that the feeling of guilt remains with a person forever. In such cases, pangs of conscience are harmful: they become a source of suffering, not motivation.

Only a psychopath can say that he will never be tormented by a sense of conscience. Feelings of guilt go with people through life, and pangs of conscience are quite an adequate practice.

Why is conscience needed? First of all, her remorse can become a stimulus, a shock that directs each person to change. Remorse helps to determine that an act is immoral. These sensations are intended to teach to learn lessons based on the mistakes of others.

Each fall is an opportunity to become smarter, to take a sober look at your insides, to become responsible for life and its course. But when guilt turns from stimulus to suffering, people become less human and experience not redemption, but rejection.

This situation is called chronic guilt. It does not leave the individual even after regret, atonement for sins, it dominates a person. Thus, pangs of conscience are transformed from a healthy state into a neurotic one. This is a huge barrier to a happy life. Constant stay in this state is a kind of self-punishment or self-punishment, which is observed in society much more often than expected.

Sometimes such self-punishment is associated with the death of a loved one, trouble at work, a state of depression, and even when one person deliberately injures another, for which he uses an offensive word and even uses moral violence. In such cases, the guilty party unnecessarily tortures himself for wrong actions. Consciousness or subconsciousness plays a huge role here - consciously or not, people determine the measure of punishment for themselves. That is, conscientiousness is also needed for lynching, which is often a destructive phenomenon.

What is conscience? This definition in each science and field of human activity varies. So, conscientiousness is the ability, intuition or judgment that helps to distinguish right from wrong. Where did human conscience come from? Moral judgment may derive from values ​​or norms (principles and rules).

In pro-scientific circles, conscientiousness is often described as a moral component, leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits actions that are contrary to his psychological values ​​and feelings of integrity, when actions do not correspond to his internal norms.

In some of his writings, notably in Dissatisfaction with Culture, Freud emphasized that psychoanalysts look at the emergence of feelings of guilt differently than psychologists usually do. So, according to the popular notion, a person feels guilty when he has committed some act recognized as evil. But such a notion does little to clarify the origin of guilt feelings. Therefore, it is sometimes added that the person who has not done any evil, but had the corresponding intention to commit a certain act associated with evil, is also guilty. However, in both cases it is assumed that a person knows evil in advance as something bad, which must be excluded before its execution. This idea of ​​the origin of guilt is based on the assumption that a person has some original, natural ability to distinguish between good and evil.

Freud did not share such an idea either about the original ability to distinguish between good and evil, or about the emergence of feelings of guilt on the basis of such a distinction. He proceeded from the fact that often evil is neither dangerous nor harmful to a person. On the contrary, it sometimes brings him pleasure and even becomes desirable for him. Proceeding from such an understanding of evil, the founder of psychoanalysis put forward the position according to which the distinction between good and evil occurs not on the basis of some innate, internal ability of a person, but as a result of the influence on him that is carried out from the outside. But in order to succumb to some external influence, a person must have a certain motive that determines this influence on him. Such a motive, according to Freud, is found in the helplessness and dependence of a person on other people, and it is nothing more than the fear of losing love. Being dependent on another, a person faces the threat of being punished by a person who once loved him, but for some reason denied him his love and, as a result, is able to show his superiority and power in the form of some kind of punishment. . "At first, therefore, evil

there is a threat of loss of love, and we must avoid it for fear of such a loss. It does not matter whether the evil has already been committed, whether they want to commit it: in both cases, there is a threat of its disclosure by an authoritative instance, which in both cases will punish the same.

In a child, the fear of losing love is obvious, because he is afraid that his parents will stop loving him and will severely punish him. In adults, there is also a fear of losing love, with the only difference being that the human community takes the place of the father, mother, or both parents. All this means that the fear of loss of love or "social fear" can be perceived not only as a breeding ground for the emergence of guilt, but also be the basis for its constant strengthening. However, Freud is not so one-sided in his assessment similar situation as it might seem at first glance. In his view, significant changes are taking place in the human psyche as the authority of parents and the human community is internalized. We are talking about the formation of the Super-I, about strengthening the role of conscience in human life. With the emergence of the Superego, the fear of being exposed by external authorities is weakened, and at the same time, the distinction between crime and evil will disappears, since it is impossible to hide from the Superego even in one's thoughts. This leads to the emergence of a new relationship between a person's conscience and his sense of guilt, since, in Freud's view, the Super-I begins torturing the I internally associated with it and waits for an opportunity to punish it from the outside world.

All these considerations about the relationship between fear, conscience and guilt were expressed by Freud in the works of the 1920s. However, already in the study "Totem and Taboo" he spoke about "conscientious fear", a sign of fear in the feeling of guilt, the consciousness of guilt of the taboo and the conscience of the taboo, as the most ancient form in which moral prohibitions manifest themselves. It was in this study that he raised the question of the origin and nature of conscience, believing that, like a feeling of guilt, conscience arises on the basis of the ambivalence of feelings from certain human relationships with which this ambivalence is associated. According to his views, the taboo can be regarded as a command of conscience, the violation of which leads to a terrible sense of guilt.

“Conscience is an inner perception of the inadmissibility of known desires that we have; but the emphasis is on the fact that this inadmissibility does not need any proof, that it is in itself undoubted.

Such an understanding of conscience has common points of contact with Kant's categorical imperative as a kind of moral law, thanks to which a person's act is objectively necessary in itself, without relating it to any other purpose. Freud accepted Kavta's idea of ​​a categorical imperative, believing that in psychological terms it is already a taboo that plays an important role in the life of primitive people. If Kant spoke about the moral law, then the founder of psychoanalysis is not averse to considering the categorical imperative as a special mental mechanism that completely predetermines or corrects human activity.

In its "internal" hypostasis, this imperative appears to Freud as nothing more than conscience, which contributes to the repression and suppression of a person's natural inclinations. Indeed, in general for the founder of psychoanalysis, morality is the limitation of drives. Therefore, conscience, as a moral category, correlates with the limitations of human inclinations and desires. But is conscience divine in its origin, as religious figures insist on it, or does it have a completely earthly origin and is connected with the history of the development of man and mankind? Is conscience given to us initially from birth, or is it formed gradually in the process of human evolution?

Drawing an analogy between Kant's categorical imperative as a moral law and conscience as not needing any proof of the internal perception-inadmissibility of the manifestation of a person's sexually hostile desires, Freud at the same time referred to clinical data and observations of children, indicating that conscience is not always a constant source of internal pressure on a person and that it is not given to him initially from birth. Thus, in patients subject to melancholy, conscience and morality, allegedly given by God, are found as periodic phenomena. A small child has no moral brakes against his desire for pleasure, and one could

say that he is immoral from birth. As for conscience, according to Freud, God worked here “not so much and carelessly”, since in the vast majority of people it is found in a very modest size. Nevertheless, as in the case of the later recognition of part of the historical truth behind religion, the founder of psychoanalysis is ready to agree that there is some plausibility in the statements about the divine origin of conscience, but not of a metaphysical, but of a mental nature. “We,” he emphasized in lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis, “do not in any way deny that part of the psychological truth, which” is contained in the assertion that conscience is of divine origin, but this position requires clarification. If conscience is also something “in us”, then it’s not from the beginning.” Turning to the understanding of the mental mechanisms associated with the presence of a conscience in a person, Freud moved from considering the history of the emergence of taboos, various kinds of prohibitions imposed on the individual from the outside, to revealing that “insideness” of moral prescriptions , thanks to which the Kantian categorical imperative as a moral law becomes the individual-personal property of every human being.According to the founder of psychoanalysis, it was with the advent of prohibitions, commandments and restrictions that a person gradually began to move away from his original animal state.

In the process of development of human civilization, commandments and prohibitions imposed from outside, with their indispensable restriction on the free self-expression of natural inclinations, have become the intrapsychic property of a person, forming a special instance of the Super-I, acting as moral censorship, or conscience, appropriately correcting his life and behavior in the real world. Considering the evolutionary path of human development, Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion: “It is not true that the human psyche has not developed since ancient times and, in contrast to the progress of science and technology, today is still the same as at the beginning of history. We can here give one example of this psychic progress. Our development is going in the direction that external coercion gradually goes inward, and a special mental instance, the human Superego, includes it among its own

Their commandments. Each child demonstrates to us the process of such a transformation, thanks to him joining morality and sociality.

Speaking of such progress in the development of the human psyche, Freud had in mind, first of all, education and strengthening of the Super-I, as a valuable psychological acquisition of culture, contributing, with a few exceptions, to the internal prohibition of the real manifestation of unconscious desires associated with incest, cannibalism, bloodthirstiness. At the same time, he was forced to state that in relation to other unconscious desires of a person, this progress is not so significant, since a significant number of people obey moral requirements and prohibitions rather due to the threat of punishment from outside than under the influence of conscience. They observe moral precepts only under the pressure of external coercion, and then only as long as the threat of punishment remains real. “An infinite number of cultured people who would recoil in horror from murder or incest, do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their greed, their aggressiveness, their sexual passions, do not miss the opportunity to harm others with lies, deceit, slander, if they can go unpunished; and this continues without change through many cultural epochs.

The statement of such a deplorable situation in the field of morality of modern people, a significant part of which is not burdened with conscience to such an extent as not to commit immoral acts in the event of a weakening of external prohibitions, did not free Freud from the research task associated with comprehending the functions of the Superego. Let me remind you that, in addition to the fact that the Super-I acted as an ideal for Freud, it was also considered in psychoanalysis as embodying two hypostases: conscience and unconscious guilt. Reflecting on the activity of the Superego, Freud showed that in functional terms it is dual, since it embodies not only the requirements of obligation, but also prohibitions. The requirements of duty dictate ideals to a person, in accordance with which he strives to be different, better than he really is. Internal prohibitions are aimed at suppressing his dark side of the soul, at limiting and crowding out the unconscious

natural desires of a sexual and aggressive nature.

Thus, the bifurcation and conflict between the unconscious and consciousness, Id and I, was supplemented, in Freud's understanding, by the ambiguity of self-consciousness, the diversity of the Super-I, as a result of which a psychoanalytically interpreted person really appears in the image of an "unfortunate" being, torn apart by many intrapsychic contradictions. The founder of psychoanalysis captures the duality of the human being, associated with the natural and moral determination of his life, and in this respect takes a step forward, compared with the extremes of anthropologism and sociologism, characteristic of various schools, whose representatives were distinguished by a one-sided vision of man. However, in trying to explain this duality, he stumbled upon such moral problems, the psychoanalytic interpretation of which led to difficulties of a methodological and ethical nature, to which some attention has already been drawn. It is no coincidence that, in his understanding, a person appears to be rushing not so much between what should be and what is, which in principle contributes to the formation of a critical attitude of the individual to his environment, but between desires and prohibitions, the temptation to break them and the fear of possible punishment, which presupposed, first of all, an appeal to mental mechanisms. nervous patients, in whom this kind of bifurcation was observed.

It is interesting to note that Freud's understanding of man, refracted through the prism of a psychoanalytic interpretation of his moral foundations, turned out to be very close to the interpretation that had been given a few decades earlier by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Both researchers sought to comprehend the essence of guilt, repentance, conscience and fear of a person, that is, those of his moral implications that made his existence problematic, torn, unstable. At the same time, both of them appealed to the unconscious.

In the section of this work devoted to Freud's understanding of the problem of fear, attention was drawn to some similarities and differences between his ideas about fear and the corresponding reflections of Kierkegaard on this subject.

Subject. Here we are talking about some of their ideas related to moral issues.

Thus, Kierkegaard considered the unconscious ethical, focusing on its dual nature. “The unconscious ethical,” he remarked, “helps every person; but as a result of precisely unconsciousness, the help of the ethical, as it were, degrades a person, revealing to him the insignificance of life ... ". Freud turned to the study of the unconscious psyche from its various angles, including its moral implications, believing that “there are persons in whom self-criticism and conscience, that is, mental work with an unconditionally high assessment, are unconscious and, being unconscious, produce an extremely important effect.

Both the one and the other described moral imperatives in order to better understand the nature of man. In addition, both adhered to the tripartite division of the psyche. Kierkegaard distinguished between "body", "spirit" and "soul". Freud talked about the id, the ego and the superego. Both tried to understand the relationship between pleasure and duty, the desire to satisfy drives and moral imperatives that impose prohibitions and restrictions.

At the same time, for all the similarity of their positions, Kirkegorov's and Freud's understanding of ethical issues differed from each other. And the point is not even that the tripartite division of the human psyche was carried out by them for various reasons, as a result of which it would be unlawful to draw unconditional parallels between the constituent parts of the psyche he singled out or to identify the concept of the human "spirit" in Kierkegaard with the concept of I in Freud, as this took place, for example, in the study of P. Cole, devoted to a comparative analysis of the theoretical positions of both thinkers.

Something else is more important, namely, that Kierkegaard and Freud assess the moral foundations of man differently. For the first, guilt, pangs of conscience, manifestation of fear are ordinary and typical phenomena, characterizing the moral state of a person who is constantly in anxiety, but thereby ethically related to the existing reality and

capable of taking responsibility for their actions and deeds.

From the point of view of the second, i.e. the founder of psychoanalysis, moral imperatives, being the "internal" property of a person, limiting his erotic, egoistic and destructive inclinations, at the same time serve as a breeding ground for the painful splitting of the psyche, where feelings of guilt and fear are not so much an incentive for a responsible, healthy attitude to life as the cause of mental disorders, flight into illness, escape from reality into a world of illusions. We must pay tribute to the fact that attention has already been paid to this circumstance in the domestic literature. In particular, in one of the works of P. Gaidenko, devoted, however, to the study of the views of not the founder of psychoanalysis, but Fichte, it was rightly emphasized that, from the point of view of Kierkegaard, the feeling of guilt is painful, but at the same time it testifies to the normal life of a person, and in Freud's understanding, this feeling is usually a sign of mental illness.

For the founder of psychoanalysis, moral guilt is an expression of the tension between the ego and the superego. With the internalization of parental authority, with the emergence of the Super-I, significant changes take place in the human psyche. Conscience, as it were, rises to a new stage of its development. If in the process of the initial origin of conscience there was a fear of being exposed by an external authority, then with the formation of the Super-I, this fear loses its significance. At the same time, the transfer of authority from the outside inward leads to the fact that the Super-I becomes a pressing force and torments the I. At this new stage of development, conscience acquires the features of cruelty. It becomes more severe and suspicious than at the previous stage of its development, when a person experienced fear of external authority. Suspicion and cruelty of conscience lead to the fact that a person begins to experience constant fear of the Superego, and this, in turn, leads to increased feelings of guilt.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud considered the question of how the first moral prescriptions and moral restrictions arose in primitive society. At the same time, he noted that the initial

The feeling of guilt that arose as a reaction to the “great event”, parricide in the primitive Horde, did not disappear “without a trace. Echoes of this feeling have retained their significance throughout the development of human civilization. “This creative consciousness of guilt,” Freud believed, “has not died out among us to this day. We find it active in neurotics as antisocial, as creating new moral prescriptions and continuous restrictions, as repentance for committed crimes and as a precautionary measure against those that are to be committed.

In later works, after the founder of psychoanalysis put forward his ideas about the three-term structure of the psyche and the relationship between the id, ego and superego, he had to explain in a new way the psychological mechanisms of the development of fear, conscience, guilt. It would be more accurate to say that it was not so much about a fundamentally new explanation of these phenomena, but about those adjustments that turned out to be necessary due to structural ideas about the functioning of the human psyche. In particular, Freud began to proceed from the fact that There are two sources of guilt. The first has to do with fear of external authority. The second - with a later fear of the Super-I, of the conscience. Fear of external authority makes a person refuse to satisfy his desires, desires, instincts. Fear of the Superego it also brings punishment, since it is impossible to hide before conscience neither forbidden desires, nor even thoughts about them. The severity of the Superego, the demands of conscience are constantly acting factors in a person's life, which have a significant impact on the intensification of guilt feelings.

From Freud's point of view, in a person, as it were, simultaneously exist two levels of conscience, namely, the original, infantile, and the more developed, embodied in the Superego. This means that a relationship develops between the renunciation of drives and the consciousness of guilt that is by no means always clear to those who are not familiar with psychoanalytic ideas. The fact is that initially the rejection of desires was nothing more than a consequence of a person’s fear of an external authority. Therefore, in order not to lose love from another person acting as an authority, he had to refuse

get away from the satisfaction of desires. Retribution with external authority by refusing to satisfy one's own desires led to the mitigation and even elimination of feelings of guilt. Another thing is the fear of the Super-I, of the internalized authority. Refusal to satisfy desires is not enough to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is impossible to hide from the Super-I. Despite such a refusal, a person feels guilty. The pangs of conscience are not only not eliminated, but, on the contrary, can intensify. If the renunciation of instincts, caused by fear of external authority, served as a sufficient reason for maintaining or gaining love, then a similar strategy of a person caused by fear of the Superego does not serve as a guarantee of love. "Man, - according to Freud, - has changed the threat of external misfortune - the loss of love and punishment from external authority - for a long internal misfortune, a tense consciousness of guilt."

Such an explanation of the nature of conscience and guilt inevitably raised the question of reconciling the genetic, related to the history of formation, and the structural, related to the functioning of the psyche, points of view formulated by the founder of psychoanalysis in the works "Totem and Taboo" and "I and It". It turned out that in the first case, the emergence of conscience is associated with the rejection of instincts, while in the second case, the rejection of instincts is due to the presence of conscience. This paradox was similarly reflected in Freud's earlier views on the relationship between repression and fear, when he had to solve the dilemma of whether fear is a consequence of the suppression of a person's drives or the suppression of drives itself is due to the presence of fear.

Let me remind you that if initially Freud believed that the energy of the repression of unconscious drives leads to the emergence of fear, then later he came to the conclusion that it is not repression that generates fear, but the previous fear as an affective state of the soul entails repression. It would seem that in the question of the relationship between the renunciation of instincts and the emergence of conscience, he could act in a similar way, that is, take a definite point of view. Thus, in The Economic Problems of Masochism (1924), he noted that usually the situation is as if the moral requirements

They were primary, and the rejection of desires was their consequence. At the same time, the origin of morality was not explained in any way. “In fact, as it seems to us, it is necessary to go the opposite way; the first renunciation of inclinations is imposed by external forces, and it only creates morality, which is expressed in conscience and requires further renunciation of inclinations.

However, the ethical issues associated with understanding the nature of conscience and guilt turned out to be so confusing and difficult to understand that Freud had to repeatedly discuss the genesis of the formation of conscience and the emergence of guilt consciousness. Consideration of the temporal sequence (rejection of drives ■ due to fear of external authority and its subsequent internalization - the Super-I, leading to the emergence of fear of conscience, torture of the Self and increased guilt) did not give an exhaustive explanation that completely removes all questions related to understanding how and why conscience becomes hypermoral. It was here that Freud needed an idea that is unique to psychoanalysis and alien to ordinary human thinking. “This idea,” emphasized the founder of psychoanalysis, “is this: although, at first, conscience (or rather, fear, which will later become conscience) was the root cause of the rejection of instincts, then the attitude is reversed. Each refusal becomes a dynamic source of conscience, each time it strengthens its severity and intolerance.

Viewing from this angle the relationship between instinctive renunciation, conscience, and growing feeling guilt was not only theoretical, but And practical value. Clinical practice showed that an intolerable feeling of guilt, which could have a destructive effect on a person, played a significant role in the formation of neurotic diseases. Thus, in obsessive-compulsive disorder, the feeling of guilt dominates the clinical picture of the disease and is persistently imposed on the person's consciousness. The very feeling of guilt is “unconscious” for patients. Often it gives rise to an unconscious need for punishment, as a result of which the Super-I of a person constantly undermines his inner world and leads to self-torture, self-discipline, masochism.

a person any unseemly act or only. I thought about it, although I did not put it into action. Evil deed and malicious intent seem to be equated to each other. The difference between them becomes irrelevant for the emergence of feelings of guilt.

One of the discoveries of psychoanalysis was that Freud considered conscience as a strict authority exercising supervision and judgment as over actions, so and over man's intentions. The cruelty, inexorability of the Super-I in relation to the warded I gave rise to such a mental state of anxiety that did not leave a person alone. Fear of the superego, tensions between the ego and the controlling conscience, the consciousness of guilt, the unconscious need for punishment - all this, from a psychoanalytic point of view, served as a breeding ground for the formation of the ego, under the influence of the sadistic superego, masochistic.

The masochistic tendencies of the ego, brought to life by the hypermoral, sadistic Superego, find their direct expression in the psyche of the nervously ill, who are acutely experiencing an unconscious need for punishment. Dealing with clinical practice with the manifestation of the masochistic tendencies of patients, Freud was forced to turn to a conceptual understanding of moral problems, which prompted him not only to consider the relationship between fear, conscience, guilt, and not to a more detailed study of masochism as such.

7. Moral masochism and negative therapeutic reaction

In The Economic Problems of Masochism, the founder of psychoanalysis specifically dwelled on the disclosure of the nature of this phenomenon, correlating it with an unconscious sense of guilt and the need for punishment. At the same time, he identified three forms of masochism: erogenous, as a condition of sexual arousal; female, which is an expression of the feminine essence; moral, acting as a certain norm of behavior. The last form of masochism was correlated by Freud with the presence of an unconscious sense of guilt, the expiation of which is found.

Lo is reflected in a neurotic illness. Hence the desire of the founder of psychoanalysis to reveal the inner connections between the sadistic superego and the masochistic ego, as well as the difficulties that manifest themselves in analytic therapy when working with patients prone to moral masochism.

In the process of analytic therapy one sometimes has to deal with such patients who behave in a rather strange way. As soon as there is progress in the treatment of this type of patient, when the analyst actually achieves some success and happily hopes for further equally successful continuation of the work, the patient immediately begins to show his dissatisfaction and, what is most unpleasant, reacts to success by worsening his condition. Trying to find an explanation for such an unusual and generally strange situation, the analyst can correlate the deterioration of the patient's condition with the manifestation of internal resistance in him. Knowing the mental mechanisms of the emergence of resistance, the analyst can first of all come to the conclusion that the deterioration of the patient's condition is nothing more than his unwillingness to see the doctor triumph over the disease and the desire to prove his superiority over him. In reality, however, something else is likely to take place. The patient reacts with a worsening of his condition to the success of the treatment because, in spite of his coming to the analyst, he is generally unwilling to part with his illness. Instead of improvement, his condition worsens. Instead of getting rid of suffering in the course of analysis, the patient has a need to increase it. He manifests to, which in psychoanalysis is called negative therapeutic response.

Behind the resistance against the recovery of such a patient lies the need for constant suffering, acting as an atonement for unconscious guilt. The fundamental here is a moral, moral factor that predetermines the flight into illness as a kind of punishment or, better, self-punishment. Based on an unconscious sense of guilt, this self-punishment needs constant nourishment in the form of suffering, the elimination of which in the course of treatment is perceived as an attack on the patient's inner world, which is under the watchful and unsleeping eye of the hygienist.

Why don't our animal relatives exhibit such a cultural struggle? We simply do not know this. Probably some of them - bees, ants, termites - struggled for hundreds of thousands of years until they found those state institutions, those divisions of functions, those restrictions on individuals that we admire today. But our present state is such that we would not be happy in any of these animal states, fulfilling whatever role is prepared for individuals in them - our senses tell us about this. In other animal species, things could come to a temporary balance between the influences of the external world and the internal struggle of instincts, which would lead to stagnation in development. In primitive man, a new attack on the libido could arouse a new rebuff of destructiveness. There are many more questions than answers here.

We are concerned with another question: what means does culture use to contain and neutralize the aggressiveness that opposes it - perhaps even completely eliminate it? We have already got acquainted with some methods, probably not the most important ones. The possibility of studying them is given to us by the history of the development of the individual - what happens to him when he tries to neutralize his desire for aggression? Something surprising and mysterious, although you don't have to look far for the answer. Aggression is introjected, transferred inside, in other words, it returns to where it actually originated and is directed against one's own "I". There it is intercepted by that part of the "I", which opposes the rest of the parts as "Super-I", and now, in the form of conscience, uses against the "I" the same readiness for aggression, which the "I" would willingly satisfy on other individuals alien to it. The tension between the intensified "Super-I" and the "I" subordinate to it, we call the consciousness of guilt, which manifests itself as a need for punishment. Thus, culture overcomes the dangerous aggressive aspirations of individuals - it weakens, disarms them and leaves them under the supervision of an internal authority, similar to a garrison in a captured city.

Psychoanalysts look at the emergence of guilt differently than other psychologists. But it is not easy for the analyst to give a full account of this feeling. When you ask how someone feels guilty, at first you hear an answer that you can’t argue with: guilty (“sinful”, as a pious person would say) feels the one who did something recognized as “evil”. Then you notice how little this answer gives. After some hesitation, perhaps they will add to this: the one who, having not done evil, had such an intention, is also guilty. Then the question arises, why are intent and its implementation equated here? In both cases, however, it is assumed in advance that the evil is already known to be something bad, and must be eliminated before it is carried out. How do people come to this decision? The ability for the original, so to speak, natural, distinction between good and evil will have to be immediately rejected. Often evil is not at all harmful or dangerous to the "I"; on the contrary, it is for him desirable and pleasurable. Thus, here we need to talk about outside influence, which determines what should be called good and evil. Since one's own inner feeling does not lead a person to this path, he must have a motive in order to succumb to this external influence. Such a motive is easy to detect in his helplessness and dependence on others. It is best described as the fear of losing love. With the loss of the love of the other on whom he is dependent, the protection from numerous dangers is also lost. First of all, he finds himself in the face of the threat that another superior in strength to him will show his superiority in the form of punishment, punishment. In the beginning, therefore, evil is the threat of losing love, and we must avoid it for fear of such a loss. It does not matter whether the evil has already been committed, whether they want to commit it: in both cases, there is a threat of its disclosure by an authoritative instance, which in both cases will punish the same.

This state is called "bad conscience", although it does not deserve such a name, since at this level of awareness of guilt, the latter appears only as a fear of losing love, as a "social" fear. It cannot be otherwise for a small child, but even for many adults the differences are small - except that a larger human community takes the place of the father or both parents. People constantly allow themselves evil that pleases them, unless they are sure that this will not be revealed by the authority or it will not punish them in any way - fear refers only to exposure. Today's society must reckon with this state. Significant changes come along with the internalization of this authority, with the emergence of the "Super-I". The phenomena of conscience rise to a new level - in fact, only after that one should talk about conscience and feelings of guilt. The fear of exposure now disappears, and the distinction between crime and evil will completely disappears, since nothing can be hidden from the "Super-I", not even thoughts. True, the real seriousness of the situation is also fading away, for the new authority, the "Super-I", has no reason for cruel treatment of the "I" internally associated with it. But the situation remains the same as at the beginning, under the influence of genesis, prolonging the life of the past and already overcome. The "Super-I" tortures the sinful "I" with the same torments of fear and waits for an opportunity to punish the "I" from the outside world.

At this second stage of development, conscience reveals one peculiar feature that was alien to it at the first and which is now difficult to explain. Namely, the more virtuous a person is, the more severe and suspicious the conscience becomes. Those who have gone further along the path of holiness accuse themselves of the worst sinfulness. Virtue is deprived of part of the reward promised to it, the obedient and abstemious "I" does not enjoy the trust of his mentor, and in vain tries to deserve it. Here objections are ready: these are, they say, artificial difficulties, a stern and vigilant conscience is characteristic of moral people. The saints had the right to present themselves as sinners, citing temptations: they are more subject to the desire to satisfy instincts than others, temptations grow with constant renunciation of them, while after satisfaction they weaken at least for a while. Another fact in this so problematic area of ​​ethics is that adversity strengthens the power of conscience in the "Super-I". As long as things are going well, the conscience of a person is soft and allows a lot to the mind; as soon as misfortune happens, he withdraws into himself, admits his sinfulness, exalts the claims of his conscience, makes vows and repents. Entire nations have acted and continue to do so to this day. It is easy to explain this by the initial, infantile stage of conscience, which does not disappear even after the introjection of the "Super-I", but continues to exist next to it and behind it. Fate is seen as a substitute for parental authority; if misfortune happens, that means that he is already deprived of the love of this supreme power. The danger of such a loss makes us bow again before the parental image of the "Super-I", which a person neglected in happiness. This is even clearer if, in accordance with a strictly religious way of thinking, we consider fate to be only an expression of the will of God. The people of Israel considered themselves the chosen son of God, and while the majestic father sent misfortunes after misfortunes to his people, the people did not grumble and did not doubt the power and justice of God, but put forward prophets who reproached him for sinfulness. From the consciousness of his guilt, he created the unreasonably harsh prescriptions of his priestly religion. Primitive man behaves quite differently! When misfortune happens to him, he blames not himself, but his fetish, which did not cope with his duties - and instead of reproaching himself, he subjects him to flogging.

So, we know two sources of feelings of guilt: the fear of authorities and the later fear of the "Super-I". The first makes one refuse to satisfy the instincts, the second also punishes (after all, forbidden desires cannot be hidden from the "Super-I"). We have also seen how the severity of the "Super-I", in other words, the demands of conscience, can be understood. They are mere extensions of the severity of external authority, which has been replaced by conscience. Now we see in what relation to the renunciation of instincts stands the consciousness of guilt. Initially, the renunciation of desires was the result of fear of external authority: satisfaction was renounced so as not to lose love. By refusing, a person, as it were, pays off with external authority, and he does not have a feeling of guilt. Otherwise it happens in case of fear of the "Super-I". There is little renunciation of gratification here, for the remaining desire cannot be hidden from the Superego. Guilt arises in spite of rejection, and this is the huge economic loss of introducing a "Super-I" or, so to speak, conscience. Renunciation of desires no longer liberates, virtuous moderation is not rewarded with a guarantee of love. A person has changed the threat of external misfortune - the loss of love and punishment from external authority - for a long-term internal misfortune, a tense consciousness of guilt.

These relationships are so intricate and at the same time so important that, despite the danger of repeating what has already been said, I would like to approach them from another angle. So the temporal sequence of events is as follows: first, the withdrawal of drives due to fear of aggression from an external authority. From it follows the fear of losing love, while love protects against such punishment. Then internal authority is created, the rejection of inclinations occurs because of the fear of it, this is the fear of conscience. Crime and malicious intent are equated to each other, and hence the consciousness of guilt, the need for punishment. The aggression of conscience preserves the aggression of authority. While everything is clear; but is there room for the conscience-enhancing influence of misfortune (refusal imposed from outside), for an exceptional severity of conscience in the best and most obedient? Both of these features of conscience have already been explained by us, but the impression could be created that the explanations did not reach the essence of the matter, something remained unexplained. And here, finally, an idea is connected that is characteristic exclusively for psychoanalysis and is alien to ordinary human thinking. It allows us to understand the inevitable confusion and opacity of the subject of our study. This idea is as follows: although, at first, conscience (or rather, fear, which will later become conscience) was the root cause of the rejection of instincts, then the attitude is reversed. Each refusal becomes a dynamic source of conscience, every time it strengthens its severity and intolerance. To reconcile this with the history of the emergence of conscience already known to us, we cannot do without a paradox: conscience is a consequence of the renunciation of instincts; or - the renunciation of instincts (imposed on us from the outside) creates a conscience, which then requires a new renunciation of instincts.

Strictly speaking, this position does not contradict the genesis of conscience described earlier, and there is a way for their further rapprochement. For the sake of simplicity, let's use the example of aggressive attraction and assume that it is always required to renounce aggression. Naturally, this is only a preliminary assumption. The effect of the refusal on the conscience is then such that every element of aggressiveness that is denied satisfaction is intercepted by the "Super-I" and increases its aggression against the "I". It does not quite agree with this that the initial aggressiveness of conscience is a continuation of the severity of external authority. Then it has nothing to do with denial of satisfaction. This inconsistency, however, decreases if we assume that the first filling of the "Superego" with aggressiveness has a different source. Whatever the first prohibitions, the child must have developed a considerable aggressiveness against that authority which prevents the satisfaction of his most urgent desires. The child was forced to give up the satisfaction of his vindictive aggression against authority. In this economic difficult situation he resorts to the help of the mechanism of identification, namely, he transfers into himself this invulnerable authority, which becomes the "Super-I". Thus he takes possession of all the aggressiveness that he directed against this authority in infancy. The childish "I" must be content with the sad role of such a humiliated - paternal - authority. As often happens, we are dealing with a mirror situation: "If I were a father and you were a child, then you would have had a bad time." The relation between the "Super-I" and the "I" is a real relation, inverted by desire, between the not yet split "I" and the external object. This is also a typical situation. The essential difference, however, is that the original severity of the "Super-I" differs from that which is experienced by the object or attributed to it; rather, it represents its own aggressiveness against the object. If this is true, then it can be argued that conscience first arises through the suppression of aggressiveness, and then it is increasingly strengthened by more and more acts of suppression.

Which of these two opinions is correct? The old, which seemed to us undeniable genetically, or the new. which brings order to the theory in such perfect images? Evidence from direct observation supports both views. They do not contradict each other, and even the vengeful aggression of the child is determined by the measure of punishable aggression that he expects from his father. But experience teaches that the severity of the "Superego" developing in the child in no way conveys the severity of the treatment he himself has experienced. With a very gentle upbringing, a very severe conscience can arise in a child. But this independence should not be exaggerated: it is not difficult to be convinced that the severity of upbringing has a strong influence on the formation of the child's "Super Ego". From this it follows that in the formation of the "Super-I" and the formation of conscience, we are dealing with the interaction of innate constitutional factors and influences. environment. There is nothing surprising in this, since we are talking about the general etiological condition of all such processes. It can be said that the child, reacting with heightened aggressiveness and corresponding severity about the "Super-I" to the first serious renunciations of instincts, follows this phylogenetic prototype. The inadequacy of the reaction is explained by the fact that the primitive forefather was truly terrible and quite capable of an extreme degree of aggressiveness. Thus, the differences between the two points of view on the genesis of conscience are further blurred when we pass from the history of the development of the individual to phylogenesis. But there is a new difference between the two processes. We continue to adhere to the hypothesis that the human sense of guilt comes from the Oedipus complex and was acquired along with the murder of the father by the sons united against him. Then aggression was not suppressed, but was carried out - the very aggression, the suppression of which in a child should be a source of guilt. I would not be surprised if one of the readers angrily exclaims: “It doesn’t matter whether he kills his father or not - the feeling of guilt appears in both cases! the children of men killed their fathers no more often than modern ones are wont to. However, even if this is not a novel, but a reliable story, then in this case there is nothing unexpected: the feeling of guilt appears after the accomplishment of something criminal. And for this everyday case, psychoanalysis just doesn't give any explanation."

This is true, and we need to catch up. There is no mystery here. The feeling of guilt that arises after the accomplishment of something criminal, rather deserves the name of remorse. It refers only to the deed, and thus already presupposes the presence of a conscience before the deed, i.e., the readiness to feel guilty. Repentance will not help us in the least in exploring the origins of conscience and guilt. In ordinary cases, the following happens: the attraction gains strength and can break through the defenses of conscience, limited in strength. But as the need is satisfied, its natural weakening occurs and the previous balance of forces is restored. Therefore, psychoanalysis rightly excludes cases of guilt arising from remorse - however often they may occur and whatever their practical significance.

But when the feeling of guilt goes back to the murder of the forefather - doesn't it represent "repentance", does it not imply the presence of conscience and guilt even before the act is committed? Where, then, is repentance? It is this incident that should clear up the mystery of guilt and put an end to doubts. I believe it is achievable. Repentance was the result of the initial ambivalence of feelings towards the father: the sons hated him, but they also loved him. After the satisfaction of hatred in aggression, love manifested itself as repentance for the deed, the identification of the "Super-I" with the father took place. As if in punishment for an aggressive act against his father, his power was given to the "Super Ego", which establishes restrictions, imposing prohibitions on the repetition of the act. The tendency to aggression against the father was repeated in subsequent generations, and therefore the feeling of guilt also persisted, which intensified each time aggression was suppressed and transferred to the "Superego". Now we can clearly see both the involvement of love in the emergence of conscience, and the fatal inevitability of guilt. It does not matter whether parricide actually occurred or whether it was abstained from. The feeling of guilt will be found in both cases, for it is the expression of an ambivalent conflict, an eternal struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct. This conflict flares up as soon as a person is faced with the task of coexistence with others. As long as this community has the form of a family, the conflict manifests itself in the Oedipus complex, in the conscience and the first sense of guilt. Along with attempts to expand this community, the same conflict continues in past-dependent forms, intensifies and leads to a further increase in guilt. Culture is obedient to an erotic impulse that unites people into an internally connected mass. This goal is achieved only with a constant increase in guilt. What began with the father finds its completion in the mass. If culture is a necessary path of development from the family to humanity, then the consequences of its inherent conflict - the eternal strife of love and death - are inextricably linked with it. A feeling of guilt grows out of it, sometimes reaching such heights that it becomes unbearable for an individual. Let us recall the great poet's stunning accusation against "heavenly powers."

Maintenance of local area networks on our website.