Conférence Vienne 2011

The two sources of morality in Freud’s work

It has been already pointed out that Freud’s statements about morality seem to be ambiguous and even
contradictory. On the one hand, we know that Freud is an eager advocate of cultural institutions and of
all that human civilization has acquired throughout its history in regard to spirituality or a sense of
ideal. By reading his work, we can learn that culture stands for the progress that has led human beings
beyond animality. Morality and its rules appear, from this vantage point, as a sharp and sometimes
cruel principle of renunciation that humanity needs in order to master its drives. But, on the other
hand, through more careful observation, we realize that such a praise of moral values is not to be
found in all of Freud’s texts. To be more specific, Freud develops this opinion chiefly after 1923-1924,
while the Oedipus complex is becoming to Freud the core of the psychic history and eventually the
main foundation of the civilized man. Thus, if we go back to earlier publications, for example to Die
“Kulturelle” sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität 1, we can easily remember that the first Freud’s
assessment about morality was more qualified and was even critical regarding its repressive
consequences. Ideals and moral values were indeed the principles of inner conflicts which could lead
to pathological effects. It would be illusory to try and remove the difficulty by asserting that if Freud
has always criticized the excess of morality, yet he never challenged morality itself. For the whole
problem lies within: Morality which Freud ends up considering as normal and unique is precisely the
one he characterized previously as being zealous and exacting, and from which humanity had to be set
free.
What can be understood about this real and important discrepancy? After being held up as an efficient
method for helping the individual to resist over-demanding cultural aims, did psychoanalysis
eventually turn into a mere educational task? It seems that its new purpose became that of leading
humanity to accept its difficult submission to inner laws. If, to quote Freud, the “individual is an
enemy of culture”, which camp does Freud finally choose to support? We would like to consider this
contradiction as an opportunity to draw out two different lines of arguments in Freud’s conception of
morality.

If, to start with, we lay our discussion upon that great work Totem und Tabu2, it is clear that Freud
acknowledges tight links between moral rules, taboos and neurotic inhibitions. A taboo can be seen as
an archaic form of moral obligation. Freud defines it as the result of a repressed aggressive impulse,
that is, a disposition related to a compulsive defence. We don’t know why we have to comply with it
but we feel with a blind and powerful sense of urgency that it has to be done. A taboo looks like an
1
Gesammelte Werke VII. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
2
Gesammelte Werke IX. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.

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obsessional symptom. However, not all moral prohibitions are taboos. Indeed, Freud describes the
“religious or moral obligations” as something else. With this second group of ethical elements, it is not
anymore a question of a stringent repression but of the ambivalent love of authority that, as we know,
Freud staged in the Darwinian tale of the original horde. Religious and moral laws are tightly related
to respectful feelings which increase within the brothers’ society after the murder of its leader: what
this magnetic figure wanted when he was alive became an inside law for his murderers after his death.
With this kind of rule, Freud explores a new modality of the neurotic side of ethics: a narcissistic love
which submits the ego to the stern laws of the superego. As it will be explained in Zur Einführung des
Narzismus3, moral ideals are the conditions of repression and must thus be regarded as a central
element of the pathological conflict characterizing neurosis. At that time, Freud considers the
secondary narcissism as a bequest of the primary one that every man must overcome to enter
adulthood. Therefore, a morality based on subjection to an ideal or to any moral laws can’t be
considered as free from the infantile condition. We thus clearly understand the recurrent comparison in
Totem und Tabu, between taboos, pathological inhibitions and moral laws : all of them are founded on
neurotic conditions.
Hence, if our analysis doesn’t mislead us, Freud must have developed another idea of moral rule; more
specifically, a morality without any pathological roots. And we can easily check our hypothesis in the
text that we have just mentioned. Indeed, reading this great work through, we can find out a third
notion of moral necessity. Freud makes a difference between the inhibition involved in taboo, the
obedience to laws and the mere inner disposition that make us feel spontaneously inclined to conform
to a rule. The Freudian metapsychology here re-enacts what the Ancients, and Aristotle in particular,
termed “hexis” and what the Romans have translated into “habitus”. “Where does virtue come from?”
was the great Greek question. Philosophers used to answer with a vague reference to “habit” without
ever accounting for it. Freud puts forward that the moral features that define a character are not habits
but mostly remains of infantile conflicts : shyness, shame, disgust, for instance, are psychic formations
replacing opposite impulses which have been overcome. The reaction generating these
“Reaktionbilduneng” that Freud regards as a successful repression 4, regularly appears during the
grieving process in which people who are suffering a loss adopt one or a few psychological attributes
of the lost one. This reaction can also occur at the origin of essential moral limits like incest- or
murder-prohibitions. One can prevent oneself from killing because of the culpability or the angst; but
one can also be simply reluctant to commit such transgressions and experience a natural refusal if one
were prompted to do so. In the first case, one belongs to the Dostoievskian world with its tormented
characters; in the second, one behaves as the wise and virtuous man according to Ancient philosophers
or as Freud himself in accordance with what he reveals of his own morality 5.

3
Gesammelte Werke X. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
4
The process of a susscessfull repression is described in Triebe und Triebschicksale: page 255-256. Gesammelte
Werke X. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.

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Readers of Totem und Tabu have often neglected this third kind of moral rules which arise after the
murder of the Leader of the horde. It should be pointed out that the norms set up by the brothers’ guilt,
immediately after the misdeed, are not the same as the ones which, later on, stemmed from the post-
murder rivalry. The first ones are the ground of religious principles; the second of social bonds. In his
concise and acute style, Freud writes that the ruling out of incest, for example, does not find its
genuine root in a feeling - culpability or any other - but in a “practical necessity” (praktische
Begründung)6 : all the murderers wanted themselves to become the chief which they killed together;
all claimed full sexual rights on the females of the group; in both cases, they all had to forsake their
desire. Humanity learns its main moral lessons from what the Greeks named Ananké: the necessity that
is experienced when the only way out of insoluble problems is to let go. To Freud, loss and grieving
tears is the painful path to wisdom. The mythical scene of the killing of the father represents only the
“beginning” of culture, not its origin and then not its necessary frame. The real source of society goes
back to the birth of the bonds that Freud called “social feelings” which have nothing to do with
religion, neurosis or guilt.
The point we are making here has of course a heavy significance for understanding what Freud meant
as well as to appreciate the meaning of the analytic work itself. For we can reasonably describe this
work as a moral process. But of what kind of moral process is it? When Freud pointed out what
succeeded in the cure of the young Hans, he put it in this way: “sie (the analytic cure) ersetzt die
Verdrängung durch die Verurteilung”7. It appears in this passage that the final condemnation provided
by the therapeutic process pertains to morality, but a morality free from repression or from any inner
conflicts. This ethics consists of a mere progress of “BewuBtsein”, of consciousness and definitely not
in a victory of a severe conscience, the “Gewissen”. If human societies had no other basis than the
ambivalent love for a totem -or any inner substitute- depicted within the members of the original
horde, there would be no hope for civilization to know another morality than the one which has
dominated it until now. The individual could not expect to defeat his neurotic problems through an
analytic cure if he were locked in an Oedipus complex seen as an universal unconscious legacy. All
the human morality would be then the one supported by the narcissistic organization of the superego:
an Übermoralität8. In such conditions, how could a cultural progress ever get rid of religion and
neurosis? It is true that Freud ended up sharing this point of view after the article “Das Ich und das
Es”9. Nevertheless it is impossible to think that this pessimistic conception belonged to Freudian views
before this turning-point. Indeed, for a long time, Freud believed in the curative virtue of his new
psychological method. The possibility of overcoming neurosis - individually or socially - was an
established fact to him. The border between psychic normality and pathology meant a lot as long as
5
Letter to Putnam : 1915, the 15th of July. James Jackson Putnam and the psychoanalysis. Harvard College.
1971.
6
Totem und Tabou : page 173-174. Gesammelte Werke IX. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
7
Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjahrigen Knaben : page 375. Gesammelte Werke VII. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
8
Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose : page 451. Gesammelte Werke X. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
9
Gesammelte Werke XIII. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.

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the oedipal complex remained a peculiar structure and still so, when it was raised up to the mould of
neurotic disease. But it becomes impossible to imagine a mind released from the infantile narcissistic
love and its ensuing conflicts when the oedipal complex is to be held as a universal and necessary
construction from which nobody escapes. Morality and religion are then to be regarded as two similar
answers to the same issue: the anguish in front of a diffuse threat coming either from heaven or from
nature or from existence itself.
How can this stunning change of mind be accounted for? Before setting out our hypothesis, let us
focus on the first conclusion of our investigation: the question of the status of morality in Freudian
thought does not claim a single answer. This does not mean that Freud answers in manifold and
indistinct ways. We have tried to bring to the fore that the ambiguity which splits the Freudian outlook
is to be connected to two different kinds of moral rules coming from two distinct sources. The trouble
begins when one of these two models, the pathological one, casts a shadow on the other. What
happens so isn’t a question of logic but of psychology: Freud is caught up with his own neurosis that,
for a long time, he was able to observe and to analyse in his own inner life. The Oedipus complex,
which was strongly ruling his infantile desires, first of all inspired his investigations and then
overwhelmed him. On a theoretical level, this complex then became a universal psychic organisation
which it was impossible to leave behind. From the key article, Das Ich und das Es, Freud explicitly
considers the superego as heir to the paternal oedipal figure. This complete revolving turn is not to be
taken as a redirection that Freud clearly endorsed but as an unconscious shift which simply weakened
and darkened the consistency of the previous analyses.
Be that as it may, the issue of the status of morality in Freudian thought raises a question whose stakes
meet current philosophical interests. To put it straightforwardly and concisely, we could simply ask: is
Freud a post-modernist thinker? Is Freudian psychoanalysis the first intellectual enterprise to
acknowledge that society doesn’t need ideals or transcendent values to gather people and make them
live together? The first Freud helps to conceive of a culture without gods and sacred obligations, based
on moral rules created by mere physical and human necessities. This cruel reality could be enough to
raise humanity to civilization. The fall of idols stand for the end of a type of culture, not for the death
of culture itself. It is this insightful view which contrasts sharply with the traditionalist complain
against the present that Freud tends to abandon in the last period of his work. This evolution actually
shows up that Freud was always divided. His academic training and the Viennese society he belonged
to could have made a pure classical man of him, only keen on Goethe, Michelangelo and Roman or
Egyptian antiquities. But Freud loved Shakespeare, Leonardo or J. S. Mill too. His scientific
background and his therapeutic practice have probably helped him to open himself up to modernity, if
not to post-modernity. The conflict between these two trends of his personality is to be revealed in the
ambivalent relation Freud developed to America. The type of horizontal social bonds within a
communicational society of which he was able to conceive, was at the same time something he
loathed. Rather than a critical theory, the Freudian anthropology is then to be deemed as a thought in

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crisis, split between two approaches of morality which are not mere conceptions but ways of
experiencing and living.
Let us conclude our investigation by stepping back and asking two general and broader questions. The
first one concerns the fate of the second Freudian view on morality within the psychoanalytic
community. After Freud, psychoanalysis didn’t get rid of the heavy inheritance of this morality
exclusively thought as a set of inner laws commanded by a superego. Consequently, on a clinical
level, the problem of ethics vanished into the pathological issue of guilt: how to confront it in order to
weaken it, to decrease its intensity? The aim was no longer ¨to cope with the inner conflict¨ but ¨to
regulate it¨. Reinforcing the ego, or more modestly, driving out the unconscious motivations of the
neurotic anguish, doesn’t make any difference: in both cases the superego was granted to be as an
unavoidable structure. In this dark inner landscape differently depicted by Melanie Klein as well as
Anna Freud, no light could rise. Lacan certainly tried to contrive some way out from this hopeless
theoretical situation. With this purpose in mind, he originally put forward that the Oedipal
organization could be the origin of the best as well as the worse. The neurotic contradiction between
drives and their prohibitions was to be considered by him as a fruitful ordeal, as a mere “function” –
“la fonction paternelle”10. Through the impossibility to reach the maternal object, the child experiences
the process that will precisely set up his own desire. The main interrogation is then to know how to
keep human desire alive. Lacan is thus to be recognized as the thinker who has given back to
psychoanalysis the ambition to speak about ethics. Nevertheless, his new standpoint is grounded on
the former normative basis. Lacan persists in holding the narcissistic formation of the superego as a
necessary and even precious psychic principle. He sees in it the path to an autonomous desiring, a
condition that Freud took for granted as long as the child developed bonds with the others.
The second point brings us back to the Freudian morality without obligations or laws. It opens new
approaches to the current evolution of our European society. What future is there for a culture whose
morality would be no longer founded on principles that help individuals or nations to love themselves?
Should this society occur, what new pathologies or social discontents would emerge? What could rise
from the Oedipus’ decline? To rephrase this question in the Freud’s last metapsychological terms, we
could freely quote the well-known and concluding words of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur: could a
human culture, and to what extent, get rid of this isolated destructive drive that, since remote times,
has expressed itself through self-aggressions and a love for domination? 11 Freud’s ambiguous and
cautious answer has been severely criticised by more than one commentator. Its undeniable pessimistic
value lies in the personification of the drive of destruction regarded as a natural principle: an eternal
“Heavenly Power”. Previously, in Jenseits des Lustprinzips12, this drive wasn’t original but stemmed
from one of the two genuine archaic principles aside Eros: the death drive. A few years earlier, Freud
could have thus raised the question: in the eternal fight between erotic impulses that bind together and
10
Séminaire V. Les formations de l’inconscient. Seuil. 1998.
11
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur: page 506. Gesammelte Werke XIV. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.
12
Gesammelte Werke XIII. Fisher Tachenbuch Verlag.

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the death drive that divide, who knows up to which point, the first could be able to turn into loving
bonds rather than into aggressive impulses? Such a formulation would be less pessimistic but wouldn’t
however promise a necessary final dissolution of moral self-aggression. It would leave utterly
undecided the question of the manners through which Eros could manage to neutralize his opposite
principle in a society free from the superego. The challenge of psychoanalysis today might be to
wonder if the various ways by which our traditional societies are passing away would not be the ones
by which Eros gets rid of the destruction drives and succeeds in dominating the death drive. Such
work would probably provide innovative metapsychological models which will give future
psychoanalysis an unpredictable face.