Civilization and Its Discontents

To what extent can we baptize Freud? To what extent can we use Freud’s mechanisms of guilt and conscience to explain Christian conception of sin?

When Freud talks about the human conscience, he is using the term to describe a part of the self that exists for the express purpose of attacking self for doing things that are instinctive, but that it has been trained are ‘bad’. This contrasts greatly with the Christian definition of conscience, a part of ourselves that responds to the Holy Spirit’s prompting about the intrinsic value of an action. While there are several problems with Freud’s analysis of the conscience, a major one that stands out is his lack of absolute values. The reduction of the perceived value of actions to an acquired flinching that has nothing to do with the action itself, and only with the punishment, is dangerous. It sounds plausible. It is a comforting thought, to think that everything that we feel bad about having done is just us being mildly neurotic. It is something that we want to believe, because then we are not responsible, and there is nothing wrong with doing whatever we want. We are free.

The thing is, it does not work. Humanity self-destructs when anarchy reigns. Also, contrary to Freud’s assertions, it does not kill us to exercise self-control, and in the long run we are happier when we do so. This lines up with his comment on pages twenty-five and twenty-six, “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” To deny one’s self is to create a contrast in which good things are even better, causing one’s self to be happier overall than one would be if one stayed in a continual state of self indulgence and moderate happiness.

Another of Freud’s fallacies is that denying a temptation only makes it stronger. I know from experience that denying a temptation makes subsequent denials easier. We grow in strength, not our desires, and eventually we can weed out desires almost entirely.

There are many things in Civilization and It’s Discontents that are similarly appealing and wrong. It is tempting to try to baptize Freud, and to pick out the truth from among the chaff. The problem is, he is so clever that it is ridiculously hard to find all of the places where he goes wrong. Each place he goes wrong, however, is major in itself, and even missing one would lead to major problems. While it might be possible to salvage the truth in Freud, it is not to be taken lightly, or to be thought easy.