Collective Pressure Versus Primary Love: A Psychoanalytic Comment

What follows are some clinical and evidential reactions to a stimulating and original paper. Writing as a clinician, indulgence is craved for inevitable philosophical naiveté.

First, Nykänen’s distinction between conscience and guilt makes good phenomenological and clinical sense. To take a fictional example, imagine a highly respected professional who is arrested for a sex-related crime—kerb-crawling or downloading child pornography perhaps. He (inevitably it will be a ‘he’) will face two distinct kinds of mental pain. First, he will experience ‘collective pressure’ (Nykänen’s ‘guilt’): ‘I’ve done something wrong. I have been caught out. I will lose my job. My colleagues will despise me. I may go to prison. I have brought shame on my family.’ But he will also experience ‘conscience’: ‘How could I have done that? What does what I have done say about me as man? How can I live with myself as a child-molester? I have used my position of power to harm an innocent suffering human.’ The first concerns actions that are deemed wrong according to the dictates of the world. The perpetrator sees himself through others’ eyes and is appalled, frightened, self-denigratory—but, equally, may be self-justificatory: ‘There are lots of other people like me who get away with it. She was asking for it. It was a straightforward financial transaction—she needed money, I needed sex,’ and so on.

The second set of feelings seems to go deeper into the perpetrator’s existential being. His conscience tells him that there is something inherently wrong with sexual exploitation, over and above the fact that it is condemned by society. He feels diminished in his view of himself as a man. A social bond has been broken, not just at the level of society’s rules, but in the I–Thou relationship fundamental to being human.

One way of capturing this distinction is to see it terms of consequentialism versus virtue ethics (Stangroom 2010). Guilt points to wrongdoing in terms of its results. Actions have consequences. Our subject faces a radical loss of his ‘social capital’: Access to financial and emotional resources, job loss, divorce, being shunned by his children, becoming a social pariah, and so on. Conscience by contrast starts off as a private matter between self and self: Knowing that one is a sexual exploiter means that one can no longer see oneself as a ‘good person.’ One’s fundamental self-worth—a sense of being ‘virtuous’—is called into question.

These two tracks also have different implications for redemption. Guilt and collective pressure ensure that once the transgressor has ‘served his time,’ ‘repaid his debt to society,’ he can be accepted back into the human fold without further questioning.¹ Conscience, by contrast, requires the perpetrator to undergo psychological transformation: To acknowledge the harm he has done to himself and others, experience remorse, suffer, and earn redemption not just by staying within the aegis of the law, but by ‘genuine’ change, which means that a similar crime could—as opposed to would—be unthinkable in the future.

Nykänen criticizes Freud for conflating guilt and conscience, by reducing the latter to the former. The internalization of the father in the form of the superego instantiates ‘collective pressure’ in the psyche as the arbiter of the moral law and the dispenser of internal justice, with harsh punishment—in the shape of mental pain—for transgression. Using Huck Finn’s dilemma as his example, he questions the ‘classical psychoanalysis’ model in which Huck’s moral conflict would be between his ego’s difficulty in reconciling his id (sublimated erotic desire for Jim) and the strictures of the prohibitive superego. In Nykänen’s model, two moral ‘agencies’ are at work in Huck’s inner world: A primary I–Thou love for the other as represented by fellow-feelings for his friend Jim, and the demands of collective pressure to conform to the racist norms of the time. If I understand him rightly, Nykänen also suggests that when conscience is abandoned in favor of collective...