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The Two Sources of Morality in Freud’s Work Gilles Ribault 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 civilisation has acquired throughout its history in regard to spirituality or a sense of an 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 realise 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, when the Oedipus complex is becoming to Freud the core of the psychic history and eventually the main foundation of the civilised 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 that could lead to pathological effects. It would be illusory to try and remove the difficulty by asserting that if Freud has always criticised 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 characterised 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 argument in Freud’s conception of morality. 1 Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Frankfurt a/M.: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag. Gilles Ribault 136 If, to start with, we lay our discussion upon that great work Totem und Tabu,2 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 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 Narzismus’,3 moral ideals are the conditions of repression and must thus be regarded as a central element of the pathological conflict characterising 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...

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