Introduction
Commencing with an overview of the material conditions of society, The Future of an Illusion proclaims that these conditions result from two processes: the technological processes that control the forces of nature and extract its wealth and the social processes that regulate the distribution of the [resulting] available wealth. Freud argues that, in all hitherto known civilizations, this second process, the distribution of social wealth, has always been out of kilter with the first, the production of wealth; the goods of society have always been inequitably distributed, resulting in the major inequalities of class society.
When one considers the history of various civilizations, one discovers that civilization is something that was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority that understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. This inequitable outcome continues in the case of all present-day cultures, and thus one finds that t is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share.
Contemporary civilization provides the social elite with the leisure and education to enjoy the fruit of civilization, including the artistic output, while it remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting work and have not enjoyed any personal education. Freud’s judgment of these class-based inequities is definitive: It goes without saying that a civilization that leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
Main text
Here, more than elsewhere in Freud’s writings on civilization, explicit sociological categories—class, status, power, labor, the extraction and distribution of material wealth—are the constituent elements of the surface layer of his thought. But right under this surface lie ideas of the psyche. Consider this question: in what consists of this wealth that is so inequitably distributed, the deprivation of which makes the masses discontent and in potential rebellion against civilization? The external materiality of goods and services, it soon becomes clear, is not the principal referent of Freud’s conception of societal wealth. At each crucial turn in his argument, Freud collapses wealth’s measure into purely instinctual terms.
For instance, privation, Freud states, is to be understood in his text as referring to the condition which is produced by the prohibition of instinctual gratification, the fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied. Hence, when he soon thereafter characterizes the underprivileged classes as suffering from a surplus of privation, the immediate referent of this comment is this concept of instinctual deprivation, not the material deprivation that is its external sign.
And when he then adds that civilization has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger portion, we begin to understand that the words “satisfaction” and “suppression” refer more to instinctual suppression and satisfaction than to their material or social variants. The terms of material economy, we discover, operate here as the outward tokens of psychic economy; structured as class exploitation, estrangement occurs as the extraction and transfer of instinctual energies and pleasures from laborers to the leisured.
Thus the inequitable distribution of the material goods of civilization turns into an inequitable distribution of instinctual gratification. Such a reduction of a social category to instinctual category presumes a translational correspondence between inner and outer, the
mechanisms of which are never fully spelled out. At one point, however, Freud suggests an awareness of mundane mediations: the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible. At other times, the correspondence of social economy and instinctual economy is treated as a matter of unproblematic equivalence. For example, in Freud’s opening characterization of the production and distribution of social wealth, he explains that these two processes overlap, since wealth is derived from both the social relations of production and those of distribution: an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another, in so far as the other person makes use of his work capacity, or chooses him as a sexual object.
A person can gain wealth through the exploitation of the labor of another: this maintains the level of an explicit material and social characterization of wealth. Or a person can gain wealth through taking pleasure in another as a sexual object: this, by contrast, is clearly an instinctual and psychical characterization of wealth. The frame of social reference (exploited labor) is equated with the frame of instinctual reference (erotic pleasure).
The transformational logic of the outward-to-inward, social-to-psyche movement which dominates Freud’s thought in The Future of an Illusion is not limited, however, to translations of social economy into psychic economy. This logic structures conceptualization in a multidimensional manner, infusing, in addition, Freud’s view of the historical development of society and the individual. Thus while on a synchronic conceptual plane the outward inequities of the material rewards of civilization translate into the inequitable inward distribution of instinctual gratification, on a diachronic (or historical) plane the achievement of civilization itself is portrayed as the developmental transformation of outward impingements into inward precipitates and, specifically, as the translation of the dictates of societal coercion into the instinctual renunciations of the superego.
Although all societies are held together by arrangements that balance outward coercion and inward consent, the advancement of civilization consists of the progressive shift of this balance from the first toward the second. Freud writes, it is in keeping with the course of human development that external coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental agency, man’s superego, takes it over and includes it among its commandments. Each child is meant to reproduce in its own development this historical achievement of the internalization of coercion, and only by this means does the person become a moral and social being.
For Freud, civilization on both a macro and a micro-level is epitomized by the introjection of authority, a historical achievement of the human race recapitulated as a developmental achievement of the individual, a transformation from being opponent of civilization into being its vehicle Thus, the achievement of civilization can be characterized, in part, as an internalization of social domination, a process by which social coercion becomes voluntary consent. And the measure of a civilization is the degree to which its social order is maintained voluntarily by the superegos of its citizens.
Summary
But if, in this formulation, ‘superego’ itself becomes another name for ‘civilization’ it is important to realize that to the degree that Freud equates the two, this equation carries explicit sociological and historical content. For in his text Freud portrays the superego as a historical product, a psychical entity embodied with social and class characteristics. As a development that makes manifest the mental advances that the human mind has undergone. since the earliest times, the superego reflects aspects of the social unevenness of the coercion that structured its formation.