In my May 14 post, I touched on how the later Freud of The Ego and Id and Civilization and Its Discontents placed conscience and the super-ego at the collision point between psycho-analysis and a system of knowledge-to-come that would be psycho-analysis’s other side. Whereas psycho-analysis focuses on how an individual makes him/herself part of a society, this other knowledge would follow the flow in the opposition direction — how civilization (Kultur) creates “a unified group out of many individuals.” (140-144)

In that post, I wrote that the psycho-analytic subject may not survive the collision and promised to take that up later: “It is hard to see how the ‘individual’ as a unity standing at the center of the historical narrative as its agent, its outcome and its protagonist can survive the collision. If the conscience is to survive, it must take on a new form and a new status.” Later is now. Let’s see how far I get.

The unified individual doesn’t survive in part because it’s too overloaded, but also because it wasn't there in the first place. As Freud traces the direction of Oedipal forces from the individual toward his/her integration into society, the individual dissolves into an increasingly complex flow of forces: id + ego + super-ego operating on the surfaces of “perception consciousness” (Pcpt. Cs.) and conscious (Cs.); operating deep within an unconscious (UCs.) with plenty of energy collecting in the preconscious (PCs.); all driven by a “pleasure principle” that is not itself a driver but at best is a “tendency.” Underlying it all is just a bunch of “energy” flowing this way and that.

By the time we get to the super-ego, more than just the coherent individual collapses. It’s possible that the entire Enlightenment collapses, but I’ll get to that later. Freud now has to speculate openly about another form of knowledge that would come at the individual from its other side — the specificity of the “process of civilization.” It is explicitly a change in the flow of the direction of the analysis — from how autonomous individuals make themselves into members of a society to how society itself unifies individuals. In the one, the individual is the agent/ protagonist and society is the scene of the action; in the other roles are reversed.

How can the Oedipus complex as a universal law — the weakest link in the argument — survive this prolonged deconstruction and conceptualization of endlessly bifurcating forces? It doesn’t, but we’ll come back to this.

When Freud speculates about this other form of knowledge — the one that will take the “process of civilization” as its starting point — he’s reluctant to transfer the concepts and vocabulary of psycho-analysis to this unnamed and unnamable knowledge-to-come:

But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved. (147)

Yet he seems compelled to go on, and as he speculates about the intersection of the two forms of knowledge, it is difficult to tell when Freud is writing about the actual lived-struggle of the individual or the eventual contest between two different forms of knowledge:

So, also, the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground. But this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction — probably an irreconcilable one — between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects, and it does admit of an eventual accommodation in the individual, as, it may be hoped, it will also do in the future of civilization, however much that civilizations may oppress the life of the individual to-day.(142)

How much of this is psycho-analysis? How much is speculation on the knowledge-to-come? How much of this is a prominent public intellectual openly voicing concern about the rise of National Socialism in Europe and its “oppress[ion] of the life of the individual to-day?” It’s difficult to parse from word to word, but the text is certainly not only operating within the discipline of psycho-analysis. It is operating right at its very limits and admitting that it may not be adequate to go further.

This much can be said: the “disputed ground” is two things at once.

1. It is the human individual as an actual person trying to make his/her way in a given culture.

2. It is the individual as an object of inquiry fought over by two forms of knowledge.

Which form of knowledge will be best at accurately describing the lived reality of the individual? The object of knowledge is not “Eros and death” as eternally opposed forces warring within individual psyches; the object of knowledge is the “economics of the libido” as the mutually disputed ground where these processes of lived experience and how best to know them will be worked out. Certainly the Delphi Oracle’s mandate to “know thyself” will take on a whole new meaning.

European intellectual history of the twentieth century was obsessed with this disputed ground. Certainly the middle of the 2oth Century used both Freud and Marx to negotiate the dispute. Later, Deleuze and Guattari completely re-imagined the collision and occupied the disputed ground as a feud with Freud’s over-reliance on the Oedipus complex.

Foucault captured this dispute in his short preface to Anti-Oedipus, which he describes as the heir and the undoer of this intellectual legacy. What we’re left with is not “the new theoretical reference” nor “should we look for a ‘philosophy’” as if it were a “flashy Hegel.” Rather, what we find here is a “book of ethics”:

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular “readership”: being anti-oedipal has become a lifestyle, a way of thinking and living).

In calling Anti-Oedipus a “book of ethics”, Foucault is certainly marking his own passage from analysis of “techniques of power” to “care of the self”. But he was walking through a door that Freud had already opened in the closing pages of Civilization:

The cultural super-ego has developed its ideals and set up its demands. Among the latter, those which deal with the relations of human beings to one another are comprised under the heading of ethics…. Ethics is thus to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt — as an endeavor to achieve, by means of a command of the super-ego, something which has so far not been achieved by means of any other cultural activities. (144)

While it opens the door to ethics as something that will and must occupy this intersection of the two kinds of knowledge, Civilization and Its Discontents decidedly is not a “book of ethics.” It simply introduces the topic as something that will need to be thought in this knowledge-to-come. As I said earlier, Freud is operating at the limits of psycho-analysis, and in doing so, he lets loose some interesting signals of a possible future.

Foucault and D/G received the signals and picked up the challenge of thinking about ethics without a unified individual as the foundation — what they called “the subject”. But arguably Freud had already set in motion a slightly different but related problem. As he proceeded from the id toward the “conscience”, the unified individual was progressively dissolving into an amalgamation of irreconcilable forces. As soon as he reaches the conscience, the dissolution is complete — the conscience is a fabrication of the super-ego (which resides within the ego and thus within the id) that is the pure absorption of a particular culture’s “demands” on the individual as a member of the community.

For the later Freud, morality (and thus ethics) must come from the outside and work its way in. Moral interiority is a fabrication of the civilization surrounding the individual. To seek the moral individual from the psycho-analytic directional flow (from individual to society) is destined to reverse the flow and seek it instead from the other direction — how a society assembles individuals into a unity.

The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harbored residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection. (The Ego and the Id, 35)

There is no way to read this section of The Ego and the Id and conclude that morality and conscience are anything other than products of the Kultur that one inhabits. To have any clear understanding of how this resurrection and revival happens in particular historical circumstances, the flow of analysis must be reversed so as to figure out exactly what and how the process of “inheritance” as “repetition,” “revival” and “resurrection” happens. At best psycho-analysis can only describe how a given individual deals with it.

Thus, the Enlightenment’s philosophical-political alliance — that tried to found the best social order on an understanding of universal values that are accessible to reasonable individuals — comes crashing down. By starting the process from the individual and working toward how the individual makes him/herself into a member of a community, Freud dissolves once and for all the idea that morality can be based on an individual’s access to universal values — whether the Christian God or the Enlightenment’s Reason. The super-ego and conscience are the very fabrications of this process that is always rooted in history that cannot be summed up as progressive. The belief that the Enlightenment discovered a universal basis for human progress cannot be abstracted from the process of super-ego formation — this belief must be a product of the process and therefore one of the features of our modern moral-political conscience that the Enlightenment passed on.

Yet, conscience as an inherited sense of right and wrong, and thus a regulator of behavior, survives. Civilization (Kultur) and its institutions cannot and will not provide salvation because there was nothing to save in the first place. But it can and does provide a sense of how to get along with others at scale. It’s just that psycho-analysis has little, if anything, to say about the best form of society because it can’t and shouldn’t scale up to that size of a problem.

To bring it home: by focusing so intently on the individual and tracing its development from The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) to Civilization and Its Discontents (1930-31), Freud exposes a fundamental problem with how the western world has thought about the relationship between morality, conscience, the individual and society. Psycho-analysis, in Freud’s hands, exposes the problem not by critiquing it but by relentlessly following the assumed flow from the individual to the social. From here, the standard Enlightenment narrative just seems quaint — that universally moral individuals got together in Coffee Houses and other institutions of “Civil Society” and created a political order organized in the interest of ultimate human progress.

When asked to think about how societies form individuals into a unity, psycho-analysis can’t operate at this scale. As it stretches and finds its limits, it exposes the weaknesses that were already there in the Enlightenment philosophical-political alliance without being able to fix the problems. Psycho-analysis simply doesn’t have the conceptual apparatus to go that far and finds itself in a kind of “Old Man and the Sea” situation — the object it seeks and brings back has been devoured by the sharks.

Consequently, the directional flow of the analysis must be reversed. In the process, psycho-analytic concepts such as the Oedipus complex, neurosis and obsessions may not be helpful, and in fact, according to Freud, may be dangerous.

The flow of analysis must be from Kultur to the moral individual as Kultur’s own creation. Thus Foucault, D/G (on the side of Continental Philosophy) and Dewey and Rorty and Rawls (on the side of American Pragmatism) and others who took up this problem were already called for long before they showed up.

So the real problem Freud sends us is this: he breaks the chain of connections holding together the individual as the bearer of a conscience that is capable of discerning universal right and wrongs and thus founding a good political order. It’s not that this issue isn’t valid; it’s just not the purview of psycho-analysis. He signals to us that the “process of civilization” must be thought and that it will involve “ethics” and “conscience,” but there will be no universal rights and wrongs that the conscience can access. Without this set of connections, how can anyone say that the rise of Nazism (happening at the time of The Ego and the Id and Civilization) is bad?

Is this Horkheimer and Adorno’s pronouncement that the Enlightenment must bring an end to itself? Are we watching it happen in the long arc of Freud’s work from helping his patients interpret their dreams to speculating on Civilization and Its Discontents? Certainly the Enlightenment project did not come to an end, but it has had to face Freud’s inheritance: can we have an ethics without a conscience that understands universal rights and wrongs? And if so, how is conscience effective when it is untethered from a unified individual that can be held responsible for its actions? Relying on psycho-analysis for the answer will be doomed to failure.