Egos, Ids and Politics

In yesterday’s post, I drew the connection between Freud’s articulation of the complex relationships among the id, ego and ego ideal and lessons for democratic politics. One can find in Freud’s articulation a model for handling the inevitability of loss and how to keep it from turning violent. When functioning properly, the ego-id relationship is one of non-domination, negotiation and cooperation.

I don’t think I’m out of line in creating the political connection. It’s not a stretch to compare Freud’s concept of the mind to political institutions and processes. He does it himself. We don’t need to go to Totem and Taboo or Civilization and Its Discontents to find the connection. He does it in at least two places in the final chapter of The Ego and the Id. In one place, he compares the work of the ego to a “constitutional monarch” who assents to or vetos the laws passed by Parliament (57).

Shortly after this, he discusses how the ego is constantly negotiating its “three masters”: the external world, the libido and the “severity of the super-ego” (58). While in the discussion immediately preceding this, the work of the ego is described in more dominating terms (conquest, controlling), this passage explicitly flips the descriptive terms, thus referring to the ego as “a helper to the id; it is also a submissive slave who courts his master’s love” (58). This description is in keeping with his previous discussions of the ego as a negotiator, helper and cooperative power created by the id (as part of itself) to help itself get on in the world.

At the end of this paragraph, he likens the always-possible dysfunctions of this constant three-sided negotiation to a dysfunctional politician:

In its position mid way between the id and reality, [the ego] only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunistic and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favor. (59)

The phrase “like a politician” cannot be read as a simile or a metaphor in Freud. This is not a comparison. Rather, because the politician is subject to the same forces as described by Freud, the equation of politician and ego is not “like” in a comparative sense. It is the same thing being enacted in the politician. Just as Seneca saw the same forces at work in human bodies and in earthquakes, it is the same thing at work in the one as in the other. We are not dealing with attempts to illuminate a complex reality by way of comparison. We find here a continuity that cannot be reduced to a rhetorical device.

Just as beliefs in religious institutions are outgrowths of human beings working out these individual struggles on a society-wide scale, so too are our political structures manifestations of this struggle. These institutions can equally become dysfunctional when the normal mechanisms of negotiation and compensation for loss break down.

The political lesson here is not that our social structures are mere superstructures as expressions a fundamental Oedipal infrastructure. Nor should we look to our political institutions as mechanisms for resolving dialectical conflicts as an ultimate end to human alienation — a program that will always bring us to power as domination in the end. Freud warns of drawing these types of conclusions in the final chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents: one cannot and should not derive a theory of the “process of civilization” as its own field of knowledge from psycho-analysis. At best, the two processes (individual development and the “evolution of a culture”) are “interlocked” (in the formation of the super-ego) but not equivalent. For Freud, such a field of knowledge may be possible, but it is not the domain of psycho-analysis, which maintains its focus on the idiosyncrasies of how particular individuals make their accommodations to belonging to their communities.

So, we must be cautious in using the theory of the individual found in psycho-analysis as a totalizing view of the social field. But they (the study of individual development and the study of how particular societies are formed) aren’t wholly separate from each other either. For Freud, psycho-analysis can only come to grips with one side of the equation: how the individual makes accommodations to to get along with others. The other side of the equation has a different directional force:

In the process of civilization things are different [as opposed to the process of individual development]. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background. (Standard Edition 141)

The flow of energy is in a different direction, which means that the dynamics must be understood using different concepts and apparatuses of knowledge. The concepts and vocabulary of psycho-analysis can only remain “analogies” (147). A larger understanding of the process of civilization must develop its own system of knowledge.

Freud’s focus and emphasis thus remains on the flow of energy from the individual to the social. Civilization and Its Discontents is more about understanding the “discontents” than how the processes of individual civilizations work. Thus, concepts such as “communal neuroses” (147) and the “pathology of cultural communities”(148) remain embryonic.

To continue my emphasis, flipping the analytical direction using the same concept is dangerous for Freud:

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)

Nonetheless, the spheres are not wholly separate. It’s just that one of them has been more fully developed as a form of knowledge than the other. But they cannot evolve separately because they collide on common ground. The super-ego (and the resulting formation of conscience) is the locus of their intersection (144) and therefore must become an important object of inquiry for both fields of knowledge.

But we can know this much: this locus would be a very precarious place indeed as it attempts to negotiate an inherent conflict: “the two processes of individual and cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground.” (142) Here the conscience as a lived reality coincides with the conscience as a contested object of knowledge. Is the “dispute” within the individual; or is it between the individual and his/her society; or is it between psycho-analysis and the system of knowledge-to-come as they contest which is the best at describing the formation of conscience? Will the individual strive toward happiness be “pushed to the background” by this knowledge-to-come? Or will this knowledge-to-come fully respect the complexity of the process of individual development and thus have to complicate its own “aim of creating a unity”? Has Freud prefigured and called for Anti-Oedipus? Will the coming contest between spheres of knowledge kill off the father of psycho-analysis and cathect his energy into another form of analysis?

Thus we find a thread that holds together our cultural formations, political institutions and our conscience. While the conscience is the “function” of the super-ego that is its “agent”(134), both are also the bearers of human history. This is where the development of the individual and the formation of the social “interlock” (144).

In The Ego and the Id, Freud opens this door briefly so that we get a glimpse of how the super-ego absorbs the cultural demands of generations of others and makes them part of the id, which is where the species’ ability to “inherit” and pass on history resides:

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. (35)

Our conscience is but a trace of generations of previous consciences. The social is absorbed into each of us as a residue and we pass its shapes to nameless and countless others for endless revival. He will pull on this thread more fully in Civilization and Its Discontents, but theorizing how this infinite resurrection happens — which is the essential “process of civilization” — Freud defers to others who must come later and who will operate in a different field of knowledge.

The “inevitability of a sense of guilt” will guarantee the inheritance and the conscience will be the receiver of the gift. While guilt will arise from primal instincts, how the individual will deal with guilt remains thoroughly the product of history, inheritance and countless others who have come before. Of course the repetition and resurrection is never the same. The individual will put his or her on spin on things and make the transference his/her own. Power will produce its own resistance that it can never predict, contain or even fully understand.

Thus the formation of the community will be a never-complete reconciliation of the individual with its others. This is, of course, not new. But what is new, I think, is Freud’s sustained articulation of “the conscience” as the “disputed ground” between the individual and Kultur. It is the faculty that is neither one’s own nor society’s. It is the other that is ourselves as our own creation of otherness within.

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. But I shall have to take that up later.

Thus we come to see how precarious our political structures are, and how much care we must bring to their proper functioning. Conscience holds it all together in a never-ending negotiation with the “fatal inevitability of a sense of guilt”(127) that is its origin. To function, the conscience must continually reactivate the individual’s own Oedipus complex, which flows toward the processes of civilization and thereby collides with the historically acceptable forms of negotiation, integration, power and punishment flowing back at it:

So long as the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the conflict [between Eros and the death instinct as aggressiveness toward others] is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. (127-128; emphasis added)

The flow of energy and thus Freud’s line of analysis is from the individual outward. We don’t get to analyze the flow in the other direction. We don’t have a theory of human liberation as something that is brought about by a particular formula of civilization. We don’t have a well-formed theory of social integration that looks at the flow of energy in the other direction. At best, liberation for Freud remains individual — the result of well-negotiated relationships between and among oneself and its others (internal and external).

Yet these issues must be dealt with even if we don’t yet have the conceptual tools to do so. At best, psycho-analysis, in the hands of the later Freud, will leave us an inheritance that ought to disabuse us from envisioning the “process of civilization” as something that can and should create a final and total unity. Our concept of the self will now be far too complex and conflicted to completely bow to the demands of total conformity.

As a pragmatist reading Freud and taking up that inheritance, I benefit from the ability to see human society as a game of continuous negotiation among individuals who don’t fully understand their own motivations let alone those of others. I see loss as a function of the game, but ignoring the fact of loss, or pretending that “everyone is a winner”, only leads to problems.

To avoid devolving into domination and violence means that we must create the mechanisms (institutions, customs, norms, policies and laws) for loss to become a form of victory for the loser — just as the ego tries “to make good the id’s loss” (The Ego and the Id 24) — and for a commitment to non-violent negotiation to be the normal course of business.

Also, as a pragmatist speaking with Freud, I do not dream of a final reconciliation: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow men as a prophet…” (149). But I can still see the dangers and insist that they be addressed without providing a final analysis of their origins or their utopian reconciliation.

Man has gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result? (149)

With Nazism looming on Freud’s horizon and our own 21st Century global embracing of nationalisms, we come back to Socrates as we pull forward his admonition to “care for our souls” as a philosophical, political and moral action — and as a way to draw the direct link between conscience, citizenship, law and politics. Loss, guilt, anxiety, frustration are always there. We should not wish to eradicate them. Far from it, our actions will exacerbate them as they inevitably create winners and losers. We must, therefore, learn to live with them and channel their energies positively as much as possible even if we can’t fully understand those energies.