freud
...the suffering of our own bodies, of the external world, and of our relations to other men” (26). What man does is try to avoid this suffering. One can isolate oneself; kill the self of instinct by turning away from it, or become a member of the civilization. What civilization has done in order to suppress this suffering is create the empire of religion so that man has a way to redeem oneself of sin. Freud looks at this way of overcoming a sin as infantile. It appears to be childish because men are putting their faith in “an impersonal, shadowy, and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!’” (23). This is the beginning of the emotion of ‘sin’ to the religious or ‘guilt’ to Freud. One desires to rid oneself of sin because it arises the “sense of guilt”. This sense of guilt seems to be instinctual. It is a natural process that occurs within the individual through development. The original sense of “aggressiveness is internalized; sent back where it came from- that is, directed towards his own ego… which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego” (84). After this happens the aggression is now in the form of conscience. It is in this conscience that man finds himself feeling guilt or sin. The super- ego may feel the guilt regardless of if the instinct was carried out. Whether the act was carried out or just an idea cannot be acknowledged by the super-ego. This handicap on the super-ego was undoubtedly created by the presence of restrictions placed on the individual by civilization. “[The] two urges, the one toward personal happiness and the other towards union with the other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual, and so, must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute the ground” (106). Society is overloading the individual with ideals and morals that Freud doesn’t see fit. It demands that the individual look to a God-like figure in order to receive redemption. Freud states that this conflict is resolved in the self. The individual when faced with a conflict must first consult the super-ego, here it “makes itself noisily heard; its actual demands of remain unconscious in the background. If we bring them to conscious knowledge, we find that they coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego” (107). These morals imposed on the individual by society are a means of control over the super-ego. Something that should not be controlled by an outer force. Society is also controlling the human instinct of love. Man falls in love not necessarily with the “women”; but with the ‘object’ that she represents. It is after-all the desire to satisfy instincts that satisfy happiness in man. Man has found the greatest satisfaction in the “sexual (genital) love” (56). The problem lies within this desire to satisfy the genital instinct. Man has a duty to civilization to have love and a duty to his-self to satisfy his instinct. This is the idea expressed by Schiller, that “hunger and love are what moves the world” (75). Freud then argues that this hunger and love are in conflict because they aim to satisfy different needs. On the side of the individual, hunger is to pre...