VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 2. Reality, Human Nature, and Society

VIII. The Anti-Social and aggression

1: Social and Anti-Social

We have been at pains to show that in the organism before it can be called a personality at all, and in the formation of personality, the social factors are essential. Let us now for a couple of chapters consider “Society” in the more usual sense, the relations and institutions of the persons. It is in this sense that we can speak of a conflict between the individual and society and call certain behavior “anti-social.” In this sense, too, we must certainly call certain mores and institutions of society “anti-personal.”

The underlying social nature of the organism and the forming personality—fostering and dependency, communication, imitation and learning, love-choices and companionship, passions of sympathy and antipathy, mutual aid and certain rivalries—all this is extremely conservative, repressible but ineradicable. And it is meaningless to think of an organism possessing drives which are “anti-social" in this sense, opposed to his social nature, for this would be a conserved inner contradiction; it would not be conserved. But there are, rather, difficulties of individual development, of growing-up, of realizing all of one’s nature.

The society of persons, however, is largely an artifact, like the verbal personalities themselves. It is continually being changed in every detail; indeed, to initiate social changes, to create institutional artifacts, is probably part of the underlying conservative social nature, repressed in any society one chooses to consider. Tn this sense, a personal behavior is meaningfully “anti-social" if it tends to destroy something of the mores, institutions, or personality current at the time and place. In therapy we must assume that a delinquent behavior that contradicts a person’s social nature is alterable, and the delinquent aspects of it will vanish with further integration. But with a delinquent behavior that is merely antisocial, contradicts the social artifact, it is always a question whether with further integration it may not become more pronounced and the person try harder not to adjust himself to society but to adjust society to himself.

2: Changes in the Anti-Social

In considering the anti-social, let us first distinguish what the neurotic considers anti-social from what is anti-social.

Any drive or aim that we have but will not accept as our own, that we keep unaware or project onto others, we fear to be antisocial. Obviously, for we inhibited it and drove it from awareness because it did not cohere with an acceptable picture of ourselves, and this picture of ourselves was an identification with, an imitation of, those authoritative persons who constituted our first society. But of course when the drive is released and accepted as part of ourselves, it turns out to be much less anti-social; we suddenly see that it is not unusual, is more or less accepted, in our adult society —and the destructive intensity that we attributed to it is less than we feared. An impulse that was vaguely felt to be hellish or murderous turns out to be a simple desire to avoid or reject something, and no-one cares whether we do or not. But it was the repression itself that (a) made the idea a persistent threat, (b) obscured its limited intent and made us not see the social actuality, (c) painted on the lurid colors of the forbidden, and (d) itself created the idea of destructiveness, for the repression is an aggression against the self and this aggression was attributed to the drive. (To cite the classic instance: in 1895 Freud thought that masturbation caused neurasthenia; later he found that it was guilty masturbation, the attempt to repress masturbation and the inhibition of the orgastic pleasure, that caused neurasthenia. Thus it was the very fear of the damage, mistaken medicine abetting the sexual taboo, that caused the damage.) Since Freud first wrote, the “contents of the id” have become less hellish, more tractable. Likely he would not now have felt called on to use that vaunting motto,

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo

—which would have been a pity.

Yet the neurotic estimate is also in the right. Theorists have gone too far in showing that the underlying drives are “good” and “social”; they have tried too hard to be on the side of the angels.

What has in fact happened is that in the past fifty years there has been an extraordinary revolution in social mores and evaluation, so that much that was considered wicked is not now considered wicked. It is not that certain behavior is now acceptable because it is seen to be good or social or harmless, but that it is considered good, etc. because it is now an accepted part of the picture of humanity. Man does not strive to be good; the good is what it is human to strive for. To put this another way, certain “contents of the id” were hellish not only because the repression made them so in the four ways mentioned above, but because also (e) they contained a residue that was really destructive of the then social norms, it was real temptation or vice—and it was real social pressure, passed through the early authorities, that led to the neurotic repression.

Where the repressed temptation was fairly universally present, however, when once it was revealed as common and somewhat accepted, it made its way in the open with astonishing rapidity; becoming public and more or less satisfied, it lost its hellish aspects; and in a generation the social norm has changed. Indeed it is remarkable with what unanimity society comes to a new picture of itself as a whole; one would have expected parts of the moral code to be more tenaciously conservative (but of course there has been the cooperation of every kind of social factor: changed economy, urbanism, international communication, increased standard of living, etc.). It is only by visiting a very provincial community, or by picking up an 1890 manual of child-care or an essay on “Christianity and the Theater,” that one realizes the sharpness of the change. And what is capital is this: the older attitude is not necessarily lurid, exaggerated, nor especially ignorant; rather it is often a sober well-considered judgment that something is inadvisable or destructive that we now hold to be useful or salutary’. For instance, it used to be seen with perfect clarity that strict toilet-training is useful to form ruly character; this is by no means ignorant, it is probably true. But they said, therefore do it; and we say, therefore don't do it. One reason for the change, for example, is that in our present economy and technology, the old standard of closeness, laboriousness, and duty would be socially injurious.

Freud took seriously this hostile residue, that which was in fact socially destructive. He kept warning of the social resistance to psychoanalysis. If our modern mental-hygienists find that what they release is invariably good and not anti-social, and that therefore they need not encounter resistance among the liberal and tolerant, it is simply that they are fighting battles already mainly won and are engaging in, no doubt necessary, mopping up. But aggressive psychotherapy is inevitably a social risk. This ought to be obvious, for social pressures do nor deform organismic-self-regulation that is “good” and “not anti-social” when it is properly understood and said with the acceptable words; society forbids what is destructive of society. There is not a semantical mistake but a genuine conflict.

3: Unequal Progress and Social Reaction

Let us consider two quite spectacular recent changes in mores in which psychoanalysis has played a leading role: the affirmative attitude toward sexual pleasure and the permissive attitude in childcare. These changes are now so widespread that they should be cumulative; that is, there should be enough actual satisfaction and self-regulation (in certain spheres) quite generally to diminish public resentment and that projection of bogey-men; therefore the taboos should become still less enforced, and there should be still more satisfaction and self-regulation, and so forth. Especially in the case of children, the permission of thumb-sucking, the more self-regulating standards of nourishment, the permission of masturbation, the relaxation of toilet-training, the recognition of the need for body-contact and suckling, the omission of corporal punishment, all these ought to show fruit in the happiness of the rising generation. But let us scrutinize the case more closely.

We have here an interesting example of unequal development, the advance in some respects toward self-regulation while maintaining, and even increasing, a neurotic deliberateness in other respects. How does society adjust itself to attain a new equilibrium in the unequal development, to prevent the revolutionary dynamism latent in any new freedom—for any freedom would be expected to release energy and lead to a heightened struggle. The effort of society is to isolate, compartment, and draw the teeth of the “threat from below.”

Thus, the increase in the quantity of fairly unrestrained sexuality has been accompanied by a decrease in the excitement and depth of the pleasure. What does this mean? It has been argued that deprivation as such is necessary for the accumulation of tension; but organismic-self-regulation ought to suffice to measure the times of appetite and discharge without external interventions. It is said that faddish imitation and “over-indulgence” cheapen sexual pleasure; this is true, but if there were more satisfactions, more contact and love, there would be less compulsive and automatic indulgence; and the question we are asking is, why is there less satisfaction, etc.? It is wiser to consider this particular de-sensitizing as similar in kind to the rest of the desensitizing, contact-lessness, and affect-lessness now epidemic. They are the result of anxiety and shock. In the unequal development, the release of sexuality has come up against a block of what is not released; anxiety is aroused; the acts are performed, but the meaning and the feeling is withdrawn. Not fully completed, the acts are repeated. Guiltiness is generated by anxiety and lack of satisfaction. And so forth.

A chief block, we are shortly going to argue, is the inhibition of aggression. And this is obvious anyway from the fact that the commercial exploitation of sexuality, in the movies, novels, comic-strips, etc. (as Legman-Keith has demonstrated), concentrates on sadism and murder. (The style of this kind of commercialized dream is always an unerring index of what goes on, for it has no other criterion but to meet the demand and sell.)

A chief social device for isolating sexuality is, paradoxically, the healthful, sane, scientific attitude of sex-education on the part of educators and progressive parents. This attitude sterilizes sexuality and makes official, authoritative, and almost mandatory what by its nature is capricious, non-rational, and psychologically explosive (though organically self-limiting). Sexuality is organically periodical, no doubt, but it is not by prescription that one loves. It was against this isolation that Rank warned when he said that the place to learn the facts of life was in the gutter, where their mystery was respected, and blasphemed—as only true believers blaspheme. It is now taught that sexuality is beautiful and ecstatic and not “dirty”; but of course it is, literally, dirty, inter urinas et faeces; and to teach that it is ecstatic (rather than to let this be the surprise of an occasion) must, in the vast majority of persons whose aggressions are blocked and who therefore cannot give in themselves nor destroy resistance in others, only cause disappointment and make them ask, “What, is it only this?’’ It is far better, permitting everything, to say nothing at all. But the so-called wholesome attitude, that turns an act of life into a practice of hygiene, is a means of control and compartmenting.

Of course the pioneer sex-educators were revolutionaries; they were bent on undoing the contemporary repression and unmasking the hypocrisy; therefore, they shrewdly seized on all the good and angelic words. But these same words are now a new taboo—“sex is beautiful, keep it clean”—they are a social defense-in-depth. This is why deprivation and the forbidden seem to lead to more intense sexual excitement; it is not that the organism needs these extrinsic aids, but that, in the blocked organism, they prevent compartmenting, they keep open the connections to resentment and rage and the unaware aggression against authority and, at a very deep level, to the desperate risking of the self. For at the moment that one is defying the taboo and running the fatal danger, one is likely to have a flash of spontaneous joy.

The permissive attitude in child-care, again, is a delicious study in unequal development and the social counter-defenses; only a comic genius like Aristophanes could really do it justice. Consider simply that, on the one hand, our generation has learned to unblock much of the noisy savagery of children; and on the other we have tightened the regimental order of all our physical and social environment. We have minimum housing in big cities—and neat playgrounds that no self-respecting boy would be seen dead in. Naturally the parents are flattened in-between. The astonishing overestimation of children in our culture, that would have baffled the Greeks or the gentry of the Renaissance, is nothing but the reaction to the repression of the spontaneity of the adults (including the spontaneous urge to slaughter their children). Also, we are overcome with our own inferiority, and identify with the children and try to protect their native vigor. Then as the children grow up, they have to make a more and more deliberate and complicated adjustment to the civilization of science, technique, and super-government. Thus the period of dependency is necessarily longer and longer. The children are allowed every freedom except the essential one of being allowed to grow up and exercise economic and domestic initiative. They do not finish going to school.

The contradictory compartments are apparent: in progressive homes and schools we encourage self-regulation, lively curiosity, learning by doing, democratic freedom. And all this is carefully impossible in the city-plan, in making a living, in having a family, in running the state. By the time the lengthy adjustment has been made, there has been no sharp frustration that could rouse a deep- seated rebelliousness, but only a steady molding pressure that forms good healthy citizens, who have early nervous breakdowns and complain that “life has passed me by.” Or another outcome, as we shall see, is to wage a good, well-behaved, orderly, and infinitely destructive war.

The history of psychoanalysis itself is a study of how teeth are drawn by respectability. It is a perfect illustration of Max Weber’s law of the Bureaucratization of the Prophetic. But this law is not inevitable; it is a consequence of unequal development and consequent anxiety, the need of the whole to adjust itself to the new force and to adjust the new force to itself. What must psychotherapy do to prevent this bureaucratizing respectability? Simply, press on to the next resistance.

4: The Anti-Social is presently the Aggressive

The most salient passional characteristics of our epoch are violence and tameness. There are public enemies and public wars unbelievable in scope, intensity, and atmosphere of terror; and at the same time, unexampled civil peace and the almost total suppression of personal outbreaks, with the corresponding neurotic loss of contact, hostility turned against the self, and the somatic symptoms of repressed anger (ulcers, tooth-decay, etc.). In Freud’s time and place the passional climate seems to have been much more marked by deprivation and resentment as regards both pleasure and sustenance. At present in America, there is a general high standard of living and the sexuality is not so much frustrated as it is unsatisfactory. On a more superficial level, the neurosis has to do with isolation and inferiority; but these are generally felt and therefore less serious; the mores are increasingly emulative and eager for sociability. Underlying is the inhibited hatred and self-hatred. The deep-going neurosis, which appears masked in such dreams as comic-books and foreign-policy, is retroflected and projected aggression.

The cluster of drives and perversions that are called aggressive— annihilating, destroying, killing, combativeness, initiative, hunting, sadomasochism, conquest and domination—these are now felt to be the anti-social par excellence. “But!” one can hear the spluttering objection, “these are obviously anti-social, destructive of the order of society!” The fact of the immediate unquestioning social rejection of various aggressions can be taken as prima facie evidence that it is in the analysis and release of aggressions that we must look for the next progress of society toward happier norms.²³

5: Annihilating and Destroying

The attitude and acts called “aggressive” comprise a cluster of essentially different contact-functions that are usually dynamically interconnected in action and thereby get a common name. We shall try to show that at least annihilating, destroying, initiative, and anger are essential to growth in the organism/environment field; given rational objects, they are always “healthy,” and in any case they are irreducible without loss of valuable parrs of the personality, especially self-confidence, feeling, and creativity. Other aggressions, like sadomasochism, conquest and domination, and suicide, we shall interpret as neurotic derivatives. Most often, however, the total mixture is not accurately analyzed and is “reduced” too much en bloc. (The ineradicable factors are in turn repressed.)

Let us begin by distinguishing annihilating from destroying. Annihilating is making into nothing, rejecting the object and blotting it from existence. The gestalt completes itself without that object. Destroying (de-structuring) is the demolition of a whole into fragments in order to assimilate them as parts in a new whole.

Primarily, annihilation is a defensive response to pain, bodily invasion, or danger. In avoidance and flight, the animal takes himself out of the painful field; in killing, he “coldly” removes the offending object from the field. Behaviorally, shutting the mouth tight and averting the head, and smashing and kicking. The defensive response is “cold” because no appetite is involved (the threat is external). The existence of the object is painful, but its non-existence is not enjoyed, it is not felt in completing the field; the enjoyment sometimes apparent is the flooding back at relaxing one’s shrinking: sigh of relief, beads of sweat, etc.

When neither flight nor removal is possible, the organism has recourse to blotting out its own awareness, shrinking from contact, averting the eyes, clamping the teeth. These mechanisms become very important when circumstances require opposite responses to the “same” object (really to different properties bound together in one thing): especially when need or desire makes necessary the presence of an object that is also painful and dangerous. One then is obliged to possess without spontaneously enjoying, to hold without contact. This is the usual inevitable plight of children and often the inevitable plight of adults. The analysis must make clear just what property in the object is needed and what is rejected, so the conflict may come into the open and be decided or suffered.

Destroying, on the contrary, is a function of appetite. Every organism in a field grows by incorporating, digesting, and assimilating new matter, and this requires destroying the existing form to its assimilable elements, whether it be food, a lecture, a father's influence, the difference between a mate’s domestic habits and one’s own. The new matter must be accepted only according to its place in a new spontaneous functioning. If the previous form is not totally destroyed and digested, there occurs, instead of assimilation, either introjection or areas of no contact. The introject may have two fates: either it is painful foreign matter in the body and it is vomited forth (a kind of annihilation); or the self partially identifies with the introject, represses the pain, seeks to annihilate part of the self—but since the rejection is ineradicable, there is a permanent clinch, a neurotic splitting.

The destructive appetite is warm and pleasurable. It approaches, reaching out to seize, with teeth bared, and it slavers in chewing. Such an attitude, especially if literally or figuratively there is killing, is of course deemed ruthless. Declining to commit the destruction. the self can either introject, or else inhibit the appetite altogether (renounce certain areas of experience). The first is the response especially to the inheritance of the family and social past; forcibly fed, not at one’s own time and need, the self introjects parents and culture and can neither destroy nor assimilate them. There are multiple partial-identifications; these destroy self-confidence, and in the end the past destroys the present. If the appetite is inhibited, through nausea or fear of biting and chewing, there is loss of affect.

On the other hand, the warm pleasurable (and angry) destroying of existing forms in personal relations often leads to mutual advantage and love, as in the seduction and defloration of a shy virgin, or in the breaking down of prejudices between friends. For consider that if the association of two persons will in fact be deeply profitable to them, then the destruction of the incompatible existing forms they have come with is a motion toward their more intrinsic selves—that will be actualized in the coming new figure; in this re lease of the more intrinsic, bound energy is liberated and this will transfer to the liberating agent as love. The process of mutual destruction is probably the chief proving ground of profound compatibility. Our unwillingness to risk it is obviously a fear that if we lose this we shall have nothing; we prefer poor food to none; we have become habituated to scarcity and starvation.

6: Initiative and Anger

Aggression is the “step toward” the object of appetite or hostility. The passing of the impulse into die step is initiative: accepting the impulse as one’s own and accepting the motor execution as one’s own. Obviously initiative can be stifled by the repression of the appetite altogether, as described above. But more common in modern times, it is likely, is the dissociation of the appetite from the motor behavior, so that it becomes manifest only as garrulous planning or dreamy prospects. One has the impression that with the giving up of hunting and fighting, people cease to move altogether; the motions of athletic games are not related to organic needs, the motions of industry are not one’s own motions.

A child’s statement, “When I grow up. I’ll do so and so,” indicates his initiative, the imitative assumption of behavior that will realize the desire still obscure in him rill it is acted. When it is repeated by the adult, the unfinished desire persists but the initiative is gone. What has occurred in between? It is that, in our economy, politics, and education, the so-called goals are too alien and the ways of reaching them therefore too complicated, not enough to hand. Everything is preparation, nothing realization and satisfaction. The result is that the problems cannot be worked through and assimilated. The system of education results in a number of unassimilated introjects. After a while the self loses confidence in its own appetites. There is a lack of faith, for faith is knowing, beyond awareness, that if one takes a step there will be ground underfoot: one gives oneself unhesitatingly to the act, one has faith that the background will produce the means. Finally, the attempt to assimilate is given up and there is bafflement and nausea.

At the same time as the initiative is being lost in bewilderment, in pursuing too difficult ends, it is being directly discouraged in the pursuit of simple ends, as a child is slapped for being “forward.” Feat results in giving up the appetite. On the whole, there is the reduction to a simpler order of appetite and non-initiative or dependency: to be fed and cared for, not understanding how, and this leads to a persistent insecurity and inferiority.

Let us suppose, however, that an appetite is strong and is under way toward its goal, and it then meets an obstacle and the appetite is frustrated: the tension flares and this is hot anger.

Anger contains the three aggressive components, destroying and annihilating and initiative. The warmth of anger is that of the appetite and initiative themselves. At first the obstacle is regarded simply as pan of the existing form to be destroyed, and it is itself attacked with pleasurable heat. But as the frustrating nature of the obstacle becomes manifest, the on-going tension of the engaged self becomes painful, and there is added to the warm destructive appetite the cold need of annihilating. In extreme cases the appetite (the motion toward the goal) is quite transcended and there is fierce white fury. The difference of white fury’ (murderousness) from simple annihilating (need for the thing not to exist in the field) is the outgoing engagement of the self; one is already committed to the situation, is not just brushing it off; murderousness is not simply a defense, for oneself is engaged and therefore cannot merely avoid. Thus a man who is slapped becomes furious.

In general, anger is a sympathetic passion; it unites persons because it is admixed with desire. (So hatred is notoriously ambivalent with love. When the transcendence of desire toward “pure” anger is based on a repression of desire, then the self is wholly engaged in the hostile attack, and it the repression suddenly dissolves —for instance by finding that one is stronger and is safe—the desire has suddenly crystallized into love.)

It will be seen that the usual formula, “Frustration leads to hostility," is true but too simple, for it omits mentioning the warm appetite in the angry aggression. Then it becomes difficult to understand why anger, an angry disposition, persists when annihilation of the obstacle has been effectively achieved by death or distance (c.g„ the parents are dead, yet the child is still angry with them), or again, why in revenge and hatred the annihilation of the enemy gives satisfaction, his non-existence is not indifferent but is fed on: he is not only annihilated but destroyed and assimilated. But this is because the frustrating obstacle is first taken as part of the desired goal; the child is angry with dead parents because they are still part of the unfinished need—it is not enough for him to understand that, as obstacles, they are out of the way. And the victim of revenge and hatred is part of oneself, is loved, unaware.

On the other hand, it is the admixture of annihilating within anger that rouses such intense guilt with regard to difficult loved objects; for we cannot afford to annihilate, make nothing of, what we need, even when it frustrates us. Thus it is that persistent anger, uniting appetite and annihilating, leads to the inhibition of appetite altogether and is a common cause of impotence, inversion, etc.

In red anger, awareness is somewhat confused. In white fury it is often very sharp, when, stifling all bodily appetite, it yet draws on the vividness of imagery that belongs to delayed appetite, as the self confronts its object to annihilate it In purple or congested rage the self is bursting with its frustrated impulses and is confused indeed. In black wrath, or hatred, the self has begun to destroy itself in the interests of its hostile aim; it no longer sees the reality but only its own idea.

7: Fixations of the Above, and Sado-Masochism

Annihilating, destroying, initiative, and anger are functions of good contact, necessary for the livelihood, pleasure, and protection of any organism in a difficult field. We have seen that they occur in various combinations and are likely to be pleasurable. Acting the aggressions, the organism fills out its skin, so to speak, and touches the environment, without damage to the self; inhibiting the aggressions does not eradicate them but turns them against the self (as we shall discuss in the next chapter). Without aggression, love stagnates and becomes contactless, for destroying is the means of renewal. Further, a hostile aggression is often rational precisely where it is considered neurotic: c.g. hostility may be turned toward a therapist not because he is “father” but because he is again some one who is forcing unassimilable interpretations and putting one in the wrong.

The fixations of these functions, however—hatred, vengeance, and premeditated murder, ambitiousness and compulsive love-hunting, habitual combativeness—these are not so amiable. To these settled passions other functions of the self are sacrificed; they are self-destructive. To hate a thing involves binding energy to what is by definition painful or frustrating, and usually with diminished contact with the changing actual situations. One clings to the hateful and holds it close. In revenge and premeditated murder, there is a burning settled need to annihilate a “person” whose existence insults one’s concept of oneself; but if this concept is analyzed, it is found that the drama is internal. So most righteous indignation is directed against one’s own temptation. The cold killer, again, is trying systematically to annihilate his environment, which is tantamount to committing suicide: “I don’t care for them” means “I don’t care for myself,” and this is an identification with the terrible judgment, “We don’t care for you.” The combative man strikes one as a man with appetite who initiates an approach and then suddenly frustrates himself, because he feels inadequate, disapproved, or so; his anger flares against the frustrator; and he projects the “obstacle” into any likely or unlikely object; such a man clearly wants to be beaten.

In general (we shall consider it more in detail in the next chapter) when an appetite is repressed, habitually kept unaware, the self is exercising a fixed hostility against itself. To the extent that this aggression is kept inward, there is a well-behaved masochism; to the extent that it finds some environmental image of itself, there is a fixed sadism. The pleasure in the sadism is the increment of appetite released by letting up on the self; to strike, stab, etc. is the form in which the sadist desiringly touches the object. And the object is loved because it is like one’s own dominated self.

In primary masochism (Wilhelm Reich) it is not the pain that is wanted but the release of the dammed-up instincts. The pain is a “fore-pain,” a sensation in one habitually desensitized, that then allows much more feeling to be recovered.²⁴ The more the instinctual excitement is increased without a corresponding increase of awareness that it is one’s own excitement and also one’s own deliberateness in restricting it, the more the masochistic longing. (It would seem, by the way, that this situation would be experimentally induced by a physiological therapy like Reich’s). In masochism, the appetites become more expansive and increase the tension, and the restriction is correspondingly tightened; the longing for release is neurotically interpreted as the wish to have it done to one, to be forced, broken, punctured, to let loose the inward pressures. The masochist loves the brutal lover who both gives the underlying release and yet is identified with his own self-punishing self.

8: Modern War is Mass-Suicide without Guiltiness

Let us now return to the more broadly social context and say something further about the kind of violence that characterizes our epoch.

We have at present in America a combination of unexampled general wealth and unexampled civil peace. Economically and sociologically these are beneficent causes of each other: the more civil order the more productivity, and the more wealth the less incentive to destroy the civil order. By civil order we mean not the absence of crimes of violence, but the pervasive safety of both city and country. Compared with all other ages and places, travel is without danger anywhere by day or night. There are almost no brawls, riots, or armed bands. Madmen do not roam the streets; there is no plague. Disease is quickly isolated in hospitals; death is never seen, childbirth rarely. Mear is eaten, but no urban person ever sees an animal slaughtered. Never before has there existed such a state of non-violence, safety, and sterility. Concerning our wealth, again, we need only point out that none of the debated economic issues has to do with subsistence. Unions demand not bread but better wages and hours and more security; capitalists demand fewer controls and better conditions for reinvestment. A single case of starvation is a scandal in the press. Less than ten per cent of the economy is devoted to elementary subsistence. More than ever in history there are comforts, luxuries, entertainments.

Psychologically the picture is more dubious. There is little physical survival frustration but little satisfaction, and there are signs of acute anxiety. The general bewilderment and insecurity of isolated individuals in a too-big society destroy self-confidence and initiative, and without these there cannot be active enjoyment. Sports and entertainments are passive and symbolic; the choices on the market are passive and symbolic; people make and do nothing for themselves, except symbolically. The quantity of sexuality is great, the de-sensitizing is extreme. It used to be felt that science, technology, and the new mores would bring on an age of happiness. This hope has been disappointed. Everywhere people are disappointed.

Even on the surface, then, there is reason to smash things up, to destroy not this or that part of the system (e.g., the upper class), but the whole system en bloc, for it has no further promise, it has proved unassimilable in its existing form. This sentiment is even in awareness with varying degrees of clarity.

But considering more deeply, in the terms we have been developing, we see that these conditions are almost specific for the excitement of primary masochism. There is continual stimulation and only partial release of tension, an unbearable heightening of the unaware tensions—unaware because people do not know what they want, nor how to get it, and the available means are too big and unmanageable. The desire for final satisfaction, for orgasm, is interpreted as the wish for total self-destruction. It is inevitable, then, that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality.

At the same time, however, all overt expression of destructiveness, annihilation, anger, combativeness, is suppressed in the interests of the civil order. Also the feeling of anger is inhibited and even repressed. People are sensible, tolerant, polite, and cooperative in being pushed around. But the occasions of anger are by no means minimized. On the contrary, when the larger movements of initiative are circumscribed in the competitive routines of offices, bureaucracies, and factories, there is petty friction, hurt feelings, being crossed. Small anger is continually generated, never discharged; big anger, that goes with big initiative, is repressed.

Therefore the angry situation is projected afar. People must find big distant causes adequate to explain the pressure of anger that is certainly not explicable by petty frustrations. It is necessary to have something worthy of the hatred that is unaware felt for oneself. In brief, one is angry with the Enemy.

This Enemy is, needless to say, cruel and hardly human; there is no use in treating with him as if he were human. For we must remember, as is shown by the content of all popular cinema and literature, that the dream of American love is sado-masochistic, but the behavior of love-making is not sado-masochistic, for that would be anti-social and indecent. It is “someone else” that is sadistic; and surely “someone else” that is masochistic.

Now in civil life, we have been saying, the cluster of aggressions is anti-social. But fortunately in war it is good and social. So people, longing for universal explosion and disaster, wage war against enemies who indeed enrage and fascinate them by their cruelty and subhuman strength.

The mass-democratic army is excellently apt for the popular needs. It gives the personal security that is lacking in civil life; it imposes a personal authority without making any demand on the secret self, for after all one is only a unit in the mass. It takes one from jobs and homes where one is inadequate and gets no great pleasure; and it organizes one’s efforts much more effectively toward sadistic practices and a masochistic debacle.

People observe the debacle approach. They listen to rational warnings and make all kinds of sensible policies. But the energy to flee or resist is paralyzed, or the danger is fascinating. People are eager to finish the unfinished situation. They are bent on mass-suicide, an outcome that solves all problems without personal guiltiness. The counter-propaganda of pacifists is worse than useless, for it solves no problems and it increases personal guiltiness.

9: Critique of Freud’s Thanatos

It was in similar circumstances that Freud dreamed up his theory of the death-instinct. But the circumstances were less extreme than now, for he could still at that time, in the flush of the theory of the libido, speak of a conflict between Thanatos and Eros and look to Eros for a counter-weight to Thanatos. The new mores had not yet had a trial.

Freud seems to have based his theory on three evidences, (a) The kind of social violence we have been describing: the World War I that went apparently counter to any principle of vitality and culture. (b) The neurotic compulsion to repeat or fixate, that he attributed to the attraction of the trauma. We have seen, however, that the repetition-compulsion is more simply explicable as the effort of the organism to complete with archaic means its present unfinished situation, each time enough organic tension accumulates to make the difficult attempt. Yet in an important sense this repetition and circling round the trauma may correctly be called a death-wish; but it is precisely the death of the more deliberate inhibiting self that is wished for (with its apparent present needs and means), in the interests of the more vital underlying situation. What is necessarily neurotically interpreted as a wish for death is a wish for a fuller life, (c) But Freud’s most important evidence was probably the apparent irreducibility of primary masochism. For he found that, far from being reduced, precisely as patients began to function more, their dreams (and no doubt Freud’s own dreams) became more catastrophic; the theorist was then forced by the evidence to extrapolate to a condition of perfect functioning and total masochism: i.c., to die is an instinctual craving. But on the theory of masochism we have been advancing, this evidence is better explained as follows: the more the instinctual release without the corresponding strengthening of the self’s ability to create something with the new energy, the more disruptive and violent the tensions in the field. And just as the physiological method of Reich experimentally induces this condition, so the anamnestic free association of Freud: there is release without integration. But Reich’s better control of the situation enabled him to find a simpler explanation.

Yet as a biological speculation, Freud’s theory is by no means negligible, and must itself be met speculatively. Let us cast it in the following schematic form: every organism, says the theory, seeks to diminish tension and reach equilibrium; but by reverting to a lower order of structure it can reach a still more stable equilibrium; so ultimately every organism seeks to be inanimate. This is its death-instinct and is a ease of the universal tendency toward entropy. Opposed to it are the appetites (eros) that tend to the ever more complex structures of evolution.

This is a powerful speculation. If we accept the presuppositions and mystique of Nineteenth Century science, it is hard to refute. Its rejection by most theorists, including many of the orthodox, is largely, one feels, because it is offensive, anti-social, rather than because it is seen to be erroneous.

But to think, as Freud does, of a chain of causes, consisting of connected elementary links back to the beginning, is a misreading of the history of evolution; it is to make actual and concrete what is an abstraction, namely some line of evidence (e.g., the fossils in the strata of rocks) by which we learn the history. He speaks as if the successive complexities were “added on” to a single operating force, of “life,” isolatable from its concrete situations; as if onto a protozoon were added the soul of a metazoon, etc.; or conversely, as if within a vertebrate were introjected an annelid, etc.—so that falling asleep as a vertebrate, the animal then addresses itself to falling asleep as an annelid, then as a platyhelminth, and finally to becoming inanimate. But in fact every successive stage is a new whole, operating as a whole, with its own mode of life; it is its mode of life, as a concrete whole, that it wants to complete; it is not concerned with seeking “equilibrium in general.” The condition of a molecule or of an amoeba is not an unfinished situation for a mammal because the existing organic parts tending to completeness are quite different in the separate cases. Nothing would be solved for an organism by solving the problem of some other kinds of parts.

(It is useful to consider Freud’s theory as a psychological symptom: if a man resigns the possibility of present solutions, he must blot out the present needs; and thereby he brings to the fore some other needs of a lower order of structure. The lower order of structure is then given a kind of existence by the act of present resignation.)

Freud seems to misunderstand the nature of a “cause.” A “cause” is not itself an existing thing but a principle of explanation for some present problem. Therefore a chain of causes—proceeding in either direction, as a final teleological goal or as a primitive genetic origin—the longer such a chain gets, the more it becomes nothing at all, for we seek a cause in order to orient ourselves in a specific individual problem, for the purpose of changing the situation or accepting it. A good cause solves the problem (of specific orientation) and then ceases to occupy us. We set down the causes in a chain, as in a textbook, not when we are handling the actual material, but when we are teaching it.

Lastly, Freud’s theory systematically isolates the organism from the on-going organism/environment field; and he isolates an abstract “time” as another factor. But this field is existing; its presentness, its on-going time, with the continual event of novelties, is essential to its definition and to the definition of “organism.” It is as part of this ever-novel field that one must think of an organism as growing, and of the species as changing. The passage of time, the change in time, is not something that is added onto a primal animal that has an internal principle of growth isolated from the time of the field, and that somehow adjusts to ever-new situations. But it is the adjustment of ever-new situations, changing both the organism and the environment, that is growth and the kind of time that organisms have—for every scientific subject has its own kind of time. To a history novelty and irreversibility are essential. An animal trying to complete its life is necessarily seeking its growth. Eventually the animal fails and dies, not because it is seeking a lower order of structure, but because the field as a whole can no longer organize itself with that part in that form. We are destroyed just as, growing, we destroy.

The aggressive drives are not essentially distinct from the erotic drives; they are different stages of growth, either as selecting, destroying, and assimilating, or as enjoying, absorbing, and reaching equilibrium. And thus, to return to our starting point, when the aggressive drives are anti-social, it is that the society is opposed to life and change (and love); then it will either be destroyed by life or it will involve life in a common ruin, make human life destroy society and itself.