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Freud said a good deal about the nature and origin of morality in both the individual and in society. Hence, there is a strong temptation for those ethicists of a naturalist persuasion to look to Freud for the factual foundations of a scientific morality: they look to (1) Freud's speculations concerning the psychological origins of morality in the individual and in civilization, together with his discussion of the psychological role morality actually plays in individual and cultural life; (2) his remarks relevant to melioristic proposals for society, and to the good life of the individual.1
Still another question can be raised, namely, that of utilizing what Freud might have said about the good life if he had developed his own theory. Herbert Marcuse in his book Eros and Civilization2 tries to show what suggestions for the cure of an aggression-torn world would flow from Freud's theories had Freud been able to separate out the merely culture-bound and hence highly contingent aspects of his own work from the elements of natural necessity he discerned in psychic development—discerned correctly, in Marcuse's opinion. And Lewis Feuer, in Psychoanalysis and Ethics3 shows what he thinks Freud's theory could teach us with respect to the good life had Freud been able to envision life in a less repressive and frustrating culture, these particular characteristics of culture not being in Feuer's opinion as inevitable as Freud took them to be.
In my reading of social and ethical programs based on Freudian doctrines, I have not seen stressed sufficiently (with