Conscience and the Divided Self

Freud did not invent internal conflict, nor was he the first to recognize it. Every rediscoverer of conscience knows, on the basis of simple introspection, something about discord within the mind. Montaigne was hardly breaking new ground when he observed: ‘We are, I know not how, somewhat double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’ Conscience may ‘make cowards of us all’, but it is not always an effective motivator. ‘I want to do this but I ought not’ may be an everyday thought, but it does not unfailingly stop the translation of wish into action. ‘Enterprises of great pith and moment’ may indeed ‘lose the name of action’, but Shakespeare's statement is certainly no rule, though it is sometimes strikingly true of the pathological. It is not too difficult to think of people whose preoccupation with what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ effectively interferes with their everyday lives and makes the most trivial of decisions a matter of earnest and unending debate.

For all that, we regard conscience, however imperfect, as a major guide to human behaviour. But it is important to consider how its role as internal watchdog stands in relation to the external forces of social expectation and censure. An issue of this complexity is easily shirked, or sidestepped altogether, by excessively simple formulations. Of these, the doctrine of total conditioning has a current clamorous appeal. From this standpoint, human development is quite uncomplicated: our views, opinions and sense of right and wrong are simply the results of social forces. People are purely the products of their upbringing. Changes in society will radically alter the way they view themselves and decisively change their social behaviour. This view is, perhaps, most avidly propagated by various types of liberationist, but it colours a good deal of common political thinking.

Freud was as interested in conscience as he was in social psychology. His reflections on lar