The Sense of Guilt and the Need for Punishment

In his work entitled The Economic Problem in Masochism(1)1 Freud was led by practical considerations to substitute the conception of an unconscious need for punishment for that of an unconscious sense of guilt. In this paper we shall attempt to find out whether these two feelings may not be theoretically differentiated and whether, with regard to genesis and content, they do not represent two different things.

According to Freud's theory the Oedipus complex is the source of man's sense of guilt and of his morality (3). Basing his assumption on Robertson Smith's hypothesis (6) with regard to the totem-feast Freud supposes that in the primal horde the father was murdered, dismembered and devoured by the sons. Having perpetrated this act, they were seized with a longing for the father whom they had thus lost. This longing was converted into dread of the community, which is another term for the sense of guilt. As time went on and the longing for the father recurred (being the expression of unsatisfied libido fixated to the father), it became the principal source of the various religions in which the power of the father was re-established by the mechanism of projection. The father was exalted, while the son was abased and the primal transgression was redressed. The father's image was revived and, in a sublimated form, the passive homosexual libido directed towards him attained its goal again.

In the development of the individual a mere thought or impulse suffices to bring about similar consequences. The father is absorbed into the ego (introjected), from which he is then differentiated as the ego-ideal or super-ego. The attitude of the ego to the super-ego is then analogous to the former attitude of the son to the father. In the main the super-ego imposes inhibitions upon the ego. The super-ego is formed by way of identification, a process which genetically has developed from the oral phase of libidinal organization (2) and (4).