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Awareness posits opposition.—Fichte.
Love thy neighbour as thyself …
Although for centuries now men have been told to love one another, they usually live in a state of mutual hatred, discord and destruction, enthusiastically following 'anti-' rather than 'pro-' movements, whatever their aim. That this should be so despite society's attempts to subdue aggression is not astonishing when one considers that life itself exacts a hostile reaction right at the very start. The first contact with his surroundings is felt by the newborn child as pain, and it takes a very long time for the resulting cry of anger to be replaced by non-aggressive responses.
Men have always known that love and hate are the very roots of their existence, but it is to Freud that we owe our really scientific investigations of these two emotions.
Apparently for many, the weight of emphasis in psycho-analytic work has been on the first emotion in its widest sense. Many psycho-analysts have found and still find that inhibited sexuality is the prime source of conflicts having a neurotic outcome.
However, it has seemed to me that those whom we are called upon to observe find greater difficulty in mastering the conflicts set up by aggressive tendencies than those of other origins. The condition necessary for lack of sexual satisfaction to have pathological effects seems to me to lie in the degree of aggression. Let us take the instance of the Oedipus complex: the traumatic element is made up not so much of the child's sexual attraction towards the parent of the opposite sex, as of aggression that he feels towards the parent of the same sex, of whom he is jealous. As for the adult, it is easier for him to find a satisfactory compromise between his sexual needs and the restrictions society imposes on him in this regard, than it is between the aggression he feels at the constant daily frustrations imposed by that society and the pressures it puts on him if he turns his aggression to action.
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