Technology and Freudian Discontent

SOPHIA (2010) 49:95–111 DOI 10.1007/s11841-009-0160-1

Technology and Freudian Discontent: Freud’s ‘Muffled’ Meliorism and the Problem of Human Annihilation M. Andrew Holowchak

Published online: 9 February 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This paper is a comprehensive investigation of Freud’s views on technology and human well-being, with a focus on ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In spite of his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, I shall argue that Freud, always in some measure under the influence of Comtean progressivism, was consistently a meliorist: He was always at least guardedly optimistic about the realizable prospect of utopia, under the ‘soft dictatorship’ of reason and guided by advances in science and technology, in spite of due recognition in his later years of the possibility of annihilation through technological advances in warfare. The possibility of human annihilation, then, muffled Freud’s meliorism. Freud’s ‘muffled meliorism’, however, was not a quiet commitment to viewing technology as something good. Ultimately, Freud steered a middle course between technoadvocacy and techno-antagonism. The technologies of science, like the discoveries of psychoanalysis, were tools for humans that could be used for human betterment or, as war showed, for human degeneration. Keywords Neo-Luddism . Techno-advocacy . Restless technology . Meliorism . Benchmark problem With the goals of adapting to, controlling, and transforming reality—principally with the aim of bettering the human condition—technology seems to be an unquestioned good. In no other human endeavor has human’s power over nature manifested itself so markedly. Yet because of that and because of the rapid, almost exponential rate of technological advance in the last 100 years or so—in areas such as medicine, military science, and intelligent systems—it has become a seductive topic for heated philosophical debate, scientific examination, and impassioned utopian speculation.

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of Sophia for helpful comments. M. A. Holowchak (*) Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew St., Allentown, PA 18104, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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How can something with the express aim at human betterment inspire such heated critical responses? Techno-criticism has shown technology to be Janus-faced. Techno-advocates— e.g., August Comte, John Dewey, Julian Huxley, Max More, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil—welcome technological advance with open arms. Today, transhumanists,1 singularitarianists,2 cyberlibertarianists,3 extropianists,4 and transtopianists5 extol the benefits of, even ballyhoo, technology. Technoantagonists (often called ‘neo-Luddists’ today)—e.g., J.J. Rousseau, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ellul, and Bernard Stiegler—describe technology as decidedly at odds with human well-being—a picture captured neatly by the dystopian literature of Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, and George Orwell. The two extremes betray not only definitional perplexity concerning ‘technology’ and its impact, but also disparate views of human well-being. In short, the critical response to technology has opened human eyes to the possibility not only of technological utopias, but also of technological dystopias. In the mass of today’s techno-criticism, Freud’s contribution often is overlooked—perhaps because his stance on the relationship between science and its technological component and their relationship to human well-being betrays ambivalence. In ‘The Future of an Illusion’ in 1927 and a 1933 essay entitled ‘A Question of Weltanschauung’, Freud seems unquestionably optimistic about science and its technology as the only antidotes to the ills and illusions of his time—especially those of religion. Sandwiched between those works are two works on social criticism—‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ and ‘Why War?’— where Freud, reacting to the brutal Fascism and Nazism of his time, adopts a dimmer, more somber viewpoint of what psychoanalysis can do to promote human well-being. Technological science, a curative to the day’s ills in the former works, is a symptom of civilization’s psychopathology in the latter works. This paper is a comprehensive investigation of Freud’s views on technology and human well-being, with a focus on ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, which contains what seems to be a scathing denunciation of technological advance. Overall, the investigation aims to show that Freud, in spite of evidence that seems to commit him to the Neo-Luddist camp, is neither a radical technoantagonist nor a radical techno-advocate. On the one hand, rabid technoadvocacy today, as in Freud’s day, betrays the psychic discontent of human 1

Transhumanists support the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human capacities and diminish human deficiencies such as stupidity, pain, disease, aging, and involuntary death. 2 Singularitarianists argue for the possibility of a technological singularity—the technological creation of a benevolent super-human intelligence—and strive for its actualization. Such a superintelligence, programmed through ‘recursive self-enhancement’, can solve problems such as poverty, war, disease, and aging. 3 Cyberlibertarianism is a movement that essays to reconcile electronically mediated forms of living with libertarian ideas of human flourishing. 4 Extropianism is a form of transhumanist thought, which strives proactively and modestly for a continually improved human condition within the evolutionary framework of modern biology. 5 Transtopianism may be understood as the journey from the transtopian realm, where humans or artificial intelligences have become superhuman through technological advance, to the posthuman realm, a nearperfect technological paradise, where humans or artificial intelligences are themselves deities.

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psychopathology that is, for Freud, the result of progressive human civilizing at the expense of human happiness, socially sanctioned. Humans would be happier to return to a state of nature, where impulses had a better chance of immediate satisfaction. On the other hand, rabid techno-antagonism today betrays a refusal to acknowledge both the impossibility of a return to the state of nature and the potential for positive gain of technological science in the service of human happiness outside of the state of nature. In spite of his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, I shall argue that Freud, always in some measure under the influence of Comtean progressivism, was consistently a meliorist. He believed always in the realizable prospect of utopia, under the 'soft dictatorship’ of reason and guided by advances in science and technology. While he was early impacted by Comtean inevitabilism, over time, however, the harshness of reality and the possibility of human annihilation through technological advances in warfare muffled his meliorism. There could be no warrant by an appeal to experience that progress towards utopia was inevitable. Experience showed that humans were themselves a threat to their own existence. Nonetheless, Freud judged his work in psychoanalysis, outside of the clinic in his later years, to be a significant, needed step towards utopia, and that in itself is evidence of a consistent commitment to meliorism—extant, but of a muffled sort. Freud’s ‘muffled meliorism’, however, is not a quiet commitment to viewing technology as something good. Ultimately, Freud steers a middle course between techno-advocacy and techno-antagonism. The technologies of science, like the discoveries of psychoanalysis, are tools for humans that may be used for human betterment or, as war shows, for human degeneration. There is a chilling paradox here. Psychoanalysis shows that humans’ use of technology may be, in the end, more a biological than psychological matter. Freud asks: Are the destructive impulses of humans quantitatively too great in comparison with those of libido to avoid annihilation? Moreover, are human egos constitutionally strong enough to allow the insights of psychoanalysis to work toward a soft dictatorship of reason and human well-being? I begin this paper with Freud’s critique of the technologies of his day in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. Next, I examine Freud’s efforts at a solution to the problem of technology in the meliorist strand of his thinking. Finally, I attempt a Freudian answer to the question: Do science and its technological advances make Freud’s vision of utopia a more realizable possibility than human annihilation? Man as ‘Prosthetic God’ ‘Technology’, following lexical definitions, may be roughly understood as a species’ use of tools and crafts in an effort to adapt to, control, or transform its environment. Less roughly and more specific to the human species, technology may be defined as the field of research and action that aims at adaptation to an environment or the control or transformation of it. Defined thus, technology is a part of science, which comprises pure science and technological science. While

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pure science aims at knowledge for its own sake, technological science aims at knowledge for the sake of change—usually of the sort deemed to enhance the human condition.6 Freud’s views on technology and the human condition7 are hard to disentangle, because in large part Freud failed to distinguish between technological science and pure science—roughly, knowledge for the sake of some end as opposed to knowledge for its own sake. He addresses the issue of science often. When he does, he focuses mainly on scientific methodology, not technological science. Frequently, his intentions are tendentious, even apologetic, as when he attempts to respond to the criticisms of antagonists, who question the scientific status of psychoanalysis. In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, however, Freud does address technological science and its relation to the human condition. He writes, ‘[T]he word ‘civilization’ [Kultur] describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serves two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 89).8 Technological gains, as civilizations advance, protect humans and adjust their mutual relations, but the cost it great—their happiness. Happiness, Freud observes, is freedom from pain and access to pleasure, which is simply the gratification of the needs of our most primitive mental apparatus—the id. Pain, in contrast, is the frustration of such needs. Described narrowly and dynamically, ‘What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 76).9 With the maturation of the mental apparatus in civilized society, other agencies (i.e., the ego and the super-ego) develop that function to delay or frustrate opportunities for energetic discharge through a regard for reality and morality. That leads to unhappiness. Here a paradox arises: Civilization protects people and regulates their mutual relations at the expense of their own happiness. Society demands that humans live by rules, but rules—promoting order through parsimony, cleanliness, and order—in turn, impose severe restrictions for outlets of libidinal expression10 (1930, S.E. XXI: 96-7).

Following Mario Bunge, ‘The Philosophical Inputs and Outputs of Technology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 170-5. 7 Following Arendt, I prefer the ‘human condition’ to ‘human nature’. Human nature is a fixed condition, while the human condition allows for flexibility. As Arendt says, ‘The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence’. Arendt, however, rejects any notion of a fixed human nature. Freud, in contrast, does have a changing notion of the human species over time, but change is developmentally fixed in a manner that resembles ontogenetic human development. In that regard, it scarcely follows a Darwinian pattern. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8-11. 8 Such achievements, he adds in ‘The Future of an Illusion’, include human’s knowledge and capacity to control nature—i.e., human technology—as well as social regulations to adjust human relations— especially the distribution of resources (1927, S.E. XXI: 5-6). 9 Later, described economically: ‘Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 83). 10 Sex is limited to the genitalia, object-choice is restricted to the other, and incest is strictly prohibited (1930, S.E. XXI: 104–5). 6


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[W]hat we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and … we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization (1930, S.E. XXI: 86). The tension seems irremediable for Freud: individuals’ demand for freedom of libidinal expression versus the regulations of civilization that prohibit such expression imposed by the group (1930, S.E. XXI: 95). Thus, society thrives at the very expense of the psychical health of the individuals in it. As civilized societies ‘progress’, the individuals in them become increasingly neurotic. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, ‘The prevalence of repressive [i.e., ‘false’, socially manufactured] needs is an accomplished fact, accepted in ignorance and defeat, but a fact that must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction’.11 The problem, Freud thinks, does not admit of a clean, happy solution. People manage through deflection strategies or intoxication, but such tactics merely mask the growing underlying tension and afford little, if any, relief from instinctual frustration. The only viable strategy is sublimation, which allows us some outlet for libidinal build-up. Sublimation thrives on renunciation and displacement of libido, which is most appropriately directed toward a libidinal bond with other human beings. Humans divert sexual energy, for instance, into philanthropy, artistic creation, scientific study, religion, and philosophy (1930, S.E. XXI: 94–7). Civilization, then, is itself a byproduct of displaced libidinal energy. It uses libido to build social bonds, whose very rules function to suppress libido. That is a poor exchange: Individuals have a goal of happiness; civilization has a goal of unification. Thus, while civilization thrives by binding people together partly through technological advances, the individuals in it become increasingly neurotic and unhappy. The greater the technological advances, the greater the underlying unrest and pathology. The overall effect of man’s technological progress—i.e., his civilizing—has had a marked impact. Though miserable, humans, in some measure, have become gods, though of a ‘prosthetic’ sort. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal; he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion to which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgment of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in other only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all of his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times…. Future ages will bring them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our presentday man does not feel happy in his Godlike character (1930, S.E. XXI: 91–2). Herbert Marcuse, ‘The New Forms of Control’, Philosophy and Technology: The Technological Condition, eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 207.

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Restless Technology Feeling themselves to have become gods, humans have gained through advances in technology some small degree of protection—albeit psychical protection—from the vagaries of nature. Freud then warns, ‘[P]ower over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavor; we ought not to infer from it that technological progress is without value for the economics of our happiness’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 87–8). He continues sourly: Is there then no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to the benefits of the kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances? But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the 'cheap enjoyment’ extolled in the anecdote—the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice. If traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on the sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him (1930, S.E. XXI: 88). The libidinal satisfaction of technological advances through sublimation seems inconsequential. In ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’, Freud states that every conquest over nature comes with a price. He notes, for instance, that the coastal security afforded a nation by warships was instantly challenged when Bleriot flew an airplane across the English Channel (1933, S.E. XXII: 177–8). Here Freud anticipates what Hans Jonas has stated sharply and succinctly many years later through his conception of ‘restless technology’, ‘[T]o a considerable extent technology itself begets the problems which it is then called upon to overcome by a new forward jump’.12 Freud would certainly add that restless technology is a symptom of restless (i.e., unhappy) humans. For Freud, measured by the standard of human happiness, technology thus far can scarcely be said to have improved the human condition. Technological advance has come at the price of libidinal suppression and displacement. At some point, it seems, the scenario would become insufferable and irreversible, should technology become the principle outlet for libido—which neo-Luddists believe is increasingly the case today—and that is an undeniable sign of severe, perhaps irremediable underlying pathology. In such a pathological society, one would expect passionate, rapid, and, Hans Jonas, ‘Toward a Philosophy of Technology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 193.

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most importantly, uncritical technological advance in all areas of productive science. Many think that that is what humans have today.13 Were it merely a case of severely suppressed and deflected libido, the scenario would not be so bad for Freud. The situation is bleaker, however. Considering universal love as a solution to the problem of libidinal outlet, Freud states solemnly: The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness (1930, S.E. XXI: 111). Thus, libido is not the whole story for Freud. Humans also have destructive impulses and they, through mutual hostility, are what chiefly upsets human relations. Ultimately, they threaten humans with annihilation. Is there the possibility of a solution to the problem of the technological advance within Freudian psychodynamics? For Freud, humans are essentially instinct-driven,14 not rational creatures. Therefore, if a solution is possible, following Hume, it cannot appeal to human reason without assuaging human passions, for ‘instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 112). In other words, the ego, humans’ link with reality and their coherent organization of mental processes, is wholly in the service of the id, the seat of human passions.15 An appeal to reason, not in the service of human passions, cannot work. Reason must have the full sanction of human impulses. Given the inefficacy of reason, how is any solution possible? Perhaps the scenario is not so bleak. Reason, housed in the ego, is not without its impact on human agency, though it is inferior in strength to human impulses, housed in the id. Freud writes in famous passage in ‘The Ego and the Id’: The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried 13

Jacques Ellul, for instance, maintains that technology has become independent from economic, political, social factors, and even of ethics. It has destroyed everything of value, only to be the basis of a new human ethics. He says, ‘technology depends only on itself, it maps its own route, it is a prime and not a secondary factor, it must be regarded as an ‘organism’ tending toward closure and self-determination: it is an end-in-itself’, which threatens to rob persons of their freedom. Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1980), esp. 125 and 358, and The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf and London Jonathan Cape, 1964). 14 Deferring throughout to the customary translation of Trieb as “instinct”, though “drive” is a translation more in keeping with the German. 15 Freud wavered on the notion of the ego being an agency whose energy source was independent of the id. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923, S.E. XIX: 30fn. 1 &46), he states baldly that the ego uses borrowed energy to fulfill its functions. In other works—‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920, S.E. XVIII: 50-2), ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925, S.E. XX: 56), ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ (1933, S.E. XXII: 103), and ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940, S.E. XXIII: 150–1)—he says plainly that the ego is the ‘reservoir of libido’.

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a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own (1923, S.E. XIX: 25). As the analogy of horse and rider shows, Freud believes that humans can use cunning to hold in check the superior power of the id, but they cannot overpower the id’s impulses, of which the most ruinous for civilization are those of aggression. In ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Freud says that reason will have its day: We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it gains a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is itself a point of no small importance. … The primacy of the intellect lies … in a distant, distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one (1927, S.E. XXI: 53). How best can human cleverness master aggression? In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, Freud says that reaction-formations must be cunningly employed to hold in check human aggression. He has in mind those reaction formations that incite people into identifications and libido-inhibited relationships with others. These are the demands of moral prohibitions, which exact goodwill and selfdiscipline—poor, but needed libidinal investments (1930, S.E. XXI: 113).

Freud’s Meliorism The economics of Feud’s psychological apparatus, especially for the reasons given in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, seems to offer little hope of successful implementation, precisely because, like neurotic behavior, technology is foremost a symptom of an unhealthy human condition: the greater, more rapid the technological advance; the greater, more insidious the psychical discontent. More than a mere symptom of human discontent, continual advances in technology function to trick the ego by consoling humans in their loss of happiness and reinforcing the notion that security is a proper exchange for unhappiness. In agreement with Freud, continued and extraordinarily rapid advances in technology are genuine signs of human discontent. Unceasing striving for greater and more numerous technological advances is unneeded and is an accurate measure of a human condition out of whack, as it were. At some point, it becomes clear that technological ‘advances’ are no longer in the service of human betterment, but rather symptoms of psychical infirmity. That is evident today, with the extraordinarily rapid, sometimes even incautious advances of technology in the past few decades. What fuels radical techno-advocacy is a radical neo-Baconianism, where advances in science and technology, are deemed sufficient for human flourishing and, presumably, human happiness. What radical techno-enthusiasts consider human flourishing Freud would deem human psychopathology, driven by sick persons in sick societies, with an unnatural and degraded notion of the human condition. As


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Marcuse warns, ‘“Progress” is not a neutral term; it moves toward specific ends, and these ends are defined by the possibilities of ameliorating the human condition’.16 The radical techno-enthusiasm of Freud’s day and ours is not about ameliorating the human condition; it is instead both a symptom and measure of social pathology. We have already seen that ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, where Freud addresses openly the pathology of technology, has little to offer that is curative or even palliative. However, outside of the thesis defended in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, there is nothing in the tenets of Freudian psychodynamics that requires Freud to view immediate drive-discharge as friend and technology as foe. Should not the security afforded by scientific knowledge and technological advances in large measure be an undeniable benefit to humans? To a lesser extent, should not also the ease that they bring? Moreover, in many respects it seems obvious that the confines of civilized society makes it easier to satisfy impulses, if not more efficiently, then at least more expeditiously. If so, it seems unlikely that humans would be undeniably happier, should they leave civilized society and return to their primitive roots, where drive reduction is avowedly immediate. One could say that Freud, like Rousseau, seems to have a poor or, at least, incomplete grasp of the human condition.17 People may be predominantly instinct-driven, but they are also inescapably social and intelligent creatures that find a great amount of enjoyment in deliberation about social ends as well as some measure of enjoyment in contemplative activity that is asocial in nature. Freud’s own mature theory of drives allows for that. If Freud deems a return to their primitive roots the only real (i.e., economical) solution to the problem of human happiness, humans are better off without it. Given the complexity of Freud’s psychic apparatus18—a product, in part, of human history—the ideal human condition is not one where humans would experience immediate and complete (or nearly so) satisfaction of impulses. On a Freudian scale, the correct conception of human happiness would be a situation where humans balance their need for security with the need for instinctual discharge (1930, S.E. XXI: 96). That cannot occur by returning to primal human hordes and that Freud recognized.19 That can occur only in the type of civilized society, where technological innovations are brought forth to meet real, pressing, instinctual needs of ‘civilized’ human beings, instead of being introduced continuously to compensate for the presumed increasing human unhappiness, due to the constraints of civilizing. Societies can be structured to accommodate human impulses, while providing an equitable amount of security. The key is to balance need for security with discharge of daily human instinctual demands and that requires reason. To find such an equitable solution, knowledge of the human condition is a conditio sine qua non. Though science and its technology ultimately may be products of human discontent, nonetheless they are vital for human happiness, given the complexity of people’s psychic apparatus as it has evolved Herbert Marcuse, ‘The New Forms of Control’, 411. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau writes, ‘I almost dare to affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal’ (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), 42. 18 For Freud, the result of our incapacity to satisfy impulses immediately. 19 Winner maintains that the thought of turning back to an older, technically simpler tradition is foolhardy, as ‘the world that supported the tradition and gave it meaning has vanished’. Langdon Winner, ‘Luddism as Epistemology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 607. 16 17

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through the millennia. At this stage of psychical development, there is no turning back: Happiness entails consideration of security and security requires some measure of technology. Freud himself acknowledges that in ‘The Future of an Illusion’, where he states flatly that sublimation through scientific work is anything but cheap enjoyment. It is the only means for humans to gain knowledge of the world around them to improve their condition through technology. Speaking to an imaginary religionist critic, he states: We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you [i.e., the religionist]. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion (1927, S.E. XXI: 55). Freud roundly states here that scientific knowledge (i.e., technological science) increases human power and helps humans adjust their mutual relations. Unlike religion, it also affords humans a sense of security, not based on wish-fulfillment. The ‘illusions’ of science, Freud vaunts, are capable of correction or rejection, and therein is the key difference between science and religion (1927, S.E. XXI: 53). Science is quite capable of giving us knowledge of the human condition and of the world, but also of improving the human condition. Science, for Freud, is wholly capable of reining in and correcting the excesses of its own technologies. It is wholly capable of developing technologies in the service of human happiness, not human discontent. Freud, here, is an unquestioned meliorist. On precisely how and whether humans can achieve such a balance, Freud seems ambivalent. Several reasons, however, suggest pessimism. First, Freud seems unwilling to accept that humans may have anything more than a loose social nature, driven by libidinal interests, that fits them together happily, at best, into primitive bands. Humans are tightly social by default, as ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ shows, and mostly at the expense of their happiness.20 Secondly, unlike Aristotle, who argues that contemplative activity is the pinnacle of human happiness,21 Freud leaves little, if any, room within his theoretical superstructure for the austere pleasure that comes with thinking that does not deliberate about ends. People—like artists, philosophers, and even scientists—experience such pleasure through contemplative activity that is, for Freud, mere sublimation of human impulses. Thus, what scientists engage in when doing pure science, for instance, is merely an incomplete source of happiness.22 Finally and perhaps most significantly for this undertaking, Freud

20 For further discussion on Freud’s self as atomic or social, see Richard H. King, ‘Self-Realization and Solidarity: Rorty and the Judging Self', Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 28–51. 21 See Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8. 22 His letters, of course, often give a different impression. For instance, he writes in a letter to Fliess on May 16 of 1897 about his discovery concerning dreams: ‘Oh how glad I am that no one, no one knows…’. No one even suspects that the dream is not nonsense but the fulfillment of a wish’. See also his short essay ‘On Transience’ (1916, S.E. XIV).


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seems ambivalent about the human condition. Let me expand on this last point, which may not at all be obvious. On the one hand, Freud’s account of human nature is avowedly fixed. He unquestionably and repeatedly asserts that humans are impulse-driven animals. Sexual and destructive impulses would seem to fix therapeutic treatment for neurosis to a universally applicable standard of healthy human functioning that is essentially cathartic. It follows that the right sort of psychoanalytic therapy is culturally invariant in its most primitive aims. It strives to bolster the ego to tolerate the demands of the super-ego and to accommodate the restrictions of reality in an effort to satisfy the impulses of the id efficiently and in a socially acceptable manner. On the other hand, when theoretically pushed on the human condition, Freud also acknowledges that it is, in some sense, a flexible condition. First, he consistently claims, as an empirical investigator, that he is always open to new scientific discoveries. That commits him to the view that his notion of human well-being, psycho-sexual in nature and empirically founded, is itself revisable in light of evidence to the contrary.23 Second, Freud’s own judgments of normalcy and pathology are themselves fixed only by socio-conventional standards. For instance, when he talks about the right sort of education for children—which has a psychoanalytic alignment—he asserts that psychoanalysis can do no other than 'bring the child into line with the established order of society, without considering how valuable or how stable that order may be in itself’ (1933, S.E. XXII: 150). In other words, a psychoanalytic educator’s task in a specific social setting is to work to the best of his ability to fit a child into that society’s definition of normalcy. Elsewhere Freud adds, ‘The frontier between states of mind described as normal and pathological is in part a conventional one and in part so fluctuating that each of us probably crosses it many times in the course of a day’ (1907, S.E. IX: 44). Finally, in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, Freud mentions that individuals are judged neurotic or normal by the canons of their society, which are taken to be the standards of normalcy that themselves have no further standard by which they can be judged (1930, S.E. XXI: 144). I call that the ‘benchmark problem’. The benchmark problem suggests, pace Fromm, that there can be no such thing as a pathological society in the manner of a pathological individual, as society itself sets the standards for individual pathology and individual pathology is always determined by some degree of deviation from the accepted canons of normalcy, and

23

There is, of course, an abundance of evidence to suggest that he was, in practice, anything but openminded on foundational theoretical issues, like statistical justification of psychoanalytic practice or the role of sexuality in human behavior. See e.g., Frank J. Sulloway, ‘Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories: The Social Construction of Psychoanalysis’, Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis, 153–192; Frank Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (Chicago: Open Court, 1998); Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Robert Holt, ‘The Current Status of Psychoanalytic Theory’, Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1989); and Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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those are culturally variable.24 The aim of psychotherapy, then, is merely to strengthen the ego of any neurotic to enable him to function, through sublimation, in a socially acceptable manner in a particular society. There can be no normatively substantive psychoanalytic critique of any society other than it affords or fails to afford the individuals that it comprises sufficient and suitable outlets for impulses.

Technology and Human Utopia Thus far, we have seen that the problem of technological advance, for Freud, is just a special case of the problem of human discontent. So, a solution to the problem of technological advance comes only with a solution to the more general problem of human discontent. The benchmark problem tells us that human discontent cannot be attributed to neurotic societies; there are only neurotic individuals and individuals are made neurotic, when societies have insufficient or unsuitable outlets for human impulses. The question now becomes: To what extent did Freud attempt a vigorous solution to human discontent through a critique of social institutions that is sensitive to the benchmark problem? Whether Freud attempted a vigorous solution to the problem of human discontent is, I believe, dependent upon the extent to which Freud may be considered an utopist. I argue that he was. Works like ‘Totem and Taboo’, ‘Future of an Illusion’, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, ‘Moses and Monotheism’ and several smaller essays—‘Why War?’ especially—articulate that utopian project. First, it is significant to note that Freud, at least fairly earlier in his career, was in some measure a progressivist. In Totem and Taboo, Freud, following August Comte,25 mentions the developmental path of three great systems of thought: the animistic (or mythological), the religious, and the scientific (1913, S.E. XIII: 76–7). The genealogy is, strictly speaking, not Comte’s, but clearly it is drawn from Comte. Philip Rieff adds: Freud developed his sense of the times and of the place psychoanalysis had in them from the crude positivist chronology. History had moved to the last of three stages: from (1) cohesive societies of primitive man, a system of repression implemented by taboos, to (2) religious cohesions, a culture of repression upheld by theologies, to (3) modern culture, an era in which the old repressions are being loosened but not yet superseded.26 Freud saw the society of his day to be somewhere between stages two and three, with psychoanalysis being in some measure a catalyst to the third stage—under the

Cf. Fromm, who maintains that there are ‘universal criteria for mental health … valid for the human race … and according to which the state of health of each society can be judged’. One such proposition is that all humans share basic psychic qualities, which are psychologically discoverable and are the province of the psychoanalyst. Psychical health is psychical development in keeping with the characteristics and laws of human nature; psychopathology is development contrary to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1955), 21–3. 25 Comte claimed to have discovered a ‘great fundamental law’ to which the human mind was subject: Each branch of human knowledge passes successively through a theological (fictive), metaphysical (abstract), and scientific (positive) stage. August Comte, Introduction to Positivist Philosophy, trans. Frederick Ferre (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1988), 1–2. 26 Philip Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 335. See also 318–9. 24


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governance of reason. Psychoanalysis was a catalyst insofar as it gave an important blow to human narcissism, to which I now turn. We have seen already that societal progress seems to occur only at the expense of human wishes. The same can be said for scientific progress. Freud illustrates that point by several references to three crushing blows to human narcissistic thinking. In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first [Copernican blow] was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness…. The second blow [by Darwin, Wallace and predecessors] fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature…. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind27 (1917, S.E. XVI: 284–54). Given that scientific advance comes at the expense of human wishes, any solution to the problem of technological advance must, in some sense, be as well a blow to narcissism—a triumph of the reality principle at the expense of the pleasure principle and an advance of scientific knowledge. Freud’s purchase of Comtean progressivism and his statement of the three blows to narcissism show that he was fundamentally a meliorist and a realist about utopia. For Freud, utopia was realizable, because meaningful human progress through scientific advances was observable: Humans were in fact progressing toward a stage of intellectual perfection, a Comtean28 or Positive utopia, characterized by a purely scientific attitude (i.e., subsumption of observable facts under general laws) towards nature.

Technology and Human Annihilation In time, Freud noticed that the observable, steady advance of science would not inevitably usher in a human utopia. Though personal misfortunes came to bear, like the death of friends and of his beloved daughter Sophie, the carnage of World War I, a result of technological advances in the weaponry of warfare, was likely the main catalyst towards his change of attitude. As he writes in his 1915 essay, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’:29 [O]ur mortification and out painful disillusionment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow-citizens of the world during this war 27 See also ‘Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917, S.E. XVII: 139) and ‘Resistances to PsychoAnalysis’ (1925, S.E. XXII: 173). 28 Comte claimed that progress toward the final stage was seen to be inevitable. 29 Where he still clings to the notion of ego- and object-instincts.

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were unjustified. They were based on an illusion to which we had given way. In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed. The fact that the collective individuals of mankind, the peoples and states, mutually abrogated their moral restraints naturally prompted these individual citizens to withdraw for a while from the constant pressure of civilization and to grant a temporary satisfaction to the instincts which they had been holding in check (1915, S.E. XIV: 285). In mature works, Freud explains the mindless carnage of war by positing a death instinct.30 He also notices great danger in essaying to set up a human utopia, what he metaphorically dubs the ‘soft dictatorship of reason’ (1932, S.E. XXII: 212), before its time. Reason has to be strong enough to tame human impulses so that impulses— both preservative and dissolutive—can be channeled technologically for human betterment. Otherwise reason slavishly serves human impulses and there is the possibility of human annihilation, through advances in the science of warfare, created by human technology in the service of human passions, unchecked by reason. Freud tackles the issue of the possibility of a human utopia in a manner that is mindful of the benchmark problem in ‘Why War?’—a 1932 correspondence, prompted by the League of Nations, between him and Einstein. Here Freud frankly addresses the chief impediment to a human utopia—the problem of human annihilation through technological advances in warfare. Einstein asks, ‘Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?’ (1932, S.E. XXII: 201) Not all wars, Freud replies, are inevitably detrimental. Paradoxical as it may sound, it must be admitted that war might be a far from inappropriate means of establishing the eagerly desired reign of ‘everlasting’ peace, since it is in a position to create the large units within which a powerful central government makes further wars impossible. Nevertheless it fails in this purpose, for the results of conquest are as a rule short-lived: the newly created units fall apart once again, usually owing to a lack of cohesion between the portions that have been united by violence (1932, S.E. XXII: 207). The result is the exchange of numerous, unceasing minor wars with local impacts for fewer, more devastating wars on a grand scale. Following Einstein, he adds, ‘Wars will only be prevented with certainly if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over’. Unfortunately, its authority cannot—at least, not initially—be the force of ideas. Given that communities are held together by the

30

First entertained in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920).


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emotional ties of identification and threat of violence, its authority must be that of the force of violence31 (1932, S.E. XXII: 207–8). Freud then goes on to expand upon the Eros- and the death-instincts— championed in ‘The Ego and the Id’. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of both. Now it seems as though an instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in isolation; it is always accompanied—or, as we say, alloyed—with a certain quota from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim (1932, S.E. XXII: 209). The death-instinct, he elaborates, is at work in every living creature and is ‘striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter’, while Eros is preservative. The death-instinct works with Eros, when it is, at least in part, turned outwards and functions for the preservation of an organism at expense of other organisms. Internalized, the death-instinct is responsible for conscience and inner destruction. He sums, 'there is no question of getting rid entirely of human aggressive impulses; it is enough to try to divert them to such an extent that they need not find expression in war' (1932, S.E. XXII: 211–2). War, in allowing suitable outlets for excesses of Eros and aggression, depicts the best and worst of humans at once. Mortification is both sincere and disingenuous. On the one hand, it is the result of a hard-to-assimilate fact that humans are capable of the vilest deeds at a moment’s notice. On the other hand, it obscures the satisfaction humans feel through annihilating fellow humans. Mortification is thus the result of human ambivalence. Freud proposes deflection strategies for destructive impulses. First, he proposes two libidinal methods, which essay to bring Eros into play against the death-instinct. One libidinal method is to cultivate generalized love—a move he rejects in ‘The Future of an Illusion’ and ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. Another libidinal method is to cultivate bonds of community through identification—a move, ‘Group Psychology’ tells us, that can easily lead to fanaticism. Both methods deal with emotional ties, not the force of violence. Second, he proposes the strategy of educating the upper stratum of human beings, with independence of thought and hunger for truth, to educate the masses. That plan could only work, if such persons could subordinate their instincts to the ‘dictatorship of reason’ for the betterment of all humans, but, he adds sullenly, ‘in all probability that is a Utopian expectation’. There are other methods, doubtless more practicable, he says, but he fails to mention them, because they are tediously slow. A drumly Freud concludes, ‘An unpleasant picture comes to one’s mind of mills that grind so slowly that people starve before they get their flour’ (1932, S.E. XXII: 212–3). Finally, Freud turns to a puzzle: If all creatures have destructive impulses, why do some, like he and Einstein, rebel so violently against war? He answers biologically, ‘We are pacifists because we are obliged to be for organic reasons. And we then find

Cf. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1984), 123–4.

31

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no difficulty in producing arguments to justify our attitude’ (1932, S.E. XXII: 213–4). He sums in quasi-Comtean fashion: For incalculable ages mankind has been passing through a process of evolution of culture…. We owe to that process the best of what we have become, as well as a good part of what we suffer from. Though its causes and beginnings are obscure and its outcome uncertain, some of its characteristics are easy to perceive. It may perhaps be leading to the extinction of the human race, for in more than one way it impairs the sexual function; uncultivated races and backward strata of the population are already multiplying more rapidly than highly cultivated ones…. The physical modifications that go along with the process of civilization are striking and unambiguous. They consist in a progressive displacement of instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses…. Of the psychological characteristics of civilization two appear to be the most important: a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and perils (1932, S.E. XXII: 214–5). Against those two civilizing tendencies, there is war. Pacifists are merely those who have not only an intellectual and emotional repugnance for its dissolutive force, but also those who have a constitutional repugnance for it through development of the civilizing tendencies. He states that it may not be Utopian to hope within a measurable time for an end to war and adds puzzlingly, ‘one thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war’32 (1932, S.E. XXII: 215).

Concluding Thoughts Given the constraints of psychoanalysis, Freud may have come upon a chilling insight—a fourth blow to human narcissism—i.e., that humans are the greatest threat to their own annihilation. Civilization, in its efforts to strengthen the intellect and internalize the death-impulse, may ultimately turn out to be the cause of human extinction. Recognition of this fourth blow to human narcissism, for Freud, may offset the optimism of the three Comtean stages of human history: With advances in scientific knowledge comes the capacity for human annihilation and it would seem strange if such a capacity, accessible to many through scientific discoveries that allow for the creation of technological devices for mass extinction, would not at some point be actualized. Did Freud believe that annihilation was inevitable? Though he envisaged mills that ground so slowly that people starved before they were fed, Freud was always a ‘muffled meliorist’—he was always at least guardedly optimistic about the possibility of utopia. He thought that psychoanalysis, with its brutal third blow to human narcissism, gave people sufficient knowledge of the human condition to avoid annihilation. It also gave them sufficient knowledge of the 32 Inconsistent with his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. Freud’s meaning here is likely ‘whatever fosters the true growth of civilization…’.


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human condition to tolerate each other. Tolerance, over time, would lead to endurance and endurance would at least allow for the future possibility for human utopia—the ‘soft dictatorship’ of reason. In short, by balancing the demands of instinctual satisfaction with human security, Freud believed that humans could make some progress towards a scientific utopia through removing all wish-based illusions, except that residue of human omnipotence needed to drive science and scientists, through fostering social settings that work towards strengthening the human ego in light of ever-pressing social constraints, and through encouraging social means to sublimate effectively human impulses.33

33

See the seminal work of Heinz Hartmann on the primary and secondary autonomy of the ego, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1939).

Technology and Freudian Discontent

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