ABSTRACT
Freud offers a psychoanalytic critique of morality and religion – but his critique stands in need of critique. His form of argument is genealogical: if we see how our commitments to morality and to religion arose, they ought to lose the authority they have held over us. In his argument against morality, Freud makes one crucially important point: the superego is formed in childhood unconsciously, as a child’s defense against his or her own hostile impulses against the parents. In this way the children’s aggression is turned upon themselves. The outcome is an inhibited and guilty child. And there is room for a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice of guilt: the more aggressive and angry a person feels, the more that aggression is turned on the self, and the outcome is overwhelming guilt. Freud argues that the social institutions of morality make use of this structure, and he concludes that the individual in society is necessarily discontent. Freud’s argument may serve as a critique of certain social structures, but it is not valid against morality as such. By way of contrast, Plato, like Freud, thought that the social morality of his day was corrupt and misleading, and that it had a devastating effect on the psyches of its citizens. But he did not think it valid to infer that ethical life as such made us unhappy. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all argue that ethical life properly understood is a source and expression of human happiness. Freud’s critique proceeds in ignorance of their accounts. He assumes incorrectly that his argument from pathology will cover all cases.
