ABSTRACT
With its overriding concern with psychic undercurrents of human beings, psychoanalysis presumes a normative, “natural” horizon beyond the boundaries of culture and history. If Freud’s theory of instinct is premised on a precultural, prehistorical stratum in the life of individuals or groups, the critical edge of psychoanalysis stems from its insistence on an undetermined unconscious stream. Yet, this elusive stream can also be a criterion revealing the repressiveness of the instituted norms of culture and tradition. As submerged remnants of a lifeworld, the unconscious stratum remains intransigent to cultural conditioning, socialization, moral modeling, and legislation. But histories of culture and nations, no matter how diverse, have trailed a record of civilizing the instincts into a corner, down a path of restriction and constraint. The Freudian theme of civilization and its discontents confirms this history of increasing repression. In their encounter with history and culture, human natural instincts have been modified, distorted, and mutilated by the specific reality principle of culture under the rubric of civilizational processes. These weighty structures come in the forms of social institutions, culturally conditioned sensibility, morality, and instrumental reason. These edifices have shaped and dominated the inner life to the harsh tune of outside reality. Deemed “necessary” and useful in the struggle for existence and self-preservation, the exogenous culture, in the words of Herbert Marcuse (1962: 125), “enforces the repressive controls of the sex instincts (first through the brute violence of the primal father, then through institution and internalization), as well as the transformation of the death instinct into socially useful aggression and morality.”
