The Social Psychism

In 1919 Freud broke with his first theory of the instincts, when, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he presented the outline of a new theory in the context of speculations sparked, in part, by the slaughter of World War One. ¹ These speculations, however, relied heavily on biological metaphor, and it was only four years later, in The Ego and the Id, that Freud was able to link their tenor broadly to concrete psychoanalytic concerns, an advance that allowed the theory (as Ricoeur asserts) “to pass from mere speculation to actual deciphering” of psychological materials. ² Here Freud also embedded this concept of the instincts in a new structural model that divided the psyche into three agencies: the id, ego, and superego. Then, six years later, in Civilization and its Discontents, both the inherent logic of the new theory and its consequent psychological applications pressed Freud’s thoughts beyond the parameters of the individual psyche on to wider fields: culture, society, and civilization.