We have glided unawares out of the economic plane over into the psychological. At first we were tempted to seek the essence of culture in the existing material resources and in the arrangements for their distribution. But with the discovery that every culture is based on compulsory labour and instinctual renunciation, and that it therefore inevitably evokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it became clear that the resources themselves, the means of acquiring them, and the arrangements for their distribution could not be its essential or unique characteristic; for they are threatened by the rebelliousness and destructive passions of the members of the culture. Thus in addition to the resources there are the means of defending culture: the coercive measures, and others that are intended to reconcile men to it and to recompense them for their sacrifices. And these last may be described as the psychical sphere of culture.
For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an instinct cannot be satisfied as ‘frustration’, the means by which this frustration is secured as ‘prohibition’, and the condition produced by the prohibition as ‘privation’. Then the next step is to distinguish between privations that do affect everybody and those that do not, those that merely affect groups, classes, or even individuals. The former are the oldest; with the prohibitions that cause them culture began, who knows how many thousands of years ago, to detach itself from the primordial animal condition of mankind. To our surprise we have found that they are still operative, that they still form the kernel of the hostility to culture. The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are born anew with every child; there is a class of men, the neurotics, who react already to this first group of frustrations by an asocial attitude. Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism, and of murder. It seems strange to classify these, in repudiating which all men seem to be at one, with those others, about whose permissibility or impermissibility in our culture there is so vigorous a dispute; but psychologically one is justified in doing this. Nor is the attitude of culture to these oldest instinctual wishes the same in each case; cannibalism alone seems to be proscribed by everyone, and—to other than analytic observation—completely overcome; the strength of the incest wishes can still be perceived behind the prohibition; and under certain conditions murder is still practised, indeed enjoined, by our culture. It is possible that cultural developments lie before us, in which yet other wish-gratifications, which are to-day entirely permissible, will appear just as disagreeable as those of cannibalism do now.
Already in these earliest instinctual renunciations a psychological factor is involved, which remains of great importance for everything that follows. It is not true to say that the human mind has undergone no development since the earliest times and that in contrast to the advances of science and technical skill it is still the same to-day as at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these advances here. It is in accordance with the course of our development that external compulsion is gradually internalized, in that a special mental function, man’s super-ego, takes it under its jurisdiction. Every child presents to us the model of this transformation; it is only by that means that it becomes a moral and social being. This strengthening of the super-ego is a highly valuable psychological possession for culture. Those people in whom it has taken place, from being the foes of culture, become its supporters. The greater their number in a cultural community, the more secure it is and the more easily can it dispense with external coercion. Now the degree of this internalization differs widely in the case of each instinctual prohibition. As far as the earliest demands of culture, already mentioned, are concerned, the process of internalization seems to have been to a great extent accomplished, if we leave out of account the unwelcome exception of the neurotics. But the case is altered when we turn to the other instinctual claims. One notes with surprise and concern that a majority of men obey the cultural prohibitions in question only under the pressure of external force, in fact only where the latter can assert itself and for as long as it is an object of fear. This also holds good for those so-called moral cultural demands, which in the same way apply to everyone. The greater part of what one experiences of man’s moral untrustworthiness is to be explained in this connection. There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs.
If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.
The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized—to express it popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of the members—is not the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic creations, that is to say, of the satisfactions they both yield.
One will be only too readily inclined to include among the psychical possessions of a culture its ideals, that is, its judgements of what are its loftiest and its most ambitious accomplishments. It seems at first as if these ideals would determine the achievements of the cultural group; but the actual process would seem to be that the ideals are modelled on the first achievements that the co-operation of internal ability and external circumstances made possible, and that now these first achievements are merely held fast by the ideal as examples to be followed. The satisfaction the ideal gives to the members of the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature, it is based on pride in what has already been successfully achieved. To make this satisfaction complete the culture compares itself with others which have applied themselves to other tasks and have developed other ideals. On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to despise the rest. In this way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between different cultural groups, as can be most clearly seen among nations.
The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also one of the forces that effectively counteract the hostility to culture within the cultural group. It can be shared not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of this culture, but also by the suppressed, since the right to despise those that are outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer in their own group. True, one is a miserable plebeian, tormented by obligations and military service, but withal one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed with the class that governs and exploits them is, however, only a part of a larger whole. Thus the former can be attached affectively to the latter; in spite of their animosity they can find their ideals in their masters. Unless such relations, fundamentally of a satisfying kind, were in existence, it would be impossible to understand how so many cultures have contrived to exist for so long in spite of the justified hostility of great masses of men.
Different in kind is the satisfaction that art yields to the members of a cultural group. As a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in exhausting labour and who have not enjoyed the benefits of individual education. As we have long known, art offers substitutive gratifications for the oldest cultural renunciations, still always most deeply felt, and for that reason serves like nothing else to reconcile men to the sacrifices they have made on culture’s behalf. On the other hand, works of art promote the feelings of identification, of which every cultural group has so much need, in the occasion they provide for the sharing of highly valued emotional experiences. And when they represent the achievements of a particular culture, thus in an impressive way recalling it to its ideals, they also subserve a narcissistic gratification.
No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important part of the psychical inventory of a culture: that is to say, its—in the broadest sense—religious ideas; in other words, the use of which will be justified later, its illusions.