Sarah Dorsey
Professor Faison
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Freud Topic Paper
“ The more virtuous a person is, the sterner and more distrustful is his conscience, so that the very people that have attained the highest degree of saintliness are in the end the ones who accuse themselves of being the most sinful.”
A statement from Freud that rings so very true. It seems that a person who is vicious is giving their total selves. Completely uncensored. One knows that they are vicious so they would know what to expect. Also along with the viciousness probably comes with content with ones self. If one is virtuous, the suppression of ones actions and thoughts will in turn ruin ones self and in turn you cant trust them because one won’t know what to expect. Guilt that is entirely unmanageable, for it attaches itself to thoughts inescapable in any human being. So in turn one who is virtuous but is repressing thoughts and actions so express their virtue has a conscience that is certainly severe, yet we cannot see his self-abnegation as saintly, rather it becomes pathologically self-centered.
As to the origin of the sense of guilt, the analyst has different views from other psychologists; but even he does not find it easy to give an account of it. A person feels guilty or sinful when he has done something which onee knows to be bad. Even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only recognized in the themselves an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal, to the deed. Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already recognized that what is bad is reprehensible, is something that must not be carried out. Freud states that the super ego is the site of the moral conscience. In that moral conscience it doesn’t remind us of good things it instead infuses a sense of guilt that in turn leads to violence and other bad things. So say for instance you have a bad person (vicious) and a good person (virtuous). Assuming the vicious person has selected the lifestyle and actions they lead, take into consideration that they do not have guilt for their thoughts, because they act them out anyway and it is expected from them.
Then look at a person who is virtuous … their thoughts of sinning consume them which in turn make their super ego go crazy and you wont know what to expect from them which deems them way more dangerous and distrustful than their openly vicious counterparts because they are oddly and surprisingly and even more somewhat unwillingly out of their character. More into the guilt, trying to live a moral lifestyle ones aggressiveness is internalized and sent back to where it came from -- that is, it is directed towards ones own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of conscience, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it expresses itself as a need for punishment.
“The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same things as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception, which the ego has of being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency,the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic
