libidinal component impulses act through the super-ego in the same way, so that the ego is forced to be orderly, dutiful, is watched and punished.

The relation to the mother suffers only one change, viz. the renunciation of the genital aim; this is not the same as complete deflection of the libido because some gratification is possible through aim-inhibited' relationships, so far as the genital-aim is concerned there is liberty given but it must be

exogamous.

This may be called, in contradistinction to the earlier stage, a Conscience Stage of development because the ego (under duress, to be sure) has acquired an internal mentor telling it not only what it is not allowed to do but also what it must do (wherein this stage differs from the former). It comes into prominence at the phallic stage of libido- and at the Oedipus stage of objectdevelopment because only here is the conflict between the sexes unavoidable, it is set in motion as formerly by the helplessness of the ego in face of the next greatest danger to death itself, viz. castration, neglect of the danger involves a loss not of a part of the self but of the unified ego- and libidinalimpulses, and isolation from parental love. Here again the ego shows its subjection to the pleasure principle and the reactive-impulses of hate and fear are seen clearly at every stage of the development.

III. The Post-Phallic Stage of Super-Ego development. The 'stages' are artificial and should not be classed with the pre-genital and genital stages of libido development, for the latter relate to distributions of libido and are easily demonstrable, whereas these super-ego 'stages' describe types of response to complicated internal and external stimuli. It would have been possible to call the first the 'pre-castration,' the second the 'castration' and this, the third, the 'loss of love' stage, which nomenclature would follow the consequences in the erotic life resulting from disregard of the super-ego's interference. Another alternative classification would have called the first the stage of 'helplessness,' the second the danger,' the third the 'boycott' stages, directing attention to the type of danger experienced by the ego. On taking another aspect of the individual's development, namely, the relation to the parents, it would be possible to talk of pre-Oedipus, Oedipus, and postOedipus stages. Perhaps the reason why these terms have not been employed in the psycho-analytical literature is that they are if not inaccurate at least likely to be misleading, and this not merely because sharp dividing lines cannot be drawn but because in so many cases where there is fixation at say the anal level the child not only plays out a great deal of its Oedipus complex in terms of anal rather than genital relationships, but also finds strong egoidentifications with the anal zone and the anal products and so may be said by all but purists to suffer from a castration complex at that stage.

In the paragraphs on the Oedipus-phallic-castration-danger-stage (call it what you will) stress was laid on the rivalry between father and son for the mother in which the original hostility between son and father was replaced by a friendly object-love which in turn was replaced by identification. This manipulation of cathexes produces the profoundest change in the individual, or more correctly, ushers in the change, for from this moment the child is a social being. From now on he deals with his fellows on the pattern of his mastering the Oedipus complex. With the inhibition of the aim of the sexual impulse towards the mother there occurs an inevitable increase in libido accumulation requiring outlet; the new direction of libido outlet is thus forced on the child from internal and external causes and the ground is prepared

for aim-inhibited gratification. This change is accompanied by a corresponding increase in the capacity to form the identifications following friendly object relations with potential rivals, viz. other persons of the same sex. It was not only through fear of the father that the ego took on his attributes by instituting the super-ego but also through love of him, so in this later or post-Oedipus stage it is not only fear of public opinion but love for fellow beings which maintains the function of conscience. The fear of chastisement becomes the sense of guilt. Thus the two factors at work in bringing an individual into society and keeping him aware of its demands spring from the primal relationships to his parents, love for companions and compatriots being derived from the homosexual component of the libido and sensitiveness to social opinion being a derivative of the hostile impulses.

(d) The Decline of the Super-Ego and Return of the Ego. The formation of the Super-Ego begins in the nursery to meet the requirements of the nursery code; it changes from a sort of 'Sphincter Morality' to a 'Genital Morality' which latter is designed to prevent incest; furthermore the sphincter- and genital-moralities work unconsciously, for the most part. Viewed in this way it is not difficult to see that the super-ego or conscience is at these stages ill designed to meet the needs of adult life, for in its second stage the prohibition covers not only incest but all genital activity, and in general its mode of action by repression, inhibition and enforcing regression is archaic, and not like conscious reactions finely graduated to suit the circumstances (the stimuli) of the moment. The super-ego, under the influence of social opinion, gradually in the third stage loses its rigid character in respect to certain actions (for instance, genital prohibition relaxes in respect to exogamous unions) but is preserved more or less strongly in others (for instance 'habits' such as the passing of wind)1. The mechanism of this relaxation was discussed in the third stage; it is substitution of other persons for the father, a series of introjections provided by everyday life. Hostility which originally led to identification with the father, later leads the individual to turn his libido away from the domestic circle to the outer world, there to find mother- and fatherimagines and objects to which he can respond without mental strain and fear. The further the displacement from the parents the more is the ego likely to be stimulated without reference to father-hate and mother-desire. By experiencing exogamous sexual relationships the ego discovers that the sexual act is not accompanied by death, castration or boycott; the unconscious force of the super-ego is weakened at the expense of the conscious regulation of mental excitation and discharge which the ego exercises; while the regulation

1 It is difficult-apart from the libido theory-to find a biologically adequate reason for such prohibitions or probably for those against incest for that matter; so far as we can observe them, animals are not shocked at actions which put nursemaids in consternation; yet we find the human adult for no obvious reason taking more notice of pre-genital activities than the sub-human groups. The explanation probably lies in the fact that culture rests on the unstable basis of partially modified impulses, if man took too much manifest erotic delight in these pre-genital activities he would lose interest in the refined evolutionary products of these activities; if he had no inclination to them at all, if his life was a simple rut and non-rut (the latter being only a filling of the belly till the next rut) he would not trouble to-could not trouble to labour over these aim-inhibited activities. By the interference of the latency period man's sexual life is divided into a stage of relatively uninhibited sexual gratification, a stage of sublimation and the final stage of relatively uninhibited sexual gratification; the gratifications allowed by culture ease the work of repression of the pre-genital erotic needs, some repression is needed to safeguard the genital.

of the psychical apparatus is relegated to the archaic unconscious, the mechanism of conscious adaptation is, if not impossible, at any rate difficult1.

The assumption of control by the ego does not mean unbridled licence and violence; unlike the super-ego it is in touch with reality and can adjust its mode of response to the external as well as to the internal stimulus. The adult's attitude to his fellow men is one of attention to their modes of response coloured with a kindly feeling, not blind subjection to codes of behaviour, which is the nursery way. The ego should supplant the super-ego as a regulator and leave it only the duty of signalling the unconscious infantile instinctual demands. This supplanting of the super-ego by no means always occurs; if it does not we may suspect disease of the function in question, which will now occupy our attention.

(e) Disorders of the Super-Ego. Where there is normally development there will be found in some individuals arrests in that development producing disorders of growth. We have found this to be the case in regard to the libido and the Sense of Omnipotence, and some day we may have a series of ego diseases to classify in the same way. The super-ego is no exception to this general rule; little is known of its intrinsic disorders, more is known of its anomalies due to concomitant disturbance of libido-cathexis and objectrelationships.

We may start a consideration of the disorders of the super-ego with a reexamination of melancholia. Here we find that there is fixation at the analsadistic stage and that the individual tries to master the accumulated libidinal tension (which has a sadistic aim) by turning this upon himself; he acts not actively nor passively but reflexively. This theory is not intelligible without the inclusion of the super-ego, which is seen to be the introjection of the father-imago at the individual's sadistic stage of development. The self punishments are acts of hostility made harmless externally at the expense of the ego. The greater the hostility to the external object the greater the danger to the self.

In the obsessional neurosis the ego forms extensive reactive formations to evade the sense of guilt caused by the hostile impulses, e.g. washing ceremonials, penances, etc. The ego is not aware of the reason for these acts but responds to the promptings of the super-ego (which is unconscious) and so reacts as if it were guilty. These peculiar behaviours are ascribed to (i) precocious ego development, and (ii) to the formation of the super-ego at the anal-sadistic stage, i.e. the child works out its Oedipus complex at the analsadistic not at the phallic stage.

Confession is an attempt to ease the need for punishment (for impulses of which the subject is not aware) by replacing the inner condemning factor in the mind (conscience, super-ego) with an external person. It is a step to social life in the sense that there is a move away from dependence on the early parental injunction to a substitute in the current life of the subject, but the technique is bound to be unhelpful in the long run because (i) the confessor substitutes the father without at the same time detaching the 1 The super-ego of woman appears to be more infantile in character than that of man. This may be explained in part by the character of persons she identifies herself with being more infantile (i.e. mothers hand on their infantile egos to their daughters as super-egos, thus perpetuating the sexual differences within the ego-system), and in part because the opportunity in the social and economic world for working off the super-ego in a succession of imagines of widely different type is more restricted than in the case of the male-at least this may have been so till the recent changes in the life of woman have made the sexual differences less marked.

patient from his early fixations, (ii) confession cannot penetrate to and deal with unconscious tendencies, and (iii) punishment is not the means to alter instinct impulses, seeing that it gratifies them. It is useless for a reformer to preach total abstinence after he has made his hearer drunk. In the same way punishment by gratifying the sadism re-enforces the pre-genital fixation, it does not lead the subject to a more adult synthesis of libidinal aims.

Self-criticism a useful super-ego function that persists under the regime of the re-established ego may be exaggerated, as in melancholia. This exaggeration is due as before mentioned to increase of sadism directed to the self combined with a scoptophilic impulse carried over into the super-ego.

The criminal is a person who has a super-ego defective in the capacity for self-criticism. It appears that the super-ego is cut off in some way from access to the outer world, so that the working-over process is prevented. In addition there has been a defective development of the super-ego in the earliest stage, the component impulses acted in isolation or rather produced isolated reaction formations. Guilt if present is connected with symptoms not with conscious acts.

Bad up-bringing, i.e. cases where the parents' conduct obviously falls below the standard set up by the super-ego, exerts a traumatic effect on the parental identifications, impairing the ease with which the original hostile impulse is changed to affectionate object-choice and later identification. The end result of this state of affairs is that the child cannot enter the third stage, i.e. transfer to society the parental complex and satisfactorily work it through.

The super-ego arises as a compromise between the desire to love and to be loved, it is maintained for a time as a mechanism for incorporating into the infantile ego a standard of conduct to which it will have to conform now and in the future (while the home influence is important to it), it provides an outlet for aggressive libidinal impulses without disturbing external relationships, and finally by duress it urges the ego to change its character and assume control of instinct impulse not according to its (the ego's) standards but those of the outer world. When it breaks up, the anal-sadistic element of it is changed into an impulse to mastery of external objects, which is taken over by the ego, and a vigilant element (derived from a blend of sadism and scoptophilia) which now acts as an agent of the ego in co-ordinating internal and external impulses.

§ 11. Death Instincts.

Some years ago Freud gave rein to his speculative inclinations regarding the nature of instinct and evolved a theory which will be given in brief in this paragraph. He said of it himself that he does not know how much credence to give these theories which differ from the other psycho-analytical theories he has put forward in being speculations rather than close or relatively close deductions from observation1.

Analysis of cases of traumatic neurosis showed that the symptoms were due not only to a libidinal wish--to a desire for erotic gratification, however distorted in expression in the symptoms-but to a compulsion to repeat in the mental life of phantasy, dream and symptom the original situation of trauma and master the great amount of psychical excitation which it evoked by a mental means. The repetition gave an opportunity to take the trauma

1 Vide Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

in 'divided doses' and so deal with it more easily than would be possible if the shock had to be mastered at a stroke1. From these observations, from a similar tendency to repetition in the phenomena of transference in the analysis of neurotics and from the play of young children Freud surmised that "an instinct would be a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the re-instatement of an earlier condition," i.e. a manifestation of inertia in organic life. But this, as he hastens to point out, does not explain certain features of the sexual instincts which appear to follow a different path in that they seem ever to strive to create new individuals. This may be more apparent than real: with the division of gonads and soma the body may be divided into organs which strive to create earlier conditions of living protoplasmunicellular germ cells and those which serve no such direct tendency; the former are the physical source of the life-instincts, the latter of the deathinstincts, the interplay of these two accounting for the almost infinite variety of physical and psychical manifestation of organic life. "The one group of instincts presses forward to reach the final goal of life as quickly as possible, the other flies back at a certain point on the way only to traverse the same stretch once more from a given spot and thus to prolong the duration of the journey. Although sexuality and the distinction of the sexes certainly did not exist at the dawn of life, nevertheless it remains possible that the instincts which are later described as sexual were active from the very beginning and took up the part of opposition to the rôle of the 'ego-instincts' then, and not only at some later time."

Every cell is on this hypothesis assumed to possess these two instincts; when the organism becomes multicellular the sexual impulses of the somatic cells take the other cells as 'objects' but the gonad cells remain 'narcissistic.' This division into a sexual and non-sexual function allows the concentration of sexual energies in the sexual cells to go forward unchecked (and thus the sexual cathexis is conserved for their enormous constructive activity) while the non-sexual cells utilize their sexual energies in 'neutralizing' their own and each other's death-instincts. This ingenious hypothesis has one application at least in psychiatry, viz. in suicide. Normally the death-instinct is turned outwards to the world and either combines with the sexual to form sadistic impulses or acts in isolation as the impulse of aggression. When turned outwards death-instincts are innocuous to their possessor, they only injure the external object; if, however, the object is introjected, this instinct is no longer innocuous to the possessor and the danger to the self may be so great that self-destruction results. Whether readers will share Freud's own 'tepid feeling of indulgence' to these views or will reject them is no great matter, since psycho-analytical psychiatry can get on very well without them at present.

1 This explains the phenomenon of 'battle-dreams' being repeated long after the outer danger is over. The course of battle-dreams is usually (a) 'pure' battle-dream with intense anxiety, (b) mixed battle- and 'civilian'-dreams (i.e. dreams of civil life) with a decreasing amount of anxiety, (c) a stage in which the war element is absent on most occasions but is revived whenever the patient is in a state of emotional excitement which may have no direct connection with the war.-It looks as if the excitations due to extreme physical danger could be more easily mastered if they were mixed with libidinal excitations, and that the mixed battle-dream' was indicative of an economic (psychical) process at work in effecting a cure, or at least some relief.