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Aggression at Freud
In his works, Freud talks about several forms of aggression and its presence and
development in different fields and periods of human culture. In Totem and Taboo he starts
by speculating how things happened in the primordial times of humanity, how individuals
must have acted in the primordial horde. Then, in Civilization and Its Discontents he explains
how aggressiveness finds its place in the civilized society of you shall love your neighbour as
yourself. He applies his theory on classic literature and myths where aggression plays an
important role in how people over time cope with the presence of Death. But, he also was
present in his contemporary society where at the request of Einstein he wrote about war,
peoples need to discharge their destructive impulses in socially accepted conditions and the
possible ways to avoid wars. In this paper I will sum up and present the Freudian view upon
aggression.
In psychoanalysis an instinct of aggression is generally recognized as innate in man and
that it is a radical and basic element in human psychology. It is considered as one of the
building blocks of the human nature, along with love, feeding and security instincts. According
to Freud, the totem meal is the first socially acceptable act of aggression. He argues that the
totem is the substitute for the father (Freud, 1912-13, pg.141) and the ambivalent feelings
towards the father are extended to the totem. After the father was killed and ate by the allied
brothers, they instated a rule in order to prevent the future crimes against the leader.
Cannibal savages as they were (Freud, 1912-13, pg.142) they devoured their victim as well
as killing him, and by doing so, they accomplished their identification with him, and each one
of them acquired a portion of his strength. Therefore, the totem meal, mankind`s earliest
festival, would be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed.
The animal totem is chosen as a representative image, a symbol of the father.
Therefore the prohibition of not killing him extends also to the totem it becomes sacred. In
spite of this restriction, their conscience is guilty, and by killing and eating the totem, they
restage the original crime, identify with it and clear their conscience through this ritual. Each
man is conscious that he is performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only
through the participation of the whole clan (Freud, 1912-13, pg.140), they also cannot absent

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themselves from the killing and the meal. The main purposes of this ritual are to breach the
prohibition and to disclaim responsibility for the crime.
The appearance of this mechanism is the beginning of morality, low and also comes
back to childhood, according to Freud. From the filial sense of guilt the two fundamental
taboos of totemism were created, which correspond to the two repressed wishes of the
Oedipus complex. All these characteristics of civilization are tied together; at the bottom God
is nothing other than an exalted father (Freud, 1912-13, pg.147). How? After a long lapse of
time their aggression against their father grew less and their longing for him increased, which
made possible for an ideal to emerge which embodied the unlimited power of the primal
father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him. That is
how they came up with the totem, and later one with God, in which the father has regained
his human shape. With the introduction of the father-deities a fatherless society gradually
changed into one organized on a patriarchal basis (Freud, 1912-13, pg.149).
And in the case of children, we do not find deeds, but only impulses and emotions, set
upon evil ends but held back from their achievements. That is why this sense of guilt still
persists with every new generation, with the shift from factual realities to psychical ones.
Freud says that every virtuous individual has passed through an aggressive and evil period in
his infancy a phase of perversion which was the precondition of the later period of excessive
morality (Freud, 1912-13, pg.161).
Again in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that civilization depends on
relationships between a considerable number of individuals and that it demands other
sacrifices besides that of sexual satisfaction (Freud, 1930a, pg.108): the fulfilment of
aggressive wishes. This prohibition takes the form of you shall love your neighbour as
yourself. But he translates it by saying that the argument goes like this: if I love someone, he
must deserve it in some way; he deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love
myself in him; and if he is so much more perfect than myself I can love my ideal self in him.
Hence the easy part is when I have to love my friends son, but when I have to love a stranger
to which I have no emotional ties and who cannot attract me by any worth of his own, it will
be a very difficult thing to do. Moreover, a friend would be entitled to call it an injustice if I
put a stranger a par with him (Freud, 1930a, pg.109). Also, if he is to be loved with this
universal love just because he is also an inhabitant of this earth, like anything else, then just a
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small piece of the love would be his. Therefore, Freud asks, what is the reason for an
enunciation of a percept if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable? (Freud,
1930a, pg.110).
The answer lies in the way our psyche is complied. It aims to deflect in peoples minds
the tendency to view the neighbour as someone who tempts them to satisfy their
aggressiveness on him, not only as potential helper or a sexual object. Its purpose is to prevent
the exploitation of his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without
his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill
him (Freud, 1930a, pg.111); to prevent a homo homini lupus state. Because, Freud says,
this commandment is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to
the original nature of man (Freud, 1930a, pg.112).
Therefore, this categorical imperative, as Kant would say, is only possible by displacing
the aggressiveness onto someone or something else. According to Freud it is always possible
to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people
left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness (Freud, 1930a, pg. 114). This
form of aggression the hostility against intruders has proven to be a very common thing in
the history of nations; the usual North against South, the Spaniards and Portuguese, English
and Scotch and so on. The Freudian name for this phenomenon is the narcissism of minor
differences.
Contextualizing all of that it is understandable why the civilized man finds it hard to be
happy, with rules that impose sacrifices not only on mans sexuality but also on his
aggressivity. In this sense primitive man must have been happier, knowing no instinctual
restrictions, but their happiness expectancy could not have been too long. What happened is
that civilized men have limited their possibilities in order to have more security, and more
secure or guaranteed pleasures.
Nevertheless this indestructible feature of human nature needs further consideration.
What is with this so called sadistic instinct? It is intimately connected to love instincts, still very
far from being loving. The answer lies in the fact that aggressiveness is twisted love, love
combined with helplessness. That is why sadism is a common part of sexual life, because the

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affection involved in some activities can easily be replaced by cruelty, considering the two
have this common ground.
Again, if we are to look in the history of the development of the individual the course
that aggression takes becomes more obvious: since its appearance the main purpose of the
education is to internalise, to introject it. It is actually sent back to where it comes from, which
is from the ego towards the ego. This procedure is responsible for a separation of forces in the
psyche which is the creation of the super-ego, 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 sense of guilt, expressed as a need for
punishment, springs from this tension between the harsh super-ego the ego that is subjected
to it. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over individuals dangerous desire for aggression
by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a
garrison in a conquered city (Freud, 1930a, pg. 123).
It is known Freud likes interpret and to apply his theories on myths and classical
literature and in his work The Theme of The Three Caskets he analyses what he thinks is a
common trait in two of Shakespeares works (The Merchant of Venice and King Lear) and in
several other writings. The problem raised is one regarding the meaning of someone in the
position to make a choice between three different objects that have different value in the
collective psyche. Most of the times it appears under the form of gold, silver and copper or
lead.
The chooser is asked to give reasons for his choice, and the third metal, the lead is seen
as the bringer of fortune, or that its plainness moves someone more than the blatant nature
of the other two. According to Freud, these versions of stories are transformed from older
ones where a male person has to choose between three women; also the caskets are a symbol
for women like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on. Considering this, it becomes more
obvious the connexion with the story of the old King Lear who splits his kingdom among his
three daughters, in proportion to the amount of love that each of them expresses for him.
This is a drama because King Lear fails to see in the rejection to compete of his third daughter,
Cordelia, the love she carries for him.

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But there are many other examples of myths, fairy tales and literature with the same
content. The shepherd Paris has to choose between three goddesses, of whom he declares
the third, Aphrodite, to be the most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is the youngest daughter and
she is preferred by the prince in favour of her two elder sisters. Psyche, in Apuleiuss story, is
the youngest and the fairest of three sisters. There is another feature that all these women
have in common, they have in several instances certain peculiar qualities besides their beauty.
They are qualities that seem to be tending towards some kind of unity, and also that they are
silent in key situations. Silence or dumbness in psychoanalysis is a common representation of
Death.
And if we are to interpret the third girl as being Death, it may shed a different light
upon the displacement mechanism at work in culture and also on the most significant problem
of men. In Greek mythology the three sister of which the last one is Death, are called the Fates,
the Moerae. Therefore, a contradiction is spotted because in stories she is never revealed as
Death, but rather in the Judgement of Paris she is the Goddess of Love, in Apuleius story she
is someone comparable to the goddess for her beauty, in The Merchant of Venice she is the
fairest and the wisest of women, in King Lear she is the one loyal daughter. Still, what is striking
is that the choice between the women is free, and yet it falls on death, for, after all, no one
chooses death, and it is only by a fatality that one falls a victim to it. What happens is,
according to Freud, that the mechanism called replacement by the precise opposite, is at
work.
This excursus can be interpreted as the aggression already turned against oneself
being at work in compelling people to choose the less valuable or desired object where
there is no choice. They switch choice for necessity, destiny. No greater triumph of wishfulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a
compulsion; and what is chosen is not the figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable
of women (Freud, 1913f, pg. 299). Nowadays it can be argued that what is represented
here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman: the one who gives birth
to him, the one who is his mate and it must be a woman the one who destroys him and
takes him back, Mother Earth.
And now coming to Einsteins questions Why War? And how to avoid the war? He
was asking Freud because he understood very well that in spite of all the efforts made to
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reach this goal there are strong psychological factors at work, which paralyse these efforts
(Freud, 1933b, pg. 200) and he very well anticipated that the answer to the first question is
because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction (Freud, 1933b, pg. 201). He
was expecting from Freud to come up with an answer to the second question.
One possible answer is that nations should unite and set up a central authority and to
hand over to it the right to give judgement upon all conflicts of interest. Such an agency was
present at that time the League of Nations but Freud saw clearly that it was not endowed
with enough power of its own. The other answer is one already discussed in Civilization and
Its Discontents and can be summarised as such: a community is held together by two things:
the compelling force of violence and the identifications between its members. Even the law
was originally brute force and today still cannot be efficient without the support of violence.
While the love that unites individuals and ties them together is held into consciousness, the
aggressiveness was pushed back to the unconsciousness. That is why, from time to time it
finds the force to spring back into the consciousness and to take over the rational reasons,
that everyone has the right to his own life, and over the morality and its purpose of loving
the other as oneself. When that happens avoiding the war is very unlikely.
According to Freud, aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in
man, and it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. In his view the civilization is a
special process in the service of Eros which mankind undergoes, whose purpose is to
combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nation,
into one great unity, the unity of mankind (Freud, 1930a, pg. 122).

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Bibliography:
Freud, S. (1912-1913), Totem and Taboo, SE XIII.
Freud, S. (1913f), The Theme of The Three Caskets, SE XIII.
Freud, S. (1930a), Civilization and Its Discontents, SE XXI.
Freud, S. (1933b), Why War?, SE XXII.
Riviere, J. (1937) Hatred, Greed and Aggression, in The Inner World and Joan Riviere, Collected Papers
1920-1952, (1991) London: Karnac.