Homo Homini Lupus
The bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
Freud's view of human nature here is explicitly anti-Rousseauian. We are not corrupted by civilization; we are aggressive by nature, and civilization exists precisely to suppress this aggression. The commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself strikes Freud as absurd not because it is morally wrong but because it contradicts what human beings actually are. The neighbour is not naturally lovable; he is a competitor, a potential victim, an occasion for the satisfaction of aggressive impulse.
The Price of Social Life
Civilization manages aggression through two main mechanisms: first, by turning it inward — redirecting the destructive energy away from external objects and back onto the self, where it becomes the superego's punishing force (the sense of guilt). Second, through Eros itself: love, solidarity, identification with others, and the libidinal ties that bind communities together. But these mechanisms exact a cost: the renunciation of instinctual gratification that leaves human beings chronically discontented.
The concept of the death instinct, Freud admits, has been controversial even within psychoanalysis. But the evidence of history — wars, persecutions, atrocities — forces him to maintain it. The aggression instinct is not an epiphenomenon of social arrangements but a primary biological drive. The question for civilization is not whether to eliminate it (that is impossible) but how to contain it — and at what human cost.
The aggression instinct is the subject of Chapters V and VI of Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud traces its biological foundation to the death instinct first introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Related Concepts
