Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] Religion for Freud is a sublimation of our lowly drives to higher spiritual ends; but so in fact is 'culture' or civilization as a whole. 'Having recognised religious doctrines as illusions', he writes,

  we are at once faced by a further question: may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature? Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and is it not the case that in our civilisation the relations between the sexes are disturbed by an erotic illusion or a number of such illusions? (216)

  Once one embarks on this line of thought, where will it end? Could it not, Freud muses, extend to reasoning and observation themselves? What if science itself were just another such sublimation? And what of the science known as Freudian psychoanalysis? The concept of sublimation is clearly getting out of hand, and Freud no sooner raises these embarrassing questions than he closes them peremptorily off. Lacking the means for undertaking so comprehensive a task, he modestly informs us, he will concentrate instead on the topic in hand.

  Freud closes down the discussion, in short, just before it manoeuvres him into his own version of the Marxist doctrine of base and superstructure. In orthodox Marxist fashion, he informs us elsewhere that the basic motivation of social life is economic: civilization is just a cumbersome device for inducing men and women to do what they spontaneously detest, namely work. We are all naturally bone idle, and without this superstructure of sanctions and cajolements we would just lie around all day in various interesting states of jouissance. This is not, of course, exactly Marx's own point: the legal, political and ideological superstructure of society, for him at least, is a consequence of the self-divided nature of the economic 'base' in class conditions – of the fact that economic exploitation needs to be socially legitimated. It does not just follow from the universal injunction to labour. But Freud is aware that labour, at least in this kind of society, entails the renouncing of instinctual gratification; and the 'superstructure' of civilization, or 'culture', must therefore either coerce or cajole us into buckling down to the business of material reproduction. Freud's thought here is impeccably Gramscian: the means by which society is perpetuated, so he informs us, are 'measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to reconcile men (to their material destiny) and to recompense them for their sacrifices. These latter may be described as the mental assets of civilisation' (189). Or – in Gramsci's own terms – the institutions of hegemony. Culture for both thinkers is an amalgam of coercive and consensual mechanisms for reconciling human subjects to their unwelcome fate as labouring animals in oppressive conditions.