[....] The problem in Freud's view is that such hegemonic processes can quickly become self-defeating. We sublimate our otherwise anti-social instincts into cultural ideals of one kind or another, which serve to unify a race of predatory egoists who would otherwise be at each other's throats. But these ideals can then become tyrannically excessive in their demands, demanding more instinctual renunciation than we can properly manage and so causing us to fall ill of neurosis. Moreover, this hegemony is threatened as soon as it becomes clear that some are being forced into more renunciation than others. In this situation, Freud comments, a 'permanent state of discontent' will persist in society and may lead to 'dangerous revolts'. If the satisfaction of the minority depends on the suppression of the majority, then it is understandable that the latter will begin to manifest a 'justifiable hostility' to the culture which their labour makes possible, but in which they have too meagre a share. A crisis of hegemony will consequently ensue; for hegemony is established by men and women internalizing the law which governs them, and in conditions of flagrant inequality 'an internalisation of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected' (191). 'It goes without saying', Freud adds, 'that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence' (192).
The mechanism by which the law of society is internalized is known as the superego. The superego is the voice of authority within us all, no longer an externally imposed power but the very ground of our personal conscience and moral idealism. Once power has inscribed itself within the very form of our subjectivity, any insurrection against it would seem to involve a self transgression. To emancipate ourselves from ourselves – the whole purpose of Freud's therapeutic project – is a much more difficult affair than throwing off some merely external model of dominion. In the formation of the superego or Name-of-the-Father, power comes to entwine itself with the roots of the unconscious, tapping something of its awesome, implacable energy and directing this force sadistically against the ego itself. If political power is as recalcitrant as it is, then it is partly because the subject has come to love and desire the very law which subjugates it, in the erotic perversion known as masochism. The suppressed classes', Freud writes, 'can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals' (193); and this, psychically speaking, is one secret of the tenacity of political domination.
Making the law our own, however, will not resolve the problems of civilization. Our appropriation of it will always be a partial, ambivalent affair – which is to say in Freudian parlance that the Oedipus complex is never fully dissolved. If we love and desire the law, we also nurture an intense animosity towards it, rejoicing in seeing this august authority brought low. And since the law itself is cruel, sadistic and tyrannical, it drives our aggression back upon ourselves and ensures that for every renunciation of satisfaction we are plunged deeper into neurotic guilt. In this sense, the power which sustains civilization also helps to undo it, stoking up within us a culture of lethal self-hatred. The law is obtuse as well as brutal: it is not only vengeful, paranoid and vindictive, but utterly insensitive to the fact that its insanely excessive demands could not possibly be fulfilled. It is a form of high-minded terrorism, which will simply rub our noses in our failure to live up to it rather than show us how to placate it. Before the law we are always in the wrong: like some imperious monarch, the superego 'does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it.'13 This fanatical power is out of control, driving men and women to madness and despair, and Freud, who regarded the law as one of his oldest enemies, sees it as one aim of psychoanalysis to temper its death-dealing rigour.
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