Hiding From Love: The Repressed Insight in Freud’s Account of Morality

Joel Backström

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedingChapterScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Freud’s account of morality is distinctive, and right, in focusing on unconscious, emotionalized conflict, and specifically on the repression of love as the centre of moral life. However, Freud misunderstands love in drive terms and confuses conscience with the superego. Conscience is actually an immediate moral understanding, an interpersonal openness that the moral normativity of collectivity (values, ideals, etc.) represses. Thus, conscience is the repressed unconscious of the superego, and ‘morality’ not one thing,but a living contradiction. This chapter details how bad conscience differs from superegoguilt, how destructive emotions (e.g. jealousy) are in themselves moralized repressions of love, and how Freud’s officially amoral, drive-based accounts of the Oedipus complex and the installation of the superego break down, but can be understood if reconceptualized in the terms proposed here. The chapter elucidates the concrete sense in which openness and love can be conceived as the very heart of moral understanding.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
EditorsRichard G.T. Gipps, Michael Lacewing
Place of PublicationUnited Kingdom
PublisherOxford University Press
Pages595-616
Number of pages22
ISBN (Print)9780198789703
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
MoE publication typeA3 Part of a book or another research book

Keywords

  • 611 Philosophy

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