Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World by Levine David P.;

Author:Levine, David P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Moral order

A social system rooted in the moral defense is characterized by its emphasis on matters of justice understood in a moral language. Because of this, I will refer to it as a “moral order.”4 Central to the idea of a moral order is the sacrifice of the individual’s unique presence of being or true self in order to secure a relationship with the good. The moral order is held together by a shared investment in achieving identification with the good object and therefore a shared investment in the way the object is conceived. This means that connections between members are derivative of their wished-for identification with the idealized good object. Because of the centrality of the moral defense, the identification with the good object exists more in the form of hope than in the form of a real expectation. This means that the bond that holds the order together, the bond of identification, is one that operates at the most primitive level of emotional experience (Freud 1959: 37).

Because the moral order is an expression of identification, it is essentially a group phenomenon. All the member needs to be accepted into the moral order is what he needs to be a part of a group, which is the ability to “sink his identity in the herd” (Bion 1961: 89). This ability, even necessity, arises out of the individual’s discomfort with the task of forming an identity of his or her own, one that expresses an emotional investment in what is unique and real in the personality. Put another way, to be a member of a moral order the individual must be made to feel discomfort with any connection with his or her self, a discomfort that, therefore, the moral order must assure is experienced by those who would belong to it. The inability to make a connection with the self is the other side of the presence of a powerful negative investment in the self, which follows from a powerful conviction that the self is a bad object. This, then, connects the moral order to the moral defense.

Moral order is something like what Freud has in mind when he speaks of the tension between the individual and the “collective” in his essay on Civilization and Its Discontents. There, he writes that “[h]uman life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals” (1961: 42). Freud links this to a dilemma of freedom: “The urge for freedom … is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. … A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation—one that is that will bring happiness—between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group …” (43).

For Freud, the term freedom means a state of unfettered pursuit of the program of the pleasure principle (23). Thus civilization stands opposed to individual

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