Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.
Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field.
At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.
The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority.
Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’,
in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.
At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with reality’s prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become.
Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subject’s ‘inner’ intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inflicts the negative affect of guilt.
This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the id’s sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subject’s own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others;
thus, the more the ‘moral’ subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ‘ethical’ principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to ‘work off’ aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the ‘pain’ consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning?
it isn’t simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: it’s also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subject’s adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.
Consequently, when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following:
the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels,
since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, ‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). 419
Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian definition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-ego’s punishment of the ego.
Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isn’t treating guilt as a properly ethico-moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely they’re held in check).
Consequently, one can be ‘guilty’ before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. 419
Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself:
Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt?
If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superego’s id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode.
Both Freud and Lacan have made significant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its definitive verdict as regards being guilty.