El papel de las pulsiones en la conformación de la moral

Abstract

This dissertation proposes to examine the different drive theories throughout Freud's work, with the aim of detaching from them a reflection about the moral. It is precisely due to the changes in the conception of the drives that we can not present them as a final concept, but in construction throughout the work, and endowed with different nuances according to the time, although, on the other hand, the subsequent theories, rather than opposed are actually complementary.

With regard to the first formulation of the theory, dated 1905, the main point to note is that it focuses almost exclusively on sexual drives while those of self (or self-preservation) are mentioned very briefly Later, in the second theory, the drives of the self acquire relevance from the work Introduction to Narcissism of 1914. In 1921, both drives, sexual and self-preservation, become components of a more comprehensive drive: the drive of life, which opposes it, completing the dualism, to the death drive. In 1923 a new text by Freud will be published “The Ego and the Id”, where maintaining the third drive theory, presents a new terminology with great repercussion in the later works of the author.

It is within the framework of the different theories that we will see the relationship of the drives with the moral, following three distinctive elements: the resignation, the desire and the guilt.

From the inevitable renunciation of drive satisfaction, culture is constituted, either processed in the preferable model of sublimation and producing works of art or scientific and technological innovation, etc. or, in the pathogenic model of repression, rendering neurotic the society. In one way or another, society arises from the renunciation of the satisfaction of drive needs and their different destinations. Subsequently, regarding the second note; it will be sublimated homosexual desire that unites men in a society, just as it was also the heterosexual desire that aroused aggressive feelings that subsequently led to an original parricide, of which, through guilt, the moral and religious norms of every society are schematically established. In this context, society, according to Freud, is a product of the civilizing element: the superego.