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INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR

SEXUAL EQUALITY

I. C. S. E.

OFFICE/BUREAU:

Postbox 1564 Tel. 34596 Amsterdam Holland

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MORALS and pseudo-morals

by Prof. E. Servadio

Even before depth-psychology and psychoanalysis had thrown their light on the origin of morals, classical psychology had described many specific cases which clearly revealed the irrational roots of certain mental attitudes. This already allowed us to trace back a distinction between morals and pseudo-morals. Contrary to what certain philosophies and theologies teach, phychoanalysis shows that morals are not innate.

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At the origin of the race, as well as at the birth of each individual, we find only interior impulses striving for satisfaction and fulfillment. Even in the pre-verbal stage, the child seems to start establishing within itself a kind of an embryonic moral code that arises from a very early internaliztion of perceptions and imaginary concepts, which, as internalized agents, are apparently opposed to the free pursuit of its desires and instinctive impulses.

The basic psychological mechanism of all moral structure is what is called in psychoanalysis "introjection," which means a process whereby criteria of behavior, as well as inhibitions, are absorbed by the psychological apparatus and develop into an autonomous function. Through this autonomizing "mechanism, the ego of the individual liberates itself for the pursuit of other interests, for it has now appointed an inner guardian who now rules the

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behavior of the individual according

to certan principles, and which does not allow any infractions with the ego experiencing the most horrible pangs of conscience, anxiety, and need for compensation. Once this inner judge or guardian has arrived at its ultimate stage of development, it is called the super-ego, and within our psychic structure it is the super-ego which has the duty of controlling, criticizing, and censoring the behavior of the ego and of punishing it in its own way.

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another, the religious hypocrites, the hateful censors who fulminate against all sexual freedom yet secretly enjoy striptease performances or look for immature girls in special houses. But let us leave aside these despicable enemies of real moral progress and let us deal with the central problem of the pseudo-morals of honest human beings.

Suppose that a hypnotist, during the induced sleep of his subject, gives him a post-hypnotic suggestion to take his umbrella and open it in his room. The subject is later brought from his trance and has no conscious memory whatever of the instructions given him, but very obediently will go, take his umbrella, and open it. If, at this moment, someone were to ask him why he did so, the subject will rationalize, which means that he will invent on the spot some sort of pseudo-explanation. He may say that he thought his umbrella was broken, or that he intended to show someone the good or bad qualities of the silk, etc. Those who have witnessed such experiments know full well that the subject is only inventing psuedo-justifications, and that in reality he has simply obeyed an order given him by the hypnotist, an order that became subconscious—but one sees this rationalization taking place before one's own eyes, showing to what a degree. the ego will give coherent appearance and illusory justification to a, behavior having an unconscious, unknown, and completely irrational origin. Replace the hypnotizer by the super-ego and one realizes that, on the conscious level, many opinions, judgments, and criteria, may' have been just as irrational in their origin as the action that the subject has just performed.

No one is unaware today that, starting early in childhood, one of the fields in which inhibitions and guilt feelings are particularly powerful is in the field of sex, and every sensible psychologist or psychiatrist knows very well how prohibition in the field of sex goes far beyond the limits of reason, common sense, and even law and morals. We constantly have the impression that the super-ego, whose most important task was initially the repression of the extravagances of infartile sexuality, has widened its tasks immensely, and lays its prohibitions and taboos on many expressions of adult sex which have no anti-social character whatsoever and against which objections could be raised from the point of view of even the strictest moral or social principles. We all know of men who condemn without appeal all sexual liberty for women, because this liberty is unconsciously in contradiction with the desexualized ideal image of the Mother These same pseudo-morals, however, do not prevent these individuals frota having relations with prostitutes who in their unconscious are only the sexualized, and therefore degraded but accessible, shadows of this same mother image from which they can never free' themselves. There are also the cases of indivi. duals who preach one way and act

The example chosen is, of course, oversimplified. It is obvious that the rationalization of opinions and of 7