Most people have some kind of internal censor that helps them distinguish between positive and negative aspects in life. It is important to learn to listen to the voice inside yourself and follow its advice, and then it will serve as a guide to a happy future.

What does conscience mean?

There are several definitions of this concept: for example, conscience is considered the ability to independently identify one’s own responsibilities for self-control and evaluate committed actions. Psychologists, explaining what conscience is in their own words, give the following definition: it is an internal quality that gives a chance to understand how well a person understands his own responsibility for the act committed.

To determine what conscience is, it is necessary to note the fact that it is divided into two types. The first includes actions that a person performs with a certain moral background. The second type involves the emotions that an individual experiences as a result of performing certain actions, for example. There are people who, even after doing bad things, do not worry at all and in such a situation they say that the inner voice is asleep.

What is conscience according to Freud?

The famous psychologist believes that every person has a superego, which consists of conscience and ego-ideal. The first develops as a result of parental education and the use of various punishments. According to Freud, conscience includes the ability to self-criticize, the presence of certain moral prohibitions and the emergence of feelings of guilt. As for the second element, the ego ideal, it arises as a result of approval and positive evaluation of actions. Freud believes that the superego was fully formed when parental control gave way to self-control.

Types of conscience

It may surprise many that there are several types of this internal quality. The first type is personal conscience, which is narrowly focused. With its help, a person determines what is good and what is bad. The next concept of collective conscience covers the interests and actions of those who are not affected by the personal type. It has limitations because it only applies to people within a specific group. The third type - spiritual conscience does not take into account the limitations of the above types.

What is conscience needed for?

Many people have asked this question at least once in their lives, and so, if there were no inner voice, then a person would not distinguish which actions are good and which are bad. Without internal control, to live a good life, you would have to have an assistant who would guide, give advice and help you draw the right conclusions. Another important point regarding why conscience is needed - it helps a person understand life, get the right guidance and realize himself. It is worth saying that it cannot be separated from morality and ethics.

What does it mean to live according to your conscience?

Unfortunately, not all people can boast that they live by the rules, forgetting about this quality and thereby betraying themselves. Thanks to this internal quality, a person performs certain actions, understanding what is good and what is bad, and also knows such concepts as justice and morality. A person who lives according to the convictions of his conscience is able to live in truth and in love. For him, qualities such as deception, betrayal, insincerity, and so on are unacceptable.

If you live by the rules, then you need to listen to your own soul, which will allow you to choose the right direction in life. In this case, the person will not commit actions for which he will subsequently feel shame and guilt. To understand what a clear conscience is, it is worth noting that in the modern world it is not easy to find people with such a trait, since in life there are many situations and temptations when one simply crosses the line. The formation of this quality is directly influenced by the upbringing of parents and the immediate environment from which the child can take an example.

Why do people act dishonestly?

Modern life cannot be called simple, since almost every day a person encounters various temptations and problems. Although many people know how to act according to their conscience, sometimes people cross the line. The reason why conscience disappeared is of a cause-and-effect nature. In most cases, a person transgresses his own beliefs in order to satisfy his ambitions. This can also be driven by selfish goals, the desire to not stand out from the crowd, to protect yourself from attacks from others, and so on.

What is a clear conscience?

When a person lives according to the rules, realizes the righteousness of fulfilling his own duties and does not harm anyone with his actions, then they talk about such a thing as a “calm” or “clear” conscience. In this case, the individual does not feel or know of any bad deeds. If a person chooses to live according to his conscience, then he must always take into account not only his own situation, but also the opinions and conditions of others. Psychologists believe that confidence in the purity of one’s conscience is hypocrisy or indicates blindness to one’s own mistakes.

What is a bad conscience?

The exact opposite of the previous definition, since a bad conscience is an unpleasant feeling that arises as a result of committing a bad act, which causes bad mood and experiences. A bad conscience is very close to the concept of guilt, and a person feels it at the emotional level, for example, in the form of fear, anxiety and other discomfort. As a result, a person experiences and suffers from various issues within himself, and by listening to the inner voice, compensation for negative consequences occurs.

What is pangs of conscience?

When a person commits bad actions, he begins to worry about the fact that he has harmed others. Pangs of conscience are a feeling of discomfort that appears due to the fact that people often set inflated demands on themselves that do not correspond to their essence. Correct internal qualities are cultivated in childhood, when parents praise for good things and scold them for bad things. As a result, a certain fear of being punished for committing unclean acts remains in a person for the rest of his life, and in such a situation they say that his conscience is tormenting him.

There is another version, according to which conscience is a kind of instrument that measures the true measure of things. For the right decisions a person receives satisfaction, and for bad ones he is tormented by a feeling of guilt. It is believed that if people do not experience such discomfort at all, then this is. Scientists have not yet been able to determine why the feeling of shame and guilt may be absent; there is an opinion that it is all due to improper upbringing or biological factors.

What to do if your conscience torments you?

It is difficult to meet a person who could confirm that he has never committed bad actions contrary to his beliefs. Feelings of guilt can spoil your mood, prevent you from enjoying life, developing, and so on. There are cases when an adult has become more principled in the case of morality, and then the mistakes of the past begin to emerge in memory, and then problems with one’s own soul cannot be avoided. There are several tips on what to do if your conscience is tormented.

How to develop conscience in a person?

Parents should definitely think about how to raise a good person who will know what conscience is and how to use it correctly. There are many parenting styles, and if we talk about extremes, then this is rigidity and complete permissiveness. The process of forming important internal qualities is based on complete trust in parents. The stage of explanation is of great importance, when adults convey to the child why something can be done and something cannot be done.

If adults are interested in how to develop conscience, then the principle of action here is slightly different. First you need to think and analyze which decisions are good and which are bad. It is worth determining their cause and consequences. To understand what conscience is and how to develop this quality in yourself, psychologists recommend doing at least one positive action every day, for which it is important to praise yourself.

Make yourself a rule - before you make a promise, think carefully about whether you will be able to fulfill it. In order not to be tormented by feelings of guilt, it is important to keep your word. Experts advise learning to refuse people who propose to do something contrary to existing beliefs. Acting according to your conscience does not mean doing everything only for those around you, forgetting about your own life principles and priorities. By acting truthfully, you can expect to get a result that will satisfy everyone involved.

In some of his works, in particular in The Discontents of Culture, Freud emphasized that psychoanalysts look at the emergence of feelings of guilt differently than psychologists usually do. Thus, according to popular belief, a person feels guilty when he has committed some act that is recognized as evil. But such a concept sheds little light on the origin of guilt. Therefore, it is sometimes added that the person who did not do any evil, but had the corresponding intention to commit a certain act associated with evil, is also guilty. However, in both cases it is assumed that a person knows evil in advance as something bad that must be excluded before its execution. This idea of ​​​​the emergence of feelings of guilt is based on the assumption that a person has a certain initial, natural ability to distinguish between good and evil.

Freud did not share this idea either of the original ability to distinguish between good and evil, or of the emergence of feelings of guilt on the basis of such a distinction. He proceeded from the fact that often evil is neither dangerous nor harmful to humans. On the contrary, it sometimes brings him pleasure and even becomes desirable for him. Based on this understanding of evil, the founder of psychoanalysis put forward the position according to which the distinction between good and evil occurs not on the basis of some innate, internal ability of a person, but as a result of the influence on him that is carried out from the outside. But in order to succumb to some external influence, a person must have a certain motive that determines this influence on him. Such a motive, according to Freud, is found in a person’s helplessness and dependence on other people, and it is nothing more than the fear of loss of love. Being dependent on another, a person faces the threat of being punished by a person who once loved him, but for some reason refused him his love and, as a result, is able to demonstrate his superiority and power in the form of some kind of punishment . "At first, therefore, evil

there is a threat of loss of love, and we must avoid it for fear of such loss. It doesn’t matter whether the evil has already been committed or whether they want to commit it: in both cases there is a threat of its disclosure by an authoritative authority, which in both cases will punish equally.”

In a child, the fear of loss of love is obvious, since he is afraid that his parents will stop loving him and will punish him severely. In adults, there is also a fear of losing love, with the only difference being that the human community takes the place of the father, mother, or both parents. All this means that the fear of loss of love or “social fear” can be perceived not only as a breeding ground for feelings of guilt, but also as a basis for its constant strengthening. However, Freud is not as one-sided in assessing such a situation as it might seem at first glance. In his view, significant changes occur in the human psyche as the internalization of the authority of parents and the human community occurs. We are talking about the formation of the Super-I, about strengthening the role of conscience in a person’s life. With the emergence of the Super-Ego, the fear of exposure from external authorities weakens and at the same time the distinction between crime and evil will disappears, since it is impossible to hide from the Super-Ego even in one’s thoughts. This leads to the emergence of a new relationship between a person’s conscience and his sense of guilt, since, in Freud’s view, the Super-Ego begins to torment the I internally associated with it and waits for an opportunity to punish it from the outside world.

All these considerations about the relationship between fear, conscience and guilt were expressed by Freud in the works of the 20s. However, already in the study “Totem and Taboo” he spoke about “conscientious fear”, a sign of fear in the feeling of guilt, consciousness of taboo guilt and taboo conscience, as the most ancient form in which moral prohibitions are manifested. It was in this study that he raised the question of the origin and nature of conscience, believing that, like the feeling of guilt, conscience arises on the basis of ambivalence of feelings from certain human relationships with which this ambivalence is associated. According to his views, taboos can be considered as a dictate of conscience, the violation of which leads to a terrible feeling of guilt.

“Conscience is the internal perception of the inadmissibility of certain desires we have; but the emphasis is on the fact that this inadmissibility does not require any proof, that it is in itself undoubted.”

This understanding of conscience has common points of contact with Kant’s categorical imperative as a kind of moral law, thanks to which a person’s act is objectively necessary in itself, without correlating it with any other goal. Freud adopted Cavut's idea of ​​the categorical imperative, believing that psychologically this is already a taboo, which plays an important role in the life of primitive people. If Kant spoke about the moral law, then the founder of psychoanalysis is not averse to considering the categorical imperative as a special mental mechanism that completely predetermines or corrects human activity.

In its “internal” form, this imperative appears to Freud as nothing more than a conscience that contributes to the repression and suppression of a person’s natural drives. After all, in general terms for the founder of psychoanalysis, morality is the limitation of drives. Therefore, conscience as a moral category is correlated with the limitations of human inclinations and desires. But is conscience divine in origin, as religious figures insist on it, or is it of completely earthly origin and connected with the history of the development of man and humanity? Is conscience given to us initially from birth, or is it formed gradually in the process of human evolution?

Drawing an analogy between Kant’s categorical imperative as a moral law and conscience as an internal perception that does not need any proof of the inadmissibility of the manifestation of a person’s sexually hostile desires, Freud at the same time referred to clinical data and observations of children, indicating that conscience is not always a constant source of internal pressure on a person and that it is not given to him initially from birth. Thus, in patients prone to melancholia, conscience and morality, supposedly given by God, are revealed as periodic phenomena. A small child has no moral inhibitions against his desire for pleasure, and one could

to say that he was born immoral. As for conscience, then, as Freud put it, God worked here “not so much and carelessly,” since in the overwhelming majority of people it is found in very modest proportions. Nevertheless, as in the case of the later recognition of a part of historical truth behind religion, the founder of psychoanalysis is ready to agree that the statements about the divine origin of conscience contain some plausibility, but not of a metaphysical, but of a psychic nature. “We,” he emphasized in lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis, “in no way deny that part of the psychological truth that” is contained in the statement that conscience is of divine origin, but this position requires clarification. If conscience is also something “in us,” then this is not originally.” Turning to the understanding of the mental mechanisms associated with the presence of conscience in a person, Freud moved from considering the history of the emergence of taboos, various kinds of prohibitions imposed on an individual from the outside, to revealing the “insideness” of moral precepts. , thanks to which the Kantian categorical imperative as a moral law becomes the individual and personal property of every human being, according to the founder of psychoanalysis, it was with the advent of prohibitions, commandments and restrictions that man gradually began to move away from his original animal state.

In the process of development of human civilization, commandments and prohibitions imposed from outside with their inevitable limitation of free self-expression of natural inclinations became the intrapsychic property of a person, forming a special instance of the Super-Ego, acting as moral censorship, or conscience, appropriately correcting his life activity and behavior in the real world. Considering the evolutionary path of human development, Freud wrote in “The Future of an Illusion”: “It is not true that the human psyche has not developed since ancient times and, unlike the progress of science and technology, today is still the same as at the beginning of history. We can give here one example of this psychic progress. Our development is moving in the direction that external coercion gradually goes inside, and a special psychic authority, the human Super-Ego, includes it among its own.

Their commandments. Every child demonstrates to us the process of such transformation, thanks to it becoming familiar with morality and sociality.”

Speaking about such progress in the development of the human psyche, Freud had in mind primarily education and strengthening the Super-ego as a valuable psychological acquisition of culture, promoting, with few exceptions, the internal prohibition of the real manifestation of unconscious desires associated with incest, cannibalism, and bloodthirstiness. At the same time, he was forced to admit that in relation to other unconscious desires of a person, “this progress is not so significant, since a significant number of people obey moral demands and prohibitions rather due to the threat of punishment from the outside, rather than under the influence of conscience. They comply with moral precepts only under the pressure of external coercion, and then as long as the threat of punishment remains real. “An infinite number of cultured people, who would recoil in horror from murder or incest, do not deny themselves the satisfaction of their greed, their aggressiveness, their sexual passions, do not miss the opportunity to harm others with lies, deceit, slander, if they can go unpunished; and this continues without change throughout many cultural epochs."

The statement of such a deplorable situation in the field of morality of modern people, a significant part of whom are not burdened with conscience to such an extent as not to commit immoral acts in the event of weakening of external prohibitions, did not relieve Freud from the research task associated with understanding the functions of the super-ego. Let me remind you that, in addition to the fact that the Super-Ego acted as an ideal for Freud, it was also considered in psychoanalysis as embodying two hypostases: conscience and an unconscious feeling of guilt. Reflecting on the activity of the super-ego, Freud showed that in functional terms it is dual, since it personifies not only the demands of must, but also prohibitions. The requirements of must dictate ideals to a person, according to which he strives to be different, better than he really is. Internal prohibitions are aimed at suppressing the dark side of the soul, at limiting and repressing the unconscious

natural desires of a sexual and aggressive nature.

Thus, the split and conflict between the unconscious and consciousness, It and I, was complemented, in Freud’s understanding, by the ambiguity of self-consciousness, the diversity of the Super-Ego, as a result of which the psychoanalytically interpreted person really appears in the image of an “unhappy” creature, torn apart by many intrapsychic contradictions. The founder of psychoanalysis captures the duality of the human being associated with the natural and moral determination of his life, and in this regard he takes a step forward compared to the extremes of anthropology and sociologism characteristic of various schools, whose representatives were distinguished by a one-sided vision of man. However, in trying to explain this duality, he came across moral problems, the psychoanalytic interpretation of which led to difficulties of a methodological and ethical nature, to which attention has already been partially drawn. It is no coincidence that in his understanding a person appears to be tossed not so much between what should be and what is, which in principle contributes to the formation of an individual’s critical attitude towards his environment, but rather between desires and prohibitions, the temptation to violate them and the fear of possible punishment, which presupposed primarily an appeal to mental mechanisms neurotic patients, in whom this kind of split was observed.

It is interesting to note that Freud's understanding of man, refracted through the prism of a psychoanalytic interpretation of his moral foundations, turned out to be very close to the interpretation that was given several decades earlier by the Danish philosopher Soren Kirkegaard. Both researchers sought to understand the essence of a person’s guilt, remorse, conscience and fear, that is, those of his moral implications that made his existence problematic, torn, and unstable. At the same time, both of them appealed to the unconscious.

In the section of this work devoted to Freud’s understanding of the problem of fear, attention was drawn to some similarities and differences between his ideas about fear and Kierkegaard’s corresponding thoughts on this

Topic. Here we are talking about some of their ideas related to moral issues.

Thus, Kierkegaard considered the unconscious ethical, focusing on its dual nature. “The ethical unconscious,” he noted, “helps every person; but as a result of precisely unconsciousness, the help of the ethical, as it were, humiliates a person, revealing to him the insignificance of life...” Freud turned to the study of the unconscious psyche from various angles, including its moral implications, believing that “there are persons whose self-criticism and conscience, that is, mental work with an unconditionally high assessment, are unconscious and, being unconscious, produce an extremely important effect."

Both described moral imperatives in order to better understand human nature. In addition, both adhered to a tripartite division of the psyche. Kierkegaard distinguished between "body", "spirit" and "soul". Freud talked about the id, the ego and the superego. Both tried to understand the relationship between pleasure and duty, the desire to satisfy instincts and moral imperatives that impose prohibitions and restrictions.

At the same time, despite the similarity of their positions, the Kirkeorgian and Freudian understanding of ethical issues differed from each other. And the point is not even that the threefold division of the human psyche was carried out by them on different grounds, as a result of which it would be unlawful to draw unconditional parallels between the components of the psyche that he identified or to identify the concept of the human “spirit” in Kierkegaard with the concept of the Self in Freud, as is the case took place, for example, in a study by P. Cole devoted to a comparative analysis of the theoretical positions of both thinkers.

Another thing is more important, namely, that Kierkegaard and Freud have different assessments of human moral foundations. For the first, feelings of guilt, pangs of conscience, manifestations of fear are ordinary and generally typical phenomena that characterize the moral and moral state of a person who is constantly in anxiety, but thereby ethically related to the existing reality and

able to accept responsibility for his actions and deeds.

From the point of view of the second, that is, the founder of psychoanalysis, moral imperatives, being the “inner” property of a person, limiting his erotic, egoistic and destructive desires, at the same time serve as fertile ground for the painful splitting of the psyche, where feelings of guilt and fear are not so much an incentive for a responsible, healthy attitude towards life, but rather a cause of mental disorders, escape into illness, escape from reality into the world of illusions. We must pay tribute to the fact that this circumstance has already been drawn attention to in Russian literature. In particular, in one of the works of P. Gaidenko, devoted, however, to the study of the views not of the founder of psychoanalysis, but of Fichte, it was rightly emphasized that, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, the feeling of guilt is painful, but at the same time it testifies to the normal life of a person, and in Freud's understanding, this feeling is usually a sign of mental illness.

For the founder of psychoanalysis, moral guilt is an expression of tension between the ego and the superego. With the internalization of parental authority, with the emergence of the Super-Ego, significant changes occur in the human psyche. Conscience, as it were, rises to a new stage of its development. If in the process of the initial origin of conscience there was a fear of exposure by an external authority, then with the formation of the Super-Ego this fear loses its significance. At the same time, the movement of authority from the outside to the inside leads to the fact that the Super-Ego becomes a pressing force and torments the Self. At this new stage of development, conscience acquires the features of cruelty. It becomes more severe and suspicious than at the previous stage of its development, when a person experienced fear of external authority. Suspicion and cruelty of conscience lead to the fact that a person begins to experience constant fear of the Super-Ego, and this, in turn, leads to increased feelings of guilt.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud examined the question of how the first moral prescriptions and moral restrictions arose in primitive society. At the same time, he noted the fact that the initial

The feeling of guilt that arose as a reaction to the “great event,” parricide in the primitive Horde, did not disappear “without a trace. Echoes of this feeling have retained their significance throughout the development of human civilization. “This creative consciousness of guilt,” Freud believed, “has not died out among us to this day. We find it acting in neurotics as asocial, as creating new moral prescriptions and continuous restrictions, as repentance for crimes committed and as a precaution against those to be committed.”

In later works, after the founder of psychoanalysis put forward his ideas about the three-member structure of the psyche and the relationship between the Id, Ego and Super-Ego, he had to explain in a new way the psychological mechanisms of the development of fear, conscience, and guilt. It would be more accurate to say that it was not so much about a fundamentally new explanation of these phenomena, but about those adjustments that turned out to be necessary due to structural ideas about the functioning of the human psyche. In particular, Freud began to assume that There are two sources of guilt. The first is associated with fear of external authority. The second - with a later fear of the super-ego, of conscience. Fear of external authority makes a person refuse to satisfy his drives, desires, instincts. Fear of the Superego it also introduces punishment, since it is impossible to hide either forbidden desires or even thoughts about them before the conscience. The severity of the Super-ego and the demands of conscience turn out to be constantly operating factors in a person’s life, which have a significant impact on increasing the feeling of guilt.

From Freud's point of view, in a person there simultaneously exist two stages of conscience, namely, the initial, infantile and more developed, embodied in the Super-Ego. This means that there is a relationship between the renunciation of desires and the consciousness of guilt that is not always clear to those who are not familiar with psychoanalytic ideas. The fact is that initially the renunciation of desires was nothing more than a consequence of a person’s fear of external authority. Therefore, in order not to lose love from another person acting as an authority, he had to refuse

from satisfying desires. Reckoning with external authority by refusing to satisfy one's own desires led to the mitigation and even elimination of feelings of guilt. Another thing is fear of the super-ego, of internalized authority. Refusal to satisfy desires turns out to be insufficient to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is impossible to hide from the Super-Ego. Despite such a refusal, a person experiences a feeling of guilt. The pangs of conscience not only are not eliminated, but, on the contrary, may intensify. If the renunciation of desires, conditioned by fear of external authority, served as a sufficient basis for maintaining or gaining love, then a similar human strategy, brought to life by fear of the Super-Ego, does not serve as a guarantee of love. “Man,” according to Freud, “has exchanged the threat of external misfortune—loss of love and punishment from external authority—for long-term internal unhappiness, a tense consciousness of guilt.”

Such an explanation of the nature of conscience and guilt inevitably raised the question of reconciling the genetic, related to the history of formation, and structural, related to the functioning of the psyche, points of view formulated by the founder of psychoanalysis in the works “Totem and Taboo” and “I and It.” It turned out that in the first case the emergence of conscience is associated with the renunciation of drives, while in the second case the renunciation of drives is due to the presence of conscience. This paradox was similarly reflected in Freud's previously discussed views on the relationship between repression and fear, when he had to solve the dilemma: whether fear is a consequence of the suppression of human drives or the suppression of drives itself is due to the presence of fear.

Let me remind you that if initially Freud believed that the energy of repression of unconscious drives leads to the emergence of fear, then later he came to the conclusion that it is not repression that gives rise to fear, but previous fear as an affective state of the soul entails repression. It would seem that in the question of the relationship between the renunciation of instincts and the emergence of conscience, he could have acted in a similar way, that is, taken a certain point of view. Thus, in his work “Economic Problems of Masochism” (1924), he noted that it is usually the case that moral requirements

They were primary, and the rejection of desires was their consequence. At the same time, the origin of morality was not explained in any way. “In fact, it seems to us that we should go the opposite way; The first renunciation of drives is imposed by external forces, and it alone creates morality, which is expressed in conscience and requires further renunciation of drives.”

However, the ethical issues associated with understanding the nature of conscience and guilt turned out to be so confusing and difficult to understand that Freud had to repeatedly turn to discussing the genesis of the formation of conscience and the emergence of consciousness of guilt. Consideration of the time sequence (renunciation of drives ■ due to fear of external authority and the subsequent internalization of it - the Super-Ego, leading to the emergence of fear of conscience, torment of the Self and increased feelings of guilt) did not provide an exhaustive explanation that completely eliminates all questions related to the understanding of how and why conscience becomes hypermoral. It was here that Freud just needed an idea that was characteristic exclusively of psychoanalysis and alien to ordinary human thinking. “This idea,” emphasized the founder of psychoanalysis, “is this: although, at first, conscience (or rather, fear, which will later become conscience) was the root cause of the rejection of drives, then the attitude is reversed. Every refusal becomes a dynamic source of conscience; it every time strengthens its severity and intolerance.”

Consideration from this angle of the relationship between renunciation of desires, conscience and increasing feelings guilt had not only theoretical, but And practical significance. Clinical practice has shown that an unbearable feeling of guilt, which could have a destructive effect on a person, played a significant role in the formation of neurotic diseases. Thus, with obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the feeling of guilt dominates the clinical picture of the disease and is persistently imposed on the human consciousness. The very feeling of guilt is “unconscious” for patients. It often gives rise to an unconscious need for punishment, as a result of which a person’s Super-Ego constantly undermines his inner world and leads to self-torture, self-criticism, masochism. It does not matter whether he committed

a person has committed some unseemly act or only. thought about it, although he did not put it into action. Crime and malicious intent seem to be equated to each other. The difference between them becomes insignificant for the emergence of feelings of guilt.

One of the discoveries of psychoanalysis was that Freud viewed conscience as a strict authority that exercises supervision and judgment over both actions, so and above human intentions. The cruelty and inexorability of the Super-ego in relation to the supervised self gave rise to a mental state of anxiety that did not leave the person alone. Fear of the superego, the tense relationship between the ego and the controlling conscience, the consciousness of guilt, the unconscious need for punishment - all this, from a psychoanalytic point of view, served as fertile ground for the development of the ego, under the influence of the sadistic superego, into a masochistic one.

The masochistic tendencies of the ego, brought to life by the hypermoral, sadistic Superego, find their direct expression in the psyche of neurotic patients who acutely experience an unconscious need for punishment. Dealing in clinical practice with the manifestation of masochistic tendencies in patients, Freud was forced to turn to a conceptual understanding of moral problems, which prompted him not only to consider the relationships between fear, conscience, and guilt, but also to a more detailed study of masochism as such.

7. Moral masochism and negative therapeutic reaction

In his work “Economic Problems of Masochism,” the founder of psychoanalysis specifically focused on revealing the nature of this phenomenon, correlating it with an unconscious feeling of guilt and the need for punishment. At the same time, he identified three forms of masochism: erogenous, as a condition of sexual arousal; female, being an expression of the feminine essence; moral, acting as a certain norm of behavior. The last form of masochism was correlated by Freud with the presence of an unconscious feeling of guilt, the atonement of which is found in

This is reflected in a neurotic disease. Hence the desire of the founder of psychoanalysis to reveal the internal connections between the sadistic Super-Ego and the masochistic Self, as well as the difficulties that appear in analytical therapy when working with patients prone to moral masochism.

In the process of analytical therapy, we sometimes have to deal with patients who behave in rather strange ways. As soon as there is progress in the treatment of this type of patient, when the analyst actually achieves some success and joyfully pins his hopes on further equally successful continuation of work, the patient immediately begins to show his dissatisfaction and, what is most unpleasant, reacts to the successes by deteriorating his condition. Trying to find an explanation for such an unusual and generally strange situation, the analyst can correlate the deterioration of the patient’s condition with the manifestation of his internal resistance. Knowing the mental mechanisms of resistance, the analyst can first of all come to the conclusion that the deterioration of the patient’s condition is nothing more than his reluctance to see the doctor’s victory over the disease and the desire to prove his superiority over it. However, in reality something else is most likely going on. The patient reacts by worsening his condition to the success of treatment because, despite his coming to the analyst, he generally does not want to part with his illness. Instead of improvement, his condition worsens. Instead of getting rid of suffering during the analysis, the patient develops a need to intensify it. He manifests what in psychoanalysis is called negative therapeutic reaction.

Behind the resistance to recovery of such a patient lies the need for constant suffering, which acts as atonement for the unconscious feeling of guilt. The fundamental factor here turns out to be a moral factor that predetermines flight into illness as a kind of punishment or, better said, self-punishment. Based on an unconscious feeling of guilt, this self-destruction needs constant nourishment in the form of suffering, the abolition of which during the treatment process is perceived as an attack on the patient’s inner world, which is under the watchful and ever-watchful eye of the hygienist.

CONSCIENCE- the ability of a person, critically assessing himself, to realize and experience his inconsistency with what he should have - failure to fulfill his duty. Phenomenological manifestations of conscience are internal emotional discomfort (“reproaches, pangs of conscience”), guilt and repentance. From a cultural-historical point of view, the idea and concept of conscience are formed in the process of understanding various mechanisms of self-control. Unlike fear (of authority, punishment) and shame (which also reflects a person’s awareness of his inconsistency with certain accepted norms), conscience is perceived as autonomous. Historically, conscience is rooted in and related to shame; However, already early attempts to understand the experience, which will later be called “conscientious,” indicate a desire to differentiate shame itself and highlight “shame before oneself” (Democritus, Socrates) as something special - a kind of exteriorized version of the control mechanism that will be called conscience. In ancient Greek mythology, this function was performed by the Erinyes; in Euripides' "Orestes" it was conceptualized as "consciousness of perfect horror." Corresponding Greek the word - sineidesis [συνείδησις] - goes back to the verb συνειδέναι, which was used in expressions indicating a person’s responsibility to himself for the wicked acts he has committed. Likewise, the Latin word conscientia (which is a kind of tracing paper from the Greek) was used to designate not only consciousness in general, but also consciousness or memories of committed bad deeds or consciousness evaluating its own actions as worthy or unworthy.

In Christianity, conscience is interpreted as “God’s power”, as an indicator of moral duty (Rom. 2:15) - first of all, duty to God (1 Peter 2:19). At the same time, the Apostle Paul speaks of conscience as a value consciousness in general and thereby recognizes that those who adhere to different faiths have different consciences (1 Cor. 8:7, 10), and therefore conscience needs Christian cleansing (Heb. 9:14 ), achieved through faith and love. In medieval literature, the deepening of the analysis of the phenomenon of conscience was mediated by the appearance of a special term - sinderesis - and the formulation of an additional term in relation to the traditional lat. conscientia concepts. In scholastic philosophy, this concept denotes the commanding power of the soul, the internal knowledge of principles, which, in contrast to the “law of reason” (lex rationis), is instilled in man by God. Conscience-synderesis in contrast to conscience-conscientia, i.e. a person’s ability to evaluate specific actions as good (good) or evil (bad), was interpreted as: a) the ability (or habit) to judge the correctness of actions from the point of view of “original correctness,” the feeling of which is preserved in the human soul despite the Fall, and b ) the ability of the will to perform the right actions. At the same time, the epistemological status of these abilities was interpreted differently (by Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus). The controversy surrounding this concept has revealed various functions of conscience, and more broadly, of moral consciousness: awareness of values ​​as general foundations of behavior and assessment of specific actions in which accepted values ​​are affirmed or violated, i.e. correlation of specific actions with values. The distinction between conscientia and synderesis was partly retained by early Protestant moral theorists. In many new European teachings, conscience is presented as a cognitive-moral force (reason, intuition, feeling), the fundamental ability of a person to express value judgments, to recognize himself as a morally responsible being, intentionally determined in relation to good. For Kant, conscience means practical reason in the sense of the medieval concept of synderesis. The development of this line naturally led within the framework of new European philosophizing to the formation of a broader concept of moral consciousness (in many languages ​​the word “conscience” is related and consonant with words denoting “consciousness”, “knowledge”), highlighting its cognitive, imperative and evaluative functions. Along with this, attempts are being made to specify the actual concept of “conscience”. In the most general terms, it is interpreted as the “inner voice”; the differences relate to the understanding of the source of this “voice”, which is perceived either as independent of the person’s “I”, or as the voice of his innermost “I”, or as “another self”. Associated with this are various theoretical positions regarding the nature of conscience. 1. Conscience is the generalized and internalized voice of significant others or culture, and its content is culturally and historically variable; in this vein, conscience can be interpreted as a specific form of shame (T. Hobbes, F. Nietzsche, Z. Freud); in its extreme form, the position about the external conditioning of conscience is found in the conclusion that conscience is a function of the political views or social status of the individual (K. Marx). 2. Conscience expresses a person’s feeling of disagreement with himself (J. Locke) and thereby acts as one of the proofs of a person’s personality and self-awareness (J. Butler, G. Leibniz). Close to this interpretation is the understanding of conscience as the voice of an impartial rational person (J. Rawls). 3. Conscience is not only metaphorically, but also essentially interpreted as the “voice of the other”; “through the mouth of conscience” the Universal Law, the highest Truth, seems to speak, this is the voice (“call”) of transcendental forces: the guardian angel (Socrates), God (Augustine), natural law (Locke), presence-Desein (M. Heidegger).

These statements are not completely mutually exclusive. The first focuses on the mechanisms of historical and individual development of conscience; in the other two - on the phenomenology of less and more mature conscience. As a form of moral self-awareness and self-control, conscience expresses a person’s awareness of the failure of duty, the imperfection of good; in this regard, conscience is associated with feelings of responsibility and duty, and, no less, with the ability to be responsible and fulfill one’s duty. Reproaches of conscience indicate to a person his alienation from the ideal and cause a feeling of guilt. In its highest state, conscience means the disappearance of duty in free good will.

These differences are accompanied by differences in the understanding of the content of conscience and the role it plays in a person’s moral life. Conscience can be interpreted negatively and positively. As a negative conscience, it appears reproachful and warning, even frighteningly warning (Nietzsche), critical of the past, judgmental (Kant). In a positive interpretation, conscience, contrary to popular ideas about it, also appears as calling, encouraging care and “determination” (Heidegger). The interpretation of conscience as the voice of God predetermines its understanding as a call to perfection; Accordingly, conscience is recognized by a person as the will to perfection and is the main manifestation of the internal liberation of the individual. The perfectionistic dominance of conscience in individual moral experience is revealed in such a moral self-perplexity of a person in which he finds himself determined precisely in relation to what is morally better.

The expressions “calm conscience” or “clear conscience” in ordinary speech denote a person’s awareness of the fulfillment of his obligations or the realization of all his capabilities in a given specific situation. Essentially, in such cases it is a question of dignity. The interpretation of the actual phenomenon of “clear conscience” is different in different normative and value contexts. Firstly, a “clear conscience” confirms to the consciousness, oriented towards external authority, its compliance with the requirements imposed from the outside, and therefore evokes a feeling of well-being and security, as if guaranteed by the very fact of pleasing the authority. In this regard, “clear conscience” is a consequence of obedience and dependence and, therefore, depravity from the point of view of autonomous and humanistic morality (E. Fromm). Secondly, a “clear conscience” can express a person’s ambition to achieve perfection, to internal integrity and completeness. The state of a “pure”, “calmed” conscience expresses a self-satisfied (or hypocritical) consciousness (Hegel); Ultimately, this is dishonesty, understood not as the absence of conscience, but as the tendency to not pay attention to its judgments (Kant).

The expression “freedom of conscience” denotes a person’s right to independence of inner spiritual life and the opportunity to determine his own beliefs. In the narrower and more common sense, “freedom of conscience” means freedom of religion and organized worship. In the strictly ethical sense of the word, conscience cannot be other than free; a conscientious act is a manifestation of the internal liberation of the individual, and freedom in its consistent expression is nothing other than living according to conscience.

Literature:

1. Kant I. Metaphysics of morals. – Soch., vol. 4 (2). M., 1965, p. 335–36;

2. Hegel G. The spirit of Christianity and its fate. It's him. Philosophy of religion, vol. 1. M., 1975, p. 114–15;

3. Nietzsche F. Genealogy of morality. - Op. in 2 vols., vol. 2. M., 1990, p. 438–70;

4. Fromm E. A man for himself. – It's him. Psychoanalysis and ethics. M., 1993, p. 113–35;

5. Heidegger M. Being and time. M., 1997, p. 266–301;

6. Ilyin I.A. The path of spiritual renewal. – It's him. The path to obviousness. M., 1993, p. 178–98;

7. Drobnitsky O.G. The concept of morality: A historical-critical essay. M., 1974, p. 337–40;

8. Butler J. Sermons, XI. – Ethical Theories. Englewood Cliffs. N. J., 1967.

Dictionary of a practical psychologist. S.Yu. Golovin

Conscience- the ability of an individual to independently formulate his own moral duties and exercise moral self-control, demand that he fulfill them and make a self-assessment of his actions; one of the expressions of a person’s moral self-awareness.

It manifests itself both in the form of rational awareness of the moral significance of the actions performed, and in the form of emotional experiences - for example, remorse. According to Z. Freud, conscience is an internal perception of the inadmissibility of certain desires, emphasizing that this inadmissibility is undoubted and does not need proof. It can be understood as a special mental agency whose purpose is to provide narcissistic satisfaction emanating from the Super-Ego, and for the purpose of this, it continuously observes the actual I and compares it with the ideal.

Oxford Dictionary of Psychology

Conscience- a well-founded set of internalized moral principles that allows one to evaluate the correctness and incorrectness of actions performed or observed. Historically, the theistic view equated conscience with the voice of God, and therefore considered it to be innate. According to the modern point of view, prohibitions and obligations determined by conscience are acquired; in fact, Freud's characterizations of the superego were an attempt to explain the origin, development and mode of functioning of conscience. Cm . Moral Development.

subject area of ​​the term