Freud fifth lecture
Chapter VIII, looking back over the whole work, speaks of guilt as "the most important problem in the development of civilization," and says that "the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt" (p. 97). Guilt comes up in Chapter VII; I'll consider two points.
1. Origin of the sense of guilt: we already have a division, within the psyche, of ego and id (a source of ideas and impulses that we don't identify with). Now we get a third internal agency, the super-ego. The genesis of the super-ego in an individual begins with anxiety over the threat of withdrawal of parental affection, and then fear of a societal counterpart to withdrawal of parental affection (a level at which some adults stick: p. 85). The final stage is internalization of standards, so that one gives oneself a bad time for violating (or even wanting to violate) one's own conception of right and wrong ("conscience").
Now that we have Freud splitting the psyche into three elements, it's natural to ask how his three-part structure lines up with Plato's. Freud's id and Plato's appetite look quite similar (the merely animal aspects of our psychological makeup). Freud's ego and Plato's reason look quite similar (that in us that is ideally in control of our lives, but under threat from unruly appetites). And Freud's super-ego and Plato's spirit match at least up to a point – consider the story of Leontius giving way to a disgraceful impulse, with his spirit trying to help his reason resist the temptation, and rebuking him when he succumbs (compare Freud's talk of conscience).
2. Why is the sense of guilt such a problem? From the point of view of civilization (personified, as often in Freud), the sense of guilt is a device for minimizing the disruptive effects of anti-social behavior: internal (self-administered) punishment as a deterrent, over and above the external punishments imposed by legal systems (see p. 70). One can avoid the external punishments by avoiding the prohibited behavior, and it might seem that the same would go for the internal (self-administered) punishments. Not so, says Freud: the super-ego punishes, with pangs of guilt, even the wish to behave contrary to one's internalized version of civilization's standards. (The super-ego is omniscient in the inner world.) The wish persists; socialization isn't perfect. So it's a price we pay for civilized life that we are burdened by guilt even if we don't have actual bad behavior to feel guilty about.
[Not discussed in lecture, but extremely interesting: the "phylogenetic" account of the origin of the human propensity to form super-egos, pp. 93-6. "Phylogenetic" means: having to do with the development of the species, as opposed to the individual. Freud is here alluding to the biological idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; i.e. the development of individual members of a species recapitulates the evolution of the species. The material about development of conscience out of fear of loss of parental approval is ontogenetic. The phylogenetic idea is that the first super-egos emerged out of an enactment of the Oedipus story – sons killing their father and then being horrified at what they find themselves to have done.]