I prefer the Freud who was a thinker on culture and civilization. Freud asked the kind of questions that young children ask, but that adults rarely ask themselves.
For example, he wanted to understand why sexuality was such a taboo subject in human civilization. Sex apparently is not taboo, in the animal kingdom.
He wanted to understand the origin of guilt and shame, for example. He was not satisfied with religious explanations for the origins of guilt or shame; he wanted to look at the world as if he were seeing it for the first time.
Because he adopted that naive attitude – taking nothing for granted – he did, in my opinion, reap significant insights that others who
do take it for granted, as self-evident, and who don’t look further into it, might not have discovered.
Even from a Catholic perspective, shame is a much broader category than guilt, and often has to do with our sexuality and creaturehood.
For example, a woman who’s water has broken in public may feel ashamed, even though there is nothing sinful about it. A wife might be ashamed of sex with her husband, ashamed of sex in general, even though she is told that sex without the confines of marriage is wholesome and good.
People often have recurring dreams of being naked in public, and being absolutely mortified about it (as opposed to aroused). This, too, is a source of shame that has nothing to do with moral conscience.
Sex is a taboo subject of conversation; it is kept private, largely because people would feel embarrassed if it were made public.
Embarrassment over one’s bodily functions, generally, has nothing to do with moral conscience. Locking the door when we go to the bathroom, and being mortified if a stranger walks in on us, has nothing to do with moral guilt, but with shame and embarrassment.
Freud has his own theories to explain the origin of both conscience
and those aspects of taboo and repression that were more pure taboo, not necessarily having any moral justification.
He came up with a theory that sex took energy away from the work of civilization,which also required energy (energy is energy, for him). Thus, he believed that civilization was based on work, not on play, and that the work of civilization was done largely by taking energy from the sphere of sex, and channeling it towards work and other endeavors.
Regarding shame, I believe he somewhere posited that its naturalistic origin may have been at about the time that humans started walking upright, and our sense of smell fell into disuse. A dog does not appear to be disgusted by its own smell, or the smell of other dogs, whereas a human can be. He speculated that, when we started walking upright, we became alienated from our own sense of smell (a dog, who is on all fours, relies largely on smell for sexual arousal, whereas human beings rely largely on sight). Human beings have an entire sense which is thus strongly associated with shame and disgust, which has nothing to do with moral conscience, per se.
It could also be natural in the sense that, if humans found their own excrement pleasant, they would not have instinctively understood that it is toxic.
These are just speculations, on my part and Freud’s, but the fact is that he was
willing to ask questions, and explore topics, that remained largely unexplored, because they easily triggered shame and aversion in the human knower.
Finally, of course, he explored the topic of the sexuality of children, another taboo topic. He observed that oral pleasure is largely associated with infancy, where suckling at mother’s breast is both pleasurable and comfortable. A four-year-old child may prolong that, and derive comfort and a feeling of well-being from sucking his or her thumb. Some adults, he observed, never grow out that entirely, and develop “oral fixations” of one kind of another – chewing gum, smoking cigarettes or, yes, sexual fetishes or practices.
He observed that anal pleasure is largely one of the byproducts of potty training, where a child becomes acutely aware of his bodily functions. For example, a potty-trained child, whether he recollects it or not (I, personally,
do recollect it) will sometimes deliberately hold off on releasing his bowels, even when he can barely hold it any longer, as it prolongs the pleasure of finally releasing them. Children also show what we would call an “unhealthy” fascination with what comes out. Some apparently posit that clay, or Play-Doh, is a healthy alternative to having a child that enjoys playing with and trying to shape his own poop.
babycenter.com/400_how-do-i-stop-my-toddler-from-playing-with-her-poop_500384_0.bc
