434 MICHAEL E. STOCK 



growth, moderating excesses without repressing instincts, and 

 guiding energies purposively into the surest and most rewarding 

 paths of development; if it fails to do this, it is the failure of 

 application, not of principle. 



Social custom, then, for St. Thomas, does not make indi- 

 vidual standards; it preserves and transmits them. The work 

 of making them is ultimately the work of reason, of which 

 custom itself is the product. Moreover custom is always subject 

 to revision by reason, to clarification and modification, and, 

 ideally, the constant re-working of custom by reason brings 

 custom continually closer and closer to a true ideal for man's 

 conduct.^^ 



The heart of the difference, however, between Freud's super- 

 ego and St. Thomas' conscience rests ultimately in their 

 opposing views about the essence of the sense of obligation. 

 For Freud, the sense of obligation, and its consequent, the sense 

 of guilt for obligations unfulfilled, are generated primarily by 

 unconscious images. It is the introjected image of the parents, 

 threatening punishment or the withdrawal of affection, which 

 in a sense haunts a man all his life, as a vestige of his childhood 

 life, and throughout his life supplies the motivation for ad- 

 herence to his standards. The pressures of the fears and favors 

 which once dominated his real environment, and which were 

 absorbed from it, interiorized and soon lost to consciousness, 

 are the real, ultimate and adequate exjDlanation of all actions 

 which are motivated by the sense of right and wrong. For St. 

 Thomas, the essence of the sense of obligation is intelligent 

 insight. As soon as a man perceives, early in life and howsoever 

 dimly, that he is an ' unfinished product,' potential and plastic, 

 and able to grow and urged inwardly towards growth and 



^^ Since for Freud the customs of the family and community were the standards 

 the child introjected, upon which he formed his ego-ideal, a problem arose, naturally, 

 regarding the original formation of the customs. Denying reason the function of 

 first perceiving and formulating the norms of right and wrong, Freud was obliged 

 to turn to other explanations and these were not, by his own admission, entirely 

 satisfactory. For a fuller account of this point, see Dalbiez, Psychoanalytic Method 

 and the Doctrine of Freud, vol. 11, pp. 300-312. 



