2.1 On Moral Law and Guilt

Longuenesse offers a simplified account of the emergence of the feeling of guilt: for her, the feeling of guilt is a moral feeling, like the feeling of respect, which responds to the moral law and allows us to acknowledge the fact that we are inadequate to follow it. I dispute that guilt is attuned to the moral law because the feeling of guilt doesn’t just arise when we ‘act against a moral duty’;Footnote ⁵ we can experience guilt even after we act (or think of acting) against a pseudo-duty, such as any ‘duty’ formulated with respect to a moral standard for self-assessment that is deliberately influenced by inclination, falls short of ideality or universality, or simply reflects the mores and conventions (including bias) of a certain time and place.Footnote ⁶ That is the case when a verdict of guilt is externally delivered on a subject who, for some reason and motivated by fear, chooses to internalise that external claim as if it were their own and legitimate.

For example, a woman writing philosophy in Kant’s milieu (eighteenth-century Germany) would probably feel guilty because she would have internalised the social bias and the punishment associated towards that behaviour at the time.Footnote ⁷ Imagine now that the same woman feels a vocation and moral imperative to write philosophy. However, she decides to refrain from it in order to avoid social opprobrium. In this second scenario, the woman will probably feel guilty as well, not because of any stigma (e.g., social, or familial disapproval) attached to it, but because she is failing to do what she considers her vocation and duty. Thus, she must consciously think of herself as guilty. In the first case, guilt is motivated by the fear of punishment for disrespecting and transgressing the dubious moral law of an external power, namely, social bias, which imposed its moral standards on her. In the second case, she feels guilty because she discovers a moral standard in herself (following her vocation is the right thing to do), and even a duty to herself based on that standard. Therefore, she can appreciate that she is disrespecting and transgressing a law, but in this case, her inner law.

Longuenesse does not focus on the differences between the various mental mechanisms through which the feeling of guilt can arise, but only on the fact that guilt responds to a subject’s feeling of inadequacy relative to her duty with respect to her moral imperative (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 32; 2019, p. 222). Now, Longuenesse’s strategy is precisely not to distinguish between these mechanisms. Her main argument for not focusing on them is that all moral commands ultimately respond to unknown unconscious motivations (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 29), so it is irrelevant for us as subjects to try to dig into something that it is in principle indiscernible. Thus, the only relevant aspect to consider is that we experience guilt, and guilt must be a response to our inadequacy with respect to the moral law. However, the KSNAs disagree about guilt on some points. I will look at them next.

2.2 Different Views on Guilt in the Kantian Sophisticated Naturalistic Accounts (KSNAs)

Samuel Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1992) and David Velleman (Reference Velleman1999), whose contributions to this debate precede Longuenesse’s, do not necessarily seem to think that unconscious motivations are completely indiscernible to the subject. They recognise the feeling of guilt can indeed arise from different sources which the subject can and must distinguish among even if they are unconscious. I believe Longuenesse’s interpretation may be based on a kind of Hegelian approach, according to which the superego represents the negative sublate of the moral conscience, which, as it develops, becomes the true moral conscience. From that point of view, the distinction between the sources of guilt is therefore irrelevant, as Longuenesse suggests. Although I find Longuenesse’s interpretation is interesting and original, I think Scheffler’s and Velleman’s positions are more plausible, as I explain below.

First, in Moral Humanity Scheffler questions the standard naturalistic approaches to ethics and asks, ‘[i]f, for example, moral motivation in fact consists in motivation by some natural attitude or inclination, how are we to explain the fact that people ordinarily conceive of the two as distinct?’ (Reference Scheffler1992, p. 65). Then, Scheffler incorporates psychoanalytical views and explains that Freud’s theory supports ‘a genuine distinction between desire-based and authoritative motivation, but as insisting in addition on another distinction: between true authoritative motivation on the one hand, and motivation by fear of the authoritative self (or desire of its approval) on the other’ (Reference Scheffler1992, p. 87). Velleman, influenced by Scheffler’s general thoughts on psychoanalysis, relates the feeling of guilt directly to the fear of being punished by an inner disciplinarian (Reference Velleman1999, p. 532). For him, the fearful component of guilt is a particular species of fear, ‘differentiated from other types of fear by its intentional object’ (Reference Velleman1999, p. 537). Velleman, like Scheffler, considered that guilt related to the ‘fear of being punished by an authority is a different emotion from fear of being coerced by a bully’ (Reference Velleman1999, p. 537). What I find especially interesting in Velleman’s position is that he thinks the ego is able to recognise the moral punishable authority, who is for some reason entitled to discipline the subject and hold him to certain standards.Footnote ⁸

Scheffler agrees with Velleman that the feeling of guilt responds to differentiated intentional motivations (fear of authority v. fear of a bully). Longuenesse agrees with Velleman that guilt is a feeling of major importance linked to the subject’s sense of inadequacy and fear of failing to meet the moral standard. First, Velleman innovated on Scheffler’s general position by crediting the ego with the capacity to distinguish different sources of motivation (the moral authority from the bully). Second, Longuenesse supplements Scheffler’s and Velleman’s approach by reincorporating some classical naturalist ideas into a model of moral progress of Hegelian traits. However, she did not completely distance herself from Sheffler and Velleman. Like Sheffler and Velleman, Longuenesse did not support a moral deflationary stance. Rather, she tried to harmonise a diversity of naturalistic views with Kant’s categorical imperative in a sophisticated way.Footnote ⁹

In The Ego and the Id, Freud indeed states that ‘the ego ideal [or superego] answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man’ (SE XIX, p. 37). In that sense, the ego ideal or superego would be a type of moral standard and moral conscience. That is why – as Longuenesse (Reference Longuenesse2012, pp. 32–34) and Velleman (Reference Velleman1999, pp. 537–539) rightly note – the feeling of guilt becomes especially relevant for Freud.Footnote ¹⁰ Nonetheless, my point is that Freud is not consistent in clarifying what he means by ‘the higher nature of man’.

Longuenesse admits that a Kant-Freud comparison is not easy (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 21), but she bases her optimism on the aspects that she thinks work well in both theories (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 21). Specifically, she grounds her comparison in the belief that both authors share the idea of a ‘moral imperative’ (Reference Longuenesse2019, pp. 205–206) and hold similar positions on ‘guilt’ as an indication of moral inadequacy. As I suggested at the beginning of this section, I specifically disagree with Longuenesse on attributing similar positions on the feeling of guilt to Kant and Freud. I will now unfold this criticism in more depth.

3.1 The Heir of Oedipus Complex?

The KSNAs take the superego to be the moral conscience. This assertion is not far from Freud’s suggestion in The Ego and the Id (1923) that ‘Kant’s categorical imperative is the direct heir of the Oedipus complex’ (SE XIX, p. 167), but I believe it is very different from Freud’s acknowledgement in The New Introductory Lectures (1933) that says:

Following The New Introductory Lectures, I believe it is more coherent to read Freud as holding that the superego is unrelated to Kantian morality. With respect to Kant’s and Freud’s differing views on the sources of moral motivation, most scholars would agree that: (1) for Kant, moral conscience is in principle innate (MS 6:400), a priori, but for Freud, the superego is the product of a process, a posteriori. (2) The a priori Kantian moral conscience arises from a different (non-conscious) mental domain than the superego does.Footnote ¹¹ That is, Freud is very specific in his claim that the superego is an agency that arises because of the cathectic pressure exerted by the ‘repressed’ unconscious (which is located in the body).Footnote ¹² In other words, Kant’s moral conscience and Freud’s superego originate from different unconscious or non-conscious sources: the former is purely mental, and the latter is mostly organic (repressed cathexis).Footnote ¹³ However, Longuenesse (Reference Longuenesse2012; Reference Longuenesse2019), Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1992), and Velleman (Reference Velleman1999), despite their differences, insist that the superego (as a developing moral conscience) could replace the Kantian idea of moral conscience notwithstanding their different origins (mental vs mostly-organic, a priori v. a posteriori).

The KSNAs are very attached to Freud’s quote in The Ego and the Id, ‘Kant’s categorical imperative is the direct heir of Oedipus complex’. However, psychoanalysis in general thinks of the superego as an agential mechanism in the subject’s psyche in charge of releasing accumulated tension through camouflage. Freud stated that the superego camouflages its activity to avoid being censored by consciousness, which enforces a standard of appropriateness.Footnote ¹⁴ In my opinion, the superego’s camouflaging ability enables it to emulate the Kantian moral conscience and enact imperatives for the subject – but only hypothetical imperatives. If my understanding of Freud is correct, the superego’s mimicry of conscience should resemble a Kantian account of self-deception and rationalisation more than the developing moral conscience.

3.2 Longuenesse and Scheffler on the Unconscious Moral Motivation

In many of his works, Freud links the superego’s genesis to an irrational reaction motivated by many emotions, particularly fear. For Freud, the superego’s development moves like a spiral, propelled by the same repressed original cathexis, as it finds different mechanisms for updating itself. He makes it clear that the superego always shepherds humanity toward civilization; however, civilization for Freud does not seem to be related to a morality independent from self-interest. He states, ‘Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization’ (SE XXI, p. 101). Now, for Longuenesse, the nature of this concern regarding self-interest is not very relevant because she believes that ‘we are blind to the true nature of the moral motivation’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 27; Reference Longuenesse2019, pp. 213–216).

Longuenesse reminds us that, according to Kant, ‘common moral wisdom just knows, without any reasoning, what ought to be done’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 26). However, as there is a limit to what we can know, we cannot have total conscious access to the understanding of that determination that we perceive as our inner imperative, which also has an effect on our feelings. Therefore, that blindness to our sources of moral motivation (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 27), together with the impossibility of fully understanding the volition that enacts the moral imperatives, leads us to accept and recognize unconsciousness behind our morality.Footnote ¹⁵

Scheffler and Longuenesse rightly point out that we can easily deceive ourselves with respect to our understanding of our moral motivation.Footnote ¹⁶ Longuenesse states, ‘indeed, we have, according to Kant, a natural propensity to deceive ourselves and to conveniently present to ourselves as an action done from duty what is really only an action in conformity with duty’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 28). If we can deceive ourselves, then (from a Kantian point of view) the moral status of the maxims of our actions would be questionable. As Scheffler and Longuenesse observe, apparently there is no way to know for certain whether the moral maxim was enacted in absolute freedom or not. So, according to Longuenesse, we should not focus our attention on that problem. By contrast to this, I argue that we must keep in mind that even though our motives aren’t perfectly transparent to us, our grasp of them is fairly reliable because, as Kant reminds us, we are capable of recognising intelligibility or opacity in the intentionality in our actions.Footnote ¹⁷ This dovetails with what Christine Korsgaard calls ‘the internalist view’ – that says that ‘the knowledge (or the truth or the acceptance) of a moral judgment implies the existence of a motive (not necessarily overriding) for acting on that judgment’ (Reference Korsgaard1986, p. 8).

In order to reinforce her argumentation regarding our impossibility to access our moral motivations, Longuenesse focuses on the term ‘awareness’. For her, awareness of the ‘I’ in ‘I think’ is:

Longuenesse explains our awareness of the ‘I’ in ‘I ought to X’ in similar terms, arguing that our source of moral motivation is inaccessible to us, but can be assumed to exist. She goes on to explain that the ego or subject can consciously feel the existence of this inner moral conscience and interpret its commands as obligations. However, the subject knows nothing about the source of motivation that lies behind those commands. I draw a different conclusion from her argument. In my view, even though we don’t have full access to the source of moral motivation for the ‘I’ in ‘I ought to X’, we can at least recognise the intelligibility of the moral imperative, and through that recognition, engage with the authoritative existence of the moral prescription, and even feel respect for it.

When Longuenesse emphasizes the relevance of unconscious components, she focuses on their inscrutability. Like Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1992, p. 63), she is very sceptical of Kant’s take on this issue. They wonder how we can know that our actions are right if, according to Kant, it is impossible to be certain whether our moral actions are influenced by the moral law itself or by self-deception and self-love (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 27). While I do believe there is some basis for Longuenesse’s and Scheffler’s criticism, I am going to call it into question. It is true that Kant teaches us in his First Critique that reason has limitations (A xii). However, a transcendental project must be able to navigate that difficulty.

Longuenesse’s premise that it is impossible for us to know our sources of motivation leads her to believe that the subject, being blind to that knowledge, is in need of guidance. According to Longuenesse, the superego takes that guiding job, and its guidance develops until it becomes categorical. For Longuenesse, we can attest the moral consistency of the superego’s job thanks to our feeling of guilt (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 27–28). In her words ‘what makes the feeling [of guilt] a moral feeling is its role in curbing libido and aggression, and in developing what Freud calls the ‘supra personal’ side of human nature’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 32).

3.3 Longuenesse on The Blind Subject

Since the KSNAs acknowledge that the superego’s commands are not necessarily categorical, they appeal to the idea of a developmental moral conscience (a developmental superego). Longuenesse says, ‘causal history and normative assessment are not mutually exclusive’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 33). If we picture, as Longuenesse does, a blind subject who does not understand her motives for action nor her moral purposes and is guided and structured by a developing superego, we can certainly assume that this blind subject cannot be at any point critical with respect to the actions she executes in obedience to her superego, since such a blind subject is someone who cannot understand the choices that she faces in the first place.

Hence, I believe that a blind subject guided by the superego cannot be equated with a blind subject guided by a moral conscience – as in a Kantian portrait, that is, understanding blindness by considering the transcendental approach, a blind subject who accepts the limits of her knowledge. Even if the Kantian blind subject cannot understand her source of moral motivation, as Longuenesse claims, the Kantian subject nevertheless has the capacity to acknowledge whether she is violating a moral standard or transgressing a moral boundary or not, because she is able to realise that her thoughts and actions follow a purpose under the prescription of a standard that is indeed intelligible.Footnote ¹⁸ The Kantian blind subject can acknowledge the intelligibility of her actions even if she cannot fully understand them. By contrast, the Freudian blind subject cannot acknowledge any intelligibility in her actions at all. Freud told us several times that the true motivation behind the superego’s commands is blocked by repressed mechanisms. The KSNAs ignore this problem and only focus on the fact that both the Freudian and Kantian subjects can feel guilt.

From my point of view, it is the ‘moral intelligibility’ revealed through the subject’s determination to act that really marks a relevant difference between a Kantian blind subject and a Freudian one. The main characters in the film Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, Reference Zemeckis1994) offer an illuminating example of intelligibility and blindness with respect to morality. Forrest had cognitive limitations associated with a low IQ and a difficult childhood (physical problems, bullying at school and an absent father). Nevertheless, he was characterized as a person who, did good deeds most of the time. Due to his low IQ, it was difficult for him to grasp the full context of the events in which he was involved. However, he constantly chose morally good maxims rather than self-interested ones when he acted. We can surmise that his desire to act selfishly was subordinated to his inner need to act righteously. Forrest does not simply follow external commands; he was discriminating, and he only followed the right imperatives. For instance, on one occasion, after enlisting in the army in wartime, his lieutenant ordered Forrest to run for his life and left him to die on the battlefield. Forrest disobeyed the lieutenant’s order because he stuck to his original commitment to being a supporting soldier and friend on the battlefield despite imminent danger. As a result, he saved many lives, including the Lieutenant’s, disregarding the latter’s emotional objections. Forrest’s choices were not guided by emotions even though he had strong feelings. Throughout the film he was able to distinguish moral maxims from immoral ones. Forrest’s decisions made sense in the context in which they were taken; that is, most of his decisions were intelligible, disinterested, necessary, and strictly universal despite his cognitive disability.

Forrest’s foil, Jenny Curran, has a normal IQ, but, like Forrest, had to overcome a difficult childhood (her widower father was an alcoholic who abused her). Throughout the film, she consistently makes bad choices, even though she apparently believed she was acting for a good cause (such as joining a ‘hippy’ movement for peace). Jenny was, like Forrest, blind to her moral motivations, but in her case, most of her actions were unintelligible. She may have done what she believed was right for her, even though she and the people around her were aware that most of her moral decisions were unintelligible. For instance, she supported movements that promoted peace and social improvement, but she would constantly end up being involved in abusive relationships and substance abuse. In other words, she was self-deceived when voluntarily choosing that lifestyle. Her (self-destructive) actions were repeating a bad pattern of male abuse in her childhood that she consciously rejected but unconsciously pursued, and those actions did not sit at all well with her ostensible search for world peace.

Forrest Gump portrays two blind subjects. We viewers can surmise that they are both guided by unknown sources of moral motivation. Nonetheless, we can also notice that those unknown sources of moral motivation differ, and we can notice this without ‘any philosophical training or special capability’.Footnote ¹⁹ One presents itself as categorical: ‘I ought to fulfil my commitment as soldier and friend by supporting my unit as well as I can’. The other one presents itself as deceiving: ‘I ought to join a movement to promote world peace by allowing myself to be abused by the members of that movement’.Footnote ²⁰ We can infer that the feeling of guilt has little say with respect to this acknowledgment of coherence/incoherence.

I find Longuenesse’s response to the problem of unconscious moral motivation lacking. She is right that ‘we are blind with respect to the sources of our moral motivation’. However, the fact that there is an unconscious or non-conscious moral motivation does not mean that we should ignore the fact that our actions are motivated from a source that indeed can be grasped in its formulation, even if our understanding of it is limited and fallible.

Freud scholars agree that he thinks the superego’s commands are not only incoherent, but intentionally distorted. Now, in my view, ‘intentionally distorted’ is not a mere detail because an intentional distortion of the imperatives makes the superego deceptive, as I discussed in the example of Jenny Curran in Forest Gump. Longuenesse does not read the superego as deceptive. She tries to resolve the problem of the distortion that the superego produces by stating that this only happens because the superego is partially unconscious: ‘in this sense: it is manifested in representations whose meaning, and connection are opaque to the subject of those representations because they do not obey conceptual/logical rules of combination’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 34). However, for psychoanalysis, the problem of distortion implies more than mere opaqueness.

For psychoanalysis, the meanings and connections among the representations of the moral demands issued by the superego are opaque because they are hiding content (cathexis). We can infer that if the superego intentionally hides its motives for action from the subject, it does so because it has the capacity to recognise an original moral standard or guide for the ego and react to it: by veiling it, mimicking and assuming its voice,Footnote ²¹ and pretending to be it. In that case, we can assume that ‘intentionally hiding’ implies some type of self-deception; the superego pretends to be a moral standard and guide in order to be able to discharge repressed cathexis. if so, self-deception must be linked somehow to the origin of the superego. Earlier, I gave the example of the prohibition against women pursuing a career in philosophy in Kant’s days. That prohibition concealed an unfair social model of gender oppression under a pseudo-ethical opaque façade. I differ with Longuenesse, Velleman, and Scheffler: in my view ‘intentional opaqueness’ is not equivalent to a ‘developing moral conscience’. For me, those functions – the function of distorting on purpose, and the function of moral learning – are distinct and operate independently within our psyche. Next, I will relate my thoughts on self-deception to the ideality of the imperatives of the super-ego.

4.1 The Ego Ideal

Longuenesse (Reference Longuenesse2012, Reference Lear2019), Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1992), and Velleman (Reference Velleman1999) mainly relate the moral achievement of the superego to its ideality. But, in what sense is the superego also an ego ideal? For Velleman and Longuenesse, the superego develops into something ideal, by ‘curbing libido and aggression’. In the phylogenetic narrative of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, Freud points us toward something in that direction. He argues that an ‘ego ideal’ is born as a consequence of the remorse and love that the children of the primal horde felt for their father after the act of murdering him. According to Freud, our ambivalent feelings help counter the outcomes of the actions that they separately motivate. Thus, for Freud, the hidden unconscious love that the children felt for their father was capable of motivating feelings and actions to counter the outcome (his murder) caused by the hate they also felt for him. The love they felt for their father triggered remorse (for an unknown reason), and remorse in turn triggered the emergence of a feeling of guilt, and with it, the need to establish a guiding ideal standard, and an agency to make us aware of this standard and to help direct our future actions. Focusing on that normativity, the KSNAs claim that the development of the Freudian superego must relate to our morality in an ideal sense. However, Freud himself found his explanation of the emergence of original guilt (which in turns triggers the emergence of the superego) lacking and he admitted that he couldn’t think of a better explanation for it.Footnote ²⁵

Freud’s later association of the superego with the ‘death drive’ further problematizes any possibility of moral ideality as understood by the KSNAs. As Freud explains several times, the death drive involves self-destruction. In The New Introductory Lectures, Freud distinguishes ‘the ego ideal’ and ‘the superego’, as two terms designating two distinct agencies that are apparently motivated by different drives. Thus, the ego ideal was motivated by erotic instincts, and the superego by thanatotic instincts.Footnote ²⁶ The KSNAs do not separate those terms; they treat them as a single construct that passes through different stages of development, as if this were constantly sublating itself. In its early stages, the superego is more misguided and threatening, while at more mature stages the superego or ego ideal is wiser and more authoritative. Regardless of the difference or relationship between the superego (death drive) and the ego ideal (related to Eros and the preservation of life), the question that arises is about ideality itself.

Lear asks KSNAs, ‘why must this account of the ego [and its identification with the superego] be treated as holding good ideally?’ (Reference Lear2019, p. 750). For Scheffler, there is at least one thing clear with respect to this, ‘moderation represents the best expression of the Ideal of Humanity, …. Thus, morality should be thought of as non-pure, ‘but moderate and pervasive, in the sense that no voluntary human action is in principle resistant to moral assessment’ (Reference Scheffler1992, p. 6). Scheffler thinks our ego ideal carries out that moderating function. Velleman and Longuenesse, on the other hand, seem to identify overly demanding traits in the ideality of the ego ideal. For them the ego ideal is not just moderating.

Velleman considers love a supreme moral feeling. For him, love accompanies the emergence of the ego ideal, which matures over time. He states, ‘we are inducted into morality by our experience of loving and being loved’ (Reference Velleman1999, p. 532). Edward Harcourt warns us that Velleman did not mean that the ideals are created from the love for our parents, but that ‘moral requirements motivate us via an ideal image of our obeying them’ (Reference Harcourt2009, p. 349). This is more clearly explained when Velleman states that ‘[t]he Categorical Imperative is not an impersonal rule but an ideal of the person, and our reverence for it is therefore akin to our feeling for persons whom we idealize’ (Reference Velleman1999, p. 532). Longuenesse’s interpretation shares some aspects of Velleman’s. For Longuenesse, ideality in the ego-ideal also has a rational aspect, shaped by education and imagination, and it is accompanied by feelings. According to her, the categorical imperative is so demanding that it can only be ideal. Longuenesse emphasises that the child ‘in the effort to give up the impossible love-object and curb his aggressive impulses, … forms the representation within his mental life of an “ego ideal”’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 30). Because of that demand, it is easy for the subject to feel inadequate and develop a sense of guilt as a response.

Longuenesse’s assumption about the origin of the superego is that, as the ego is per se self-conscious and has rational capacities, the superego, as a splinter of the ego, should have that rational power as well.Footnote ²⁷ Longuenesse refers to Kant (G 4:421) to explain that it is possible to think of the ‘I’ as the author and subject of a moral command issued by the superego. For her, the superego is a part of the ego that contributes by structuring it, ‘and makes us capable of meaningful use of “I” in the moral categorical “I ought to”’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 23). My point is that Longuenesse’s interpretation of the superego seems to modify Freud’s original conception of it, since Freud says the superego splits off from the ego as a result of a process of introjection first carried out by means of a process of cathectic projection and identification with something external.Footnote ²⁸ Scheffler (Reference Scheffler1992) and Velleman (Reference Velleman1999) do not disagree with this classical Freudian portrait, but Longuenesse does. The famous Freudian claim states that the superego is an a posteriori agency that is associated with our external human environment. In my view, Longuenesse’s interpretation of this point is a stretch. What is clear to me is that, since the original source of the superego is the id – ‘a cauldron of seething excitations’ (SE XXII, p. 73), it cannot be equated with moral conscience in the Kantian sense, which does not incorporate our natural instincts.

Now, why is ‘ideality’ in the ego ideal problematic? Because ‘ideality’ in the Freudian superego involves distortion, and consequently, self-deception or rationalising. In my understanding of Freud, the ego ideal and/or superego is a compulsive agency which relates to moral conscience but not in the way that Kant understood that concept. Freud states that the ‘‘goodness’ of human nature is one of those evil illusions by which mankind expect their lives to be beautified and made easier while in reality they only cause damage’ (SE XXII, p. 104). Freud did not believe that the ego ideal can moderate or orient the subject as, according to Scheffler, the Kantian moral conscience supposedly does. The role of moderation in Freud’s work was specifically attributed to the therapeutic setting. In that space, according to psychoanalysis, ‘[t]he analysand must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness’ (SE XIV, p. 152). What Freud discovered is that the superego or ego ideal helps the subject release an excess of tensional aggression (the main cause of her mental illness). However, the release catalysed by the superego only lasts a short time and is not necessarily healthy or good for the subject, because simple observation of case studies tells us that aggression can easily increase when it is channelled through the superego.

I agree with Velleman that the ego ideal is related to the ideality of the feeling of love (libido) in some way, but I doubt we can consider love a moral feeling, because love itself is not enough to orient the subject in the acknowledgment of what is right and good. As we know, intense love can develop into very deceptive and dangerous practices, like blind love. It is true that Velleman distinguishes between immature and mature versions of love, but that distinction, as Harcourt (Reference Harcourt2009) claims, is in need of further explanation. Unlike Longuenesse, I think that a demanding imperative that allows you to curb your aggression or libido and feel guilt is not necessarily categorical. As we saw in Section 3, Longuenesse tries to surmount this obstacle by emphasizing that a distinction between the sources of motivation of the laws enacted by the ego ideal or superego and those enacted by the Kantian moral law is not relevant; only the ideality of the law is! She states that ‘the very effort at self-reflection and conceptually clear elucidation of one’s motivation all too naturally turns into a mere tool for moral pretence’ (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 29). I wonder if it is really impossible to dig into our sources of moral motivation as Longuenesse claims.

4.2 Digging into the Sources of Moral Motivation

Freud would have disagreed with Longuenesse’s claim about the impossibility of elucidating our unconscious motivations for action, because one of his main discoveries working with patients who suffered psychopathologies is that through analytic methods it is indeed possible to uncover the sources of motivation for action. Now, Longuenesse counters that argument with a Hegelian move; she asserts that at the moment that we believe we know our moral imperative, we lose it immediately. She quotes Kant to explain that ‘[t]rue moral wisdom consists in character and action rather than knowledge’ (G 4:405). My point is that Freud’s theory incorporates a psychotherapeutic space, and that space is where I find Kant aligns better with Freud. Therapy is precisely where we delve into our unconscious motivations. In Sebastian Gardner’s opinion (Reference Gardner1993, p. 219), what is special about psychotherapy is that it offers us a third-person perspective, which we need in order to grasp the full context of our actions.Footnote ²⁹ For Freud, the purpose of psychotherapy was never to grasp the motivational content per se but to find, through a dialogue between patient and therapist, the overarching normative structure in which our instinctual wishes move and/or get reinforced through repetitive loops. In other words, what is evaluated in Freudian psychotherapy is not so much the content to which our imperatives relate (which he assumes is mostly sexual) or the context in which they unfold (i.e., whether the facts really happened in the way the patient recounts them, or if they were mere phantasies), but rather the structural coherence that orders and subordinates the motives for action.

Longuenesse understands the relevance of structures for Freud, she also recognises that Freud’s main concern has to do with digging into our psychological genesis (Reference Longuenesse2012, p. 21–22). However, I believe she fails to recognise that the main pillar of psychoanalytic practice relies on the space of therapy, which, when it is successful, leads us to understand ourselves as ‘structured agents full of drives’. Through psychotherapy, we inevitably need to dig into the intention that stems from the intelligibility of our unconscious sources of motivation. The purpose of therapy is to help us regain agency over ourselves by willingly choosing to open our inner eyes (as in the myths) to the intentions behind our actions. That is, to regain agency by ceasing to be blind agents. Finally, I think it is important to highlight that Freud found that the ‘moral motivation’ (superego’s motivation) of all his patients was far from ideal in a Kantian sense.