ivilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt."1 By and large, Freud says, this guilt is unconscious, and he later notes that it arises largely from lack of sexual fulfillment. The instant point, however, is the overall denomination of anxiety as unconscious guilt:
[T]he sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a
topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it
coincides completely with fear of the super ego. . . .
Anxiety is always present somewhere or other behind every
symptom; but at one time it takes noisy possession of the
whole of consciousness, while at another it conceals itself
so completely that we are obliged to speak of unconscious
anxiety or, if we want to have a clearer psychological
conscience, since anxiety is in the first instance simply a
feeling, of possibilities of anxiety. . . . The sense of
guilt, the harshness of the super ego, is thus the same
thing as the severity of the conscience. It is the
perception which the ego has of being watched over in this
way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings
and the demands of the super ego.2
Elsewhere, Freud says that "neurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes."3 However, this goes to the fundamental Freudian theory that sexuality is at the heart of human experience. This being so, it is at the root of artistic creation which seeks to display human experience. His discussion of Oedipus and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams illustrates this point. Because Oedipal feelings are fundamental to human experience, for example, Hamlet delays killing Claudius. "Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's place with his mother."4 On one hand, Hamlet seeks...