The above is a scene from George Orwell’s 1962 adaptation of Kafka’s ‘the Trial’. It shows a lawyer named Josef negotiating with a guard. The guard hinders him access from the law. Josef finds this unreasonable. For why should one not have access to the law? He keeps negotiating. The guard, however, says that he will not allow it, and that even if he did manage to go beyond him, there only would be stronger guards afterwards. Josef grows old negotiating before he ultimately dies. He never went beyond the guard to access the law.

In a literal reading, the parable means that in societies there are guards or people who block access to a just life or society. On the other hand, this parable can also be understood as a parable of innerworldly conflict. In this understanding, the guard is some internalized and projected ‘self-figure’ that the mind constructed and has internalized as being representative for what is outside of itself. Prof. Donald Carveth, who is a psychoanalyst and em. prof of social and political thought, calls this the superego. The understanding of this superego is that it is a persecutory authority, which he contrasts with conscience, which in its reparative capacity is what I understand as a liberative authority. This psychoanalytic understanding reveals how the individual and the social intertwine.

The reason why the social and individual intertwine is because external persecutory authority emerges in society as a result of many internal persecutory processes. If many individuals construct images of the world or of oneself dependent upon mistrust or, for example, conspiratorial thinking, this erodes trust. If societal trust is eroded, it becomes more difficult for individuals to be trusted. If individuals find that, in spite of their effort of giving trust, they themselves are not trusted or did not know how to defend themselves against a betrayal of that trust, they can become mistrusting. The persecutory authority becomes active and the individual walled in, the other walled out. It can become a downwards spiral.¹

It can only be counteracted by a liberative authority, which Carveth calls conscience. The purpose of this authority is that it can point to some place different, to some repair, to distancing oneself, in a way that is relatively harmless. Without liberative authority or conscience, there is no stern defence, no guide to what is goodness, no harmlessness.

Carveth argues that Freud put conscience and superego into one structure. And so in popular narrative the conscience has been seen as something that can burden someone. But in this understanding, which distinguishes between the two, it is really the conscience that is burdened. And it is the conscience that frees. In order for it to do so requires wisdom about what path to that freedom is reparative and protectively seclusioned and boundaried.

1. In the teachings of the Buddha, there also is conscience, complemented with prudence, though it is framed a source of restraint, which is quite different. It is approached as a preventative of what wrong, rather than understood as a wholesome factor worthwile unto itself. The theory of Carveth is therefore additive to this conceptualization in the time of the Buddha (AN 7.65). ↩︎