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(1949). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18:19-43

The Passing of the Gentleman—A Psychoanalytic Commentary on the Cultural Ideal of the English

W. N. Evans

I

In the closing pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud observes that just as the individual develops a superego, so the community develops a superego under the influence of which cultural evolution proceeds. 'But', he goes on to say, 'we come across the remarkable circumstance that the mental processes concerned here are actually more familiar to us and more accessible to consciousness when they proceed from the group than they can be in the individual'. When the injunctions and reproaches of the individual's superego are brought to consciousness 'we find that they coincide with the demands of the prevailing cultural superego'. The parallel developments of the individual and the group are always 'firmly mortised together'. 'Consequently, many of the effects and properties of the superego can be more easily detected through its operations in the group than in the individual.' As an inducement to further research, Freud concludes, 'it seems to me that the point of view

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