But if the human sense of guilt goes back to the killing of the primal father, 
that was 
after all a case of ‘remorse’. Are we to assume that a conscience and a sense 
of guilt were 
not, as we have presupposed, in existence before the deed? If not, where, in 
this case, did 
the remorse come from? There is no doubt that this case should explain the 
secret of the 
sense of guilt to us and put an end to our diFculties. And I believe it does. 
This remorse 
was the result of the primordial ambivalence of feeling towards the father. 
His sons hated 
him, but they loved him, too. After their hatred had been satis±ed by their 
act of 
aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. It set 
up the superego 
by identi±cation with the father; it gave that agency the father’s power, as 
though as 
a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, 
and it created 
the restrictions which were intended to prevent a repetition of the deed. And 
since the 
inclination to aggressiveness against the father was repeated in the following 
generations, 
the sense of guilt, too, persisted, and it was reinforced once more by every 
piece of 
aggressiveness that was suppressed and carried over to the super-ego. Now, 
I think, we 
can at last grasp two things perfectly clearly: the part played by love in the 
origin of 
conscience and the fatal inevitability of the sense of guilt. Whether one has 
killed one’s 
father or has abstained from doing so is not really the decisive thing. One is 
bound to feel 
guilty in either case, for the sense of guilt is an expression of the con²ict due 
to 
ambivalence, of the eternal struggle between Eros and the instinct of 
destruction or death. 
This con²ict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living 
together. So 
long as the community assumes no other form than that of the family, the 
con²ict is 
bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the conscience 
and to create 
the ±rst sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to widen the community, 
the same