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Front Cover

Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"), it is one of Freud's most important and widely read works (e.g., Gay, 1989, p. 722).

[edit] Contents

In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such commandments are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.

Freud's theory is based on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. Most notable are the desires for sex, and the predisposition to violent aggression towards authoritative figures and towards sexual competitors, which both obstruct the gratification of a person's instincts. Human beings are governed by the pleasure principle, and the pleasure principle is satisfied by the instincts.

Freud begins by taking up where his previous work The Future of an Illusion left off, namely that the concept of the oceanic feeling is the source of religious sentiment. Freud himself cannot experience this feeling of dissolution, but he acknowledges its existence and examines it as being a regression into an earlier state of consciousness before the ego had differentiated itself from the world as object. He sticks to his conviction that religion arose out of 'the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father', and 'imagine[s] that the oceanic feeling became connected with religion later on'.

The next chapter delves into these childhood states of consciousness to explore how the world as source of gratification of desires loses appeal once the infant becomes aware that the world can also be a source of suffering and pain. The ego of the child forms over the oceanic feeling to separate itself from the negative aspects of the world, and so that the infant will be better able to act towards securing happiness in accordance with the Pleasure Principle. Freud claims that the 'purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle' and the rest of the chapter is an exploration of various styles of human adaptation we use to secure happiness from the world while also trying to avoid or limit the sufferings that come our way from our own mortality, from the natural world, and from the realities of living with others in a society. Freud regards this last source as 'perhaps more painful to us than any other'. Religion is just one more imposition of the world that restricts our choice of adaptation and attempts at gratification of our instinctual desires.

The third section of the book sets about defining civilization and its paradoxical nature of being the tool we have created to protect ourselves from unhappiness but also our largest source of unhappiness. People become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the frustration which society imposes in the service of its cultural ideals. Freud points out that all of the contemporary advances in science and medicine have not made people any happier, that at best technological development has been a mixed blessing for human happiness. He asks what society is for if not to satisfy the pleasure principle, and defines civilization as man achieving only a parody of his ideals. Civilization is built out of human ideals of beauty, hygiene, and order; and especially for the exercise of humanity's highest intellectual functions. Freud draws a key analogy between the development of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual: the anal eroticism that develops into a need for order and cleanliness, the sublimation of instincts into useful actions, and the renunciation of instinct by suppression or repression. This final point Freud sees as an implicit danger in civilization, one that if "not compensated for economically, one can be certain than serious disorders will ensue." Thus civilization creates discontent and mental pathology within its members.

[edit] Historical context

This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I undoubtedly influenced Freud and had an impact on his central observation about the tension between the individual and civilization. Amidst a nation still recovering from a brutally violent war, Freud developed thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927), wherein he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud, an avowed atheist, argued that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, thus helping a civilization. Yet at the same time organized religion also exacts an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God.

[edit] Quotations

"...admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological ... At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation'."

"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido."

"The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one."

"...readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love."

"Man has become, so to speak, a God with artificial limbs." (29)

"Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force."

[edit] References

Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (July, 1989), ISBN 0-393-30158-3
Freud, Sigmund, "Civilization and Its Discontents", London: Penguin, 2002. ISBN 978-0=141-18236-0
Gay, Peter, ed., The Freud Reader, W. W. Norton & Company, 1989, ISBN 0-393-95806-X

[edit] External links

Civilization and Its Discontents in PDF format