Civilization and Its Discontents
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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.[citation needed]
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[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 – both of which 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.
[edit] Historical context
This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I undoubtedly influenced Freud and impacted 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."
[edit] References
- Freud, Sigmund; Civilization and Its Discontents W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (July, 1989), ISBN 0-393-30158-3
