Civilization and Its Discontents

About the Author

I will be summarizing the information found in Sigmund Freud: A Brief Life, by Peter Gay that I found at the back of my version of Civilization and Its Discontents. Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in the small town of Freiberg. (Freud was originally names Sigismund Schlomo, and he adopted the name Sigmund in the early 1870s when a medical student at the University of Vienna. He was a clever and inquisitive youngster. In 1860, his family moved to Vienna; it was the opening phase of the liberal era of the Hapsburg Empire, and Jews there, recently freed from onerous taxes, humiliating restrictions on their property rights, professional choices, and religious practices, could harbor hope hopes for economic advancement, political participation, and a measure of social acceptance.

In 1873, at the age of 17, Freud entered the University of Vienna, where he originally planned to study law, but driven by what he called his greed for knowledge, decided to study medicine instead. He did not earn his degree until 1881 due to him being so absorbed in his studies.

Freud had grown up with no religious instruction at home, came to Vienna as an atheist, and left it as an atheist - with persuasive scientific arguments.

In 1882, Freud took a lowly post at Vienna General Hospital. During this time he met his future wife, Martha Bernays, with whom he has 6 children. He wasn't able to marry her until 1886 due to lack of finances, and also in 1886, he opened his own practice in Vienna, with the help of aid of wedding gifts and loans from affluent friends. Freud worked in Paris for some time with Jean-Martin Charcot in 1895, during which time nervous ailments because his specialty, and in the 1890s, ad he told a friend, psychology became his tyrant. During those years, he developed the psychoanalytic theory of mind.

Freud was propelled toward the discovery of psychoanalysis in his practice: his patients proved excellent teachers. He was increasingly specializing in women suffering from hysteria.

In 1895, Freud published Studies on Hysteria and first managed to analyze his own dream. In the spring of 1896, he first used the term psychoanalysis. Freud's seduction theory holds that every neurosis results from premature sexual activity, mainly in child molestation, in childhood. (He later abandoned seduction in theory in that he abandoned the idea that only the rape of a child, whether a boy or girl, by a servant, an older sibling, or a classmate, could be the cause of a neurosis. Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1899; in this work, he treated all dreams as wish fulfillments. In 1902, he was appointed an associate professor at the University of Vienna. In 1908, Freud and a group of Viennese physicians founded the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

In 1905, Freud published the second pillar of his theory: the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It outlined perversions and 'normal' development from childhood to puberty with a lack of censoriousness and an openness hitherto virtually unknown in medical literature.

In 1913, he published an audacious, highly speculative venture into psychoanalytic prehistory, Totem and Taboo, which specified the moment that savages, in some dim, remote past, entered culture by murdering their father and acquiring guilt feelings.

During WW1, the meeting of physicians across country borders and the communication between them ground to a halt; all three of Freud's sons were in the war, and two of his sons were in mortal danger daily. The war confirmed the skeptical psychoanalytic appraisal of human nature. After the war, Vienna was hungry, cold, desperate, [and] food and fuel shortages produced deadly ailments - tuberculosis and influenza. In January 1920, Freud's second daughter, Sophia, died in the Influenza epidemic.

In 1923, in his classic study The Ego and the Id, he completed his revisions. He now proposed a structural theory of the mind, which visualizes the mind as divided into three distinct yet interacting agencies: the id (the whole unconscious the wholly unconscious domain of the mind, consisting of the drives and of material later repressed), the ego (which is partly conscious and contains the defense mechanisms and the capacities to calculate, reason, and plan), and the super-ego (also only partly conscious, which harbors the conscience and, beyond that, unconscious feelings of guilt).

In April 1923, he was operated on for a growth in his palate. While doctors pretended that the growth was benign for months, by September, it was revealed he had cancer. From then on, Freud was compelled to wear a prothesis and was rarely free from discomfort or pain. He published Civilization and Its Discontents, in 1930. In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor in Germany, and although initially unwilling to leave Vienna, after his daughter Anna was questioned by the Gestapo, he decided to leave, initially to Paris and then to London, where he died on September 23, 1939, asking his physician for a lethal dose of morphine.

Brief Overview

Chapter 1

Freud starts Civilization and Its Discontents discussing religion. Freud's friend, Romain Rollard, admitted to Freud to being religious due to a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as if something limitless, unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic'. This feeling confuses Freud, admitting to have never felt it, and he reasons that this feeling is a fragment left in the mind from before the ego is fully formed, which is to say, the ego is not able to distinguish the self from the outside world. He argues that in mental life, nothing which has once been formed can perish - that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brough to light. Here are some other of his thoughts on the preservation of stages of the mind:

The fact remains that only in the mind is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside the final form possible

what is past in mental life may be preserved and is not necessarily destroyed

it is rather the rule rather than the exception for the past to be preserved in mental life

He claims that the need for religion is like the need an infant needs of a father.

Chapter 2

In the second chapter, Freud initially broaches the question of the purpose of human life, but dismisses the question due to human presumptuousness and the fact that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system. He then asks what man's behavior can show about the purpose of human life and decides that man strive(s) after happiness.

As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.

Freud then makes a statement on the human condition:

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from the state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.

The three directions from which the human suffers:

1. the suffering of the body (of the flesh)
2. from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction
3. from our relations to other men
4. 1. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.

He notes that:

The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed.

and he enumerates the methods by which men may try to seek happiness or keep suffering away. He discusses love, which does not turn away from the external world ... [but] clings to the objects belonging to that world and obtains an emotional relationship to them, and he discusses aesthetics, the science which investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful. Ultimately, he concludes:

The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not — indeed, we cannot — give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other.

and that

Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

Chapter 3

In chapter 3, Freud discusses the social source of suffering, the one which we do not admit at all, the one which we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not, on the contrary, be a protection and a benefit for every one of us. He mentions a belief of many which holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. For the rest of the chapter, he investigates the question:

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization?

He mentions that our newly-found superhuman powers (after the industrial revolution) have seemingly failed to increase our happiness, and investigates civilization, which he defined as:

the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes - namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.

Some characteristic features of civilization:

• It brings nature under control
• It requires a reverence for beauty
• It values cleanliness, order, and hygiene
• It has esteem and encouragement of man's higher mental activities - his intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievement.
• • This requires what Freud calls sublimation of instinct.
• It regulates man's relationships to one another.

He reminds the reader that the liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. Freud tells us that the desire for freedom from civilization may spring from some injustice of from remnants of original man. The quote below conveys a possible reason for man's discontent with civilization:

it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, and other means?) of powerful instincts.

Chapter 4

Freud starts this chapter with the intent to answer what influences the development of civilization owes its origin, how it arose, and by what its course has been determined? Freud answers referencing his former work Totem and Taboo, in which he supposes that civilization arose from a band of brothers overpowering and killing their father, after which they realize that a combination can be stronger than a single individual. On the beginnings of the community:

The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object — the woman — and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her — her child.

He uses the terms Eros and Ananke to mean Love and Necessity respectively, and gives them credit for being the parents of human civilization. He then discusses aim-inhibited love, which is a kind of non-sexual love that one might show towards friends, family members, or people in general, and he admits: " this readiness of universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach". He notes the conflict between the family and that larger community, the conflict which arises due to the fact that the more close a family is, the more they are cutoff from the larger community. He also mentions that civilization greatly impairs man's sexual life.

Chapter 5

In this chapter, Freud discusses the libidinal way in which civilization attempts to join men together, and he shows why that it is a problem.

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy

Reality shows us that civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which strong identifications can be established between the members of the community, and it summons up aim-inhibited libido on the largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bond by relations of friendship. In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable

Freud starts talking about, what is to him, the restrictive commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. He vehemently disagrees with this commandment, and believes that it will make your life worse if you follow it, for men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. He proposes that civilization encourages aim-inhibited love in order to limit man's aggression. Freud talks about the flaws of communism, the narcissism and small differences, and concludes the chapter by remarking:

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.

Chapter 6

In Chapter 6, Freud talks about the development of instincts in psychoanalysis. He reviews his own work on the instincts and claims that the instinct is not one, but that there are two instincts: Eros and the destructive/death instinct, both of which contribute to man's discontent in civilization.

Hunger could be taken to represent the instincts which aim at preserving the individual; while love strives after objects, and its chief function, favored in every way by nature, is the preservation of the species. Thus, to begin with, ego-instincts and object-instincts confronted each other. It was to denote the energy of the latter and only the latter instincts that I introduced the term ‘libido'.

Freud talks about how the destructive instinct could have been overlooked or how some might merge it with the Eros instinct, given the existence of sadism and masochism. When Freud mentions the destructive instinct and how civilization tries to regulate that instinct, and how that fact may make man unhappy, one might think of getting rid of the destructive instinct; but the instinct, when moderated and tamed, when it is directed towards objects, provides the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature.

On civilization:

And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life arid the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.

Chapter 7

In chapter 7, Freud discusses the control of the destructive instinct and the super ego. Freud claims that civilization obtains mastery over the destructive/death instinct through guilt. What is guilt? Guilt is the super-ego, in the form of the conscious, punishing the ego for libidinal desires. How does the super-ego determine what is bad, and what thoughts or actions or desires it should punish the ego for? The bad is a fear of a loss of love.

The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world.

Ill-luck can cause the enlargement of the super-ego. Freud says that there are two origins of the sense of guilt:

1. Arising from a fear of an authority
2. Arising from a fear of the super-ego.

Freud claims that:

conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or that instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further renunciation.

The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external object.

Freud discusses the effects of parenting on the super-ego. He also returns to the Oedipus complex:

We cannot get away from the assumption that man's sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together.

the sense of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the external struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction and death. This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living together.

Civilization makes the father in the Oedipus complex society itself.

Chapter 8

In chapter 8, Freud clears up some definitions:

• Sense of guilt
• • fear of the super-ego
• Super-ego
• • an agency which has been inferred by us
• Conscious
• • a function to which we ascribe super-ego's agency. This function consists of keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exorcizing a censorship.
• sense of guilt = harshness of the super-ego = severity of the conscience
• Remorse
• • a general term for the ego's reaction in a case of sense of guilt

Freud remarks on the similarities between the process of human civilization and the development or educative process of individual human beings.

the development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges, the urge towards happiness, which we usually call ‘egoistic’, and the urge towards union with others in the community, which we call ‘altruistic'.

Freud discusses ethics and other things before concluding:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

Review

At the beginning of chapter 6, Freud remarks:

In none of my previous writings have I has so strong a feeling as now that what I am describing is common knowledge.

But this book and the information in it were common knowledge to me. I think most of the psychology you see today (most of anything that you see is on the internet), is pretty pseudo-scientific and not backed up by anything other than pseudo-science, a flaws social sciences study, or a religious doctrine. I have read some on psychiatry (I have read some of Peter Breggin and some on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and while what I have read I have found to be helpful in my life, this was the first writing on Psychology that I have read that I found to try to investigate the mind like a philosopher. Most of the ideas in the book were new to me, I liked the way they were laid out, and while I didn't agree with everything Freud had to say and while I don't share his contempt for religion, I thought this book was interesting and well worth the time spent reading it - not only because of the ideas in the book, but because of their influence on the future. Also, I am glad that I read this after having read the Republic, Politics, and while reading Democracy in America - man's mental state and his relation to civilization in my mind definitely has implications with regards to how government/the state/society operates (why would Freud have discussed communism in this book if this was not the case? Also, Aristotle often mentions man's feelings in Politics and how sometimes these feelings lead to the destruction of the state).

Some Things That I Find Relevant Today

I am only going to mention one quote that I found in the book today because I want to go do something else, but here is Freud talking venturing into cultural criticism before concluding that he is no longer going to broach the issue:

If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become neurotic?

Many people today claim that society itself has become neurotic today as a result of social media. Social media is like a large super-ego - every always has a camera / is always watching - and this large super-ego may be causing problems for the ego; there are many current social issues that relate to this fact of young people taking less risks / possibly fulfilling what their ego desires not often enough.