Civilization and Its Discontents

About Civilization and Its Discontents
Civilization and Its Discontents, which Freud wrote in the summer of 1929, compares "civilized" and "savage"
human lives in order to reflect upon the meaning of civilization in general. Like many of his later works, the
essay generalizes the psycho-sexual theories that Freud introduced earlier in his career - the Oedipal conflict, the
theories of sexual impulses, repression, displacement and sublimation. Whereas before Freud was interested in
specific neurotics, one might say that in Civilization Freud expands his interest to identifying the neurotic
aspects of society itself. He extends his inquiry from man-in-particular to man-in-general.
The work is frankly pessimistic in tone, and many commentators have attributed this dark view to the
devastating experience of the First World War. This horrible conflict seems to have justified his insistence on
the violent and cruel nature of humanity. Earlier, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud revised his
earlier thesis that human beings are driven by a desire for erotic fulfillment by proposing that humans are
equally driven by a desire for destruction. This theory of the "death-drive," which Freud formulated in the midst
of the war, finds a wider application in Civilization.
From a chronological standpoint, this essay extends most immediately on Freud's reflections in The Future of an
Illusion (1927), in which Freud describes organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud argues that religion
performed a great service for civilization by taming asocial instincts and creating a sense of community around
a shared set of beliefs, but it has also exacted an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him
perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God. An avowed atheist, Freud refines his
theories in Civilization and Its Discontents to outline more emphatically the relation between psychoanalysis
and religion, as well as between the individual and civilization.
Published in 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents has never been out-of-print. It was perhaps Freud's most
widely-read essay during his lifetime and it continues to be among his most influential studies. It stands as an
authoritative analysis of culture and human civilization, made more relevant by the atrocities committed in the
following decades, particularly the Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist genocides, and nuclear bombs dropped on civilian
populations in Japan. Some have pointed to the prophetic nature of Freud's observations about the destructive
currents running throughout human civilization; indeed, Adolf Hitler's 1933 rise to power by democratic
majority found in Freud a personal historical witness to the phenomenon that he had previously attempted to
account for in psychoanalytic terms in his writings.