Civilization and Its Discontents is considered one of Sigmund Freud’s greatest works, as it discusses many of the concepts that are key tenets in psychoanalysis. First published in 1929 and then translated to German in the next year, Civilization and Its Discontents deserves its fame, for it discusses the conflict between individuals and their respective societies.
The first chapter describes, among many things, the ego. The ego, believed by Freudians, is only a member of the triumvirate of psychology - the other two members are the id and the ego. The ego, described by Freud, “detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself” (29). To begin, the ego, believed by Freudians, is the conscious self, the person, so to speak, who tries to satisfy both the id and the superego to the best of their ability. The id is the part of the person’s psyche which contains every desire and base drive. The superego keeps the id in check, as it is basically your conscience, and makes a person remorseful upon committing a “bad” deed, and guilty for just thinking of doing something undesirable. As encapsulated in the previous quote, Freud clearly believes that the ego in a person, before their birth, is one with the rest of the world due to a lack of consciousness. However, once the individual is born into this reality, they gain a sense of self, as they are indeed part of this world, but separate from most of its objects. This consequently imbues them with a sense of morality and their view of the world, as most people aren’t omnipotent. Freud also mentions the “oceanic feeling,” which is frequently experienced by the religious. Freud states that the oceanic feeling occurs when one feels of “limitlessness and of a bond with the universe” (29). That is, the oceanic feeling is one of profound self-transcendence, in which a person gets the “big picture” from a bigger angle that isn’t limited to themselves.
In chapter 2 of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses more about religious feelings and their implications, as well as an age-old question: “What’s the meaning of life?” Freud, instead of giving an answer, acknowledges that the question itself “has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one” (42). Freud then describes how many people would feel like life wasn’t worth living anymore if there was no meaning, but that this only arises from “human presumptuousness,” as “Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man” (42). Freud moves on to the “pleasure principle,” which, he admits, “dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world” (43). Freud presents an ironic fact - one of the main reasons people live is to satisfy their desires and for pleasure, yet living solely for this purpose is quite impossible, as society and nature doesn’t allow for such things. Furthermore, Freud states, quite accurately, that “When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment” and that “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things” (43). For example, one can feel a lot of pleasure and anticipation during a roller coaster ride, but not from a positive state of life, no matter how pleasurable it may be in the beginning. I, for instance, want to go to beautiful areas like Santorini. While I will definitely love the experience as a whole and feel intense happiness in the first few weeks, eventually I will grow accustomed to the whole state of affairs, though I will obviously still appreciate my good fortune.
On the opposite side of pleasure, we have pain. Pain, as described by Freud, is much easier to experience than pleasure. Though the quote that Freud gives is a long one, it should be said by him for it is one of the main ideas of the book: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men” (44). Freud’s assessment of suffering encapsulates the concept very well. To give his argument flesh, we can look at potential suffering - when it comes to the body, diseases can be acquired that are unpleasant, such as the common cold, measles, tuberculosis, cancer, and other terrible ailments. These diseases and conditions range in intensity and duration - cancer, paralyzed limbs, and chronic pain could last for years or even lifetimes, while relatively trivial ailments like the flu are generally gone within a week or two. When it comes to the external world, there are two forces worried about: impersonal ones and human ones. Most animals, not just humans, are threatened by the outside world to varying degrees. Natural disasters are a part of nature’s nature. Another example is that of the dinosaurs - the dinosaurs were on Earth for more than 100 million years, and they were wiped out through no fault of their own. Aside from natural disasters, humans also wage war on each other, as seen in many of the disastrous battles in history. Ironically, soon after Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents, he was forced to flee Europe because of the Nazi takeover. Finally, when it comes to the suffering which arises from interpersonal relationships, Freud states that that kind of suffering is oftentimes the most painful and is inevitable like the other two, for humans are social animals who generally desire to help and please others, and they will commonly forgo many forbidden pleasures in exchange for companionship, which is what a civilization is at its most fundamental level.
Freud begins chapter 3 by admitting that many people are hostile towards civilization because of the many restrictions it puts on the lives of its inhabitants. For instance, Freud describes how the “victory of Christendom over the heathen religions” caused much emotional and physical repression due to the “low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine” (59). Christianity has been described by Nietzsche as a religion of weakness and denial, as it severely limits what its followers could do - they couldn’t aspire to greatness, do even morally ambiguous acts, or otherwise enjoy life due to the supposed afterlife which may not even exist. Freud then moves on to his diagnosis of the causes of neuroses - “a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals” (59). Then Freud discusses an irony - our control over nature has skyrocketed over the last few generations, but happiness has not increased in a similar way, as technical control (or management) over nature is not the only cause for happiness, but one of many. Freud continues to discuss science, technology, and culture, eventually coming to state that “Beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of civilization” as they are just as important as control over nature, for they represent control over the separate individual. Furthermore, these three elements also enable people to use their higher mental faculties, as stable environments and rules are fundamental to such things. Freud eventually discusses the state of liberty in society - “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” (72). While civilization does restrict freedoms - what people can do - it is not without reason, because if people have complete and total freedom, anarchy and disorder will ensue, destroying the said civilization.
Freud’s basic premise in chapter 4 is that love is a mandatory component of civilization: “The communal life of human beings had … 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” (79-80).
In Chapter 5, Freud clearly states that sexual restrictions is the main reason why people are neurotic - “The neurotic creates substitutive satisfactions for himself in his symptoms, and these either case him suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering for him by raising difficulties in his relations” (89). The love instinct in Freud’s vocabulary is the “Eros” instinct, while the death instinct is known as “Thanatos.” Both these names derive from Greek mythology of the corresponding gods. Freud then discusses aggressiveness again, as another reason of neuroticism is that people have few ways to vent their frustration: humans are “creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness,” and this is seen very well in history, from the Mongols to Tamerlane to Crusaders to WWI and soon WWII (94). Freud soon concedes that civilization’s attempts to make humans an inherently tamer animal by restricting their sexual life and telling them to love one’s neighbor has only prevented “the crudest excesses of brutal violence” but have failed to make humans inherently calmer or approachable. Freud even discusses the viewpoints of the Communists, in that people are only corrupted by property. Freud firmly states that even if private property is to be completely abolished, aggression will still remain, for power will still remain in some form and will continue to be used due to wanton aggression. To end this chapter on a relevant note, Freud states that it is easy to understand why humans are so unhappy in a civilization when they are severely restricted, which can be encapsulated in the quote: “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security” (100).
Freud focuses on the “Thanatos” instinct, which includes many of the unfortunate tendencies of humanity. For instance, he discusses masochism as arising because of repressed sexuality and aggression that has also been repressed - a lethal combination. To put it in Freud’s own words, masochism “would be a union between destructiveness directed inwards and sexuality - a union which makes what is otherwise an imperceptible trend into a conspicuous and tangible one” (107). Freud eventually talks about the role of the superego in monitoring aggression. In a classical dilemma, Freud shows that in many individuals, the superego isn’t really a conscience, more like a watchman when it comes to figures of authority, for “people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out” (116). Freud then states that present-day society is largely based on that principle. This is, at the very least, somewhat accurate, for many people, if given the chance, would speed, so long as they assured that they wouldn’t get into an accident or be caught by a member of the police.
Freud ends Civilization and Its Discontents by discussing the “cultural superego” of the human race. He remarks that “The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual” since “It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders” (143). Freud also states that many of these great leaders were maltreated by the rest of humanity, with many being put to death cruelly. Freud states that the best example of his phenomena is in Jesus Christ, who was crucified for being untraditional in the eyes of civilization. Freud then discusses the nature of the superego: it is invariably strict, and in order for neurotics to survive in a civilization, they must lower their own standards. However, when it comes to the cultural superego, there is no such thing - “It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it” since “it assumes that man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id” (145). Freud then discusses that the cultural superego is commonly mistaken, for when more is demanded of an individual than what they could do, one can expect them to either become neurotic or be rendered unhappy. Freud, after mentioning psychoanalysis, ends his book on page 149 with the following sentences: “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 … Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that … they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man … And now it is to be expected that … eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”
Personal thoughts:
For the most part, Civilization and Its Discontents was an illuminating discussion on human civilization and the corresponding human psyche. Freud’s language is easy to understand, and he published this book at a fateful time, for WWII broke out afterwards, which would signify the victory of Thanatos over Eros, but is further counterbalanced by the long peace after the war. Freud, throughout the book, is easy to understand and follow, and as stated before, this book includes many of the key terms of psychoanalysis which are pervasive in the field of psychology. To conclude, Civilization and Its Discontents is a great, accessible read for anyone interested in Freud’s ideas.
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