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Civilizations and its Discontents
Sigmund Freud
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What is Civilizations and its Discontents about?
In The Civilizations and Its Discontents, Freud attempts to understand how people relate to society, how societies are formed, and how individual psychological forces interact with larger, group-level forces.
Key ideas of Civilizations and its Discontents
The Pleasure-Happiness Mismatch
Human beings are wired for fleeting pleasure, not lasting happiness, and no technology or social arrangement has changed this basic fact.
Civilization Demands Renunciation
Every advance in culture is built on instinctual sacrifice, and the aggression that cannot be discharged outward is turned inward as guilt.
Eros Against the Death Instinct
The history of civilization is a struggle between Eros, which binds people together, and a destructive instinct that pulls toward dissolution and self-annihilation.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Letter That Started It All
A French novelist wrote Freud a letter. The novelist was Romain Rolland — winner of the Nobel Prize, friend of Gandhi, mystic of a kind Freud distrusted. Rolland had read *The Future of an Illusion*, Freud's 1927 demolition of organized religion, and he wanted to say: you've missed the point. You attacked the doctrines, but doctrines are not where religion lives. Religion lives in a feeling. He called it the oceanic feeling — a sensation of limitless, unbounded oneness with the universe. No belief required. No promise of heaven. Just the felt sense that the self dissolves into something larger and older than itself.
Freud begins his last great book by admitting that he cannot find this feeling anywhere in himself. He is a scientist, and the absence of the datum bothers him; he refuses to fake it. So he does what he always does, which is to ask what such a feeling would mean if it existed.
His answer is one of the most beautiful turns in his work. The infant, Freud says, does not yet know where its body ends and its mother begins. It cries, and food arrives. It is hungry, and warmth comes. There is no edge to the self because there is no self yet — only a smear of sensation and need. Slowly, painfully, the ego learns to draw a line. What is outside it can be lost; what is inside cannot. The infant casts off everything painful and clings to everything pleasurable, and out of this sorting it builds a pure pleasure-ego, surrounded by a hostile not-self that has to be negotiated with from then on.
But the early state, the all-inclusive ego, leaves a residue. Freud's hypothesis is that the oceanic feeling is the survival of this earliest condition, alive underneath the adult mind, occasionally bursting through. The grown-up brain contains the infant brain the way a city contains its older versions.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand why modern comfort has not made people noticeably happier.
- Anyone who is interested in the psychological roots of guilt, conscience, and moral anxiety.
- Anyone curious about why civilization produces discontent rather than simply relieving it.
- Anyone drawn to big-picture thinking about human nature, aggression, and the limits of political idealism.
About the author: Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Over roughly four decades of clinical practice in Vienna, he developed the concepts of the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, repression, and the structural model of the mind. His work transformed how the twentieth century thought about human motivation, mental illness, and culture.
Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, grew out of a correspondence with the French novelist Romain Rolland and stands as Freud's most ambitious attempt to apply psychoanalytic thinking to society as a whole. He wrote it in his seventies, near the end of his life, as political conditions in Europe were darkening around him.
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