For all the celebrated shortcomings of his theories, Sigmund Freud remains, even in retrospect, the most influential thinker of the 20th century, a giant among the giants of that now by-gone era of late modernity. He still must be regarded as the most perspicuous among positivistic and systematic students of human nature and the most devoted, at least in the consistency of his ideas. His rubric for the self-referential category, "ego", is used almost universally, regardless of culture, language, or learning. Who among us hasn't used the term? Very few thinkers in any age can claim such rapid and profound widespread assimilation of their ideas as Freud. He was also first among the moderns, really the first since Montaigne, to formally prioritize self-knowledge among all types of knowledge, and, reverting to a very ancient idea, perceive the telos or fruit of the attainment of knowledge as therapeutic. While James and other contemporaries focused on elaborating the principles of the new science of human nature, founded on behavioral rather than traditionally metaphysical grounds, Freud undertook the project of their application, in a simple and accessible manner on as broad a scale as possible. Nowhere in his oeuvre is this delineation of the explanatory power of the application of psychological theory to central social problems or queries more transparent than in Civilization and Its Discontents.
Surprising to many coming to Freud for the first time, is that his writing, for the most part, exhibits such clarity that it can be read and understood, within the limits of their comprehension, by children. I remember reading a bit of The Interpretation of Dreams at age fourteen and getting something out of it. But more than accessibility accounts for the impact of Freud's ideas. If a science of human nature is in its infancy, in his nascent structuralist model, Freud gave it a language if not a new paradigm that could be universally acquired. But personally, exclusive of Totem and Taboo, I find his later works, The Future of An Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and the vastly underrated, Moses and Monotheism, to be far more interesting and relevant than the better known early works where he develops his psychological theories.
The quintessential late modern (an era that begins philosophically with publication of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the incendiary works of Tom Paine), Freud appears to write The Future of An Illusion as a defense, an apologia, if you will, of his atheism. He begins by designating Civilization and Its Discontents an extension of this argument. He cannot be merely, tritely arguing didactically for atheism. What he is saying in the preliminary stage of the argument amounts to this: Up to now, traditional religion has been our primary lense for viewing human, thus social, action. But what if, and one must grant at least the possibility, God, Christ, et al, is a mass delusion or rationalization? Could not a science of human nature, a systematic inward scrutiny, provide a more productive perspective on our problems? Is not the human project something other than, even more than, a divinely ordained, fatalistically fulfilled apocalyptic end? And, looking at the human condition (he writes in 1930), there is no denying a new way looking is desperately needed, for perhaps our very survival.
The next claim in the argument is that all societies promise justice. Yet, as individuals, we inevitably protest the "civilizing" process a society takes to deliver some degree of justice to its members. Freud claims that this process necessarily does violence to the individual. The individual is bound by civilization to his/her fellows and, in this process, the natural desires are limited, restricted, and bent by the whim of an external, collective will, " . . . which aims at binding the members of a community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end." We are naturally resentful. We want it all. Especially sex, with whomever we deign to mount or be mounted by. But Freud buys further into psychological egoism: " . . . men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the 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." "Man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization . . . whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind."
Hobbesian as a social theorist, he's absolutely Nietzschean when he debunks the Socratic "Archimedian Point of Good" and Agape or Christian Altruism as ideals of civilization which can never be happily achieved, sources of frustration, guilt, despair, and worse yet. "We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good or bad." The "civilizing programme" thus sets itself up as a sentinel within the individual psyche, in opposition to the natural tendencies to self-gratification. [Then] " . . . the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, `social' anxiety." "Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal's commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself - a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man."
Abiding by the Amazon rules, I won't be a spoiler. What I wish to point to is how Freud acted as a conduit for some of the most influential and disturbing modes of thought, general acceptance of which the popularity of the `psychological' approach he spearheaded encouraged. A few of his conclusions thus call for review. " . . . 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'." "The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their extent their cultural development will succeed is mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction." The continuing influence of these pioneering insights renders Civilization and It's Discontents a must read for any who wish to come to grips with structures of thought which have crucially contributed to current malestorm.
Civilization and Its Discontents
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Last update: 01-28-2025
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cvairag"No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such."
CrystalGreat book!
Thorn CathedralO.K
Steven VoseAny other Strachey edition will do
James FosterOh Freud
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