sigmund freud civilisation and its discontents

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.

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. This theory of the 'death-drive,' which Freud formulated in the midst of the war, finds a wider application in Civilization.įrom 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. 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 horrible conflict seems to have justified his insistence on the violent and cruel nature of humanity. The work is frankly pessimistic in tone, and many commentators have attributed this dark view to the devastating experience of the First World War.

He extends his inquiry from man-in-particular to man-in-general. 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. 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. 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.

Sigmund freud civilisation and its discontents