Commentary on Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” By Janet Oakes April 2007

Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents in 1929, toward the end of his life. He was suffering from cancer of the palette and was in constant pain. This, and the post WWI historical time create the context for his pessimistic view of the irresolvable tension between the individual and civilization. The Part 1 of the book continues his sociological application of psychoanalysis from The Future of an Illusion (1927), his analysis of religion as a collective neurosis that supports civilization, functioning as a collective super ego. I agree with his view of religion as mankind’s defense against feelings of helplessness, a defense that keeps man infantile and dependent on an illusory father/God.

The conflict between individual’s instincts and the restrictions of civilization may be traced back to Freud's earliest psychological writings. His early work on the psychosexual stages of development included aggressive or destructive drives bound to Libido in the form of sadism (oral, urethral, anal). He still considered aggression as part of the self-preservative instincts when is arose in response to frustration of, or conflict between the ego instincts (hunger) and the object instincts (love). Not until 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle did Freud posit a death instinct separate and opposed to the self-preservative instinct. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud describes both 1) the conflicts between our sexual urges and the social rules that help us survive and 2) Thanatos, a primary self-destructive death instinct that has devastating social repercussions when it is directed outwards. War, genocide, murder are all evidence for Freud’s theory that man is not innately ‘good’, as Rousseau believed. 

“The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that 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. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” (69)

Freud says it is impossible to answer the age-old question, “What is the purpose of human life?” that we only know that men strive after happiness. He catalogues our ways of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure: intoxication, sublimation of libido into work, the displacement of libido onto enjoyment of beauty, etc. Civilization helps protect men against nature, regulates human relations and encourages man's higher mental activities: intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements. Eros and the self-preservative instincts contribute to civilization; as we can survive better by working together, and sexual love (the prototype for all happiness) unites us in couples, families, and groups. But restrictive sexual mores contribute to man’s “discontent”

“As regards the sexually mature individual, the choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex, and most extra-genital satisfactions are forbidden as perversions. The requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice.” (60) 

Civilization provides us with greater security through law and order and mutually agreed upon social values, but always at a cost -

“The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. 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. (72)

Freud sees how difficult it is for man to give up the satisfaction of aggression and observes that groups offer an outlet for it through sanctioned hostility against intruders. “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” He calls this tendency to feud against adjoining territories and communities ‘the narcissism of small differences’. Racism, anti-Semitism, etc. are also examples of this.

Freud sees aggression as a fundamental part of human instinctual disposition that is the greatest threat to civilization. Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to unite people, families, and nations into one great unity of mankind. Eros serves the preservation of the species through reproduction. Civilization is a fragile compromise solution in the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction.

“In the developmental process of the individual, the program of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition, which must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness can be achieved. The fateful question for the human species seems 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.”

Freud shows a profound and original understanding of human nature. By the time of writing Civilization and Its Discontents he is in his Post Enlightenment phase. He dares to look beyond the hopeful ideals of progress and evolution, to stare into the unknown and possibly bleak unfolding of story of man.

See also The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud, and for a current (April 2007) treatise of the same theme; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

“In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.”