Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"), it is one of Freud's most important and widely read works. Sigmund Freud (IPA: ), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Year 1930 (MCMXXX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display 1930 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Cover of Civilization and Its Discontents.

Image File history File links Civilization_and_Its_Discontents_book_cover. ... Image File history File links Civilization_and_Its_Discontents_book_cover. ... Civilization and Its Discontents is a book written by Sigmund Freud in the decade preceding his death in 1938. ...

Contents

In this book he states his views of human nature and the question of man's place in this world, a place Freud says is on the fulcrum between the individual's quest for freedom and civilization's demand for conformity. As a result, civilization, or its culture, inhibits man's instinctual drives, which can (and perhaps must) result in guilt and nonfulfilment. Freud bases this on the theory of the origins of civilization he first posited in Totem and Taboo and the idea of a death instinct first developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Look up Fulcrum in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Mohandas K. Gandhi - Freedom can be achieved through inner sovereignty. ... Conformity is the act of consciously maintaining a certain degree of similarity (in clothing, manners, behaviors, etc. ... Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics was a book written by Sigmund Freud published in German as Totem und Tabu: Einige Ãœbereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker in 1913. ... Deathwish redirects here. ... Beyond the Pleasure Principle Published in 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle marked a turning point for Freud, and a major modification of his previous theoretical approach. ...

In this book, Freud maintains that human beings are inherently aggressive and that love for all of humanity is far from an inherent state of the human mind. Instead, this 'universal love' is a diluted and safe form of love that is motivated by our instinctual desire to avoid displeasure. Our aggression is weakened and disarmed by civilization, which then places in us a sense of guilt, the method by which civilization's norms are enforced.

Other important concepts of this book are the human instinct of aggression towards each other, dichotomy of Eros vs. the Death Drive and the super-ego. In his theory of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud sought to explain how the unconscious mind operates by proposing that it has a particular structure. ...

Historical context

This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I has undoubtedly influenced Freud and impacted his central observation about the tension between the individual and civilization. Under such conditions, Freud develops his thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927), in which he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud, an avowed atheist, argues that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, thus helping the civilization, yet at the same time it has also exacted an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God. “The Great War ” redirects here. ... The Future of an Illusion (written 1927) by Sigmund Freud is a book that describes his interpretation of religions origins, development, psychoanalysis, and its future. ... Churchianity is a negative description of organized religion that characterizes it as emphasizing the institutional forms of Christianity (traditions, rituals, committees, and programs) and omitting the actual gospel teachings of Jesus Christ that forms the basis of Christianity. ... For information about the band, see Atheist (band). ...

Quotations

"...admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological .... At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact." Pathology (from Greek pathos, feeling, pain, suffering; and logos, study of; see also -ology) is the study of the processes underlying disease and other forms of illness, harmful abnormality, or dysfunction. ...

"Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city." For people named Garrison, see Garrison (disambiguation) Garrison House, built by William Damm in 1675 at Dover, New Hampshire Garrison (from the French garnison, itself from the verb garnir, to equip) is the collective term for the body of troops stationed in a particular location, originally to guard it, but...

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation'."

"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido." Libido in its common usage means sexual desire; however, more technical definitions, such as those found in the work of Carl Jung, are more general, referring to libido as the free creative—or psychic—energy an individual has to put toward personal development, or individuation. ...

"The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one."

Reference

• Freud, Sigmund; Civilization and Its Discontents W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (July, 1989), ISBN 0-393-30158-3

External links

• Summary and notes on the book