Civilization and Its Discontents

Summary

Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style. The first chapter begins with a letter from the French writer Romain Rolland, who had praised Freud's critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion but objected that the true source of religious feeling was an 'oceanic' sense of limitless connection with the world. Freud says he cannot find this feeling in himself and explains it as a survival of the infant's early ego, before it distinguished itself from the outside world, illustrating the persistence of earlier mental states with the image of Rome's buried strata. The second chapter asks what people want from life and answers: happiness, as defined by the pleasure principle. Yet suffering threatens from three directions, the decaying body, the overwhelming external world and our relations with other people. Freud surveys the techniques people use to cope: intoxication, which he calls the crudest but most effective chemical method; the taming or killing off of drives; sublimation in work, science and art; withdrawal into fantasy; delusional remoulding of reality, among which he counts religion; love; and the enjoyment of beauty. None is guaranteed, and each person must find his own way. The third chapter turns to civilization itself, the 'third source' of suffering, and lists its achievements: tools that make man a kind of prosthetic god, cleanliness, order, beauty, intellectual and religious ideals, and the regulation of social relationships, which replaces individual power with the power of a community. All of this rests on the renunciation of instinct. Chapter four traces civilization's origins in Eros and Ananke, love and necessity, and argues that love, which founded families, comes into conflict with the wider culture, especially through restrictions on sexual life. In chapter five Freud examines the command to love one's neighbour as oneself and concludes that it is impossible because humans carry a powerful inclination to aggression; he quotes the Latin 'homo homini lupus', man is a wolf to man, criticizes the communist hope that abolishing property will end hostility, and names the 'narcissism of minor differences'. Chapter six revives his theory of a death drive opposed to Eros, and chapter seven explains how civilization disarms aggression by turning it inward as the super-ego, whose severity grows with each renunciation and produces an unconscious sense of guilt. The final chapter calls this guilt the most important problem of civilization, suggests that whole cultures may become neurotic, and ends by wondering whether Eros can hold its own against its immortal adversary.

Top Lessons

• Every way of escaping suffering has a cost

  Freud's survey in chapter two treats intoxication, withdrawal, sublimation, love and religion as strategies with different risks and payoffs, not as right or wrong choices. It is an early, sober comparison of coping methods.

• Conscience grows harsher the more we obey it

  Freud's paradox is that renouncing aggression feeds the super-ego, so the most virtuous people may feel the most guilt. Guilt need not track wrongdoing at all.

• Aggression does not disappear when property does

  Against utopian hopes, Freud argues that hostility is a drive that will find new objects, including minor differences between closely related groups. Social reform can redirect but not abolish it.

• A diagnosis of a whole culture should be offered with caution

  Freud raises the possibility that civilizations can be neurotic, then warns that there is no 'normal' culture to compare them with and no authority to impose therapy. The ending refuses consolation.

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Medical Lens

One of Freud's most read works and a core text for the psychoanalytic theory of guilt, aggression and the super-ego. Chapter two contains Freud's brief but important remarks on intoxicants as the most effective chemical method of keeping suffering at bay, written by a man who had promoted cocaine in the 1880s and who knew the risks of dependence. His treatment of the oceanic feeling as regression bears on later psychiatric discussion of mystical and drug-induced states of ego dissolution. The idea that cultures can be neurotic remains contested. Readers often connect the 'prosthetic God' image and the book's sober tone with Freud's cancer and prosthesis, which is plausible biographical context, not something the text states. Freud's death by morphine in 1939 is part of the history of physician-assisted dying.

• Ch. I

  Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling explained as an infantile ego-feeling persisting alongside the adult ego; pathological states in which the boundary between ego and world becomes uncertain.

• Ch. II

  Survey of methods of avoiding suffering: intoxication as the crudest and most effective chemical method, with the danger that it wastes energy; killing the drives as in yoga; sublimation; fantasy; flight into neurosis or psychosis; love; beauty.

• Ch. III

  Civilization's protections against disease and nature, including hygiene and cleanliness; technology as prosthetic organs; the footnoted speculation about the control of fire.

• Ch. IV and notes

  Restriction of sexual life by civilization; speculation that upright posture and the devaluation of smell led to 'organic repression'.

• Ch. VII–VIII

  The super-ego, unconscious guilt, and the 'need for punishment'; melancholia as the clinical picture of a harsh super-ego; the possibility of diagnosing 'communal neuroses'.