Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents: A Reappraisal

Rishab Somani                                                                                        

Dr. Travis Tanner

English 1010

8 March 2018

Freud’s Civilization: Reappraised

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist, scholar and neurologist and is known for developing the psycho-analytic theory of human psychology. In his book, Civilization and its Discontents, he is talking about how civilization came to be and why it is the way it is. He is simultaneously discussing the development of the human psyche and how it is analogous to the development of the society.

Freud starts off by saying that everyone wants to derive as much pleasure as possible and be shielded from things which hurt them (729). Every person has their own way of achieving happiness and so there can be “no golden rule which applies to everyone” (Freud 734). Religion imposes a certain way to the path of happiness and that is unfair (Freud 734). He continues and accurately concludes that “civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security” (Freud 752). However, this civilization that man has created for himself imposes many restrictions on him. Freud is primarily concerned with the restrictions on sexual relations. He claims that civilization forces people to take time and energy from something that they would derive pleasure from doing (i.e. having sexual relations) and that is the root of the cause of their unhappiness with it (Freud 745). He is also concerned with man’s primal instinct of aggression that is curbed by civilization (Freud 750), which actually unifies hordes of people and disallows using aggression against them (Freud 747). This causes unhappiness too, and the society as a whole then sublimates their aggression towards other countries and people who are not in their community (Freud 752). Freud also concerns himself with showing that just like an individual has an id, ego and super-ego, so does a civilization and he elaborates on how both these entities gain them (767). By enumerating the similarities between an individual’s psychic make-up and that of a civilization’s, he furthers his purpose to get the reader to think about how our civilization might be facing intra-psychic problems just as the individual does (Freud 771).

Freud begins the text by discussing the origin of religious attitudes. He takes into consideration the ‘oceanic’ feeling that religious people feel – a oneness with the universe (Freud 727). Religion preys on this ‘oceanic’ feeling as a means to further its own cause. He claims that this feeling is similar to the ego of an infant which does not yet know its boundaries and thus, does not distinguish itself from the external environment (Freud 724). He bases this theory on the fact that sometimes the boundaries of the ego get distorted as when someone in love claims ‘I’ and ‘you’ to be one, or more empirically when people have pathological disorders such as dissociative identity disorder (Freud 724). Freud’s conclusion based on this evidence is unjustified. The former has been taken too literally and while the latter is true, it does not imply that infants start off with an undefined ego. However, recent research studies show that babies do, in fact, take time to develop a consciousness (which has been frequently equated with the ego) and the earliest babies who develop it are still five month old. Freud would argue that this unawareness of the ego is what some people interpret to be the ‘oceanic’ feeling. Therefore, Freud’s conclusion that “the origin of the religious attitude can be traced back to the feeling of infantile helplessness” (727), still holds true.

Furthermore, Freud picks a bone with the religious commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (747). He alleges that by loving the stranger without a reason, he is unjustly putting him on par with everyone else he actually loves (Freud 748). Also, if he is supposed to love everyone then everyone can only receive a small part of his love (Freud 748). He believes, on the contrary, that the neighbor is more worthy of his hostility than love because he can try to take advantage of him (Freud 748). Freud’s ideas on this matter are flawed because just like he said before, there are different types of love such as sexual love and aim-inhibited love (744). Also, the commandment is actually asking you toconsider the neighbor as an extension of you, so as to not cause harm to him. On closer inspection, it is nothing more than a defense mechanism which causes both you and him to treat each other nicely so that there are no altercations – much like the driving idea behind forming a civilization.

Another important implication of Freud’s text is that civilization creates restrictions on sex such as incest (745), extra-genital satisfactions (746), homosexuality (746) and polygamy (746). However, civilization cannot be held responsible for it. As Zvi Lothane put it, “The Catholic doctrine that sex is sinful and shameful, started by St. Paul, was a reaction to Roman pagan culture of sexual licentiousness or excesses under Caesars like Caligula or Nero, resulting in sexual repression” (528). Obviously, the ‘Roman pagan culture’ was thousands of years after the development of the first civilization and so Freud’s statement that civilization causes sexual repression is incoherent. However, if one were to say that Christianity or religion (generally speaking) is the cause of it, there might be some weight behind the argument. Freud has erroneously amalgamated religion and civilization, possibly due to his given dislike of both. However, even though civilization may not have created sexual restrictions, they are still prominent in it.