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Sigmund FreudCivilization And Its Discontents
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Individual Versus the Group
The main topic of Civilization and Its Discontents is the tension between individual human beings and the societies they organize and live in. The basic purpose of culture and civilization is to generate benefits for everyone, but this result requires cooperation. Meanwhile, each person has his or her own desires and fundamental yearnings to pursue, and often this quest leads to clashes with others.
The main purpose of a culture is to divert people’s energies toward useful group activities, including working together to build prosperous communities. Humans also need to reproduce, so they organize into couples and then families to provide for their next generations. A society tries to coordinate families so they support rather than conflict with each other.
In the process of diverting human energies toward cooperation, a society may resort to intimidation and threats to keep control people, thus heightening the struggle between individual desires and fellowship. Group values, for the most part, align with personal values, but where they don’t, individuals may find they are at war with themselves. Sometimes this battle breaks out into open conflict, a result the society wants very much to avoid.
For Freud, this tension between individual and group desires is never-ending, though progress toward harmony can be achieved. He believes community actions often resemble, in scaled-up format, the workings of individuals, to the point where a group can behave as if it were neurotic. Freud hopes insights gleaned from psychoanalysis can be useful in larger social contexts.
Human Aggression
When an individual clashes with a culture, the individual has the advantage of aggression, energized by a powerful destructive impulse. Societies attempt to suppress aggressive instincts, chiefly by imposing upon each individual’s super-ego, which guards against antisocial tendencies. As a result, an individual will come to accept communal constructs as a part of his or her own belief system. The super-ego relies on guilt, functioning as if society has installed an electric cattle prod inside each individual that fires a painful charge in response to any urge to behave in a way that might damage the society at large.
Nevertheless, humans and societies very often fail at curbing aggression. Recent research corroborates Freud’s observation that self-regulation is ineffective: Scientists have found that personal willpower, when exercised often during a day, tends to weaken and become used up as the day progresses. It’s no wonder, then, that the news is filled with reports of shootings, rapes, riots, beatings, and property crimes. The police can do only so much to quell this behavior; the super-ego, acting as a little policeman inside each person’s head, also reaches a limit. Because civilizations are built to benefit people communally, they will inherently fail to meet individual needs. Those who feel stepped on by the march of progress will rise up in rebellion. As a result, Freud has his doubts about the ability of civilization fully to restrain the humans’ destructive impulses.
Civilization
Despite the conflict between individuals and their societies, Freud believes civilization is worth defending. He cites scientific and artistic progress as important examples of how the sublimation of human impulses powers the machinery of human progress. Freud admits, however, that one of the main quests of modern humans is freedom—especially the freedom of individuals to be themselves, even if that license is inimical to a society that wishes to control anarchic impulses. Thus, the very thing a civilization most wants to suppress becomes the thing its members most desire. Political systems have tried, in recent centuries, to accommodate this need with laws that permit but also sandbox certain personal liberties. Freud views civilization as a work in progress, one that he hopes will succeed despite its inherent difficulties and uncertainties. After all, the advantages of civilization appear to outweigh the downsides. Perhaps someday culture and freedom, apparent opposites, will find a way to harmonize successfully.
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