User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur = Civilization And Its discontents, Sigmund FreudCivilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. It was written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Civilization").
Exploring what Freud sees as the important clash between the desire for individuality and the expectations of society, the book is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works, and one of the most influential and studied books in the field of modern psychology.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «تمدن و ملالتهای آن»؛ «ملالتهای تمدن»؛ «ناخوشایندی های فرهنگ (مترجم: امید مهرگان، نشر گام نو، 1382)»؛ «تمدن و ناخرسندیهای آن»؛ نویسنده: زیگموند فروید؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و دوم ماه آوریل سال2006میلادی
عنوان: تمدن و ملالتهای آن ؛ نویسنده: زیگموند فروید؛ مترجم: محمد مبشری؛ تهران، ماهی، سال1383؛ در124ص؛ شابک9647948352؛ چاپ چهارم سال1387؛ موضوع: روانکاوی و فرهنگ از نویسندگان اتریش - سده 20م
عنوان: ملالتهای تمدن؛ نویسنده: زیگموند فروید؛ مترجم: محمود بهفروزی؛ تهران، جامی، سال1395؛ در160 ص؛ شابک9786001761515؛
باز هم شرورهایی که با عنوان کنترلچی کار میکنند داده هایی را که با درد و زحمت در اینجا نگاشته بودم حذف کرده اند؛
فروید، با رویکردی «روانکاوانه»، «تکوین»، و «تکامل» فرهنگ و تمدن را، مورد کنکاش قرار میدهند؛ کشمکش میان سلیقه های فردی و اوضاع اجتماعی، که همان خاستگاه «ملالتهای تمدن یا ناخوشایندیهای فرهنگ» است را، برای خوانشگر کتاب نیک مینمایانند؛ این کتاب محصول واپسین دهه ی زندگانی «زیگموند فروید»، بنیانگذار «روانکاوی»، و به گویشی، یکی از پیام آوران عصر مدرن هستند؛ «فروید» در این رساله، که گویی «فلسفه اجتماعی» ایشان است؛ میکوشند بر پایه ی دستاوردهایشان در روانکاوی، و پژوهش در حیات جنسی بشر، روایتی از چگونگی «تکوین» و بالیدن «فرهنگ و تمدن» به دست دهند؛ روایت ایشان گواه است به ساز و کار سرکوب گرانه ای، که در بطن فرآیند رشد فرهنگ، دست اندر کار سرکوفتن و واپس راندن غریزه های بشر است...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/09/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
This book helps explain one of life’s enduring phenomena: rage. It explains why standing behind that scruffy, ponytailed, mustachioed gentleman in the checkout lane (let’s call him “Gerard,” for good measure), can trigger paroxysms of homicidal fury. Something deep and ancient roils inside as you do a quick comparison: Gerard, with his sensationally attractive girlfriend in tow, (let’s call her “Melanie”); and you, with just you. You stand there fronting a twitching half-smile that conceals the throbbing urge to rip the man-bun off his head with your bare hands. Alas, the spell is broken: you need to pay the cashier for those artisanal cucumbers, the ones you read about on that message board dedicated to “wellness.”
Later, sitting behind the wheel of your Hybrid, you shudder. Where did that come from, you wonder. The answer: you're an animal, buddy. That handsomely tailored Oxford button down only goes so far to hide the truth: you're a bloodthirsty, sex-crazed, status-seeking ape. Go on, if you dare, look inside yourself. You'll see the truth. Just try to keep your clothes on.
Rating: really liked it
THE MAN THAT HATH NO MUSIC IN HIMSELF,
NOR IS MOVED WITH CONCORD OF SWEET SOUNDS,
IS FIT FOR TREASON, STRATAGEMS AND SPOILS;
THE MOTIONS OF HIS SPIRIT ARE DULL AS NIGHT,
AND HIS AFFECTIONS DARK AS EREBUS.
LET NO SUCH MAN BE TRUSTED.
Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice.
No one in entre-deux-guerres Vienna of prim and proper upbringing really trusted the man Sigmund Freud. For his affections, as the Bard says, seemed as dark as the world of Erebus, the dwelling place of the Dead.
What business was it of any gentleman to openly discuss abnormal intimacy? Really!
But Freud was only following his own path, as Carl Jung would soon put it, of Individuation. And Jung selected the dramatic coming of age moment in Daphne du Maurier’s early novel Jamaica Inn as symbolic of that turnaround into selfhood.
My own jejune efforts at individuation were nipped in the bud, cause I was an absurd individual, and certainly a round peg in a square hole!
And Freud was just making HIS own Mid-Life Crisis PUBLIC - really growing is hard to do without risking prolonged exposure to the Real World. And the Real World is ugly.
But, to make the Bard’s prophecy above complete, Freud HATED MUSIC.
Hey, I don’t think he’d care for Thousand Foot Crutch (not surprising for a guy who distrusted believers as well, is it? Heh, heh)... no, this man had no music in his soul.
As a pampered child he would Scream in Protest the moment anyone - anyone! - sounded a note on the piano. So no one ever played it in his parents’ house. Point final!
Yikes. And when the adult Freud started a new project as an adult, no one who knew him DARED discourage him. And his primary pet project was psychoanalyzing himself - and his resultantly mixed-up family.
Freud’s kids ended up in pretty rough shape after all of his acting out a Watchful Big Brother rôle, overseeing ‘em.
Goodbye to their infantile daydreaming, and welcome to an alarmingly premature adulthood, kids!
Yikes again.
So, anyway, when this little book appeared early in the progress of his self-analysis, the good citizens of Vienna were mightily taken aback by his theory of the repression of primitive desires being a necessary byproduct of civilization.
What a dirty old man, this Herr Doktor! they said.
And rightly so.
For the European World of ethical high-mindedness that Freud’s compatriots knew was being threatened by an Earth-Shakingly Global Coming of Age -
Which would change the way we moderns see that ancient God, Eros.
To which most moderns say good riddance to bad hypocrisies...
But I’m not so sure -
For discretion, politeness and a decent sense of couth seem now to have vanished like the Dodo with the old holier-than-thou gentry!
But of COURSE you were right, in a way, Sigmund...
But did you HAVE to throw out the Baby of Decency with the Bathwater of Sexual Repression?
Rating: really liked it
There’s something unbelievable about Freud. If he was some ancient Greek or Medieval thinker, his ideas might not seem as strange. But the man was a contemporary of Albert Einstein, John Maynard Keynes, and F.D.R. He lived through the Great Depression and died during World War II—two events that continue to haunt the present day. Yet his theories seem so remote from our positivistic era that it can be difficult to even take them seriously.
Nonetheless, he remains one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In their diluted form, his ideas have pervaded our culture to the extent that we do not even realize that we are drawing on them. His name is just as recognizable as Einstein's, or Darwin's. Yet both of those thinker’s ideas are still held in high repute—more, they established the entire paradigm for their fields. Meanwhile, Freud’s ideas are only taken seriously in the dark recesses of literary or cultural criticism.
Pondering this, I came upon a realization, which I am sure many have had before. Freud’s system is a bizarro version of Christianity. Instead of a soul experiencing the temptations of the body, we get the ego experiencing the temptations of the id. Instead of Original Sin, we get the Oedipus Complex. Instead of confession and atonement, we get psychotherapy. Replace the Virgin Mother with the mother as an object of lust. Replace the Heavenly Father with the father as an object of jealousy. And replace Jesus with Freud.
By now I’m convinced that the erstwhile popularity of his ideas was a product of this confluence. It is an entire secular religion. His ideas are so appealing, that some people have become enthralled enough to apply them to nearly aspect of human life. The whole sexual liberation movement drew inspiration from this sexually repressed Austrian. Strange. But I am rambling now, let me get to this book.
It strikes me that
Civilization and its Discontents is Freud’s sequel to Nietzsche’s
The Genealogy of Morality. The two works tackle nearly identical issues: the origins of religion, of good and evil, and of the guilty conscience. And both give historical answers. Nietzsche believed that the guilty conscience was an outgrowth of the creditor/debtor relationship; Freud, on the other hand, believed that guilt arose as a result of a historical act of aggression towards a father. But most psychologists nowadays, I suspect, would find it quixotic to look for a historical origin to an emotion.
It seems hardly worth the time to criticize Freud’s ideas, but here is just a bit. When trying to grapple with something as abstract as a mind, it seems that thinkers resort to an analogy. The central analogy of Freud’s thinking is pneumatic. He believes we are motivated by “drives,” which build up pressure when not satisfied. These drives can be diverted and redirected, like a stream of water. While this analogy seems viable when thinking about sexual desire or hunger, it is useless when thinking of questions like language acquisition. Moreover, Freud places sexuality in the center of his system. Yet this makes just as much sense as placing the urge to eat in the center of a theory of human nature. Human behavior is complex. Reducing it down to the satisfaction of one or two drives is beyond simplistic. It’s stupid.
But enough of these criticisms; let’s look at the positives. Freud was one of the first intellectuals (though by no means the first) to place the emotional life in the center of human nature. As far back as Plato, philosophers have tended to think that rational theories were fundamental to our thinking. Witness Socrates, asking logic-chopping arguments about the nature of religious worship in Euthyphro, apparently oblivious to the emotional side of religion. This tendency to see human life as attempts at rational explanations extended all the way down to Freud’s day. In The Golden Bough, the anthropologist James Frazer,a contemporary of Freud's, explained religion as a kind of proto-science. Compared with this, I think Freud’s notion that religion is a satisfaction of an emotional need is a real insight.
Not only that, but Freud made clear the extent to which self-knowledge is almost impossible. Much of our motivations, he pointed out, stem from unconscious sources. While these motivations are not the river-like drives that he posited, he was at least correct in his supposition that the brain’s activities are not all conscious. In my opinion, this was a definite advance over thinkers like Locke, Hume, or Kant, who believed that they could get to the bottom of human thinking simply via introspection.
Regardless of the extent to which he was correct, Freud's influence is undeniable. So It’s worth the time to wade through his books, however bizarre they seem.
Rating: really liked it
This book deftly delineates the dilemma in our civic society, where the struggle between our ethics and animal instincts continue, and the ‘prices’ we have paid in making our society safe and secure. It rejoins what Victor Hugo and Tolstoy and Steinbeck show in their works...
But, most of all, I think it acutely depicts the fate of our judicial system, conceived by men who thought punishment would be the detriment to crime, but which ironically turned out to be the incitement to more heinous crimes.
True, countries like Norway have understood the importance of humane treatment in restoration, as opposed to humiliation in confinement, but, in most countries, the old-fashioned system still reigns, because it’s the easiest to sleep in the status quo.
Let’s hope this will change someday.
Rating: really liked it
This may come as a surprise considering how much I complain about psychotherapy, but I LOVE SIGMUND FREUD. This is not just transference, and no, he doesn't remind me at all of my father; I believe Freud was a great genius, and far more importantly, that he was a fantastic writer and very interesting person. I also believe that Freud is one of the most unfairly maligned and willfully misinterpreted figures of the past hundred-or-so years.
If you haven't read him (HIM, not his theories), or if you have but your mind was so full of distracting, disparaging thoughts about how he was a sexist pig or whatever that you couldn't concentrate, I encourage you to go back and read him again. He's a lot of fun, extremely interesting, and surprisingly humorous -- check out his short piece on jokes for a good time. This book here explores dark themes and ends on a somber note, as one might expect of a European book about civilization written in 1931.
Anyway, if I were to stay up all night long talking and doing lines with any figure, alive or dead, throughout human history, there is no question in any structure of my mind who it would be.
Rating: really liked it
the discrete joys of cultural pessimism This volume consists of two of Freud's essays
Civilisation & its discontents (1930) and the far shorter
'Civilised' sexual morality & modern nervous illness (1908).
The latter essay is the simple one , it points out that conventional (in turn of the century Vienna) sexual morality is a cause of mental ill health and even when it isn't, the focus on marriage as the only socially acceptable forum for the expression of sexual love in practise causes frigidity in women while among men it produces the effect that (citing Karl Kraus)
'coition is only an inadequate surrogate for onanism' (p.147) and therefore disappointment and dissatisfaction in marriage which is meant to be the central social unit and unique source of interpersonal pleasures.
In a wider sense we can see that mental illness can have a social component, and that in such cases it is society which is making us sick, if running off to some other society might offer a cure, Freud does not go so far as to suggest, although some have tried that with variable success.
I think from this I had a sense of how scandalous Freud was in his day, equally how far his vision of Viennese society - repressed, sexual double standards, the scandal of people in pursuit of their own desires: Colonel Redl, Egon Schiele, Alma Mahler - is now our dominant vision that that society, how far that is fair, just, and reasonable I don't know. The introduction points to the USA where apparently abstinence only education on questions of sexuality and sexual activity is apparently increasingly prevalent, something in the writer's opinion which will guarantee the continuing relevance of Freud as future generations will endure the same miseries as his contemporaries.
Anyhow that was the younger Freud in 1908, making an effort to get his voice heard.
Civilisation & its discontents is a very different piece, it is unhurried and self assured, there is no sense of urgency to save the world from muddled thinking, this is the voice of the man confident that he has a following and that there is some respect and acceptance of his vision, it is above all deeply pessimistic about society and culture, but in a surprise twist not about human history.
Freud is a gregarious author - which I had forgotten, but here as in Die Traumdeutung there is a reference to a friend and their experience in this case of how the friend's yoga practise gave them the Oceanic feeling which Freud imagines is the emotional experience that becomes rationalised into human religion. But I sense in this not Freud the cultural critic out on a limb (or two) on his own, but the friendly Freud, the man in the convivial circle of his fellows.
Reading this essay for the first time it struck me as significant that Freud and Marx were Jews, it is from the later Temple period of Judaism that a conception of history as purposive emerges, which historically is pretty unusual, it is the idea that history has meaning - specifically one created by God. History has a beginning and an end, and in the end God has decreed that there will be Peace, Justice and Good times, Freud and Marx both create secular versions of this, for Marx these ends will be achieved through social and economic developments for Freud through the interactions of basic human drives, he asserts that of the two primary forces- one destructive and anti-social, the other social bonding through love, that love will win through and humans will form a world community in which everybody is tied together in mutual re-enforcing bonds of friendship. Freud doesn't seem to quite believe himself, as he also sees the potential for humanity to self-destruct in an orgy of mutual slaughter. In an aside Freud looks at Communism, a flawed project in his view because for him tensions in human society don't come from an unequal division of property but from the psychological state of man. There is a destructive drive that is in contention with a constructive drive (view spoiler)
[ very much the view of Doestovesky's underground man desiring to throw a stone at the crystal palace (hide spoiler)].
Freud's vision of man in society reminded me of the opening scene of the film
Cool hand Luke - drunken Paul Newman chopping off the heads of parking meters (view spoiler)
[ and indeed I don't see so many parking meters around these days (hide spoiler)], that is Freudian freedom, freedom is quite negative in its manifestations in Freud's view, it is the freedom to please yourself by harming others. Civilisation is repression and so in Freud's view a rather good thing. Sickness is the price we pay for social living. For Freud - as we say about ageing - this may not be good, but it is preferable to the alternative. This means as a consequence we are all somewhat repressed and frustrated, and it follows that this is why people were in Freudian talking therapies for ever - there can be no cure , only adaptation, and the marker of a mature well adjusted person is a certain melancholy, if not a persistent low level depression. Freud is distinctly not impressed by his own essay, and we are not surprised by his persistent cigar smoking. Given his views, the need for comfort and reassurance was sufficient for him to smoke himself to death.
Again because this is a late essay, and perhaps one reason why Freud sees it as unoriginal is that it feels like a medley of his greatest hits - Man creates God in his own image, specifically of an angry Father, the brothers overthrow the father, but internalise him as conscience. This Freud describes as
history, it is interesting (for me at least) to see that if he starts by destroying the myths of the society in lived in that he quickly comes to create a new set of myths or 'Just So Stories' to explain why we are the crazy mixed up creatures that we are.
Still the unavoidable awfulness for which we are all responsible, the lingering painful consequences of economic growth and development, our Kafkaesque guilt - it works for me, or doesn't maybe. I had the sense that if Freud had not existed, it would have been necessary to have invented him as a cultural and social critic, poking beneath the surface of our accepted realities, an example here. It is a version of Enlightenment thinking that has limited faith in the goodness of human nature in a Darwinist world - everything is subject to the powers of reasoned analysis and observation, but what people say and believe about themself must not be taken at face value - just look at the self-destructiveness we see in figures in public and private life. Finally Freud looks forward to the possibility that we will be able to analyse entire ages and historical societies
"one day somebody will venture upon such a pathological study of cultural communities" (p.117)
In passing Freud seems to use man to mean man rather than people, so this is openly and confidently a one sided perspective. Also there are some great footnotes (view spoiler)
[ on Heine's wish to see his enemies hang on trees before his windows and on the sense of smell in sexual life (hide spoiler)].
This is a new translation, the translator has sort to avoid certain familiar technical usages in favour of achieving greater clarity, your mileage may vary.
Rating: really liked it
This book was sent to its publishers right after the great crash of 1929, but of course, it was written earlier. In the coming decades of wars, economic recessions, nuclear weapons, colonialism and unchecked capitalism, Freud became a preacher sort of figure despite his disdain for religion. His view that civilization with its laws and morals prevents us from gratifying a primitive human aggressiveness was seen to represent the general antagonisms of the twentieth century and the violent human condition in the western world.
With it portentous message, the views expressed in this book are very reflective of the sense of crisis that was prevalent in the twentieth century, the world always seemed to be on the brink of collapse, on the verge of destructive conflict. So of course it was easier to place its source within human nature, but to me, this largely removes credibility, responsibility from the actual source. It seems to me that it's easier to accept doom as an inevitable consequence of human nature than it is to actually confront the cause of antagonisms, and this is where I'm very influenced by Marxism. I do believe that a lot of the conflicts of the previous century had their roots in actual material conditions than in abstract human nature.
To me, this book reeks of the meta-critique of reason, the human and civilization at large are identified as the self-caused cause. For Freud the resolution between the Kantian dualism of theory and practice seems to be in the Unconscious and at this point, I honestly don't know what to make of it. Maybe I'll return to this book when I'm more mature.
Rating: really liked it
`Civilization and its Discontents' is Freud's miniature opus. It is a superficial masterpiece that stretches further than any of his other works; he is reaching for an explanation for human nature in terms of the id-ego-superego structure of the individual as he exists in civilization. For Freud, human beings are characterized by Eros (Sex Drive) and Thanatos (Death Drive), which remain in opposition to one another. This small book is filled with as many interesting ideas as any work of modern philosophy. Freud adopts (perhaps a bit hastily), a Nietzschean position with regard to the role of religion and institutions of social morality which curb and shape primordial human drives. As a result, human beings, and civilizations as a whole remain unsatisfied and suffer from neuroses. He concludes with a discussion of human aggression, which manifests itself in the form of communalized human aggression. He wonders as to whether or not human beings will be able to overcome this drive. It seems to me that this question remains the most important for human beings in the 21st century. Will we be able to overcome our Thanatos and survive the destructive powers that we have created? I suspect that Freud will be better remembered as a thinker and philosopher than as an analyst or doctor precisely because he asks the questions that remain relevant for civilization today, and are likely to remain imperative in the future.
Rating: really liked it
This is more of a rant:While reading a different book, it just dawned on me: this book excessively echoes the centuries of the Western hatred of the self. The book is haunted by the ghosts of not only Hobbes and Augustine but also Thucydides and Hesiod. The role of culture is to suppress and/or sublimate the pre-social animalistic nature of human beings. The primitive anti-social instincts of the child are put down by a super-ego representing a father and more largely a civilised society --- taking a distinct form of Augustinian or Hobbesian contours of the sovereign domination of the individual's anarchic impulses. Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist, mentions that the infant's grasping of "reality" through experiences of pleasure and pain is a virtual replication of Hobbes' empiricist epistemology in the opening chapters of
Leviathan.
I have only recently begun to notice that the deeper you dig into Western philosophers/theorists, the older and less original their theories get. It's amazing how blood-sucking systems like capitalism is an acutely Western phenomena --- predicated entirely on the "selfish gene" aspect of humanity, that philosophers/thinkers, including the whole system of Freudian psychoanalysis, partook in. Arbitrary satisfactions of bodily desires were mystified as universal rational choices.Ontologies and Theologies of an irredeemable materialist aspect were furnished. A whole cosmos was fashioned in the image of the "I am the Species" tendency of the West. If humans really have an anti-social animal disposition, how have these ethnic groups and tribes not discovered their animality and bestiality living so close to nature?
Civilisation and its Discontents is a testimony to this perverse idea of human nature that the West has unleashed upon the rest of the world.
Rating: really liked it
Studying psychology I never cared much for Sigmunds insights into the human psyche and dreams. They seemed interesting from a cultural, maybe even literary or intellectual perspective -but not from a scientific point of view.
His sociological ideas and writings however impressed me deeply in my student years. I read this book cover to cover in two days. One of the points that stuck was that humans not only have an innate drive to survive, but also to self destruct.
Fascinating book and very well written. I should reread..
Rating: really liked it
Undoubtedly, Sigmund Freud is a classic. Consequently, he shares the fate of any classic: everybody knows of and few read him anymore. After all, what is to discover we didn’t already learn? That he explained every evil or deviation in human behaviour by some repressed sexual urges generated mainly by the Oedipal complex. That he founded the science of psychoanalysis, but many of his theories and methods are obsolete today. That he influenced the Modernist movement, especially regarding some famous techniques such as introspection, psychological analysis, stream of consciousness, involuntary memory and so on. Things we've learnt in school, while studying more or less some excerpts of his books.
But when you finally make up your mind and read it, you realize he is definitely worth it. That he is always relevant, and in no way a mere fossil frozen in time to remind of obsolete periods in our culture.
In this context,
Civilization and Its Discontents is a revelation. Its main theme: civilization as a source of unhappiness for the individual, is not new (Rousseau’s good savage comes easily to mind, not to say that it is a problem debated since antiquity), but the development he chose to give it is seductive and pertinent.
The premise is simple and difficult to argue with:
…what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.This pursuit of happiness is prevented by at least three factors: our own body, the external world and our relations with the others. Therefore, whenever life becomes too hard to bear, man resorts to palliative measures: “powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.” An example of deflection could be the scientific activity. Art, with its refugee in the phantasy can act as a substitute. Drugs, alcohol etc. – as an anaesthetic.
But why is man unhappy with himself and the world? Because, Freud says, man is basically an aggressive being whom civilization keeps in check through two “weapons”: Ananke and Eros, that is, “the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love”. However, the love instinct (used by the society to keep its members together) is counteracted by the aggressive instinct. (I liked, even I wasn’t convinced of, the reference to the Oedipal complex as illustration for this problem: the aggressive instinct dictates the killing of the father, whereas the love instinct stops it).
The struggle between Eros and Thanatos (with the continual repression of the death instinct dictated by society) leads to a sense of guilt which, although the most important problem in the development of civilization bringing with it the loss of happiness, usually remains in subconscious, being experienced rather as a sort of malaise, of anxiety. Moreover, the super-ego, which is the consciousness, penalizes the ego either with remorse or guilt, for sins committed or only thought of.
The book ends with two presumptions: on one hand that beside an individual super-ego there could also be a “cultural super-ego”, thus viewing the society as a huge organism that developed its own consciousness, and on the other hand, that the battle between Eros and Thanatos is not only eternal but also unpredictable, thus throwing a pessimist shadow over the future. And he was unfortunately right. The World War II was just around the corner.
Rating: really liked it
A tedious read, Freud's essay is mundane at worst, general knowledge at best.
Freud had this tendency to make pretty obvious and minor premises and then jump to big and somehow unrelated conclusions depending on said premises.
It's already known that Freud and his disciples were treading a deserted land which is psychoanalysis in their times, which calls for far more caution and far more-in this case, very welcomed-pedantry.
Nevertheless Freud writes with uncalled for confidence, mixing facts with personal views with no impartial evidences to stand on, he even admits it more than once in this particular book.
All in all, I didn't come out with anything new, all I had were "Oh yeah? I think so too" moments which are not my expectations whatsoever from this book.
Rating: really liked it
The Price of Civilized Security“Civilized man has traded in a portion of his chances of happiness for a certain measure of security.”Sometimes it is worth reading the original source of an idea that now should be taken for granted in our culture. Not this time. While there are a few gems in this work, I am mainly reminded why Freud is no longer taken seriously. Here we receive his view of an entire civilization based on his experience with those few neurotic patients who can afford his services. And have you noticed that he is rather obsessed with sex?
Freud deserves credit for recognizing a few fundamental truths: Unconscious processes motivate much of our behaviour, and sex plays an important role. And in this book, repression is an essential part of civilization. It is in pursuing the details that he often departs from scientific method, and sometimes from reason itself.
Religion and Universal LoveFreud was not exactly a fan of religion:
“Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing human beings in a state of psychical infantilism and drawing them into a mass delusion, religion succeeds in saving many of them from individual neurosis.”Religious people believe that they increase the value of life, and some religious practice may be based on sound psychological principles that Dr. Freud ignores because they are not sex. But he has a good point about universal love:
“It is always possible to bind quite large numbers of people together in love, provided that others are left out as targets for aggression… After St Paul had made universal brotherly love the foundation of his Christian community, the extreme intolerance of Christianity towards those left outside it was an inevitable consequence.”In modern society there is a new God:
“Man has become, so to speak, a god with artificial limbs. He is quite impressive when he dons all his auxiliary organs, but they have not become part of him and still give him a good deal of trouble on occasion… Let us also remember that modern man does not feel happy with his god-like nature.”Death, Fire and Sex ObjectsWe are not happy because our tendency for violence and sex must be suppressed for civilization to work. Writing after the shock of World War One, Freud invented a death instinct to explain why it happened. This makes no evolutionary sense. Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined makes a much better case for the importance of suppressing our natural tendency to violence. Unfortunately, Freud sees sex behind everything. Seriously, this is his version of how humanity learned to use fire:
“Extinguishing a fire by urinating on it was therefore like a sexual act performed with a man, an enjoyment of male potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever first renounced this pleasure and spared the fire was able to take it away with him and make it serve his purposes. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitement he had subdued the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest would thus be the reward for forgoing the satisfaction of a drive. Moreover, it is as though the man had charged the woman with guarding the fire, now held prisoner on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to such a temptation.”Silly me. I thought it had something to do with fire being warm. But along with the irresistible male urge to piss on every phallic flame he sees (if I don’t feel that way it must be because I am repressed), we can see a certain view of the relationship between men and women.
“Hence, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female or – to put it more generally – his sexual objects around him.”This may remind one of The Donald’s locker room talk. But Freud was a keen (if sexually obsessed) observer of human nature, and other parts of the book seem quite sensitive to the (mainly sexual) needs of women. It is hard to tell here if that is his personal view, or he is guessing about attitudes in primitive society (like towards the fire), or if it reflects what he learned from his male patients.
Neurosis, Civilization and Free LoveWe are constantly reminded that the cause of neurosis is suppression of the sexual drive. In the 1960s we tried to solve that problem with free love, as part of a general campaign against the perceived ills of civilization, or against civilization itself. Freud himself knew better then to dismantle civilization:
“It is contended that much of the blame for our misery lies with what we call our civilization, and that we should be far happier if we were to abandon it and revert to primitive conditions. I say this is astonishing because, however one defines the concept of civilization, it is certain that all the means we use in our attempts to protect ourselves against the threat of suffering belong to this very civilization.”Good point. I would add that one of those things that civilization tries to repress is violence, including violence against those women who are reduced to sex objects. Maybe we should think first before we tear something down.
Today we can do something conspicuously lacking in Freud’s work – look for evidence to test the hypothesis. So does all that free love at least reduce neurosis? It seems every university reports that today’s liberated generation needs ever-escalating mental health support. This suggests that while some sexual freedom may beneficial, more is not necessarily better.
Sex as Distraction, Diversion and DopeWe are told there are there are three kinds of palliative measures to help us endure life:
“powerful distractions, which cause us to make light of our misery, substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it, and intoxicants, which anaesthetize us to it.” In other words, Distraction, Diversion and Dope. I suppose in his sex-starved society he never imagined sex itself filling these roles, especially the role of intoxicant. Fuelled by unlimited pornography, sex has become, in the words of his fellow intellectual luminary, an opiate for the masses. See The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science for what a modern psychiatrist has to say about that.
Let me suggest my own hypothesis that should, at least in principle, be testable. An obsession with sex, as opposed it being part of a relationship between people, necessarily leads to an objectification of the partner, the meaning of Freud’s “sex objects”. When a person is seen as an object, the inhibition to using coercion to achieve the goal is reduced. I am drawing a direct connection between sexual “liberation” and the result we now call “rape culture”, in contradiction of the popular ethic that anything goes as long as it is consensual.
Something to Talk AboutI don’t apologise for throwing my own opinions in here, because I see that as the only possible value of this book: as a stimulus to discuss the role of repression in maintaining civilization, and in particular the consequences of too much or too little sexual repression. I cannot recommend this book for any other purpose than to start such a discussion.
Rating: really liked it
At one time it was wrongly believed that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (i.e. the embryonic stages mirrors the development stages of the species). Similarly Freud thinks the phases that an individual goes through mirror the same phases that civilizations have gone through. Freud uses that theme to explain his psychoanalysis in describing individuals and the societies in which they live as mirror images of each other.
Yes, Freud does believe some weird things and he restates them in this book such as the early infant's whole world is the mother's breast and thus we end up fetishizing the breast when we grow up, our time in the womb means we always are looking to return to an abode of some kind, something about the anal fixation and how it never leaves us and unrepressed sex desires lead to our anxieties and other such things that sound weird to our modern ears. But those distractions don't necessarily mean that this book is not highly engaging and worth reading. I'll challenge you to read any recent biography because you''ll almost always see the author slip into Freudian speak (e.g. I'm currently listening to "The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor", and the author says that her father was strict and controlling and that made Mary Astor not trusting of men and unwilling to share her feelings with others particularly men, a very Freudian interpretation ). It's not a bad way of seeing the world. It's how we understand our selves or others. Now days, we just don't add on the word neurosis or repression, but it's how we cope with the nature within ourselves and others.
I like this book for the same reason I liked Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals". I don't agree with what they are saying, but they provide a narrative that is compelling. Matter of fact, you can tell that Freud is really influenced by Nietzsche within this book. Freud will say something such as the "conscience of the individual gets repudiated by the instinct leading to an anxiety that gives a person guilt" and that leads them to the wanting of taking away of the power of the father. (I don't have the quote exactly, but I think its fairly close to what he was getting at). Nietzsche's "will to power" at it's most basic cries out for how the community takes away our primal instincts, takes us away from "man’s instinct to freedom". What Freud does within this book is argues Nietzsche's viewpoint with the emphasis slightly different. Freud states that our conscience gets perturb from within the family and by extension within the community leading away from our authentic (not a Freud word, but I feel comfortable using it here) selves.
As I was listening to this I had to pause to see what year he wrote this book. I noticed it came before Heidegger's "Being in Time". Heidegger had a long section on 'conscience', and seemed to conclude that the conscience is the cause of itself. Freud does a similar thing (if you take his complete statement on the topic within the book and you relate it to the father of the individual as he does or as he does latter on in the book to the sacrifice of the Messiah on the cross, he makes it a complete circle thus giving itself as its own ground (I think)). "Will" is defined as it's own cause by St. Thomas Aquinas thus giving our conscience its primal place in his theology and leading to free will such that God can judge us for our moral acts in a necessary universe but which was contingently created by God exercising His will. Freud is giving us our conscience as a thing in itself and thus we can be blamed for who we are or became (even if we are schizophrenic, autistic, or predisposed to alcoholism by genetics, or whatever).
The conscience leads to guilt because of our repressed neurosis (he'll say). Nietzsche will say the guilt is not real, Heidegger says it is because of the debt we owe to the future because of the one absolute truth we always know (our own impending death), and Freud says we have the guilt always but we repress it thus leading to our neurosis. (I love using that word 'neurosis'. It's totally void of meaning and I think the DSM V doesn't use it at all as a category for that reason). All three are trying to return to us our authenticity which has been taken away from us by civilization (and the family).
Freud in this book also lays out a defense for the importance of character, community, and science and aesthetics in the development of the individual and the functioning of civilization as a whole. He dismisses religion. The neurosis (there's that word again) that exist in the individual also exist within the civilization as a whole (he'll say). By character he is getting at blaming the victim. It's the values that the individual (and species) are not learning properly from their community and will later on allow for 'refrigerator mom's' to be blamed when their child is schizophrenic or have autism. He'll even say that civilization as a whole is currently (1920) suffering from neurosis.
Freud lays all of this stuff out in this book. Do I agree with any of it? Not at all. But, there is a narrative that Freud uses that is fun to follow. I liked this short book so much, I'll probably buy "The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis" by Freud that audible offers which I would guess will cover most of this stuff in deeper detail.
