About Civilization And Its Discontents
(steve nickolson)
The devastation of the First World War was squarely at the forefront of Freud's consciousness when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents in the summer of 1929. His central observation in this essay about the tension between the individual and civilization was historically grounded in the destructive warfare and unleashing of violent human energies he had witnessed a decade earlier.
From a chronological standpoint, this essay extends on Freud's reflections in The Future of an Illusion (1927), in which Freud attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Religion has performed a great service for civilization by taming asocial instincts and creating a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, Freud argues, but it has also exacted an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God. An avowed atheist, Freud refines his theories in Civilization and Its Discontents to outline more emphatically the relation between psychoanalysis and religion, as well as between the individual and civilization.
Published in 1930 and reprinted several times, Civilization and Its Discontents was perhaps the essay by Freud most widely read during his lifetime. It stands as an authoritative analysis of culture and human civilization, made more relevant by the atrocities committed in the following decades, particularly the Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist genocides, and nuclear bombs dropped on civilian populations in Japan. Some have pointed to the prophetic nature of Freud's observations about the destructive currents running throughout human civilization, but it is also important to bear in mind that Adolf Hitler's 1933 rise to power by democratic majority in Germany made Freud a personal historical witness to the phenomenon that he had previously attempted to account for in psychoanalytic terms in his writings.
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