Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud

We must agree with Freud, to whom our culture and civilization were merely a thin layer liable at any moment to be pierced by the destructive forces of the underworld.
-- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, page 4

Themes
1) The sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization. 2) The repercussions of the superegos attempt to control destructive/aggressive instinct inevitably causes conflict and unhappiness for the individual and for civilization as a whole.

 I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a fathers protection. -- page 20

Goethe on Religion and Life

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion! He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who posseses neither of those two, let him have religion! -- page 23 Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days - Alles in der Welt lsst sich ertragen Nur nicht eine Reihe von schnen Tagen. -- page 26

 Intoxicants and Yoga are two methods for subduing unhappiness. Sexual love is the most pleasurable means of gratifying the urge for happiness.

 It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes upon him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness. -- page 39

 No feature seems better to characterize civilization than its esteem and encouragement of mans higher mental activities -- his intellectual, scientific, and artistic achievements -- and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life. -page 47

 Genital love and aim-inhibited love (such as friendship) -- page 58

Happiness
Mine is a peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a fe fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. After their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive ones enemies -- but not before they have been hanged. -- Heinrich Heine ()pages 67-68)

Raw Aggressive Desires

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. -- pages 68-69

Historical Atrocities
Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and the Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War -- anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. -page 69

 The Narcissism of Minor Differences -Scots and Englishmen, Spanish and Portuguese, North and South Germans, ridiculing each other -- page 72

 Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. -- page 73 The attempt to restrict instincts is a reform which civilization cannot accomplish. -page 74

 Hunger and love are what moves the world. Schiller -- page 75

 Civilization obtains mastery over the individuals dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. page 84

Conscience and Fortune

Ill luck greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances. -- page 87

Thrash The Fetish!

If a primitive man has met with a misfortune, he does not throw the blame on himself but on his fetish, which has obviously not done its duty, and gives it a thrashing instead of punishing himself. -page 88

 The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt. -page 97

Communal Super-Ego and Heros

The community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds. The super-wgo of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders -- men of overwhelming force of mind during their life thesed figures were -- often enough, if not always -- mocked and maltreated by others and even dispatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence. -- page 107

Opposing the Super-Ego

We are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavor to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. nIt issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey. -- page 109