Civilization and Freedom Essay

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of personality argues that human behavior is the result of the interactions among three component parts of the mind: the id, ego, and superego. The Id (Anger), is concerned with satisfaction of basic and physical needs and urges.

Civilization is the stage of human social development. Civilizations have improved over the years. The ancient River Valley Civilizations have created a foundation for future human developments. The ancient River Valley Civilization all made key contributions for future societies. The Civilization from Mesopotamia and China had a massive influence for future civilizations.

Freud primarily subscribed to the idea that there are two energies that drive human behavior. These two energies are sex – the pleasure principle and aggression. The human mind is comprised of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Within the realms of the mind, the human personality is controlled by the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is driven by the pleasure principle. The superego is the instinctual moral good, which aims to please the ego ideal, or the magnified moral values. The ego interacts with both the id and the superego and aims to please both components (Connors).

The unconscious contains the instincts, those driving force for all human behavior. In Freud’s later writing he revised the conscious- unconscious distinction and came up with the id, ego and superego. The id is the unconscious, the least accessible part of the personality. The id includes the sex and aggressive instincts. Freud wrote, “We call it…a cauldron full of seething excitations. [The id] knows no judgments of value, no good and evil, no morality” (Freud, 1933, p 74). The id seeks immediate satisfaction without regard for the circumstances of reality. The id operates under the pleasure-seeking principal. For example, a newborn’s mind consists only of the id, which is responsible for the satisfaction of physical desires. The id, represents a human being’s most primitive desires, and a person ruled only by the id would do everything strictly for his or her own pleasure, breaking societal norms in the process and risking punishment. (SparkNotes, 2007)

Throughout history freedom has had many different meanings and definitions; based on race, gender, and ethnicity. According to the dictionary freedom means the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint (“freedom” def. 1). Freedom may seem like something given to everyone however it was something workers had to fight for. Not everyone believed that workers’ rights needed to be changed, which led to a long battle between workers, employers and the government. To the working class people freedom meant making higher wages, having regulated hours, workable conditions and the right to free speech.

Civilization: an advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been reached.

“The condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc.” This is the definition of civilization. So when I explain the different characteristics of the western civilizations, which is mainly made up of all the countries in the world that have roots that go way back to ancient Greece. Although western societies have a lot of similarities as todays and other civilizations, it’s still tend to be known to as pretty rare, mainly in the way “western” think and believe. Western people thinking investigates something that is thought to be true and questions it, they were the type of humans to heavily test everyone’s mind. They would challenge one another to think outside of what

Philosophers Sigmund Freud and Eric Hobsbawm present two explanations of the origins of civilization in their books Civilization and its Discontent and Nations and Nationalism since 1780, respectively. In doing so, each philosopher establish a distinct, and somewhat similar, definition of civilization. According to Freud, “’civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors.” (Freud, 63) There are distinct features of a civilization, such as beauty, the “encouragement of man’s higher mental activities – his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements” (Freud, 69) and the social relations between men. While Freud refers to this union of a group

Freud attempted to explain how the unconscious functions by dividing it into three structures, the id, ego, and superego. The id holds our primitive instincts that demand immediate gratification, because it operates on the pleasure principle (McLeod, 2010). Similarly, the ego also seeks pleasure. However, instead of seeking immediate gratification, the ego acts realistically in order to avoid potentially negative consequences that may arise. On the other hand, our superego represents our conscious. It encompasses the morals and values we learn by society and our parents as we go through the stages of

Freud mainly focuses on human nature and questions the desire, ideas ,and beliefs that shape a human, he then further analyses them. We see in his literature, Civilization and its Disconnect, that he questions religion and the belief in God. He himself does not believe in God, but wants to know why many people follow and trust something that they cannot see. He also questions the concept of human relationships. Knowing that a two person relationship and interaction is inevitable and that it is a part of life, but he does not know if a third relationship, and further on, is necessary. Regardless, human relationships are a part of society, and one of causes of civilizations, which Freud defines as “the whole some of achievement and the regulations which distinguish our lives” (Freud). With one of the achievements

Civilization is the period in which humans develop and organize their community in an advanced form in different aspects. As time was fleeting the ancient Greek civilization was starting to shape and adopt many alterations which started to center a more stable community. Just as the Greeks there were other civilizations developing some similar to the Greeks attributes and some differing them in different aspects.

Freud described humans as having three essential components that built personality. The three components were the id, the ego, and the superego. He described the id, as being what governed an infant’s drive to overcome their primitive biological desires. According to his theory infants had no other goal than to release the tension that built up when their

Freud’s view of civilization emerges from his understanding of the struggle between Eros and Death. Freud expresses the existence of two contrary instincts, Eros and Death, via starting from the speculations on the beginning of life and biological parallels. While Eros preserves the living substance and joins it into larger units, such as societies, Death dissolves these units and brings them back to their primeval state. The death drives appear to be regressive, striving for a return to a less differentiated, less organized state of tensionlessness. In contrast, Eros (which embraces sexual and life-preserving instincts) is progressive in seeking ever more differentiated forms of organized life and even the widening of differences in it

Freud's realization that mental life and civilization are so connected helps him to achieve a deeper understanding of the complexity of mental life. He comes to conclude that the development of each, if not the same process applied to different kinds of object, then they are at the very least similar. Freud's examination of the relationship between civilization and the individual allows him to note that the individual seeks to serve itself while at the same time serving civilization, just as civilization seeks to create unity among humans while perpetuating its own self. Freud also comes to conclude through his

Civilization is a word that cannot be used too loosely. How then, is civilization defined? It is difficult to define in one word or phrase because a complex society or “civilization” depends on many different aspects. There are characteristics of a civilization that are more essential than others, some of which may be more important to one group than to another. However, a definition for civilization can be narrowed down to a few fundamental aspects that are necessary for one to exist. For a complex society to exist, it must have means to provide for a growing population. Acquiring resources is vital for a civilization to flourish. Next, the earliest civilizations all seemed to