Essay on Freud?s view of civilization

Throughout the rest of the book, Freud addresses the conflict between civilization and the individual. He starts with the fundamental paradox of civilization: we created civilization as a tool to protect ourselves from unhappiness; however it is our largest source of unhappiness. He also points out that contemporary technological advances have been a mixed blessing for human happiness. He also asks what the purpose of civilization is if it is not to satisfy the pleasure principal. He later concedes that civilization has to make compromises of happiness to fulfill its primary goal of bringing people into peaceful relationships with each other, by making them subject to a higher, communal authority.

In chapter 8, Freud analyses the relationship between civilization and individual further. In his view, personal fulfillment still can be achieved under the community culture. He explains, “ Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of the individual human beings. It is true that the aim of happiness is still there, but it is pushed into the background”(Freud 105). In other words, community formed with every single individual and forming a community is the most important objective in the process of society development. Personal satisfaction can be achieved maximize if it is assumed that personal development is independent. However, the fact is not that simple. Individuals were born in community and they grow up in the environment that surrounded by their families and friends. They developed themselves along with the improvement of community. Individual and society are inseparable. So when individual considers about achieving personal fulfillment, the community culture is the first and the most primary restriction because they live in the community and they must obey community rules first. That is why Freud writes that personal happiness is always people pursuing but it is pushed into background when it intersects with community culture. For this reason, individual

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

In his work, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses modern-day society and scrutinizes the social restrictions it poses on its citizens. Throughout his analysis, Freud recounts the progression that humankind has achieved in the various branches of knowledge over time; he expresses, however, that this intellectual breakthrough has caused individuals to regress emotionally. Freud asserts that the manner in which modern communities construe moral behavior diverge from a human’s natural tendencies, causing for man to abide by a repressive code of conduct and subsist in a constant state of agony. Although Freud makes a sound claim in highlighting the indirect relationship between man’s intellectual development and sentimental retrogression, there exist a multitude of discrepancies in his discussion of technology and its applications, the social construct of love, as well as religious teachings that weaken his overall reasoning of the emotional limitations that modern society imposes on its inhabitants.

In progress, the current state of a people which is more prepared provide more rationalized thought would see the predecessor period in the terms of a primitive man. The primitive man would be considered as the Other while the ‘modern man’ would be considered the distinguished One in the conflict theory. The Other is considered “primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality”, but according to C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, the social conditions have changed ,but man itself has not improved enough to be considered different form the ‘primitive man’ . C.S Lewis mentions that the role of nature and man switched in terms of one being the master of another ,but this shift does not mean man has conquered death. Man has just prolonged life where “our endeavor to modify the significance of death from a necessity to an accident” reigns true. The condition of man has changed culturally, scientifically, and philosophically, but these improvements do not provide a shield from the human condition, but more of a tolerance for it. The primitive man and the modern man just have different perspectives concerning the reality of life where “our fellow citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed” so the plane of existence is the same just illusions have

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud attempts to explain the sources of human suffering: We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men (54). Ultimately concluding that the most heartbreaking kind of suffering is the pain felt due to the words and actions of our peers, specifically our loved ones, Freud laments the necessity of turning to others in order to find some sort of joy and argues

The super-ego functions as a self-regulating tool for the ego, “exercis[ing] the same severe aggression that the latter would have liked to direct toward other individuals.” Unlike the id or the ego, the super-ego is a result of society’s ideals and is what causes us to feel guilt, it is “an internal authority.” Society dictates what one should or should not feel guilty about, it is a learned, not innate aspect of human consciousness. This again similar to Nietzsche’s discussion on guilt, that guilt developed out of society and his ideas of conscience and morality to be a social construct. Although, Nietzsche explicitly puts the blame on the priests and religion, Freud seems to think it a naturally occurring aspect of

Freud referred to the Hobbes argument that humans are naturally hostile to one another, humans depend on their own man made devices and hostile nature, leading humanity into a war where a man will be against each other (Hobbes 1906, 96). Human civilization is an effort to set up limitations for man’s aggressive

In his book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud offers an explanation for why, as individuals, we tend to punish

but his theories on dreams seemed to be the most popular, even to this day.Freud thinks that the agent that

In his ground-breaking book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud postulates that society, despite ostensibly being set up to protect us from unhappiness, has a net negative impact on human happiness.  According to Freud, the three most important causes of suffering are the natural world, our own bodies, and our interactions with other people (Freud 44).  In addition to identifying these as the main causes of suffering, Freud also states that the suffering that comes from other people is the worst of the three.  Given how civilization has changed since Civilization and Its Discontents was published, however, this belief simply no longer holds true.  Freud’s belief that interaction with other people in society is the worst cause of human suffering is no longer valid in today’s world because of the net benefits of society’s protection, because of society’s benefits to the human body, and because of advances in society’s ability to satisfy human happiness.

Freud explained that our superego is conscience, or the voice inside our heads telling us individuals how to act or respond to events happening in the moment. The superego focuses on how we ought to behave. It strives for

The Ego, according to Freud, perpetuates feelings from within us, and as such can be ascribed certain traits. Firstly, the boundaries of our Ego are not constant; the Ego’s central role is to fend of displeasure from the external world. Wherein, the instinct of self-preservation, and similar constructive and destructive principles are preserved within it. Furthermore, our Ego’s do not necessarily die with us, using Rome as an example; we can see that certain developmental constructs crafted by our Egos have survived to modern day (i.e., Law). However, it remains that our Ego’s primary purpose is to fend off displeasure, whilst maximizing pleasure; this becomes known as the pleasure principle. Accordingly, the unsatisfactory tenets of our own mortality, and the measures we are willing to go to avoid such displeasure are relatively drastic at times. As displeasure can be brought on by three distinct entities: our own bodies, the external world, and our relationships with other men. German novelist and poet, Theodore Fontane offers us some examples, as there are “…three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.” (Freud, 1962). Ultimately, however, despite these coping mechanisms, our happiness and subsequent desires are “…a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and, finally, how much strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes” (Freud, 1962). Therefore, according to Freud, desire is all about maximizing the pleasure principle through the principle of transference. These processes are inherently instinctual, as they are perpetuated through the Ego, but no

Upon review of Civilization and its Discontents, it is apparent that several themes emerge throughout the essay that offer insight into Freud as the individual and his own personal journey navigating his place in civilization, as well as his position in the professional and clinical psychological communities. Freud holds that the division between the individual and civilization exists, in one form or another, due to a clash of needs: the individual desire for freedom and satisfaction of instinctual needs naturally collides with society's need for conformity and obedience, which thereby creates the most tragic of paradoxes in the human realm - our most basic needs and wants are, if manifested completely, harmful to our existence as a group.

This misery of the oppressed class arises from multiple factors. First, the people in this class are forced to submit to bourgeois greed through exploitation. Since the proletariat depend on wage labor for basic survival, they are forced into hard labor with minimal payment- no more than required to entice them to work. This system fulfills the capitalists’ greed, but subjects the proletariat to miserable living conditions, because they have no alternative. Marx is concerned with oppression, while Freud is concerned with repression. However, both reflect on the principle that this stifling of the individual creates misery and discontent in society. While Marx believes this misery can be overcome by overhauling the pattern of social order, Freud seems to believe that the maladies found in society are more or less unavoidable. In Freud’s view, suffering comes from three sources: “the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and…family, state and society” (Freud 37). He believes that the first two causes of suffering are unavoidable. However, what he refers to as “the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings” (37) are avoidable. This is what he refers to as civilization, and we feel a “strange attitude of hostility toward civilization” (38). Citizens begin to harbor aggressive hatred