Sigmund Freud 's Civilization And Its Discontents

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.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers are two extremely renowned individuals who have greatly contributed to the history of psychology. Their contributions are the foundation for the tools, techniques, and methodologies used by psychologist today. Although, each psychologist is from different times and developed different methods, they shared a passion for the workings of the human mind. As a result, their drive and foundation has motivated and prompted new theories and research for the future. This paper will provide a summary of two articles highlighting the processes contemporary psychologists use to develop the theories of Freud and Rogers. It also explains their views of human nature and worldviews as

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).

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud composes essentially to look at the relationship between the individual and society. Through Freud's examination of the relationship, a more profound comprehension of the intricacy of mental life is figured it out. Freud starts to add to the relationship ahead of schedule in the work by portraying the most primitive acknowledge of self and the most primitive acknowledge of the outside world. He further adds to this relationship through the pondering of sexual yearning and its associations with adoration, which he claims, lead to the arrangement of families and after that later gatherings of humankind that came to include development all in all. Through inquiries raised concerning society, society, history and the self, Freud has the capacity portray a kind of guide of the brain. This guide Freud delineates further empowers him to build up a comprehension of the relationship in the middle of human advancement and the person.

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

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

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.

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

The philosophy of Karl Marx begins with the belief that humans are inherently cooperative with common characteristics and shared ends. To human beings, life is considered an object and therefore, humans make their “life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness” (Tucker 76). In other words, humans are able to think, imagine, and “produce even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” (p. 76). It exemplifies that idea that humans not only have the capability to create things for survival but express themselves in what they produce, within the standards of the human race or universally. When capitalist wage-labor enters the picture, it forces these shared ends and the freedom of expression in human production to cease, causing a rise of competitiveness among

Among the most controversial figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The rhetoric of the first of these men, Karl Marx, both inspired revolutions in China, Russia, and Cuba, as well as led to his expulsion from Germany, France and Belgium. As for Freud, Yale history professor Peter Gay notes in his biography of the psychologist: “[He] has been called a genius, founder, master, a giant among the makers of the modern mind, and, no less emphatically, autocrat, plagiarist, fabulist, the most consummate of charlatans.” (xvi). Though Marx is perhaps best described as a political theorist and Freud a psychologist, there is a great deal of overlap in the work of the two intellectuals. Most importantly, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx shared a fervent dissatisfaction with society and its oppressive mechanisms. Yet the source of this oppression was not a point of agreement among the two thinkers. Where Marx advocated class struggle and bourgeois domination as the main obstacles to a harmonious, peaceful society, Freud contended that the fundamental barrier to such a society is human nature itself, which, in his opinion, consists of a constant struggle between a desire for pleasure and the constraints of reality; while Marx believed that Communism could bring about societal contentment, Freud held that the pleasure which man derives from aggressiveness precludes the possibility of collective peace and, concurrently, the restraint with

In the first few chapters of Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud comes to a number of interesting conclusions about the human psyche. Throughout the first chapter, Freud outlines the complex nature of the human mind; the ruins of childhood provide the basis of further building. Although human nature is intricate, people are easily manipulated, so Freud argues. Another one of Freud’s “astonishing contentions” is tricked and coerced by society to the point that humans involve themselves in civilized society to protect themselves. To their detriment, humans transfer their freedom to the opinion and acceptance of the group.

This essay argues that the propositions put forth by Karl Marx in his political essay “Estranged Labour” presents a nuanced and logically sounder theory behind his concept of human nature than Hobbes does in his essay “The natural condition of Mankind”. Marx’s perception was that man’s labour is intrinsically a part of his human nature, and the alienation of this labour drastically negates what it means to be man. Whereas Thomas Hobbes presents that man’s natural state is one of conflict, and that this conflict can only be overcome through rules set forth by the sovereign, only then can men live in peace with each other.

Whereas Fromm discards some of Freud’s ideas, he agrees with much of Marx’s theory. He uses an example of class war where those who are concerned with material equality are as obsessed with possession as those on top. On the contrary, “if everybody’s possessions are functional and personal, then whether someone has somewhat more than another person does not constitute a social problem” (Fromm 84). Fromm provides evidence that Marx was an advocate of this idea. One of the good qualities of the book is that Marx’s philosophy is explained from the point which people often overlook because of the general negative perception of the Soviet Union as an example of a Marxist-Leninist state.

When considering religion, various theories by Sigmund Freud can be quite controversial yet interesting. Some of Freud’s theories and views with regards to religion involve; the origin of religion, the basis of guilt or sin for obedience, and God as a heavenly father a mere projection made by humans based on their needs. Before going into depth on some of the theories of Freud, we can gather from his book Totem and Taboo, that he was in fact of Jewish background and ultimately an atheist as he describes himself as “in his eternal nature a jew with no desire to alter that nature” but also “completely estranged from the religion of his father and any other religion” (Freud 1930). We can also gather that Freud had a reductionist approach, which argues “objects or beliefs, including super human entities, are nothing more than human constructions that can be ‘reduced’ to human basics”. (Nye 2009) Within this approach it continues to also reduce God to “merely what humans want him/her/it to be, a projection of one of more aspects of human behavior.” (Nye