Sigmund Freud 's Vision Of Humanity Essay

“Civilization and Its Discontents” is a book written by Sigmund Freud in 1929 (originally titled “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” or The Uneasiness in Culture.) This is considered to be one of Freud’s most important and widely read works. In this book, Freud explains his perspective by enumerating what he sees as fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. He asserts that this tension stems from the individual’s quest for freedom and non-conformity and civilization’s quest for uniformity and instinctual repression. Most of humankind’s primitive instincts are clearly destructive to the health and well-being of a human community (such as the desire to kill.) As a direct result, civilization creates laws designed to prohibit

The unconscious mind houses the preconscious, a small section that houses material that is non-threatening, and easily brought to mind. But deeper in the unconscious mind are the instinctual drives, the wishes, desires, demands, and needs that are kept hidden from out conscious selves because of the conflicts and pain they would cause if they were brought to bear every day. Psychoanalytic personality theory tells us that the personality consists of three separate, but forever intermingling elements, id, ego, and superego. The id section of a personality is by far the largest, the only section that we are born with, and the section that contains the unconscious thoughts, it is raw, unorganized, and from the time of birth it tries to reduce tension caused by our primary drives. The ego, a section that develops soon after birth, balances the instinctual desires of the id and the realities of the outside world. Last of course is the superego, the final personality structure that is developed in childhood, and represent the rights and wrongs of society, contained within the superego is the conscience, the part of us that prevents us from behaving in a morally deplorable way and is responsible for guilt. Psychoanalytic personality theory is not without its virtues; Freud’s proposed five psychosexual stages – oral, anal, phallic-oedipal, latency and genital – are all supported in life.

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).

Sigmund Freud was a well known psychologist whose theories have founded the understanding of the human psyche. Freud’s theory of personality is one of his most known theories. It details that there are three segments of consciousness. The id is desire, immorality and is what drives us to do wrong. The superego exists to counteract and overpower the id, as it is morality, commonly known as our conscious. The ego exists to balance out both extremes and devises a solution to sate each segment. Then there are the defense mechanisms, repression, denial, projection, displacement, regression and sublimation. These are employed by the ego to keep the balance between the id and the superego and to protect the psyche, especially in traumatic times. Last, the Oedipus complex which Freud believed, only exists in children from the ages of 3-5, when they become attracted to

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.

Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud are European sociologists who studied and wrote about the affect of industrializations and with society. Emile Durkheim is known to many in the humanities and academic fields. Freud is familiar to anyone who has studied intellectual and scientific history. Durkheim and Freud believed understanding the rules of society was vital for human survival. Durkheim compares to Freud in some aspects to religion. Both Emile and Freud were of European descent.

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

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

In Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, the author presents a world where women are in the background. The men go out and risk their live and hunt for the family while the woman’s only role is to take care of the child. Similarly, To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf is a novel, that exemplifies Freud's idea of a family. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are the two main figures of the house. Mr. Ramsay is a controlling dominant creature that depends on his wife for happiness. Since men are dominant, specifically Mr.Ramsay, Freund states “...women finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.”(Freud 84 ). When Fred states “forced into the background” he means that women are dependent

First Paper Due: What is Freud’s central thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents? What evidence does he use to support his argument? How might Bataille’s work confirm or refute Freud’s central argument(s) in Civilization and Its Discontents? Using Freud’s book as a methodological tool, analyze and interpret Bataille’s writing—what does it demonstrate or suggest about the fate of the psyche in the modern world?

Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality and the stages of consciousness and its constant battle paint a very negative picture of human life. The ego constantly has to battle the id and its selfish demands and the superego flying in trying hard to aid the id in calming down and strengthening the ego. As such our mind is constantly in war, our ego constantly battling off the evil id and losing every battle.

One of the most intriguing aspects of psychology is child development, it greatly impacts the rest of our lives and ultimate helps determine who we become as an adult. From a psychoanalytical perspective there are two great theorists, Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson.

According to Sigmund Freud and his theory of Psychoanalysis, human behaviors, morals, and patterns of thought are all linked to our past childhood experiences. Our experiences and our exposure to our environment during our lifetime made who we are. How we grew up, who we interacted with, and what we saw around us affected how we viewed certain hot topics in our modern society.

Men strive for happiness. According to Freud, the possibilities for pleasure are limited resulting in unhappiness from the following: our body, the external world and relationships with others. He discusses the various strategies used to avoid dissatisfaction: becoming members of a community, influencing our bodies—such as intoxication—and isolation. The Von Rezzori family in The Snows of Yesteryear is a prime example of Freud’s thesis. Von Rezzori’s father was unfilled with his marriage and found refuge in solitude in his hunting trips. His mother, frustrated by a life that didn’t conform to her expectations, escaped to spas and resorts in Egypt in hopes to fill the void of discontent. Freud makes the conclusion that civilization is

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