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.

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

This ties directly into Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche conjectures that religion is nothing but a masochistic daily torture that we put ourselves through each day. He thinks it is unpragmatic because people are putting themselves on a guilt trip “a labyrinth of obsession”(line 16). Christopher believes that religion is a lie that people tell themselves to feel better at night, while in the eyes of Nietzsche religion is unnecessary: “Man harbors too much horror,” implying that mistakes are inevitable and a masochistic consequence system is nothing but paradoxical and unnecessarily torturous.

Thus, by eradicating one end of the spectrum of emotion, the other end-- joy-- must be eradicated, too. Brave New World showed me that in order to experience joy, something beyond a static pleasure, it must coexist with suffering, yet it is worth the price. The static emotion produces the sense of reaching for something but always falling short as mediocrity dominates. When the World State pulls out suffering, like a weed in a flower patch, it pulls out the flowers with it: beautiful things such as art, gratuitous beauty, poetry, and reflection. One character, Helmholz, remarks that he has the urge to write poetry but has no substance with which to compose it.

Religion emerges from the human susceptibility for protection and use it as a tool for liberation from the bitter realities and perplexities of the world. “Religious ideas are teachings and pronouncements about facts and states of external (or internal) reality that convey something one has not discovered for oneself and which assert the right to be believed” (Freud 88). We must object to religious claims because there is no proof to substantiate them and merely ideas we follow for generations. Religious ideas are beyond the control of reasoning, as if we don’t validate our beliefs and behave that our beliefs have a substantial basis of support. Religious ideas are teachings, not the thought 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.

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

Belief in an illusion is not an error, through its connection to reality, rather it is indicative of “when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality.”(31) Although Freud acknowledges the function religion has played in society, however he is critical of its success in instilling satisfaction. The scientific spirit “of the higher strata” has figuratively dismantled religion through the efforts of critics, natural science, and comparative research. Freud claimed that religion, while protecting from neurosis, was an obsessional neurosis which arose from the concept of father-God. Furthermore religion was meant to be psychoanalyzed as a means of movement towards

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

For example, he highlights God, power, nature, good versus evil, hell versus heaven, fate and so on. He also explains that “Life in this world serves a higher purpose; no doubt it is not easy to guess what that purpose is, but it certainly signifies a perfecting of man's nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul…which is the object of this elevation and exaltation” (Freud, 1972, p. 18). Ideas such as soul and body are inclusive to nature and the universe, instead of human society.

Sigmund Freud explored many new concepts in the human mind during his lifetime. He was the scholar who discovered an immense new realm of the mind, the unconscious. He was the philosopher who identified childhood experience, not racial destiny or family fate, as the vessel of character, and he is the therapist who invented a specific form of treatment for mentally ill people, psychoanalysis. This advanced the revolutionary notion that actual diagnosable diseases can be cured by a technology that dates to the dawn of humanity: speaking. Sigmund Freud, writing more than 320 books, articles and essays on psychotherapy in his lifetime, forever changed how society viewed mental illness and the meaning of their dreams. However, controversy over

     In the next segment, I said, “It’s like… I don’t know. Die. Maybe God will. Yeah… maybe.” I think here Freud would suggest that I was feeling lost and helpless and wishing for either an easy way out or help. This is very true. Many times I’ve thought that dying would help to solve all my problems and make things all better. Shortly after, I realized that it wouldn’t. Things would actually get worse. If I were to ever commit suicide, it would be against God’s will and He will instantly reincarnate me into a newborn, who later in life will have to deal with the exact same problem which I ran away from earlier in the previous life.

He is unsatisfied with his life because he finds that life has a lack of meaning for him and finds himself depressed as a result of allowing civilization to suppress his innermost desires or instincts, “like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct” (Fight Club). Freud asserts that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of what makes one happy (Freud 25), thus Freud implies that our perception of reality is built from the incline toward satisfying our natural instincts. Freud argues that even though civilization was initially developed to protect us it has turned to become one of the major obstacles for the individual to achieve the purpose of life which is satisfaction of natural needs; “our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions (Freud 38).

“A trailblazer of modern-day psychology,” Sigmund Freud presented new ways of thinking about human nature, pioneered new techniques of understanding human behavior, and created the most comprehensive theory of personality and psychotherapy ever developed (Himmat, 1997).

In Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents”, we are introduced to a new outlook in the way we view our lives due to his analysis of civilization and how it has affected our happiness. Freud uses his theory of instincts in order to explain what encourages us as well as how our behavior is all linked together and is motivated by our instincts. He explains why humans seek happiness and how it is one of the toughest things to achieve. Towards the end of his book he also gives an insight on how the individual psyche which consist of the id, ego, and super-ego leads us to feel guilt and its impact on civilization. Through his theory of instincts and the individual psyche, Freud is able to demonstrate how civilization has set limits to