Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
My rating: 3 of 5 stars TL;DR: Freud is somehow simultaneously a genius and just as bad as all our stereotypes about him. This book has a lot to teach us about our feelings of guilt, competing instincts, and why generally jeremiads have become such a best-selling category. Why are people so upset with the current state of affairs? While Freud is not a Christian, and his answers to this question are wrong (and in some cases deranged), he provides an important perspective about the restlessness of our culture and means by which happiness can be achieved. This is a summary of each chapter I wrote for class. I omitted a lot, but the exercise was helpful in wrapping my head around this absolutely insane book. Chapter 1 Freud’s work is concerned with establishing the quality and origins of the “religious feeling” (20). He begins by questioning whether the “oceanic feeling,” or feeling of something “limitless, unbounded” as a sensation of eternity inside of certain people—Freud himself does not have this feeling—is in fact a religious feeling at all (10–11). Freud suggests that the oceanic feeling some people possess is in fact an “early phase of ‘ego-feeling’” (20), merely a feeling of the self (12); thus the religious attitude is “infantile helplessness,” a longing for the protection of a father (21) Chapter 2 This chapter focuses on “the question of the purpose of human life” (24), which Freud suggests is the “programme of the pleasure principle” (25); in other words, to eliminate suffering in our pursuit for happiness. Freud outlines seven different methods for reducing suffering, all of which influence ourselves alone: first, intoxication; second, quenching desire; third, losing yourself in your work, especially if it is creative; fourth, losing yourself in illusions; fifth, constructing counter-realities, which is what religion tries to do; sixth, “loving and being loved”; and finally, seeking after beauty of either senses or judgments (27–33). The problem with religion, Freud concludes, is that it forces everyone to achieve happiness through a singular path of obedience (36) when in fact happiness is achievable only by the volitional choices of a lone individual (34). Chapter 3 Today’s human is uncomfortable in his civilization, as he cannot survive without it, both his sustainer and the source of all his miseries (41). Freud intends for the remainder of this work to examine the question of civilization, suggesting that the thing which protects us against nature and adjusts our mutual relations (42), allowing us to come together in a community seeking after a common rather than individual good (49), also requires us to suppress our natural urges (52). Chapter 4 Freud examines the history of the development of civilization as he attempts to examine what natural desires are repressed in order to build cultural life together (54, n. 1). This chapter is concerned with love (Eros), particularly “heterosexual genital love” (60). Men have united in order to provide a context in which they can satisfy their sexual urges (57), but civilization in turn suppresses those sexual urges with “substantial restrictions” that are necessary to provide order (58): civilization demands marital monogamy as the only stable means of perpetuating civilization (60). Chapter 5 Freud examines the second natural urge that civilization must suppress in order to survive, and that is aggression (69–70). Civilization claims to be founded upon Christ’s second greatest commandment—to “love your neighbor as yourself”—and thereby forces people to go against their natural aggressive urges (65). Freud suggests that man is unhappy in his civilization (ch 3) because it imposes great sacrifices on both sexuality and aggressivity: “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security” (73). Chapter 6 Chapter six is a continued examination of the place of Eros and aggression in civilization as Freud explores the role and purpose of instincts (75), especially the destructive one which manifests itself both in sadism/masochism and “non-erotic aggressivity” (79). The inclination to aggression is the original instinctual disposition of a person and is also the greatest impediment to civilization; the inclination to Eros collects people together, libidinally binding them together, to create a unified mankind out of all single human individuals (81). Chapter 7 Freud suggests that civilization renders a person’s “desire for aggression innocuous” by internalizing it, directing aggression from the ego to the super-ego and thereby becoming a guilty conscience (84). Since our desire is to be loved by the highest power, we tend to blame ourselves for our problems; that is, when we experience misfortune it means we run the risk of losing love and so hold up our own sinfulness as the source of those misfortunes (88). At an instinctual level, guilt is the product of the external struggle between Eros and the instinct of destruction (95). Chapter 8 Freud concludes his work by summarizing the main points of the previous seven chapters and suggests that the sense of guilt is the primary problem in the development of civilization, for the more our civilization advances the less happy we are because our sense of guilt has increased (97). This sense of guilt, though it can be remorse (101) or a felt need for punishment (100), is more often than not unconscious, a sort of discontent (malaise) and dissatisfaction that religion is concerned with (99). Just as a single individual can feel guilt or experience the effects of the super-ego, so too can an entire community develop a sense of conscience (104) as it suppresses our basic instincts (111). View all my reviews
0 Comments
Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Paradigm shifting. Everyone should read this book. Kagge is a brilliant writer and taps into deep human longings in a way only poets can. View all my reviews |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |