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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 150.1952
EAN num: 9780393301588
ISBN number: 0393301583
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 127
Printing Date: 1989-07
Publishing house: W. W. Norton & Company
Sale Popularity Level: 19683
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the individual. We all know that living in civilised groups means sacrificing a degree of personal interest, but couldn't you argue that it in fact creates the conditions for our happiness? Freud explores the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding this proposition, focusing on what he perceives to be one of society's greatest dangers; 'civilised' sexual morality. After all, doesn't repression of sexuality deeply affect people and compromise their chances of happiness?
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Freud didn't discover anything. The study of sex and aggression has been around a long, long time. What Freud 'discovered' is that there isn't anything such as Love, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, Wisdom or Art. Rather than add Freud subtracted. 'Civilization and It's Discontents' documents the Freudian subtraction. Freud lopped off large parts of human nature. By and large psychoanalysis has never been of assistance to the individual qua individiual. What psychoanalysis does though is fill people with a boundless aggression as regression is the fact of psychoanalysis. There is no successful 'analysis' unless the boundless aggression brought forth by psychoanalyis, can be directed in a global way, global because of the boundlessness of the aggression. The 'Freudian climate' isn't one where dreams are finally understood or the unconcious explored, of course, a concious unconcious is nonsensical but rather where aggression is unleashed globally but hidden amidst a civil demeanor. This is the Freudian climate of yesterday which was grounded by 'Civilization and It's Discontents'.
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Freud gives his pessimistic take on human nature and expands this formula to society as a whole. I am not sure if his argument is sound based on the fact that he went from the micro-individual to a macro view of society, but his argument was quite convincing based upon the amounts of aggression seen throughout world history, such as constant war, greed, slavery, genocide, the inquisition, scape goats, etc. etc. If anything this book made me rethink and revise my views on society and politics as a whole. It is a short read so I strongly recommend it.
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i got this book 2nd i ordered 3 at the same time. i was so happy to get it. the book arrived promptly and in good condition.
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For all the celebrated shortcomings of his theories, Sigmund Freud remains, even in retrospect, the most influential thinker of the 20th century, a giant among the giants of that now by-gone era of late modernity. He still must be regarded as the most perspicuous among positivistic and systematic students of human nature and the most devoted, at least in the consistency of his ideas. His rubric for the self-referential category, "ego", is used almost universally, regardless of culture, language, or learning. Who among us hasn't used the term? Very few thinkers in any age can claim such rapid and profound widespread assimilation of their ideas as Freud. He was also very first among the moderns, really the very first since Montaigne, to formally prioritize self-knowledge among all types of knowledge, and, reverting to a very ancient idea, perceive the telos or fruit of the attainment of knowledge as therapeutic. While James and other contemporaries focused on elaborating the principles of the new science of human nature, founded on behavioral rather than traditionally metaphysical grounds, Freud undertook the project of their application, in a simple and accessible manner on as broad a scale as possible. Nowhere in his oeuvre is this delineation of the explanatory power of the application of psychological theory to central social problems or queries more transparent than in Civilization and Its Discontents.
Surprising to many coming to Freud for the very first time, is that his writing, for the most part, exhibits such clarity that it can be read and understood, within the limits of their comprehension, by children. I remember reading a bit of The Interpretation of Dreams at age fourteen and getting something out of it. But more than accessibility accounts for the impact of Freud's ideas. If a science of human nature is in its infancy, in his nascent structuralist model, Freud gave it a language if not a new paradigm that could be universally acquired. But personally, exclusive of Totem and Taboo, I find his later works, The Future of An Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and the vastly underrated, Moses and Monotheism, to be far more interesting and relevant than the better known early works where he develops his psychological theories.
The quintessential late modern (an era that begins philosophically with publication of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and the incendiary works of Tom Paine), Freud appears to write The Future of An Illusion as a defense, an apologia, if you will, of his atheism. He begins by designating Civilization and Its Discontents an extension of this argument. He cannot be merely, tritely arguing didactically for atheism. What he is saying in the preliminary stage of the argument amounts to this: Up to now, traditional religion has been our primary lense for viewing human, thus social, action. But what if, and one must grant at least the possibility, God, Christ, et al, is a mass delusion or rationalization? Could not a science of human nature, a systematic inward scrutiny, provide a more productive perspective on our problems? Is not the human project something other than, even more than, a divinely ordained, fatalistically fulfilled apocalyptic end? And, looking at the human condition (he writes in 1930), there is no denying a new way looking is desperately needed, for perhaps our very survival.
The subsequent claim in the argument is that all societies promise justice. Yet, as individuals, we inevitably protest the "civilizing" process a society takes to deliver some degree of justice to its members. Freud claims that this process necessarily does violence to the individual. The individual is bound by civilization to his/her fellows and, in this process, the natural desires are limited, restricted, and bent by the whim of an external, collective will, " . . . which aims at binding the members of a community together in a libidinal way as well and employs every means to that end." We are naturally resentful. We want it all. Especially sex, with whomever we deign to mount or be mounted by. But Freud buys further into psychological egoism: " . . . men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness." "Man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization . . . whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind."
Hobbesian as a social theorist, he's absolutely Nietzschean when he debunks the Socratic "Archimedian Point of Good" and Agape or Christian Altruism as ideals of civilization which can never be happily achieved, sources of frustration, guilt, despair, ... Read More
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Good stuff. A bit outdated but a must read for those who want to understand where our modern concepts of psychology begun.
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