Civilization and Its Discontents

Overview

This is a hundred and ten pages by a man near the end of a long career, writing for an educated reader rather than for clinicians. There is no case material, very little technical vocabulary that is not explained, and the tone is conversational and often dry. It is the most readable of Freud’s books and the least consoling.

The structure is a chain, not a system. Eight short chapters, each beginning from a question that the previous chapter turned up, so that an essay which starts as a reply to a friend’s letter about religious feeling ends with the survival of the species in doubt. Freud says himself, more than once, that he is telling the reader nothing new, and that he is merely putting together things everyone already knows. That is a rhetorical move, and it is also more or less true; the force of the essay comes from what he does with commonplaces.

Two pieces of Freudian machinery are assumed. The first is the superego, the internal authority formed by taking the parents’ prohibitions inside, from The Ego and the Id. The second is the death drive, proposed ten years earlier in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an urge toward dissolution that Freud presents here as the source of aggression when it is turned outward. Many readers who accept everything else in the book will not accept the death drive. Freud anticipates that, and says he can hardly persuade himself of it either.

The argument

Chapters I and II: what people want. A friend, unnamed but known to be Romain Rolland, had written that the true source of religion is an oceanic feeling of being one with the universe. Freud is polite and unmoved: he cannot find the feeling in himself, and where it exists he reads it as a memory of infancy before the boundary between self and world was drawn. Religion’s real root is helplessness and the longing for a father’s protection.

That raises the larger question. What do people demand of life? Happiness, meaning intense pleasure and the absence of pain. But the programme is impossible, because pleasure by its nature is episodic while suffering has three reliable sources: the body, which decays; the external world, which is indifferent and stronger; and other people, which is the most painful of the three. So everyone adopts some technique of living: distraction through work, substitute satisfactions in art, intoxication, the killing of the drives by yoga or asceticism, the pursuit of love, or religion, which Freud calls a mass delusion that spares its believers an individual neurosis.

Chapters III and IV: what civilization is. He defines it by its products and its demands: control of nature, but also beauty, cleanliness, order, and above all the replacement of individual power by the power of a community whose members bind themselves by law. Every one of these is paid for. The famous image of prosthetic God, man magnificent in his auxiliary organs and not at ease in them, comes here. Then the conflict between family and society, and between sexual love, which binds two people and wants nothing else, and civilization, which needs affection spread thin over many.

Chapters V and VI: aggression. The essay’s turning point. Freud examines the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself and calls it unreasonable. His neighbour has no claim on that love and will, given the opportunity, exploit and humiliate and kill him. Aggression is not a reaction to mistreatment; it is a standing disposition, and civilization’s whole history is a struggle to contain it. He then brings in the death drive as its source, and reframes the argument as a contest between Eros, which binds people into ever larger units, and its opposite.

Chapters VII and VIII: guilt. How is aggression contained? By being turned back on the self. The portion that cannot go outward is taken into the ego as the superego, which watches, judges and punishes, and which does not distinguish between an act and the wish for one. So the mechanism has a cruel property: renunciation does not satisfy conscience, it strengthens it, and the most scrupulous people suffer the most guilt. Freud calls the sense of guilt the most important problem in the development of civilization, and states his thesis flatly: the price of progress is happiness, forfeited through a heightening of guilt.

The ending offers nothing. He declines to play the prophet or the comforter, notes that the question is whether Eros can assert himself against his immortal adversary, and adds, in a sentence inserted in 1931, that nobody can foresee with what success or with what result.

How to read it

Read it straight through. It is short, and the argument accumulates; chapter V is unbearable on its own and nearly inevitable in sequence.

If you are new to Freud, do not worry about the metapsychology. The essay stands up remarkably well if you treat the death drive as one proposed explanation of aggression and keep the observation about aggression itself, which is what he actually argues for.

Read chapter V against Hobbes on the state of nature and chapter VII against Nietzsche on bad conscience in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche got there first, with almost the same mechanism and a completely different attitude to it, and Freud’s relation to him is one of the good questions in the history of ideas.

Watch what Freud does with evidence. He argues by ordinary observation, historical aside and analogy, not from clinical data, and he frequently concedes that a claim cannot be demonstrated. Deciding which of the steps are established and which are assertion is most of the work of reading him well.

The common misreading is that Freud wants less repression. He does not. He thinks the demands of culture are often excessive and sometimes stupid, and he also thinks that some renunciation is the condition of there being any culture at all, and that no arrangement removes the cost.

Questions it raises

• Is aggression an independent drive, or does it need frustration, scarcity or injury to appear? What evidence could settle it?
• If conscience is aggression turned inward, is a good conscience simply a failure of the mechanism?
• Freud says renunciation increases rather than satisfies the demand of the superego. Does that fit anything you recognise in yourself?
• He treats religion as a mass delusion that works. Is a delusion that reduces suffering an error, and on whose account?
• The essay says that culture and individual happiness are permanently at odds. Is that a discovery about human beings, or a definition of culture that guarantees the result?
• Written in Vienna in 1929, it says nothing directly about politics. Does the argument explain what happened next, or is it too general to explain anything in particular?