Civilization and Its Discontents

The question

Sigmund Freud was seventy-three, ill with the cancer of the jaw that would eventually kill him, when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents in 1929. It was published in Vienna in 1930. By then he had spent four decades building psychoanalysis, the theory that much of mental life is unconscious and shaped by drives and conflicts formed in childhood. In his later years he turned from individual patients to culture and society, and this short book is the most famous result.

Its German title speaks of the unease, Unbehagen, in culture. The question is a paradox. Human beings created civilisation, with its laws, technology, art and institutions, to protect themselves against nature and against each other, and to make life better. Yet people in civilised societies are often deeply unhappy, and some even feel hostility toward the civilisation that sustains them. Why?

The path through it

Freud begins with a letter from the French writer Romain Rolland, who suggested that the source of religion was an “oceanic” feeling, a sense of oneness with the universe. Freud says he cannot find this feeling in himself, and explains it psychologically as a survival of the infant’s early state, before it learns to distinguish itself from the world. Religion, he argues, is better explained as a response to helplessness, a longing for a protective father.

He then asks what people want from life. His answer is happiness, which he defines in terms of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But the possibilities of happiness are limited by our constitution, and suffering threatens from three directions: from our own bodies, which decay; from the external world, which can turn against us; and from our relations with other people, which he thinks is the most painful of all. People use many methods to avoid suffering, including intoxication, withdrawal, work, love, art and religion. None is fully reliable.

Then comes the central argument. Civilisation is built on the renunciation of instinct. To live together in large groups, people must restrict their sexual drives, channel them into lasting relationships and redirect some of their energy into work and culture. They must also restrain their aggression. Freud quotes the Latin saying that man is a wolf to man, and argues that the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, which he regards as psychologically impossible to obey, exists precisely because the inclination to aggression is so strong.

In the later chapters he draws on his theory, developed in 1920, that human beings are driven by two great forces: Eros, the drive that binds people together, and a death drive, which in its outward form appears as aggression. Civilisation is the work of Eros, binding individuals into families, communities and nations. Aggression threatens to tear it apart.

How does civilisation hold aggression in check? Freud’s answer is that it turns aggression inward. A part of the mind, the superego, takes over the aggression that would have been directed at others and directs it against the self, as conscience. The tension between the superego and the ego is felt as guilt. And because the superego can see wishes as well as deeds, and punishes both, guilt grows even in those who behave well.

Where it arrives

Freud arrives at a sombre conclusion. The sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilisation, and the price of progress is a loss of happiness through the heightening of guilt. Much of this guilt is unconscious, felt as a vague unease or discontent rather than as remorse.

He refuses to say whether civilisation is worth its costs, and he declines to offer consolation. The book ends by asking whether Eros will be able to hold its own against the destructive drive. In a sentence added in 1931, as the Nazi movement was rising in Germany, he wrote that no one could foresee the outcome.

What remains open

Much of Freud’s theory has been rejected or heavily revised by later psychology. The death drive in particular was controversial even among psychoanalysts, and many of his claims about sexuality and development lack empirical support. His views on women, expressed here and elsewhere, are widely regarded as products of his time.

But the book’s central questions remain open. Is aggression a basic part of human nature, or a response to circumstances? Can societies restrain it without producing inner suffering? Does progress, as Freud suggests, carry psychological costs that are rarely counted? Later thinkers, from the Frankfurt School to the psychologists who study self-control and moral emotions, have kept these questions alive in other vocabularies.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what your organisation requires people to give up, and what happens to what they give up. Every institution channels people’s energies and restrains some of their impulses. The restrained energy does not vanish; it may reappear as stress, guilt, cynicism or conflict.

It asks whether the rules and ideals you set are ones people can live by. Freud’s point about impossible commandments applies to cultures that demand more than people can deliver and then leave them feeling permanently inadequate.

And it asks about the costs of progress that do not appear in the accounts. The site’s idea page The Remedy That Is Also a Poison explores the same double-edged character of what we build.