freud civilization

8/3/2019 Freud Civilization

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Sigmund Freud

Civilization and Its Discontents


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We must agree with Freud, to whom

our culture and civilization weremerely a thin layer liable at any

moment to be pierced by the

destructive forces of the underworld. -- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, page 4


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I cannot think of any need in childhood as

strong as the need for a fathers protection.

-- page 20


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Goethe on Religion and Life Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;

Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!

He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who

posseses neither of those two, let him have religion! -- page 23

Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days --

Alles in der Welt lsst sich ertragen

Nur nicht eine Reihe von schnen Tagen. -- page 26


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Intoxicants and Yoga are two methods for

subduing unhappiness. Sexual love is the

most pleasurable means of gratifying the

urge for happiness.


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It was discovered that a person becomes

neurotic because he cannot tolerate the

amount of frustration which society imposes

upon him in the service of its cultural ideals,

and it was inferred from this that the

abolition or reduction of those demandswould result in a return to possibilities of

happiness. -- page 39


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No feature seems better to characterize

civilization than its esteem and

encouragement of mans higher mental

activities -- his intellectual, scientific, and

artistic achievements -- and the leading role

that it assigns to ideas in human life. --page 47


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Genital love and aim-inhibited love (such

as friendship) -- page 58


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Happiness

Mine is a peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a

humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed,

good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before

my window, and a fe fine trees before my door; and ifGod wants to make my happiness complete, he will

grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my

enemies hanging from those trees. After their death I

shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrongthey did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true,

forgive ones enemies -- but not before they have been

hanged. -- Heinrich Heine ()pages 67-68)


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Raw Aggressive Desires

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved,and who at the most can defend themselves ifattacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures amongwhose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a

powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, theirneighbor is for them not only a potential helper orsexual object, but also someone who tempts them tosatisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his

capacity for work without compensation, to use himsexually without his consent, to seize hispossessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, totorture and to kill him. -- pages 68-69


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Historical Atrocities

Anyone who calls to mind the atrocitiescommitted during the racial migrations or

the invasions of the Huns, or by the peopleknown as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan andthe Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrorsof the recent World War -- anyone who

calls these things to mind will have to bowhumbly before the truth of this view. --page 69


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The Narcissism of Minor Differences --

Scots and Englishmen, Spanish and

Portuguese, North and South Germans,

ridiculing each other -- page 72


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Civilized man has exchanged a portion of

his possibilities of happiness for a portion of

security. -- page 73

The attempt to restrict instincts is a reform

which civilization cannot accomplish. --

page 74


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Hunger and love are what moves the

world. Schiller -- page 75


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Civilization obtains mastery over the

individuals dangerous desire for aggression

by weakening and disarming it and by

setting up an agency within him to watch

over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

page 84


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Conscience and Fortune

Ill luck greatly enhances the power of the

conscience in the super-ego. As long as things

go well with a man, his conscience is lenient

and lets the ego do all sorts of things; butwhen misfortune befalls him, he searches his

soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens

the demands of his conscience, imposes

abstinences on himself and punishes himself

with penances. -- page 87


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Thrash The Fetish!

If a primitive man has met with a

misfortune, he does not throw the blame on

himself but on his fetish, which has

obviously not done its duty, and gives it a

thrashing instead of punishing himself. --

page 88


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The price we pay for our advance in

civilization is a loss of happiness through

the heightening of the sense of guilt. --page 97


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Communal Super-Ego and Heros

The community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose

influence cultural development proceeds.

The super-wgo of an epoch of civilization has an origin

similar to that of an individual. It is based on the

impression left behind by the personalities of great

leaders -- men of overwhelming force of mind during

their life thesed figures were -- often enough, if not

always -- mocked and maltreated by others and even

dispatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed,

the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he

had met his death by violence. -- page 107


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Opposing the Super-Ego We are very often obliged, for therapeutic

purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we

endeavor to lower its demands. Exactly the sameobjections can be made against the ethical

demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does

not trouble itself enough about the facts of the

mental constitution of human beings. nIt issues acommand and does not ask whether it is possible

for people to obey. -- page 109


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