CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS - Freud E-Book

Sigmund Freud

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Freud Essencial
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 160

Beschreibung

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and important psychologist. He is considered the father of psychoanalysis, which significantly influenced contemporary social psychology. In Civilization and its discontentes, Freud argues that civilization forces us to renounce the individual's instinctual pursuit of pleasure and aggression. Religion and religious ideas help achieve this through taming human instinctual expression. Certainly, his interpretation contributes to the understanding of religious ideas and experiences and cultural and social development within a psychological perspective. However, his negation of the possibility of ultimate realities and his overly narrow focus on instinctual desire lead him overlook the value of human religious lives. Perhaps it is not the super-ego that gives human the sense of guilt, but the finitude of being that humans express. Maybe it is not civilization that obstructs the individual's pursuit of happiness, but the tendency of human beings to objectify everything. In fact, religion may be well suited to helping human beings overcome finitude and objectification.  Civilization and Its Discontent is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works, and was described in 1989 by historian Peter Gay as one of the most influential and studied books in the field of modern psychology.

Leseprobe

琍

Author

CIVILIZATION

AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Original Title:

“Das Unbehagen in der Kultur“

First Edition

Contents

INTRODUCTION

About the autor

About:  Civilization and Its Discontents,

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

INTRODUCTION

About the autor

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and important psychologist. He is considered the father of psychoanalysis, which significantly influenced contemporary social psychology.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, on May 6, 1856. The son of Jacob Freud, a small merchant, and Amalie Nathanson, of Jewish origin, he was the firstborn of seven siblings. At the age of four, his family moved to Vienna, where Jews had better social acceptance and economic prospects.

Education

From an early age, Freud showed himself to be a brilliant student. At the age of 17, he entered the University of Vienna to study medicine. During his college years, he became fascinated by the research conducted in the physiological laboratory led by Dr. E. W. von Brucke. From 1876 to 1882, he worked with this specialist and later at the Institute of Anatomy under the guidance of H. Maynert. He completed his degree in 1881 and decided to become a clinician specializing in neurology.

For several years, Freud worked in a neurological clinic for children, where he distinguished himself by discovering a type of cerebral palsy that later became known by his name. In 1884, he came into contact with the physician Josef Breuer, who had cured severe symptoms of hysteria through hypnotic sleep, where the patient could remember the circumstances that gave rise to his illness. Called the "cathartic method," it constituted the starting point of psychoanalysis.

In 1885, Freud obtained a master's degree in neuropathology. That same year, he received a scholarship for a period of specialization in Paris, with the French neurologist J. M. Charcot. Back in Vienna, he continued his experiments with Breuer. He published, along with Breuer, "Studies on Hysteria" (1895), which marked the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigations.

Oedipus Complex

In 1897, Freud began to study the sexual nature of infant traumas causing neuroses and began to outline the theory of the "Oedipus Complex," according to which physical love for the mother would be part of men's mental structure. That same year, he had already observed the importance of dreams in psychoanalysis. In 1900, he published "The Interpretation of Dreams," the first proper psychoanalytic work.

Father of Psychoanalysis

In a short time, Freud managed to take a decisive and original step that opened perspectives for the development of psychoanalysis by abandoning hypnosis, replacing it with the method of free associations, thus penetrating into the darkest regions of the unconscious, being the first to discover the instrument capable of reaching and exploring it in its essence.

For ten years, Freud worked alone on the development of psychoanalysis. In 1906, he was joined by Adler, Jung, Jones, and Stekel, who in 1908 met at the first International Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg. The first sign of acceptance of Psychoanalysis in the academic community came in 1909 when he was invited to lecture in the United States at Clark University in Worcester.

In 1910, on the occasion of the second international psychoanalytic congress held in Nuremberg, the group founded the International Psychoanalytic Association, which consecrated psychoanalysts in several countries. Between 1911 and 1913, Freud was the target of hostilities, mainly from scientists themselves, who, outraged by the new ideas, did everything to discredit him. Adler, Jung, and the entire so-called Zurich school separated from Freud.

Some concepts developed by Freud: unconscious, psychic conflict, repression, Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality, and death drive.

End of Life

In 1923, already ill, Freud underwent his first surgery to remove a tumor in his palate. He began to have difficulty speaking, felt pain and discomfort. His last years coincided with the expansion of Nazism in Europe. In 1938, when the Nazis took Vienna, Freud, of Jewish origin, had his property confiscated and his library burned. He was forced to take refuge in London, after paying a ransom, where he spent the last days of his life.

Sigmund Freud died in London, England, on September 23, 1939.

About:  Civilization and Its Discontents,

Freud finished the first draft of this book in 1929, two years after he had finished another book, The Future of an Illusion. Freud carries over his ideas on religion and society from the earlier work to this book. Religion for him is a psychological need of human beings to gain comfort and a feeling of protection. It is a neurosis expressed and projected in the name of God.

Based on this thought, Freud draws a boundary between ‘what is internal,’ the ego, and ‘what is external,’ the world. His central interest is in the problem that arises because ego and the world are often in conflict. The reason the individual falls into religion is that religion answers their desire for purposeful life and happiness. For Freud, our pursuit of happiness is based on ‘the program of the pleasure principle’. He argues that sexual satisfaction is the most natural and the most manifest pleasure principle. Civilization becomes an obstacle for this happiness, however, because the interests of civilization stress not individual happiness but the happiness of the commonwealth. The sexual relationship is typically between two individuals, but civilization concerns relationships among many individuals. Therefore, civilization requires regulation and limitation of individuals in order to achieve common goals.

Civilization also demands the sacrifice of individual ‘aggression.’ Freud argues that the human being is instinctively aggressive. People look at their neighbors not only as ‘potential helpers or sexual objects,’ but also as object of aggression. Freud notes, “The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure of energy”. Giving up aggression is not easy. Human beings feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. To inhibit aggression, civilizations deploy ‘internalization’ or ‘introjection.’ This is what he calls ‘the sense of guilt,’ which has two origins: “from the fear of losing one's love” and “from the fear of conscience executed by super-ego”. Whether this sense of guilt appears consciously or unconsciously is beside the point since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego.

In conclusion, Freud argues that civilization forces us to renounce the individual’s instinctual pursuit of pleasure and aggression. Religion and religious ideas help achieve this through taming human instinctual expression. Certainly, his interpretation contributes to the understanding of religious ideas and experiences and cultural and social development within a psychological perspective. However, his negation of the possibility of ultimate realities and his overly narrow focus on instinctual desire lead him overlook the value of human religious lives. Perhaps it is not the super-ego that gives human the sense of guilt, but the finitude of being that humans express. Maybe it is not civilization that obstructs the individual’s pursuit of happiness, but the tendency of human beings to objectify everything. In fact, religion may be well suited to helping human beings overcome finitude and objectification.퀍

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Chapter I

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this kind one is in danger of forgetting the manifold variety of humanity and its mental life. There are certain men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold veneration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideas of the multitude. One might well be inclined to suppose that after all it is only a minority who appreciate these great men, while the majority cares nothing for them. But the discrepancy between men’s opinions and their behavior is so wide and their desires so many-sided that things are probably not so simple.

One of these exceptional men calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had sent him my little book which treats of religion as an illusion, and he answered that he agreed entirely with my views on religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the ultimate source of religious sentiments. This consists in a peculiar feeling, which never leaves him personally, which he finds shared by many others, and which he may suppose millions more also experience. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’ a feeling as of something limitless, un-bounded, something ‘oceanic’. It is, he says, a purely subjective experience, not an article of belief; it implies no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious spirit and is taken hold of by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into definite channels and also, no doubt, used up in them. One may rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even though one reject all beliefs and all illusions.

These views, expressed by my friend whom I so greatly honor and who himself once in poetry described the magic of illusion, put me in a difficult position. I cannot discover this 'oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientific-ally with feelings. One may attempt to describe their physiological signs. Where that is impossible — I am afraid the oceanic feeling, too, will defy this kind of classification — nothing remains but to tum to the ideational content which most readily associates itself with the feeling. If I have understood my friend aright, he means the same thing as that consolation offered by an original and somewhat unconventional writer to his hero, contemplating suicide: ‘Out of this world we cannot fall1. So it is a feeling of indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole. To me, personally, I may remark, this seems something more in the nature of an intellectual judgement, not, it is true, with-out any accompanying feeling-tone, but with one of a kind which characterizes other equally far-reaching reflections as well. I could not in my own person convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But I cannot on that account deny that it in fact occurs in other people. One can only wonder whether it has been correctly interpreted and whether it is entitled to be acknowledged as the fons et origo of the whole need for religion.

I have nothing to suggest which could effectively settle the solution of this problem. The idea that man should receive intimation of his connection with the surrounding world by a direct feeling which aims from the outset at serving this purpose sounds so strange and is so incongruous with the structure of our psychology that one is justified in attempting a psycho-analytic, that is, genetic explanation of such a feeling. Whereupon the following lines of thought present themselves. Normally there is nothing we are more certain of than the feeling of our self, our own ego. It seems to us an independent unitary thing, sharply out-lined against everything else. That this is a deceptive appearance, and that on the contrary the ego extends inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we call the id and to which it forms a façade, was first discovered by psycho-analytic research, and the latter still has much to tell us about the relations of the ego to the id. But towards the outer world at any rate the ego seems to keep itself clearly and sharply outlined and delimited.

There is only one state of mind in which it fails to do this — an un-usual state, it is true, but not one that can be judged as pathological. At its height the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object. Against all the evidence of his senses the man in love declares that he and his beloved are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. A thing that can be temporarily effaced by a physiological function must also of course be liable to disturbance by morbid processes. From pathology we have come to know a large number of States in which the boundary lines between ego and outer world be-come uncertain, or in which they are actually incorrectly perceived — cases in which parts of a man’s own body, even component parts of his own mind, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, appear to him alien and not belonging to himself; other cases in which a man ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in himself, and that ought to be acknowledged by him. So the ego’s cognizance of itself is subject to disturbance, and the boundaries between it and the outer world are not immovable.

Further reflection shows that the adult’s sense of his own ego cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have undergone a development, which naturally cannot be demonstrated, but which admits of reconstruction with a fair degree of probability2. When the infant at the breast receives stimuli, he cannot as yet distinguish whether they come from his ego or from the outer world. He learns it gradually as the result of various exigencies. It must make the strongest impression on him that many sources of excitation, which later on he will recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him at any time with sensations, whereas others become temporarily out of his reach — amongst these what he wants most of all, his mother's breast — and reappear only as a result of his cries for help. Thus an ‘object’ first presents itself to the ego as something existing ‘outside’, which is only induced to appear by a particular act. A further stimulus to the growth and formation of the ego, so that it becomes something more than a bundle of sensations, i.e. recognizes an ‘outside, the external world, is afforded by the frequent, unavoidable and manifold pains and unpleasant sensations which the pleasure-principle, still in unrestricted domination, bids it abolish or avoid. The tendency arises to dissociate from the ego everything which can give rise to pain, to cast it out and create a pure pleasure-ego, in contrast to a threatening ‘outside’, not-self. The limits of this primitive pleasure-ego cannot escape readjustment through experience. Much that the individual wants to retain because it is pleasure-giving is nevertheless part not of the ego but of an object; and much that he wishes to eject because it torments him yet proves to be inseparable from the ego, arising from an inner source. He learns a method by which, through deliberate use of the sensory organs and suitable muscular movements, he can distinguish between internal and external — what is part of the ego and what originates in the outer world — and thus he makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality-principle which is to control his development further. This capacity for distinguishing, which he learns, of course, serves a practical purpose, that of enabling him to defend himself against painful sensations felt by him or threatening him. Against certain painful excitations from within the ego has only the same means of defense as that employed against pain coming from with-out, and this is the starting-point of important morbid disturbances.

In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Origin-ally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling, a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many people, to a greater or lesser extent, it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe, the same feeling as that described by my friend as ‘oceanic’. But have we any right to assume that the original type of feeling survives alongside the later one which has developed from it?

Undoubtedly we have: there is nothing unusual in such a phenomenon, whether in the psychological or in other spheres. Where animals are concerned we hold the view that the most highly developed have arisen from the lowest. Yet we still find all the simple forms alive to-day. The great saurians are extinct and have made way for the mammals, but a typical representative of them, the crocodile, is still living among us. The analogy may be too remote, and it is also weakened by the fact that the surviving lower species are not as a rule the true ancestors of the present-day more highly developed types. The intermediate members have mostly died out and are known to us only through reconstruction. In the realm of mind, on the other hand, the primitive type is so commonly preserved along-side the transformations which have developed out of it that it is superfluous to give instances in proof of it. When this happens, it is usually the result of a bifurcation in development. One quantitative part of an attitude or an impulse has survived unchanged while another has undergone further development.

This brings us very dose to the more general problem of conservation in the mind, which has so far hardly been discussed, but is so interesting and important that we may take the opportunity to pay it some attention, even though its relevance is not immediate. Since the time when were cognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace, we have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for instance, when regression extends back far enough. One might try to picture to oneself what this assumption signifies by a comparison taken from another field. Let us choose the history of the Eternal City as an example3. Historians tell us that the oldest Rome of all was the Roma quadrata