Civilization and Its Discontents

Democracy Newsletter: May 2024

By Steve Zolno

​Our discussion for April 8 was about Sigmund Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents. It was written toward the end of Freud’s career, in 1930.
 
In his later years, Freud adopted the view that aggression and competition are our most significant motivating factors, replacing his emphasis on sexuality: “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” (Page 7). So we read further to determine what he thought were the precious things in life.
 
Perhaps he means love as one of those precious things: “Normally there is nothing we are more certain of than the feeling of our self, our ego. … At its height the feeling of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and subject” (Page 10). Is he saying that the ego finds fulfillment in its own obliteration?
 
Perhaps the feeling of connection with the mother (and thus the world) is the original state to which we long to return. Another term for this seeking is the Pleasure Principle: “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 probability. When the infant at the breast receives stimuli, he cannot as yet distinguish whether they come from his ego or from the outer world. … 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 the threatening outside” (Page 11).
 
He still views religion in psychological terms, as a continuation of the infantile dependence on the father: “I could not point to any need in childhood so strong as that for the father’s protection. … The derivation of the religious feeling can be followed back in clear outline as far as the child’s feeling of helplessness” (Page 21), and “Religion [assures man] that Providence is watching over him … [in the form of] a greatly exalted father. The whole thing is … patently infantile [and] incongruous with reality” (Page 23).
 
Another key motivation, according to Freud, is avoiding the inevitable pain of life by distracting ourselves, similarly to Becker’s Denial of Death: “Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies [such as] powerful diversions of interest, which leads us to care little about our misery; substitute gratification, which lessens it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it” (Page 25).
 
For Freud, there is no answer to a key question: “ ‘What is the purpose of life?’ has been asked times without number; it never has received a satisfactory answer” (Page 26).
 
On happiness: “[People] seek happiness…There are two sides to this striving…it aims on the one hand at eliminating pain and discomfort, on the other at the experience of intense pleasures,” but “The task of avoiding pain forces that of obtaining happiness into the background” (Pages 27–28).
 
Freud seems to approve of love as a path to happiness more than religion: “Love…does not turn away from the outer world; on the contrary, it takes a firm hold of its objects and obtains happiness from an emotional relation to them” (Page 37). But then, loss of the love object [person] causes suffering: “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object” (Page 38).
 
He tells us that happiness, at least in the long term, is not possible, but working to attain it still is a noble objective: “The goal toward which the pleasure principle impels us — of becoming happy — is not attainable; yet we cannot give up the effort to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other” (Page 39). And it is best to focus on multiple sources of happiness to avoid disappointment: “Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter” (Page 41).
 
Now we get to the gist of his argument. Is human unhappiness caused by civilization or our view of things? “According to [one point of view] our so-called civilization itself is to blame for a great part of our misery” (Page 44). And it seems that all of human progress has not made us happier: “But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfillment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier” (Page 46).
 
So Freud seems to take the view of Hobbes (Leviathan) that our basic state is misery and aggression, which leads to the necessity that civilization is needed to reign us in: “And what do we gain by a long life when it is full of hardship and starved of joys and so wretched that we only can welcome death as our deliverer” (Page 48), and “Human life in communities only becomes possible when a number of men unite together in strength superior to any single individual and remain united against all single individuals” (Page 59).
 
Yet our quest for freedom seems a basic human attribute: “[Man] will always defend his claim to individual freedom against the will of the multitude” (Page 61).
 
Getting back to sex, he claims that marriage is an essential conduit for the sexual instinct: “Present-day civilization gives us to understand that sexual relations are permitted only on the basis of a final, indissoluble bond between a man and woman” (Page 77).
 
He comments on the impossibility of living up to our moral standards, largely because we are incapable of it, but also because there are those who don’t deserve to be treated according to the tenet of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Not merely is this stranger on the whole not worthy of love, but I must confess he has more claim to my hostility, even to my hatred” (Page 83).
 
Freud tells us that our laws are incapable of modifying our basic aggressive nature because it is part of our daily thoughts and actions: “Civilization expects to prevent the world’s atrocities of brutal violence by taking upon itself the right to employ violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hands on the more discreet and subtle forms in which human aggressions are expressed” (Page 87).
 
Love, he believes, is built into us because it is part of our survival mechanism: “It is easy to discover this motive in man’s helplessness and dependence on others; it can best be designated the dread of losing love. If he loses the love of others on whom he is dependent, he will forfeit also their protection against many dangers, and above all he runs the risk that this stronger person will show his superiority in the form of punishing him” (Page 107).
 
Freud claims that it is only our conscience, or super-ego, that keeps a check on our aggression: “A great change takes place as soon as the authority has been internalized by the development of a super-ego. … As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all kinds of things; when some calamity befalls, he holds an inquisition within, discovers his sin, heightens the standards of his conscience, imposes abstinence on himself and punishes himself with penances” (Pages 108–110).
 
Because of our internalized sense of guilt, we have the same sensation if we only contemplate aggression: “A mere intention to commit an act of violence could evoke a sense of guilt” (Page 129). So, we are told to believe, ethics is not as much about upholding our ideals as doing all we can to avoid the guilt caused by our internal tendency toward aggression: “The cultural super-ego has elaborated its ideals and erected its standards. Those of its demands which deal with the relations of human beings to one another are comprised under the name of ethics” (Page 138).

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Steve Zolno graduated from Shimer College with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and holds a master’s in educational psychology from Sonoma State University. Steve has founded and directed private schools and a health care agency in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of seven books.

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