SIGMUND FREUD’S CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, 1930 Term paper

In the summer of 1929, Sigmund Freud wrote a short but powerful book entitled Civilization and Its Discontents. Published the following year, the book warned its readers that civilization was a fragile creation requiring constant attention. Its appearance in the early days of the Depression and not long before the Nazis came to power in Germany, made it into one of the most influential books of the first half of the twentieth century.

By 1930 Freud was widely known in Europe and America as the founder of psychoanalysis. His provocative theories of human psychology had gained many adherents and generated much controversy. In his depiction of human nature, Freud emphasized two basic drives: a death drive that played itself out in aggression and destructiveness, and a sexual drive that manifested itself in terms of love and desire. In the individual, the id was the source of these drives. The ego was the individual’s conscious awareness of himself or herself. The superego or conscience acted to restrain the id and remind the ego of the importance of limits.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discussed human society more or less in terms of the individual writ large. Civilization was analogous to the superego, a set of ideas and institutions necessary to keep the instinctual drives of humans from creating chaos.

If civilization provided a means for making life livable, it nonetheless made humans unhappy because it forced them to repress or suppress basic drives. Civilization, then, was a self-imposed compromise between what humans wanted to do and what they should do in order to live more comfortably and securely. One paid a price for living in a civilization, at times a very high price, but the alternative was worse. Freud may be seen as a gloomy realist. He was hostile to the idea of utopia, a perfectly ordered society that featured abundance, peace, and harmony. From his vantage point in Vienna at the end of the 1920s, Freud saw the fallacies in both communism and fascism. Neither system took into account human nature. Typically, Freud disparaged what he had accomplished in the book, but it extended his ideas about human psychology to the level of society. The struggles of society to maintain civilization mirrored the struggles of the individual. The last decade of his life provided ample opportunity for observing civilization’s struggles. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Freud emigrated to England, where he died shortly after the beginning of World War II in September 1939.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Investigate the reception of Sigmund Freud’s theories in Europe and America in the 1920s. To what extent did people understand and make use of his theories?
2. Compare Civilization and Its Discontents with another short, speculative book written a few years earlier, The Future of an Illusion (see Suggested Sources).
3. Another important examination of European civilization, José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, was also published in 1930. In a comparison of the two, note similarities and differences.
4. Why does Freud find that civilization, however necessary it may be, is also painful for human beings?
5. Perhaps the most controversial parts of Civilization and Its Discontents concern his views on women and civilization. Read this material closely together with at least one feminist critique of Freud’s views (see Suggested Sources), then assess the validity of his position.
6. As part of a group project, examine contemporary journalism and other writing, music, films, television, and Internet sources to determine whether Freud’s perspective on civilization is reflected in contemporary culture.

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, 1928–1932” (#23), “The Nazi ‘Seizure of Power’ in 1933” (#24), and “Kristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’), 1938” (#31). Search under Anna Freud, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Lou Andreas-Salome, Carl Jung, and Albert Einstein.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Original edition 1930. Freud’s application of psychoanalytic theories to human civilization.

———. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. A convenient source of Freud’s most significant writings.

———. The Future of an Illusion. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Original edition 1927. Freud’s analysis of religion. Like Civilization and Its Discontents, an attempt to use his ideas to address large issues.

———. The Letters of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Ernest L. Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1960. A convenient selection. Letter 243 to Lou Andreas-Salome mentions completing Civilization and Its Discontents in Freud’s typically disparaging style.

Secondary Sources

The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Edited by Jerome Neu. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Useful articles on, among other topics, Freud and women and Civilization and Its Discontents.

Clark, Ronald W. Freud: The Man and the Cause. New York: Random House, 1980. A good biographical study of Freud.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Probably the best biography of Freud now available.

Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Edited and abridged in one volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books, 1961. The standard biography in a convenient abridged version. Kofman, Sara. The Enigma of Woman: Women in Freud’s Writings. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. An important feminist discussion of Freud’s controversial ideas about women.

Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. See in particular “Politics and the Individual.”

Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought. New York: Knopf, 1968. A good overview of Freud’s ideas on social and political topics.

Stromberg, Roland N. Makers of Modern Culture: Five Twentieth-Century Thinkers. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1991. Includes a good introductory essay on Freud.