Freud Civilization and Its Discontents Humankind strives for happiness, but according to Sigmund Freud, the creation of civilization as a means to further this goal has instead generated unhappiness. In his book Civilization and its Discontents, Freud asserts the happiness of the individual is often sublimated to the need for civilization to establish law and order. People have an instinctual desire for absolute freedom which includes a need to be sexually

Freud Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud's volume, Civilization and its Discontents, he tackles no less than the broad and ambitious concept of man's place in the world. In this volume, he looks at culture from his unique psychoanalytical perspective, and touches upon a number of important concepts, including aggression, civilization and the individual, organized religion, the death drive and Eros, and the super-ego and conscience. Civilization and its Discontents was

Civilization instills certain necessary checks to contain sexual and aggressive impulses, like feelings of guilt. The original, Oedipal anger of the boy against the father is turned inward, against himself, given that he is taught that it is 'wrong' to want to hurt his father and desire his mother. Civilization and its Discontents is partially an argument against utopian philosophies like Marxism. Freud's concept is that society is inherently masochistic

.. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier." This insight then, marked the point in which he asserted that in order for

Modern civilization required more sublimation and repression of desires, both sexual and destructive aggressive desires, than most people were capable of maintaining for long periods without either physical, or psychological, illnesses developing. 'Civilization', in early twentieth century Europe in particular, required too much renunciation of the release of instinctual desires, from which pleasure could be derived, so that many people became physically, psychologically, or psycho-somatically, ill and discomforted, or,

Freud's Writing by Socrates and Socrates' Writing by Freud Socrates Commenting on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents Sigmund Freud presents a very interesting set of principles in his work Civilization and its Discontents. Here, he describes his belief in the true identity of the nature of man. More than anything else, man is aggressive. This aggression is essentially caused out of the tension and conflict between innate primal desires and the