Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud’s essay on the conflict between the individual and civilisation. It opens with Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”, which Freud traces to the infant’s early ego-feeling rather than to a source of religion. People seek happiness by many methods, yet civilisation, which protects them against nature and regulates their relations, demands that they renounce sexual and, above all, aggressive drives. The aggression this restrains is turned back against the ego as the super-ego, and its tension with the ego is felt as a sense of guilt, much of it unconscious, that grows with civilisation. Freud presents the history of civilisation as the struggle between Eros and the death drive, and ends by asking whether Eros will prevail.