Book
Civilization and Its Discontents
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
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.
What it shows
- 1907
Sigmund Freud introduced Unconscious sense of guilt
Freud first spoke of an unconscious consciousness of guilt in his 1907 paper on obsessive actions and religious practices. In Das Ich und das Es (1923) he made it a central clinical problem, behind the negative therapeutic reaction; in 1924 he linked it with a need for punishment, and in 1930 with the discontents of civilisation.
- 1930
Sigmund Freud developed Death drive
In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur Freud treats the drive to aggression as the main derivative and representative of the death drive, sees civilisation as the struggle between Eros and death, and explains the severity of conscience as aggression turned back against the ego by the super-ego.
- 1920
Life drive opposes Death drive
Freud's second drive theory is a dualism: Eros binds living substance into ever greater unities, while the death drive tends to undo connections and lead back to the inorganic. All of life, he writes in 1930, is the interplay and struggle of the two, which are usually found fused.