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Freud’s theme is that what works for civilization doesn’t necessarily work for man. Man, by nature aggressive and egotistical, seeks self-satisfaction.
It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings.
the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object.
what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so. There are two sides to this striving, a positive and a negative; it aims on the one hand at eliminating pain and discomfort, on the other at the experience of intense pleasures.
Unbridled gratification of all desires forces itself into the foreground as the most alluring guiding principle in life, but it entails preferring enjoyment to caution and penalizes itself after short indulgence.
Voluntary loneliness, isolation from others, is the readiest safeguard against the unhappiness that may arise out of human relations.
The feeling of happiness produced by indulgence of a wild, untamed craving is incomparably more intense than is the satisfying of a curbed desire.
The daily work of earning a livelihood affords particular satisfaction when it has been selected by free choice,
And yet as a path to happiness work is not valued very highly by men. They do not run after it as they do after other opportunities for gratification. The great majority work only when forced by necessity, and this natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems.
It is remarkable that the genitals themselves. The sight of which is always exciting, are hardly ever regarded as beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, on the other hand, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters.
our so-called civilization itself is to blame for a great part of our misery, and we should be much happier if we were to give it up and go back to primitive conditions.
was found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.
Mankind is proud of its exploits and has a right to be. But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly-won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfilment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier. The valid conclusion from this is merely that power over nature is not the only condition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of civilization’s efforts, and there is no ground for inferring that its technical progress is worthless from the standpoint of happiness.
we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of power over fire, and the construction of dwellings.
Beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization.
Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.
there is one feature of culture which characterizes it better than any other, and that is the value it sets upon the higher mental activities – intellectual, scientific, and aesthetic achievement – the leading part it concedes to ideas in human life.
the more righteous a man is, the stricter and more suspicious will his conscience be, so that ultimately it is precisely those people who have carried holiness farthest who reproach themselves with the deepest sinfulness. This
If the evolution of civilization has such a far- reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization – or epochs of it – possibly even the whole of humanity – have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends?
