Civilization and Its Discontents

by Sigmund Freud

originally the ego contains everything, and only later it separates an outside world from itself. Our sense of self today is only a shrunken remnant of a far more comprehensive and indeed all-encompassing feeling, which corresponded to a more intimate connection of the ego with the environment.

Since we have overcome the error that the familiar process of forgetting means a destruction of the memory trace, i.e., annihilation, we tend to the opposite assumption that nothing in mental life that had once been formed can ever perish, that everything is somehow preserved and can become manifest under suitable conditions, for example, by means of a far-reaching regression.

It seems irrefutable to me that religious needs derive from infantile helplessness and the resulting longing for the father, especially since this feeling does not simply continue on from childhood but is constantly replenished from fear of the overwhelming power of fate. I would not be able to identify a need from childhood that was as strong as that for paternal protection.

This sense of oneness with the universe, which is its basic idea, strikes us as a first attempt at religious consolation and like another way of denying the danger that the ego recognizes as threatening from the outside world.

As life is imposed on us, it is too difficult for us and brings us too much pain and disappointment, and too many impossible tasks. We absolutely need palliatives to endure it. (“We cannot do without provisional constructions of support,” the writer Theodor Fontane told us.)13 There are perhaps three such measures: powerful distractions that make us disregard and attach less importance to our misery; substitute satisfactions that reduce it; and intoxicants that make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is absolutely required.

When any situation longed for by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are made in such a way that we can derive intense pleasure only from a contrast and from the continual state itself only very little.15 In this way our possibilities for happiness are already limited by our constitution.

Intentional isolation and keeping oneself apart from others are the most obvious defense against the suffering that can arise from human relationships. We realize that the happiness that can be achieved on this path is that of lasting quiet. There is no other way to defend yourself against the dreaded outside world than by turning away from it in some way, if you want to solve this task for yourself alone.

The greatest results can be achieved when one knows how to sufficiently increase the pleasure gained from the sources of mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm you. The satisfaction of this kind, such as the artist’s joy in creating and giving form to his imaginary visions and that of the researcher in solving problems and grasping the truth, has a special quality that we will certainly one day be able to define in metapsychological terms. At the moment we can only say figuratively that they appear to be “more refined and more sophisticated” to us, but their intensity is subdued compared to that derived from the satisfaction of coarse, primary instinctual impulses; they do not convulse our bodily existence.

Particularly important, in this regard, are cases in which a large number of people jointly embark on the effort to ensure happiness and ward off suffering by a delusional transformation of reality. The religions of mankind must also be counted as instances of such mass madness. Nobody who still participates in such madness, of course, ever recognizes it as such.

We are never more unprotected against suffering than when we are in love, never more helplessly unhappy than when we have lost the beloved object or its love.

three sources of our suffering: the superior power of nature; the frailty of our own bodies; the inadequacy of the institutions that regulate the relationships people have with each other in the family, the state, and society.

It proposes that much of the blame for our suffering stems from our so-called civilization and that we should be much happier if we gave up on it and returned to primitive circumstances. I call it astonishing because—however one may define the term civilization—it is certain that everything we use in order to try to protect ourselves against the threat from various sources of suffering is a product of that same civilization.

It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of renunciation that society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was concluded that when these requirements are removed or greatly reduced, he could return to other opportunities for happiness.

But they have begun to notice that this newly gained control over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature and the fulfillment of thousand-year-old longings did not satisfy their craving for pleasure or make them palpably happier. This statement should lead us to conclude merely that power over nature is not the only condition for human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of the endeavors of culture, but not to deduce from it the general worthlessness of technical advances for the achievement of our happiness.

And finally, what is the point of a long life for us when it is arduous, poor in joyful pleasures, and so painful that we can welcome death only as a redeemer?

We will always have the tendency to define misery objectively, which means projecting ourselves into these conditions according to our expectations and sensitivities in order to examine what would make people happy or unhappy there. This kind of observation, which appears objective because it disregards the variation in subjective sensibility, is, of course, the most subjective possible since it substitutes one’s own mental state for all other, unknown mental states. But happiness is something quite subjective.

the word “civilization” denotes all of the achievements and institutions that mark the distance of our lives from that of our animal ancestors and that serve two purposes: the protection of humans against nature and the regulation of the relationships between humans.

Man has become, so to speak, a kind of prosthetic god who is quite formidable when he puts on all his auxiliary organs, but they have not yet fused into a natural part of him and occasionally still give him a lot of trouble. Incidentally, he can rightly draw some consolation from the fact that this development will not quite conclude with the year 1930 AD. Future times will lead to new, probably unimaginably great advances in this area of civilization, which will further increase man’s likeness to God. For the purposes of our investigation, however, we do not want to forget that today’s man does not feel happy in his likeness to God.

we also welcome it as a sign of civilization when people turn their care and attention to things that are not at all useful and seem rather useless, e.g., if the green spaces necessary in a town to be used as playgrounds and air reservoirs also have flower beds, or if the windows of peoples’ homes are decorated with flower pots. We soon notice that this useless part, which we expect civilization to value, is beauty. We require civilized man to revere beauty wherever he encounters it in nature and to manufacture it for objects to the extent he is capable of doing so.

This replacement of the power of the individual with that of the community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.

Individual freedom is not an achievement of civilization. It was greatest prior to any civilization, but then mostly without value because the individual was hardly able to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on individual freedom, and justice demands that no one be spared these restrictions.

A good part of the struggle of humanity culminates in the task of finding an expedient balance—one that will bring happiness—between the demands of the individual and those of the masses under civilization. It is one of humanity’s fateful problems whether this balance can be achieved through a particular form of civilization or whether the conflict is irreconcilable.

Overall theme

The part of reality that is often denied behind all of this is that man is not a gentle creature in need of love, who at most is able to defend himself when attacked, but that the human being can count among his instinctual gifts also a large proportion of the tendency to aggression. As a result, his neighbor is not only a possible helpmate and a sexual object but also the temptation to satisfy the aggression against him, to use his labor without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to take possession of his belongings, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man].

As a result of this primary hostility of people against each other, civilized society is constantly threatened with disintegration. The shared interests of a collective of workers would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to muster everything possible to impose limits on the aggressive drives of people and to suppress them from being expressed through the formation of psychical reactions. Hence the array of methods that are supposed to drive people to identification and goal-inhibited love relationships, hence the restriction of sexual life and therefore also the ideal command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, which is actually justified by the fact that nothing else runs so contrary to original human nature.

With the abolition of private property, one deprives the human appetite for aggression of one of its powerful tools, though certainly not the most powerful. This changes nothing in the differences in power and influence which aggression abuses for its purposes, and also nothing in its essence.

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on sexuality but also on man’s tendency to aggression, we can now understand better that it is difficult for man to find himself happy in it. In fact, primitive man had an easier time in this regard, as he did not experience any restrictions on his instincts. As a counterbalance, he had very little certainty that he would enjoy such happiness for long. Civilized man has traded in a piece of happiness for a piece of security.

The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the development of its civilization will succeed in bringing under control the disturbance of communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction.

In the mind of each of us, it is civilization itself—not the pillaging enemy—that destroys the traces of past experience, burying the personal life of instinct under the weight of its censorious denials and demands. But the psychoanalyst can, like the archeologist, recover what is buried and, by restoring a personal history to consciousness, enable us to come to terms with its traumas and even to build it anew.

England was good order, morality, and liberal rationality, appealing to Freud as a possible refuge from the social inequities and professional frustrations of Austria. Paris was the very opposite: a city of danger, of the questionable, of the irrational. Freud accepted, but richly elaborated, Paris as the wanton, the female temptress; he approached it in a spirit of adventure at once thrilling and terrifying.

In the deepest, pagan layer of the Eternal City, where he found the mutilated remnants of Minerva, Freud the psycho-archeologist could celebrate his own achievement: to reconcile in thought the polarities of male and female, conscience and instinct, ego and id, Jewish patriarchy and Catholic maternalism, London and Paris—all in the name of science.