Civilization and Its Discontents

by Sigmund Freud

women are denied ‘the opportunity to take an intellectual interest in sexual problems … they are deterred from thinking at all, and knowledge loses its value for them’.

The energy with which a man pursues all his goals in life, Freud astonishingly and unquestioningly maintains, is a function of how ‘energetically [he] conquers his sex object’.

Masturbation ‘corrupts the character through indulgence in more ways than one’ (masturbators will take ‘the easy route’ in the pursuit of ‘significant goals’).

Freud comes close to giving an anticipatory validation to homophobic fears, all too familiar to us, that heterosexuals can somehow be seduced into homosexuality and, especially, that if they do cross that line they may be permanently lost to, or spoiled for, heterosexuality.

If society would just allow young men and women to have (presumably) normal sex, the women will think more clearly and the men will be better artists and bolder political activists.

At bottom, we are all insatiable and unhappily repressed perverts.

Like the oceanic feeling, aggressiveness includes an intense erotic pleasure.

The explicit argument of Civilization and Its Discontents goes like this: we must sacrifice part of our sexuality and sublimate it into brotherly love in order to control our murderous impulses towards others.

sexuality = aggression = civilization.

Freud claims that ‘in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be lost’,

At the height of erotic passion the borderline between ego and object is in danger of becoming blurred.

The life imposed on us is too hard for us to bear: it brings too much pain, too many disappointments, too many insoluble problems. If we are to endure it, we cannot do without palliative measures. (As Theodor Fontane told us, it is impossible without additional help.) Of such measures there are perhaps three kinds: powerful distractions, which cause us to make light of our misery, substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it, and intoxicants, which anaesthetize us to it.

However, there must also be substances in the chemistry of our bodies that act in a similar way, for we know of at least one morbid condition – mania – in which a condition similar to intoxication occurs, without the introduction of any intoxicant.

The effect of intoxicants in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is seen as so great a boon that not only individuals, but whole nations, have accorded them a firm place in the economy of the libido.

The feeling of happiness resulting from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse that has not been tamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that occasioned by the sating of one that has been tamed.

The religions of mankind too must be described as examples of mass delusion. Of course, no one who still shares a delusion will ever recognize it as such.

‘Beauty’ and ‘attractiveness’ are originally properties of the sexual object. It is notable that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are hardly ever judged beautiful; on the other hand, the quality of beauty seems to attach to certain secondary sexual characteristics.

What is the good of the reduction of infant mortality if it forces us to practise extreme restraint in the procreation of children, with the result that on the whole we rear no more children than we did before hygiene became all-important, but have imposed restraints on sexual life within marriage and probably worked against the benefits of natural selection?

how the mutual relations of human beings are regulated, the social relations that affect a person as a neighbour, employee or sexual object of another, as a member of a family or as a citizen of a state.

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual and presents a united front against every individual. The power of the community then pits itself, in the name of ‘right’, against the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’.

The replacement of the power of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization.

Hence, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female or – to put it more generally – his sexual objects around him, while the females, not wanting to be separated from their helpless young, had for their sake to remain with the stronger male.

But I shall avoid the temptation to engage in a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give the impression of wanting to employ American methods myself.

I must hasten to a close, but there is still one question I can hardly avoid. If the development of civilization so much resembles that of the individual and operates with the same means, is one not entitled to proffer the diagnosis that some civilizations or cultural epochs – possibly the whole of humanity – have become ‘neurotic’ under the influence of cultural strivings?