Civilization and Its Discontents question

The details of this forward progress
are universally known: it is unnecessary to enumerate
them. 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 long
ings, 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.
[...] What is the use of reducing the mortality of children, when
it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest
moderation on us in begetting them, so that taken a
ll round we do not rear more children than in the days
before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time
we have created difficult conditions for sexual life in
marriage and probably counteracted the beneficial effects of natural selection.


I was kind of taken aback when I read this first, because it just screamed eugenics. I know it was very popular before The US and Germany actually did it, but I don't expect to see it in Freud's work! But then i thought about it and of course he is not advocating we return to nature or that we start letting more babies die, so no of course it's not. But it's still such a strange passage. I don't think there is anything on earth that compares to the grief of a parent losing a child, it's so odd to say that families that have never lost a child or baby are no better off, happiness wise, than families that have.

(I don't know if it was possible for him to know this 100 years ago, but that natural selection part is backwards, we no longer live in a time when geniuses are dying just because of physical weakness. Natural selection is still making us more fit, because now we live in a civilization when we need smart people to survive when they get appendicitis or ALS.

I mean nowadays it's demonstrably not true, with a tiny handful of exceptions, countries with higher infant mortality rates also have higher suicide rates and lower subjective well-being scores. Am I misunderstanding this? I mean I know Freud is quite famous for being wrong about almost everything but I didn't expect something like this. )

But anyway, how could a psychotherapist, even if he was only a psychoanalyst, how could he not believe that grief was absolutely crippling, in a way that "I miss my son because a train has taken him half way around the world" isn't? What am I missing?