Digital Rare Book :
Civilization and its Discontents
By Sigmund Freud
Published by Verlag, Austria - 1930

Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"), it is one of Freud's most important and widely read works.

In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud propounds his perspective by enumerating what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such rules are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.

This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I undoubtedly influenced Freud and had an impact on his central observation about the tension between the individual and civilization. Amidst a nation still recovering from a brutally violent war, Freud developed thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927), wherein he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud, an avowed atheist, argued that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, thus helping a civilization. Yet at the same time organized religion also exacts an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God.

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