Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

I noticed it came before Heidegger's 'Being in Time'. As I was listening to this I had to pause to see what year he wrote this book. Freud states that our conscience gets perturb from within the family and by extension within the community leading away from our authentic (not a Freud word, but I feel comfortable using it here) selves. What Freud does within this book is argues Nietzsche's viewpoint with the emphasis slightly different. Nietzsche's 'will to power' at it's most basic cries out for how the community takes away our primal instincts, takes us away from 'mans instinct to freedom'. (I don't have the quote exactly, but I think its fairly close to what he was getting at). Freud will say something such as the 'conscience of the individual gets repudiated by the instinct leading to an anxiety that gives a person guilt' and that leads them to the wanting of taking away of the power of the father. Matter of fact, you can tell that Freud is really influenced by Nietzsche within this book. I don't agree with what they are saying, but they provide a narrative that is compelling. I like this book for the same reason I liked Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Morals'. Now days, we just don't add on the word neurosis or repression, but it's how we cope with the nature within ourselves and others. It's how we understand our selves or others. I'm currently listening to 'The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor', and the author says that her father was strict and controlling and that made Mary Astor not trusting of men and unwilling to share her feelings with others particularly men, a very Freudian interruption). I'll challenge you to read any recent biography because you''ll almost always see the author slip into Freudian speak (e.g.

But those distractions don't necessarily mean that this book is not highly engaging and worth reading. Yes, Freud does believe some weird things and he restates them in this book such as the early infant's whole world is the mother's breast and thus we end up fetishizing the breast when we grow up, our time in the womb means we always are looking to return to an abode of some kind, something about the anal fixation and how it never leaves us and unrepressed sex desires lead to our anxieties and other such things that sound weird to our modern ears. Freud uses that theme to explain his psychoanalysis in describing individuals and the societies in which they live as mirror images of each other. Similarly Freud thinks the phases that an individual goes through mirror the same phases that civilizations have gone through. the embryonic stages mirrors the development stages of the species). At one time it was wrongly believed that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (i.e.

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud