Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud's central argument is that civilization is built on instinctual renunciation, and that the internalization of aggression—the superego's turning of destructive impulses against the ego—produces a permanent sense of guilt and discontent that no amount of cultural progress can eliminate. The book rejects the assumption that civilization's advance automatically increases human happiness, and it rejects the socialist idea that abolishing private property would resolve the fundamental tension between individual freedom and social conformity. Freud's somber conclusion is that the struggle between Eros and the death instinct shapes civilization's fate, and that no one can be confident the life-giving force will prevail . The essay thus offers a psychoanalytic rather than economic or political diagnosis of cultural malaise.

The superego is the mechanism through which civilization achieves its hold on the individual. External authority is internalized, and the individual's own aggression is turned against the ego as guilt. As one contemporary reviewer described it, the inhibiting function had to be internalized because no external force could reliably curb man's unbridled aggression and egoistic self-satisfaction; therefore an organ grew up within the man himself—conscience, or in Freud's term, the superego—which censors and judges every act and even every desire . This internal judge is necessary for civilization, but it makes each individual a house divided against himself, and when the conflict becomes unbearable, neurosis follows.

The two books take civilization as their shared subject but differ radically in tone and conclusion. The Future of an Illusion (1927) analyzes religion as a collective neurosis and holds out the possibility that reason and science might eventually free humanity from illusion. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) abandons that optimism. As one scholarly comparison puts it, the later book 'exudes an outlook of melodramatic angst, and envisions a future dominated by discordant forces threatening the annihilation of humankind,' concluding that if civilization can be saved, it will be 'by the instinctual power of love' rather than by reason . The Cambridge Companion notes that the rise of Nazism and Fascism in the intervening years partly explains this shift in Freud's outlook .

Reception was marked by resistance to its conclusions. Lionel Trilling, then a young critic, drafted a scathing unpublished review denouncing the book as 'ridiculous and even offensive,' objecting that any explanation of the human condition by reference to anything other than economic and political injustice seemed to him 'morally indecent' . A more sympathetic contemporary review acknowledged the pessimism but argued it was warranted: the great poets have always seen tragedy in human fate, and Freud had merely brought the poets' intuitive knowledge to a new level of scientific consciousness . The reviewer noted that the book's view of humanity 'concurs so well with the view expressed with perfect unanimity by the poets,' and that this agreement was 'an immense confirmation of his general conclusions' .

The book opens with Freud's response to a friend's letter describing a religious experience he calls 'eternal'—a feeling of indissoluble connection with the universe, which the friend terms 'oceanic.' Freud confesses he cannot discover this feeling in himself and suspects it is 'more a sentiment than a feeling' . He does not dismiss it, however; he treats it as a residue of the earliest phase of ego development, when the infant's ego had not yet separated itself from the external world. The oceanic feeling is thus interpreted as a vestige of primary narcissism, a piece of psychic history preserved beneath later layers. One contemporary reviewer found the discussion of the oceanic sensation a 'bypath' that diverts from the main theme, though it leads to the rewarding problem of the preservation of psychic content .

The German original, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, was written in 1929 and first published in 1930 by Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna . The first English translation, by Joan Riviere, was published by Hogarth Press in London in 1930, the same year as the German original . A new translation by James Strachey was published in 1961–1962 by W. W. Norton and became the standard English edition . David McLintock's translation appeared in 2002, and a Norton Critical Edition with introduction by Christopher Hitchens was published in 2010. The book's title is itself a translation problem: Das Unbehagen means 'uneasiness' or 'malaise' as much as 'discontent,' and the English title has shaped its reception as a work of cultural pessimism.