Civilization And Its Discontents

In his book Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud delves into the topic regarding the relationship between an individual and the civilization that surrounds them. Freud’s overarching theme revolves around the intrinsic need of humans, specifically children, to plot their own path and society’s constant demand for conformity. Freud talks about how people desire to commit many evil acts, such as killing or inappropriate sexual relationships as harmful to the civilization and as a result, civilization creates laws that try to prohibit these desires by threatening harsh punishments to the offender.
Many of Freud’s claims are very applicable to society, and its effect on people. Freud claims that people turn to religion as a coping method, which I believe is true; and I believe that religion is so important to people because of their experiences in society. Throughout one’s life, there are many challenges that one …show more content…
In each environment, they are taught how to act. As they grow up, they learn about common courtesies that society values and they learn about values that society does not accept. The way that children learn to act usually differ depending on where they are and who they are with. For example, children will act differently when they are with their friends as opposed to when they are with their parents or with their teachers.
The different behaviors of children in different locations lead parents to believe that maybe they do not have as much of an impact on children’s life as they would like. It goes against all intuition that a child would behave differently depending on their surroundings if their parents had a major effect on their personalities because the parents usually only influence children to act in one certain way, and not multiple ways for multiple situations. This is one of the main topics that Harris focuses on and it is a very interesting argument. Harris says