Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud Essay

In the essay Civilisation and Its Discontent, Sigmund Freud analyses societies and tries to make sense of human behaviors, beliefs, desires, fears, and impulses. Throughout the essay, Freud reveals indirectly that society is on a decline. The first theoretical perspective found in Civilisation and its Discontent is the id, the ego, and the superego. This is the foundation of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic personality theory. According to Freud, when an infant is born it is only equip with the id. The id represents all selfish desires and operates within the unconscious mind. Also, Freud believes the id is the strongest motivating force within an individual. During the oral stage, a child’s ego is develops. The egos role is to control the…

Review of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents" was written by Donald Capps and Nathan Carlin and was published in Volume 62, Issue 3, of the journal Pastoral Psychology in April 2012. I accessed the article through the University of West Florida library’s online database. In order to find the article on the UWF library’s website, go to the “Academic OneFile” database under “A-Z Database List.” To search for this article, enter the name of the article in the database’s search box. The…

Sigmund Freud is perhaps the most iconic figure in psychology. Although many of his theories in psychoanalysis have been dismissed in the modern age, he is still often referenced and regarded as a noteworthy pioneer in the field of psychotherapy in his time. One of his most prominent works, written and published shortly before his death, is Civilization and Its Discontents. In this piece, Freud takes a rather pessimistic look at the perpetuation of human civilization. He generalizes many of his…

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, civilization is “the condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc”. Despite the positive cognition that comes with civilization, Sigmund Freud, a neurologist and initiator of the concept of psychoanalysis, acquainted civilization as being something inadequate. According to Freud, civilization enables the human race to feel genuine happiness by outlawing actions that come…

Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents concludes that if a person can not fulfil their needs, then they will use “substitutive satisfactions” which give them the feeling they are looking for--feeling of satisfaction (Freud, 24). In addition, he explains how the “question of the purpose of human life” has been asked by multiple times and yet, no one has come up with an answer that shows that life has a purpose (Freud, 25). Additionally, Freud states that religion as come up with the…

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst who is known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. His book “Civilization and Its Discontents” show how civilization can cause discontent in human beings and why people must undergo the civilization process. In it, he proposes a theory, which states that civilization itself is the main reason why there is unhappiness among civilized people. He describes civilization as “a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to…

Over the past century, Sigmund Freud’s oeuvre has been the subject of intense study and debate by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, literary and cultural critics, philosophers and, of course, historians. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is no exception. For historians, one fruitful line of inquiry is Freud’s critique of Western society, and in particular, its development over the long nineteenth century. In addition to Freud being one of the…

The treatment of human happiness in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents is comparable to that described in Thomas More’s Utopia. Freud’s basic assumption is that man could be naturally happy, but that civilization makes rules that suppress a man’s natural ability to be happy. More’s Utopia describes a fictional land whereby the forced perfection of man ensures the general health and welfare of man so that all people achieve a basic level of happiness, but that the Utopian society…

Despite living in a world tailored towards human comfort, for many, happiness is an elusive mental state. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud argues that Human Nature and Civilization are at loggerheads, and that this incongruity makes happiness difficult to achieve. Freud is correct in arguing that human happiness is hindered by a conflict between internal desires and external strictures; however, he attributes far too little suffering to the individual’s fallacious desire for…

does not show up in the conscious state, due to the repression of it. Freud realized that in this unconsciousness lies a natural aggression, an impulse or innate madness that human beings have in their minds, but society and culture suppressed it from becoming reality. Advanced technology has played a huge part in sublimating man’s nature, by expressing desires in a more socially accepted way. However, in our society there have been countless incidents that man broke through this barrier of…