34 pages • 1 hour read
Civilization And Its Discontents
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Modern humans often blame civilization for human suffering. Explorers discover primitive peoples who appear happier than current Europeans, and they wish humanity would return to a seemingly simpler age. Others point to the neuroses that modernity imposes: Science and technology have improved people’s health and provided conveniences, but these developments haven’t “made them feel any happier” (27). For example: “If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would never have left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice” (27). It is hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those who preceded us, so we cannot really know how happy they were or how hard their privations struck them. In short, there is no assurance that past civilizations are better or worse than ours, Freud concludes.
Instead, to make headway on this question, first we must define “culture”: It is “all the activities and possessions which men use to make the earth serviceable to them, to protect them against the tyranny of natural forces, and so on” as well as “regulating the relations of human beings among themselves” (29). Modern culture has achieved so much that it becomes, for an individual, “a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales” (30).
People want much from their civilization: “[W]e expect a cultured people to revere beauty where it is found in nature and to create it in their handiwork so far as they are able” (31). People also expect “signs of cleanliness” and count as “barbarous” the dung heaps in medieval towns, trash in the Vienna Woods, or the smelly, unwashed bodies of seventeenth-century French royalty (32). Orderliness rates high as a cultural value. So, too, do “the higher mental activities—intellectual, scientific, and aesthetic achievement” (33), including religious and philosophical ideas.
The most vital cultural benefit involves social relationships and their regulation. People band together to enforce norms: “This substitution of the power of a united number for the power of a single man is the decisive step towards civilization” (34). This, in turn, leads to a system of justice that protects the many from the powerful few, the many having “contributed by making some sacrifice of their own desires” (35). On the other hand, “[t]he liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture” (35). Man nevertheless “will always, one imagines, defend his claim to individual freedom against the will of the multitude” (35). Thus, the rights of the individual and the needs of the community exist in tension.
Culture imposes itself on individuals by channeling their instincts into behaviors that become character traits. For example, the anal-erotism of young humans “is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits that we know well—thriftiness, orderliness, and cleanliness” (36). Culture’s “sublimation of instinct” makes room for “the higher mental operations, scientific, artistic, ideological activities” (36) and suppresses those that lead to social conflict.
Chapter 4 Summary
Early in human history, culture transitioned from the family unit to the community group, allowing the group to overthrow the individual: “By overpowering the father, the sons had discovered that several men united can be stronger than a single man” (40). During this “totemic stage,” when larger groups learned to live together in common, humans used restrictions and rules, or taboos (41), to keep order.
A major cultural development is the inhibition of erotic love and its transformation into a generalized love for all. This state, “an unchangeable, undeviating, tender attitude—has little superficial likeness to the stormy vicissitudes of genital love” (42), yet it descends from that source. Relatively few people, St. Francis of Assisi among them, fully achieve a love for all people. Meanwhile, an earlier form of “aim-inhibited love,” affection, continues to benefit societies: “Genital love leads to the forming of new families; aim-inhibited love to friendships” (43).
Too much familial affection can make it difficult for individuals “to enter into the wider circle of the world at large.” (43) A rift between families and the larger community/culture becomes inevitable. Adolescence is the stage in human development when individuals must detach themselves from their families; “often society helps [the individual] through it with pubertal and initiatory rites” (43).
Freud holds women responsible for further family-society discord, as women uphold the family while men sublimate their libido toward cultural purposes. A man’s work and “his constant association with men and his dependence on his relations with them even estrange him from his duties as husband and father” (44). His wife resents this, “and she adopts an inimical attitude towards it” (44).
On the other hand, Freud notes, restricting the sexual impulse and channeling its energies to benefit society can lead to a struggle: “Fear of a revolt among the oppressed then becomes a motive for even stricter regulations” (44). In Western Europe, sexual activity is constrained to heterosexual love, and “most of the extra-genital forms of satisfaction are interdicted as perversions” (44). Even the “normal” heterosexual impulse “is further circumscribed by the barriers of legitimacy and monogamy” (45). Despite all these efforts, sexual restrictions tend to disobeyed. Nonetheless, the “sexual life of civilized man is seriously disabled” (45).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Our social lives are filled with dilemmas. Sometimes personal desires interfere with the interests of families and neighbors, and we must temper our urges if we want to get along with people who can provide us with the advantages of association. Denying ourselves can thus provide benefits, but sometimes the cost is great. Can culture resolve this tension? Culture, which Freud defines as an accumulation of social benefits, is neutral on whether, in fact, culture has, or ever can, succeed in this effort. To function in society, individuals must sacrifice many of their cherished private ambitions, but even the advances of science and technology and improvements brought by governance have not resolved this tension. The question remains whether the benefits of communal society outweigh the costs to personal freedom.
Freud is skeptical of the alleged advantages brought about by increases in civil liberties. Personal freedom is always at odds with the needs of society, and the task of balancing liberty and authority becomes fraught with conflict. Since Freud’s time, humans have greatly improved the freedoms of people who don’t conform to community standards of behavior, especially with respect to their sexual proclivities, which largely have been liberated from earlier restraints. This project remains unfinished, and great forces have gathered to resist those new freedoms. For Freud, the tension between libido and authority will continue, perhaps indefinitely.
Critics have suggested that Freud’s obsession with sexuality, especially his focus on libido, may be due to the nature of the patients he treated. The Late Victorian and early 20th-century eras were times of tight sexual restriction, and it’s possible that people suffered much more uniformly from sexual dysfunction and neurosis, to the point where such issues would dominate a therapy session. Thus, Freud may have concluded erroneously that sex is the driving force in human life, by contrast with later analysts such as Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, who believed that many energies, and not just sexual ones, contribute to the id, the unconscious self. Today’s easing of social restrictions on sexual activity mean it’s often not much harder to indulge one’s sexual predilections than to make a few taps on a smartphone. If Freud were treating patients today, he might find fewer sexual concerns and more worries about money, purpose, and the ever-present problem of connecting with and getting along with fellow humans.
Freud hews to an older view of human progress as an improvement over time on earlier primitive conditions. Modern anthropology casts doubt on this simplistic assessment of our ancient forebears: We have learned, for example, that present-day non-literate societies—which arguably resemble prehistoric communities—enjoy complex social rules and arrangements that in many ways resemble our own. We may not, then, be all that different from Stone Age people. Technology and its impact on modern societies have presented us with new dilemmas, but the essential problems and conflicts persist and may remain with us well into the future.
Unlock all 34 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Sigmund Freud
