Civilisation and Its Discontents

"Interestingly, this was chosen by Penguin in its Great Ideas series that included Seneca and Hazlitt. In 2004 it was reviewed in The Guardian by Nicholas Lezard in an excellent short review that showed how bowled over he was by reading it. It is about Freud’s theory of our relation to culture and was written in 1930 in his later period. In German it’s called Das Umbehagen in der Kultur and they had a lot of trouble translating ‘Umbehagen’. Perhaps ‘The Malaise of Culture’ might be a more accurate translation, although Kultur has a slightly different meaning to culture so ‘civilisation’ is probably more accurate. It is relatively easy to read as a stand-alone text and it addresses what we mean by civilisation and what the cost to us is of being civilised. It is partly Freud’s attitude that makes him so remarkable – his capacity for detached observation. I don’t mean cold and indifferent but it is a psychological achievement to take in as much as he can in as unbiased a way as possible. He takes a long look at civilisation, embracing within that the cost to the individual, a cost we continue to pay. He writes: ‘We have taken care not to concur with the prejudice that civilisation is synonymous with a trend towards perfection.’ This laconic style is typical of the way Freud writes. He means that in order to be civilised we have to repress certain sexual and destructive desires and the very powerful forms of rivalry that are inherent in all of us – for the group to function together. Inevitably the cost to the individual is expressed in neurosis. Freud had a tremendous respect for neurosis. He did not see it as something to be got rid of, he was not contemptuous of it, but he sees it as an expression of what we are like. The word has been somewhat debased but neurosis can be a very severe form of suffering. There are not many things in psychoanalysis that people agree Freud was wrong about, but his attitude to femininity is one of those things. It is not enough to say that Freud was a man of his time because he wasn’t. His view of femininity is completely derived from his view of masculinity, which culminated perhaps in his idea of penis envy, of the woman as a castrated man. This is not baseless in the sense that we all desire what we cannot have, but a woman who saw herself as a castrated man would now be considered to be suffering from a neurosis. Freud did write that we would need women analysts to investigate femininity, but there is no getting away from the fact that he was powerfully wrong here. On the other hand, Freud had women patients who were extremely ill. These were not the walking well of Hampstead but very disturbed people. In his attitude to them Freud allowed them to express aspects of themselves that the culture did not allow them to express, including sexual wishes and desires. Their torment was derived from repressed desires and the way forward was to give them a form of expression, so to that extent he was a great liberator of women. Freud believes that neurotics speak loudly of the things that society asks us to repress. This partly explains our dislike of mental illness in that it reveals aspects of ourselves. So, civilisation demands that we repress our desires and Freud points out that this repression will unleash dangerous forces. It is our natural tendency to form groups like, for example, religious groups. Freud writes about the civilising influence of Christianity but points out that after St Paul made the pledge of love for humankind and demanded that we love each other as brothers this had the effect of creating extreme intolerance of groups outside Christianity. If all you can feel for your brother is love, and not hatred and rivalry as well, then the cost of joining the group is repressing your violence which will then be directed at others outside the group. So you’ve got the Inquisition. It is bleak but the cost of our ignorance of this is huge. If we are aware of the darker side to our natures we can create social structures that allow for it. But, if not, then it is easy to fan flames of hatred because they are flames we all already have. We are appalled that young Muslims are attacked on the street but we have helped to create a culture in which that is inevitable. Freud refuses simply to praise the achievements of culture. He relates cultural ritual, like religious ritual, to the symptoms of obsessive neurosis. The content of religious ritual is similar to that of obsessive ritual, in that both separate the clean and the dirty, the sacred and the profane and the theme of guilt is central to both as is a belief that there are powers that must be placated by putting things in their place. For the obsessive these rituals are idiosyncratic to that individual but for religious people these are communal activities that symbolise being part of a group. Both deal with similar problems so Freud does not idealise civilisation. It puts a brake on man’s destructive forces but the repression of these forces causes untold damage. The belief in man’s perfectibility is very destructive because anything negative will be projected out. Yes. This was written in 1931 and he writes at the end: ‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two Heavenly Powers, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?’"

"Freud is a very relevant figure to this discussion. The limits of progress are in the flaws and divisions of human nature, which are integral to being human. The way Freud represents this in a number of his works, including Civilisation and Its Discontents , is to say that there are a variety of instincts – a very unpopular term now which may not be scientifically valid – from benevolence and love on the one hand to violence and aggression on the other, which are equally part of the human animal. Civilisation, as Freud understands it, begins with the restraint of violence – although of course it doesn’t end there. A civilised state is one which controls violence. Freud’s key point is that because humans are self-divided in the way I’ve described, civilisation always carries with it a degree of repression of instinctual satisfaction, which in turn means that the civilisational condition will always be one of discontent. In other words, it’s not possible to imagine – and dangerous to experiment with – any conception of a civilisation emptied of its discontent, in which all desires are satisfied and society doesn’t exact a price for the repression of violent impulses. Freud thought that civilisation is inestimably valuable – unlike some other writers in central Europe, he was never tempted by barbarism. But he also recognised that civilisation is inherently flawed, not because of political repression and corruption or economic inequality, but because of the nature of the human animal. That is why civilisation can never be rid of its faults, can never be entirely benign. I think that is true. In the language of religion, it might be called original sin. In other religions such as Buddhism, it is called original ignorance. However one wants to put it, it is a truth that humans are ineradicably flawed, and that is a commonplace in pretty much any religious tradition. It’s only recently, in the last 150 years, that the idea which Freud presented in a secular form is considered to be shocking. And the death principle, or death instinct. All these instincts are curbed in society for the benefit of civilisation, and I agree that civilisation carries a price of that repression. If we’re reasonable, we should make sure that the repression is necessary, not cruel and irrational as hostility towards sexuality has been. In other words, elements of this repression are needless and should be eliminated. But part of the territory of humanity are our impulses of cruelty and destruction, which are not the result of a bad environment, education or power structure but are integral to us as humans. Freud is a very interesting writer on religion. As you say, he is strongly critical of religion in many ways. But he has a much more complex view of it than many people think. He never renounces or diminishes his atheism – he lived and died an atheist. I’m an atheist myself, so I sympathise with that. But Freud came to think that religion also had an irreversible role in human development, and was one of the seeds that created the later possibility of psychoanalysis, because [of the religious notion that] the workings of our minds may be invisible to ourselves. So he came to think, as he argues in Civilisation and Its Discontents , that although religion has at times added needlessly to the repression that is necessary for civilised life, it has nonetheless played an irreplaceable role in human development. In this sense he wasn’t an evangelical atheist. It’s true that I’m not a Christian, and don’t follow any religion. And here I think we’re moving towards Norman Cohn."