Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud 1930
This extended essay examines the conflict between human desires and the demands of living together. A comparison with Rome imagines the mind as a city where every past building still stands.
95 pages 1h 51m reading time
- One of the most widely read books on what society costs the people who live in it, and a key late work of Freud's thinking.
- Argues that civilization asks people to hold back their urges for sex and violence, and that this holding back leaves them with a lasting sense of unhappiness and guilt.
- Claims that people carry a drive toward aggression and destruction that is as basic as love, and that keeping it in check is the central problem societies face.
- Shaped later thinkers who joined Freud's ideas with social criticism, including Herbert Marcuse, whose "Eros and Civilization" (1955) was written as a direct reply to it.
- Helped make the idea of a built-in human "death drive" and guilt as the price of social life part of 20th-century debates in philosophy, literature, and social theory.
Answered a friend's letter
The French writer Romain Rolland wrote to Freud about an "oceanic feeling," and the book opens by replying to him.
Written while fighting cancer
Freud drafted it on holiday in the summer of 1929, while ill with the mouth cancer that troubled his last years.
A gloomier first title
Freud first called it "Unhappiness in Civilization," then softened the German word to one meaning "unease."
A last line added later
As the Nazis gained strength, Freud added a closing question in 1931 about whether love or destruction would win.
Translated from German by Joan Riviere