Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud Discussion Questions Write two discussion questions that invite the class to critically analyze the autho
Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud Discussion Questions Write two discussion questions that invite the class to critically analyze the authors arguments.write 2 discussion questions per reading please. ONLY use the readings attached! ,
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Sigmund Freud
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CIVILIZATION
AND ITS
AND
BY
EDITED
DISCONTENTS
TRANSLATED
BIOGRAPHICAL
James Strachey
A
NORTON & COMPANY
~
Peter Gay
INTRODUCTION
WITH
w .W·
New York· London
BY
I
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement-that they seek
power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them
in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value
in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this
sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the
human world and its mental life are. There are a few men
from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and
achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and
ideals of the multitude. One might easily be inclined to
suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates
these great men, while the large majority cares nothing for
them. But things are probably not as simple as that, thanks
to the discrepancies between people’s thoughts and their
actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses.
One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend in
his letters to me. I had sent him my small book that treats
religion as an illusion,l and he answered that he entirely
agreed with my judgement upon religion, but that he was
sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says,consists in a peculiar feeling,
I(The Future of an nlusion (1927C)].
Civilization and Its Discontents
( 11
which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed
by many others, and which he may suppose is present in
millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call
a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless,
unbounded-as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is
a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with
it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source
of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various
Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One
may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground
of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief
and every illusion.
The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in
a poem,2 caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover
this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scIentifically with feelings. One can attempt to describe their
physiological signs. Where this is not possible-and I am
afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of
characterization-nothing remains but to fall back on the
ideational content which is most readily associated with the
feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly, he means the
same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and
somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a
self-inflicted death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world.’3 That
2[Footnote added 1931:] Liluli [1919].-Since the publication of his two
books La vie de Ramakrishna (1929] and La vie de Vivekananda (1930),
I need no longer hide the fact that the friend spoken of in the text is
Romain RoHand. [Romain Rol1and had written to Freud about the ‘oceanic
feeling’ in a letterof December 5, 1927: very soon after the publication of
The F,uture of an Illusion.]
3Christian Dietrich Grabbe [1801-36], Hannibal: ‘Ja, aus der Welt werden
wir nicht faHen. Wir sind einmal darin: [‘Indeed, we shaH not fall out of
this world. We are in it once and for all:]
12)
S I G M U N D
F R E U D
is to say, it is.a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one
with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me
this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual
perception, which is not, it is true, without· an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any
other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of
such a feeling. But this gives me no right to deny that it does
in fact occur in other people. The only question is whether
it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought to be .
regarded as the tons et origo of the whole need for religion.
I have nothing to suggest which could have a decisive
inHuence on the solution of this problem. The idea of men’s
receiving an intimation of their connection with the world
around them through an immediate feeling which is from
the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits
in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is
justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic-that
is, a genetic-explanation of such a feeling. The following
line of thought suggests itself. Normally, there is nothing of
which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of
our own ego.” This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything
else. That such an appearance is deceptive, -and that on the
contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp
delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we
designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of
facade-this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic
research, which should still have much more to tell us about
the relation of the ego to the id. But towards the outside,
4[Some remarks on Freud’s use of the terms ‘ego’ and ‘self’ will be found
in the Editor’s Introduction to The Ego and the fd (1923b), Standard Ed.,
19,7·1
Civilization and Its Discontents
( 13
at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines
of demarcation. There is only one state-admittedly an
unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological-in which it does not do this. At the height of being
in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to
melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who
is in love declares that T and ‘you’ are one, and is’prepared
to behave as if it were a fact. 5 What can be temporarily done
awaywith by a physiological [i.e.normal] function must also,
of course, be liable to be disturbed by pathological processes.
Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of
states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the
external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a
person’s own body, even portions of his own mental life-his
perceptions, thoughts and feelings-, appear alien to him
and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in
which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly
originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged
by it. Thus even the feeling of our own ego is subject to
disturbances and the boundaries of the ego are not constant.
Further reflection tells us that the adult’s ego-feeling cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have
gone through a process of development, which cannot, of
course, be demonstrated but which admits of being constructed with a fair degree of probability.6 An infant at the
breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external
world as the source of the sensations Howing in upon him.
He gradually learns to do so, in response to various prompt-
S[Cf. a footnote to Section III of the Schreber case history (1911C), Standard Ed., l2., 69.]
6Cf. the many writings on the topic of ego-development and ego-feeling,
dating from Ferenczi’s paper on ‘Stages in the Development of the Sense
of Reality’ (1913) to Fedem’s contributions of 1926, 1927 and later.
14)
SIGMUND
FREUD
ings.7 He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that
some sources of excitation, which he wi1llater recognize as
his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at
any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to
time-among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s
breast-and only reappear as a result of his screaming for
help. In this way there is for the first time set over against
the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists
‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special
action.8 A further incentive to a disengagement of the ego
from the general mass of sensations-that is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external world-is provided by the
frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and
unpleasure the removal and avoidance of which is enjoined
by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted
domination. A tendency arises to separate from the ego
everything that· can become a source of such unpleasure, to
throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is
confronted by a strange and threatening ‘outside’. The
boundaries of this primitive pleasure-ego cannot escape rectification through experi’ence. Some of the things that one
is unwilling to give up, because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object; and some sufferings that one
seeks to expel turn out to be inseparable from the ego in
virtue of their internal origin. One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one’s sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can
7[In this paragraph Freud was going over familiar ground. He had discussed
the matter not long before, in his paper on ‘Negation’ (1925h), Standard
Ed., 19,236-8. But he had dealt with it on several earlier occasions. See,
for instance, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915C),ibid., 14, 119 and
134-6, and The Interpretation of Dreams (Hp:Ja), ibid., 5, 565-6. Its
essence, indeed, is already to be found in the ‘Project’ of 1895, Sections
1, 2, 11 and 16 of Part I (Freud, 1950
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