Freud, Sigmund, & Strachey, James. (2005). Civilization and its discontents. New York: Norton.
As Louis Menand points out in the introduction to this well known work, Freud did not believe in the perfectibility of man (14). Freud takes a step slightly outside of his realm of psychology and attempts to explain how civilization must always be a mitigating factor on human instincts generally, and human aggression more specifically. This conclusion about human nature in relation to society allows Freud to speak very negatively about communism.
Freud begins his exploration by talking about an “oceanic” feeling that is common to all people, and that many tend to relate to a belief in God. This feeling is related to the feeling of being in love, a point where the boundary between the ego and the object seems to fade away. He then moves on to discuss the separation of the ego and the object, or the outside, which happens in infancy. “In this way [the separation of ego and object] one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development” (10).
Freud then goes on to discuss the pleasure principle. “The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (63). He also explains how religion acts as a constraint on human instinct and aggression, a helpful transition for explaining how the state does the same.
Civilization is then defined by Freud: “…describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (73). Humans became civilized through processes that embraced order, cleanliness and beauty. The individual must become subsumed to society, the individual is condemned as “brute force” and the community is exalted as “right” (81).
Freud also picks apart the Biblical claim that one should “love your neighbor as yourself” by positing that, “…the element of truth behind all this…is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (103-4).
Communism is critiqued because it attempts to destroy the regime of private property, and thus bring about a society where humans can interact free from avarice. However, Freud claims that, “…I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion” (106). And that, “Aggressiveness was not created by property” (106). There is still the tension that arises from sex, as well as other psychological tensions that do not arise from relations based on private property. Freud quips that, “One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois” (108).
The meaning of the evolution of civilization is thus: “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species” (119). Civilization exists to curtail the instincts of man, and it does this, “by weakening and disarming [him] and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (121).
Freud ends by positing this question: “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” (154).
The text is generally sexist, and grand statements are consistently proponed. Additionally, the critique of Communism looks like a straw-man argument and doesn’t deal with any of the substantive critiques of industrial society presented by Marx (among others).
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