Civilization and Its Discontents

This important essay, which Freud worked on during the summer of 1929, is perhaps his best work ever known. This book is a brilliant overview of cultural views, from the perspective of psychoanalysis that Freud had developed since the beginning of the century. Civilization and Its Discontents (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) is a combination of things at once: a cursory flashback of The Future of an Illusion (1927), an analysis of the inevitable tensions that more or less make individuals enemies of society, a meditation on the lethargy that seems to be affecting so many people in modern civilization. However, this is the book of a psychoanalyst (we must remember this), and stands as a testimony and appreciation for the final theory of the soul—what is called structural theory (first revealed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, and The Ego and the Id in 1923)—with its emphasis on acts of aggression, the impulse or stimulation of death, as Eros’s mortal enemy.