My grandfather studied psychoanalysis at Hopkins. At the end of years of training, he gave it all up and switched to a more quantitative approach to psychology. As Freud himself says, "It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings" and Grandpa decided that the Freudian approach was simply too resistant to quantification to serve as the foundation for a productive scientific career. But up until the very end, Grandpa held that Freud's understanding of human psychology was profound and real.

This was my first time reading unfiltered Freud and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. The overall tone and style of "Civilization and Its Discontents" reads like the musings of an armchair philosopher, but it clearly has scientific pretensions. While much of Freud has been debunked, there is no denying his influence and this book's arguments are certainly compelling. If nothing else, Freud provides a very different perspective from which we can attempt to understand our world.

The central argument of the book is that civilization impinges upon man's natural freedom and thus causes various psychological neuroses, the most prominent of which being a sense of guilt. Freud draws parallels between an individual's psychological development (particularly regulation of the ego by the super-ego) and the maintenance of order in society (repression of individual freedom by the collective). He claims that societies promote in-group/out-group dynamics to channel man's natural aggression to a societally-approved release valve.

But Freud doesn't stop there, he's also got provocative things to say about pleasure, love, sexuality, religion, and work. I found his thoughts on economic work to be particularly interesting. Freud says that "displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work" is a mechanism that society has created to alleviate our psychological nature and that work would be valuable for this reason alone even if it had no economic function. He also has some odd evolutionary hypotheses about genitals and psychology... I am not knowledgeable enough to determine how seriously to take these claims.

Overall, worth a read - if only to gain an appreciation for its place in the history of ideas.

Full review and highlights at http://books.max-nova.com/civilization-discontents/

Civilization and Its Discontents - Likewise Book Reviews

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