The New Republic recently featured a fascinating review of a new edition of Civilization and Its Discontents, the classic work by that most famous of Vienna citizens, Sigmund Freud.
Reviewer Udi Greenberg writes, in part:
"When Freud embarked on his quest to map the human psyche with The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), his focus was mostly on the individual. If people suffered from mental difficulties like hysteria, so the argument went, this was likely due to repressed personal trauma, which psychologists could expose and heal through one-on-one conversations. As time passed, however, Freud increasingly wondered what his new “science” of psychoanalysis meant for broader social questions. After the violence of World War I and the upheavals that followed, it seemed evident that people’s psychology was tied to collective causes: Their hopes and anxieties, happiness and despair, were inseparable from their thinking about religion, politics, or economics. With Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud therefore set out to explore how civilization—by which he meant the laws and informal norms that society imposed on its members, as well as the culture and technologies it produced—both reflected and shaped the human psyche. Could social structure help ameliorate common psychological miseries? Or was civilization responsible for them?
[...]
"Rather than a political tract, then, Civilization and Its Discontents can be understood as a mediation about the inevitability of contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions. Being human, Freud seemed to claim, is to accept that our understanding of the world is always partial and misguided, with all the misery this entails: We can never know if the source of our unhappiness is social conditions or individual idiosyncrasies, or whether our actions, individual or collective, increase or diminish our suffering. Social theorists, whether progressive, centrist, or conservative, may strive to produce clear categories for analysis and offer neat solutions for human dilemmas. But as Freud’s doubts about his own ideas show, in his eyes, this was as futile as distinguishing between civilization and its discontents."
Read the whole article HERE.