This is the stage that, according to Freud, all infants go through immediately after birth until about the second or third year of life. Boundlessness, oneness, a sense of union with the entire world Freud identifies with infantile narcissism. Instead, he explains it by turning to psychoanalytic experience. Freud acknowledges the existence of this "oceanic" feeling, but for him it does not bespeak an innate religiosity. It is a sense of oneness, boundlessness, limitlessness. Rolland calls this an "oceanic" feeling in which the individual feels bonded with the entire world and the whole human race. Rolland agrees with Freud about the illusory nature of religion, but he maintains that humans share a common feeling of innate religiosity. Freud also begins Civilization by countering an objection to Future of an Illusion made by his friend, the French writer and critic Romain Rolland. This text sets the stage for Civilization insofar as it marks a first extension of a psychoanalytic problematic into the general sphere of shared culture. In 1927 Freud had published The Future of an Illusion, in which he criticized organized religion and religiosity in general as a mass delusion, a compensatory escape from the realities of existence.In this sense Freud shares in a general cultural pessimism, or anti-modernism, a kind of skepticism about the accomplishments of civilization, that is typical of this period. Civilization itself comes to be defined as a space of conflict, or as an extension into cultural community of the tensions that stigmatize the individual psyche. He transfers the intra-psychic conflict (between ego and id pleasure principle and reality principle unconscious and conscious mind etc.) that he had analyzed in his psychoanalytical writings over to the domain of human civilization. Freud himself represents a profoundly pessimistic point of view in this treatise. This experience generated a new sense of pessimism about the human being and human nature. Death became anonymous in the trenches, mass killing took place for the first time in this war. WWI as the first technologically advanced war, with the use of tanks, poison gas, etc. All human cultural achievements and advancements.įirst World War as defining experience for Freud and his contemporaries. Kultur: A more encompassing term than English "civilization" includes science, technology, art society, etc. Unbehagen: "Malaise," a sense of uneasiness, dissatisfaction, vauge "discontent."
German title: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.
Lecture Notes: Civilization and Its Discontents
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