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It is impossible to resist the impression that people commonly apply false standards, seeking power, success and wealth for themselves and admiring them in others, while underrating what is truly valuable in life. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Freud as psychoanalytic sociologist.,
By Augustus Caesar, Ph.D. (Eugene, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Civilization And Its Discontent (Paperback)
Sigmund Freud, whatever the variations in his posthumous reputation, remains the most compelling, daring, and persuasive analyst of the human condition we have. His psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, sublimation, repression, etc., offer original insights that profoundly influenced the course of Western consciousness in the 20th century. In addition to his gifts as a thinker, Freud was a master stylist, a man whose luminous prose and skillful argumentation make reading him a genuine pleasure. "Civilization and Its Discontents," one of Freud's last works, remains one of his most vital and important. Don't be fooled by its brevity; this is a deeply complex and wide-ranging examination of Western civilization and its tensions. Freud speculates about the origins of our modern societies, the difficulties of assimilating ourselves to them given our own individual psyches, and ends the book with a rather pessimistic look forward. Clearly, Freud felt that civilization's "discontents" were an unresolvable fact of life. What makes "Civilization and Its Discontents" so fascinating is Freud's application of psychoanalysis to Western society as whole. He examines how the factors at play in our own psyches--family conflicts, sexual desire, guilt, the "death instinct," and the eternal battle between our own self-interest and the interests of the human species at large--cause the problems that human beings encounter on a daily basis. As always with Freud, his ideas are put forward not as a final statement, but as a tentative first step. This is one of Freud's indispensable texts, and its accessible and absorbing style make it an ideal introduction for those who are seeking to discover this colossal mind for the first time. A must read.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
badly translated,
By Craig Chalquist, PhD, author of TERRAPSYCHOLO... (Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Civilization And Its Discontent (Paperback)
If you can find another translation of this seminal book (see my review of Freud's Gravida), then do so. Strackey translates "kultur" (culture) as "civilization," "I" as "ego," and in general makes Freud seem so lifeless and cold-blooded that it's nearly impossible to get an accurate feel for his thought.Without defending Freud's obvious reductionism, it needs saying that it was he who prompted us to ask: do the demands of modern life encourage or pathologize our innermost strivings? What do they do to our eros, our capacity for loving and feeling solidarity? And how do they stimulate our frustration and aggression? While I disagree with Freud's conclusion that the total psychic repression of powerful passions is a necessary evil for the existence of culture, I do think he challenges us to wonder about just how high a price we pay for what we believe to be the "higher" and "nobler" achievements of the mind.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Freud as a philosopher ...,
By FrizzText "frizz" (Wuppertal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Civilization And Its Discontent (Paperback)
With his culture theoretical documents Freud had essentially share at the development of the philosophical self-determination of mankind. After the Christian conception of the world had shattered, and human beings lost their feeling of being in security, after philosophers like Kierkegaard told, that only the fight for a pure individuality (and no common religious feelings) would be a help in the future, after Immanuel Kant had recognized the one-sidedness nature of academic scientifical points of view - a Nietzsche became famous, hammering out, that the power of will and lust (like Dionysos) should be focused - since the contrary, the Apollonian world of law and order had surpressed too much of important emotional horizons. Freud delivered more details of this conflict between sex and aggression and - on the other hand - sublimation, the capability to listen to the routes of correctness: a "super-ego" (like an inner police, living in every human being) is fighting against an ego, wishing childishly to love or to fight, often in the wrong moment and at the very wrong place. While an Arthur Schopenhauer still constituted the will as driving force of the world, but assigned only a role of an onlooker to the intellect, Freud drilled in greater detail: The destruction strength of human beings, their desire to meet death, their lust of aggression is the core of all driving inner-forces (Freud's opinion). This driving energy arduously sublimes in good behaviour, but then often dumps in self aggression or in an outside aggression. It is Freud's contribution to have made us examine an anthropological basic constant: the perpetually endangering human aggression instinct. Freud is therefore completely congruent with Schopenhauer, concerning the pessimistic prevailing mood. So he does not share the naiveté and enthusiasm of the at that time current "life philosophy" or the optimism of the existentialism starting with Henri Bergson's "elan vital": It is not very astonishing: Sigmund Freud was powerlessly hemmed in between two World Wars. He suffered (emigrating to London) under the Nazi-oppression. Long before any Islamic fundamentalism ruled the daily news, he clearly analyzed how much efforts we need, to calm down the global attacks of a so-called "death instinct". Therefore his culture theoretical documents perhaps are still much more meaningfully than the gloomy approaching area of his sick individual person stories...
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