How does freud define civilization

What does Freud consider the three sources of human suffering? Why does Freud say that civilization has been a cause of human misery? Why is modern man hostile to civilization? What does Freud mean by culture? What does he consider achievements of culture and why? Why do these achievements not bring happiness? Why does civilization also require beauty, cleanliness, and order?

Why does Freud say that individual liberty is not a benefit of culture? Why does Freud say that we should not confuse civilization with progress towards perfection? Chapter 4. Describe the "primitive family.

How does Freud explain the evolution of the first laws totems? How does Freud use the need for physical love eroticism to explain the emergence of culture? How does "inhibited" love friendliness bind society together? Why is there a rift a contradiction between love and culture? The family and society? Why does Freud say that women become antithetical to culture?

Why must culture set restrictions upon sexual life? What is the result? Chapter 5. Folks need to find solace where they can, according to their own lights. But what is the purpose of life? A silly question. To put it in simple but even more troublesome terms, unrestrained indulgence of the libido fails to bring happiness.

Unrestrained libidinous pleasure seeking does not work. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.

Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one -- if, that is to say, by means of sublimation , it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses.

Unfortunately most people work only to subsist so as to allow them to seek libidinal pleasures elsewhere. And why not then wash all these problems away in religion? At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis.

There are many roads to happiness, but the painful truth is that none of them leads there for certain. There is always a price to pay. We can do nothing about the first two. And while we can do a great deal about the third -- and over the centuries humans have done a great deal -- we have to acknowledge that failures in the third realm -- civilization -- must have some obdurate psychological cause.

Great industrial, scientific, engineering, and technical advances have been made in recent decades. Freud emphasizes medicine, hygiene, transportation and communications. But that is ridiculous. Civilization may not bring liberty, freedom or happiness, but it does restrain primitive impulses in the human psyche.

Civilization may not solve all problems, but it does prevent many problems. Science provides the only route to understanding how the irremediable aggressive instincts of humans can be restrained in civilization. Civilization creates an environment in which primitive libidinous impulses can be sublimated.

But civilization exacts its own particular price. Freud earlier established that the unrestrained libidinous life did not work to bring happiness. Now we learn that restraint too has its costs. Libido love, genital love, strives for objects, and suffers if restricted. The strong find substitutes for the natural fixation on aggressive genital satisfaction. If you become neurotic by denying instinct, and the development of civilization depends on the denial of instinct, does that mean civilization creates—and depends on!

It is totally unconscious. The ego, which is mostly conscious, begins as an "undifferentiated" psychic structure. When a child learns to distinguish between itself "I" and the objects it desires "other" , the ego develops as a structure separate from the id. This separation results from early disappointments—when our desires are not fulfilled.

When Freud refers to the ego , he is talking about our conscious self of who we are. The super-ego is internalized self-criticism, an internalization of the voice of the father or authority.

The size of the super-ego is not related to the force of the authority figures one has experienced; the super-ego strengthens in proportion to the aggression directed against it. Freud discusses "sublimation" as a process of redirecting psychical energy from ego-desire e.

Ideal demands —the requirements of civilization to live in a way that will contribute to the "perfect" functioning of civilization.