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Teachers' Resource Web Study Questions on Sigmund Freud Civilization and its Discontents Chapter One: 1. Freud begins his task as cultural analyst by discounting the theory that what his friend calls the "oceanic instinct" is responsible for the rise of religion. He acknowledges that this instinct may exist, but derives it from "an early phase of ego-feeling" (21). Describe Freud's narrative about the manner in which the ego comes to differentiate between itself and the world outside. 2. Does Freud's tracing of the so-called oceanic feeling back to the early childhood of individual humans allow him to make an important point about the structure of the human psyche? Explain. 3. If the oceanic feeling is not behind what Freud considers the lamentable human need for religion, what, then, is responsible for this need? Chapter Two: 1. Freud at once dismisses religion's stock question about the meaning of life. Now that he has done this, what question does he pose by way of entry into the field of cultural analysis? Examine page 25. Does Freud sound like a utilitarian here? 2. What three basic obstacles do humans face in attaining pleasure and avoiding pain? 3. Describe the ways in which humans, having been forced by the brute facts of life to moderate their claims to happiness, merely seek to avoid pain. Follow out, that is, the means whereby people try to extirpate, deaden, or shift ("sublimate") instinctual impulses and thereby attain at least some degree of satisfaction. 4. On what grounds does Freud dismiss religion once and for all? 5. Why does Freud say that love offers the strongest hope of happiness to mankind? His enthusiastic remarks aside, however, does Freud really approach this topic of love with wide-eyed, utopian innocence? 6. Near the end of the chapter, Freud-as-cultural-analyst offers some doctorly counsel about the chances for individuals' achieving happiness. How close does he seem to think civilization can come to serving as a platform for the happiness of all, or many of, its citizens? While we have the transitory pleasure of observing Freud play at being Bentham and Mill, let us ask, "just how good a utilitarian is he, anyway?" Chapter Three: 1. Freud opens this chapter by pointing out some historical reasons for humanity's disappointment at the limited satisfaction it has reaped from its "civilized" achievements. What reasons does he give? 2. From pages 42-50, Freud sets down what he believes to be the defining characteristics of civilization. List these characteristics. Dwell especially on the one that Freud describes as "the decisive step of civilization" (49). Does this decisive step also turn out to be the source of civilization's troubles? How so? 3. From pages 50-52, Freud provides yet another narrative of civilization's rise: he compares it to the maturation process, or libidinal development, of a normal individual. This new narrative offers him another way to describe the frustration caused by civilized life. Describe the three mechanisms whereby human instinctual disposition is forced into compliance with the needs of growing up. Which one does Freud say causes people the most frustration, and so the most hostility against civilization? Chapter Four: 1. If civilization resembles the libidinal development of an individual, how, then, asks Freud, did civilization itself grow up? Follow out Freud's bedside story about this process; the main characters are Eros, the unrestricted father, and this father's sons. 2. Notice that while Freud has kept his promise to return to his commentary on Eros, his latest insights show that instinct to be anything but a panacea for human happiness. Examine the problems that come of Eros, the instinct that supposedly connects human beings in ever-larger associations. Why doesn't love spread its net of pleasure and harmony as smoothly as one could wish? Concentrate on what Freud says about the family, incest, and the restriction of children's sexuality. Chapter Five: 1. Freud confesses that Eros behaves much as the Renaissance poet John Donne said--it tries to unite two lovers into one entity, and is quite satisfied in making the four walls of a lover's hideaway the universe. Even admitting this self-limiting quality of human love, says Freud, we still might be able to imagine a state of affairs in which a vast number of libidinally satisfied couples would be free to connect with all others via work and common interests. That utopian vision, however, Freud instantly shatters--it is simply too good to be true. What is it about human beings that renders this impossible, and how does Freud discover this troublesome instinctual fact? 2. What does Freud have against communism's goal of abolishing capitalist property relations and setting up a fully rational society? And supposing that such an earthly paradise were to be established in, say, one section of the globe, what would happen soon thereafter to that section's relationship with all other groups? 3. At one point, Freud briefly entertains the notion that so-called primitive men were happier than the poor victims of civilization. Just as quickly, he destroys any such illusion. Examine the way he does this. 4. Freud is no Herbert Spencer--he seems earnestly to believe that we should try to make things better for ourselves and our fellows. Nonetheless, what is his closing point in this chapter? Chapter Six: 1. Early in his effort to formulate a theory of the instincts, Freud says, he simply adopted the poet Schiller's terms "hunger" and "love" (i.e. self-preservation or ego-instinct and libido or object-instinct) to describe the key human instincts. Then, while analyzing narcissism, he says, he discovered that libido actually inhabited the ego. If libidinal energy was so general, he asked, was it to be identified as the force that governs all life, as the kind of vitalistic life force that so many scientists had posited in the nineteenth century? The answer was "no." Describe the equally powerful force that opposes Eros, making the human organism an entity with deeply divided instincts. 2. How is it possible to grasp or observe the workings of this opposing instinct? 3. Examine Freud's now fully developed definition of civilization. In what way does civilization serve Eros, and how does the Death Instinct interfere? Chapter Seven: 1. In what way does civilization inhibit the aggressive manifestations of the Death Instinct? Trace out Freud's narrative about the development of the super-ego, conscience, and guilt. What makes the super-ego such a terrible fortress, replete with its own little dungeon and torture chamber? 2. In an attempt to resolve the possible contradiction between the external and internal factors involved in the rise of conscience, Freud returns to the issue and provides two narratives: the first has to do with the individual child's way of handling the aggression that is directed toward the father who has prohibited him from enjoying certain instinctual satisfactions, and the second with the broader phylogenetic struggle between a terrible father-king and his sons. The latter narrative involves the entrenchment of a cultural super-ego. Analyze the role of guilt in these two Freudian murder-mysteries. Chapter Eight: 1. "The process of civilization," says Freud, is "a modification which the vital process experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by Eros and instigated by Ananke--by the exigencies of reality; and that task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties" (104). In conflict with this cultural task is the development of the individual, whose egoistic, pleasure-principle-derived aim is merely to fit into a much smaller group (a couple, a family). Freud says that this conflict between the individual and his culture, at least, need not be traced to the primal struggle between Eros and the Death Instinct, and so may admit of accommodation. What does he suggest might be done by way of making individuals more comfortable within the culture whose demands they must meet? 2. Helpful suggestions aside, however, Freud is no prophet; rather, the way he ends Civilization and Its Discontents reminds the Victorianist of that scathing pronouncement on Thomas Carlyle's cultural project: "He led us," said one observer, "into the wilderness, and left us there." Examine the end of Freud's text--with what feelings about the survival of civilization does it leave you? (Remember that the final sentence of the book was added under the shadow of the Nazis: Brownshirt agitators were already battling in the streets and spreading the anti-Semitic, anti-everything-but-Aryan rubbish that helped Hitler become Chancellor of Germany in April, 1933. Less than eight years later, in 1939, Freud, by then dying of oral cancer, reluctantly emigrated from his native country and so narrowly escaped the German takeover of Austria.)
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