In Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents Freud discusses the innate aggression of human beings. Freud asserts that civilization occurs from opposing forces that are always in conflict with one another, and ultimately causes an overall sense of discontent. However, when laying out the opposing forces, he details the forces as only occurring to men. Women make up half of civilization, and from Freud’s analysis, do not have the same aggressive capacity, they do not have the same opposing forces within them that bring up discontent and create civilization. Freud details women as beings who care solely for their children, and marks men as beings who are looking to find sexual gratification from women. In doing so, Freud fails to include people who do not prescribe to heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Additionally, Freud ignores the female experience in his analysis. The way that Freud details aggression is mostly in reference to straight men. Freud’s psychoanalysis of human beings is thus limited to one sect of human beings, is outdated, adhering to principles such as heteronormativity as constants, and cannot be attributed to all. Because people who do not prescribe to heteronormativity and women are not shown to have the same aggressive drive as heterosexual men, the opposing forces do not exist strongly anymore, and there is no constant threat to civilization.
Freud emphasizes that society’s construction begins with primordial human beings. Civilization begins with the Id, with unconscious instinct. Parents and authority figures overpower the Id’s insatiable desires and creates the super ego. The superego eventually manifests into what creates the ability for people to exist together in communal life. Freud goes on further, “the communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object — the woman — and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her — her child. Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization too” (Freud 24). While this is true to a certain extent, it is an archaic view. People do not continue to exist in civilizations because of love and necessity anymore, people have met and exceeded maslow’s hierarchy of needs with survival and sex at the bottom.
Civilization and its Discontents’s argument is contingent on the aggressive nature of human beings. Freud argues that “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud 31). This depiction of man however does not factor women into the equation. Women are less inclined to be as aggressive as men. Additionally, it cannot even be said that all men have this extreme aggression. Freud believes that “the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man” (Freud 43) . This is not true, aggression has gone away. It may be original, in a primitive sense, but the aggression and frustration subsides in modernity. Some men are not aggressive and violent. Some women are aggressive. Some men do not wish to have a “sexual object” and some women do not wish to protect their children. There is no universal aggression that dictates the constant discontent Freud evokes. Some people are perfectly content within civilization. Additionally, the innate aggression of human beings has gone away in a lot of respects, and therefore leads to less discontent. Freud discusses in depth the need for distractions to placate our innate aggression, but are they truly distractions? Hobbies, passions, activities, and relationships are real. Being a part of civilization is to be entrenched in these. Freud argues that “man’s discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and [...] suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital erotism the central point of his life” (Freud 25). This is simply not the case anymore. People find fulfillment through what they do in their day to day life.
Society has advanced beyond its primitive stage of aggression and violence. Society is comprised and ruled by more people than heterosexual men. People do not placate themselves with distractions, they find real activities, interests, and people that make life worth living. The vast majority of people do not feel an overwhelming sense of aggression that overpowers their lives and makes them discontent. Freud does not encapsulate the reality of communal human existence in Civilization and its Discontents, he does not discuss women in depth, he does not explore people who are not heterosexual, or people who do not align themselves within heteronormativity. In not expanding his analysis, he does not show that civilization is in a constant threat of disintegration.
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