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8/3/2019 Freud Civilization
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Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents
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We must agree with Freud, to whom
our culture and civilization weremerely a thin layer liable at any
moment to be pierced by the
destructive forces of the underworld. -- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, page 4
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I cannot think of any need in childhood as
strong as the need for a fathers protection.
-- page 20
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Goethe on Religion and Life Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!
He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who
posseses neither of those two, let him have religion! -- page 23
Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days --
Alles in der Welt lsst sich ertragen
Nur nicht eine Reihe von schnen Tagen. -- page 26
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Intoxicants and Yoga are two methods for
subduing unhappiness. Sexual love is the
most pleasurable means of gratifying the
urge for happiness.
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It was discovered that a person becomes
neurotic because he cannot tolerate the
amount of frustration which society imposes
upon him in the service of its cultural ideals,
and it was inferred from this that the
abolition or reduction of those demandswould result in a return to possibilities of
happiness. -- page 39
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No feature seems better to characterize
civilization than its esteem and
encouragement of mans higher mental
activities -- his intellectual, scientific, and
artistic achievements -- and the leading role
that it assigns to ideas in human life. --page 47
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Genital love and aim-inhibited love (such
as friendship) -- page 58
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Happiness
Mine is a peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a
humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed,
good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before
my window, and a fe fine trees before my door; and ifGod wants to make my happiness complete, he will
grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my
enemies hanging from those trees. After their death I
shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrongthey did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true,
forgive ones enemies -- but not before they have been
hanged. -- Heinrich Heine ()pages 67-68)
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Raw Aggressive Desires
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved,and who at the most can defend themselves ifattacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures amongwhose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a
powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, theirneighbor is for them not only a potential helper orsexual object, but also someone who tempts them tosatisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his
capacity for work without compensation, to use himsexually without his consent, to seize hispossessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, totorture and to kill him. -- pages 68-69
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Historical Atrocities
Anyone who calls to mind the atrocitiescommitted during the racial migrations or
the invasions of the Huns, or by the peopleknown as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan andthe Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrorsof the recent World War -- anyone who
calls these things to mind will have to bowhumbly before the truth of this view. --page 69
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The Narcissism of Minor Differences --
Scots and Englishmen, Spanish and
Portuguese, North and South Germans,
ridiculing each other -- page 72
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Civilized man has exchanged a portion of
his possibilities of happiness for a portion of
security. -- page 73
The attempt to restrict instincts is a reform
which civilization cannot accomplish. --
page 74
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Hunger and love are what moves the
world. Schiller -- page 75
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Civilization obtains mastery over the
individuals dangerous desire for aggression
by weakening and disarming it and by
setting up an agency within him to watch
over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
page 84
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Conscience and Fortune
Ill luck greatly enhances the power of the
conscience in the super-ego. As long as things
go well with a man, his conscience is lenient
and lets the ego do all sorts of things; butwhen misfortune befalls him, he searches his
soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens
the demands of his conscience, imposes
abstinences on himself and punishes himself
with penances. -- page 87
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Thrash The Fetish!
If a primitive man has met with a
misfortune, he does not throw the blame on
himself but on his fetish, which has
obviously not done its duty, and gives it a
thrashing instead of punishing himself. --
page 88
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The price we pay for our advance in
civilization is a loss of happiness through
the heightening of the sense of guilt. --page 97
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Communal Super-Ego and Heros
The community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose
influence cultural development proceeds.
The super-wgo of an epoch of civilization has an origin
similar to that of an individual. It is based on the
impression left behind by the personalities of great
leaders -- men of overwhelming force of mind during
their life thesed figures were -- often enough, if not
always -- mocked and maltreated by others and even
dispatched in a cruel fashion. In the same way, indeed,
the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he
had met his death by violence. -- page 107
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Opposing the Super-Ego We are very often obliged, for therapeutic
purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we
endeavor to lower its demands. Exactly the sameobjections can be made against the ethical
demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does
not trouble itself enough about the facts of the
mental constitution of human beings. nIt issues acommand and does not ask whether it is possible
for people to obey. -- page 109
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