civilization and its discontents penguin

Both question the very foundations of civilization, which had not managed to achieve what it had been created to do, to prevent men from having their “throats slashed,” or as Gerald puts it in Women in Love, “everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes” ( WL 33). Discontents, symptoms and other diseases arising from the post-WW1 crisis in civilizationĤBoth Lawrence and Freud who came after him, at least chronologically, expressed their discontents with civilization, even if Freud was less forceful than Lawrence in expressing them. These traces could be organized under three headings: 1. Discontents, symptoms and other diseases arising from the post-WW1 crisis in civilization 2. Remedies within and without civilization 3. An unrelenting tension between the two drives/the two flows. These unacknowledged sources could include the writings of Lawrence.ĢIt is furthermore obvious that discontents with civilization were quite common among artists and writers after the WW1 trauma and that this led many of them to question the validity of art as a remedy for this disease, unless new forms of art were to be found to express the inhuman violence and destruction of this new form of war, without which only silence or absence of representation could prevail.ģIn this context, we will try to find some traces of Lawrencian thoughts and ideas in Freud’s essay on civilization. However, as Freud often quotes from writers, Twain, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Rolland, he may also have been inspired by other literary sources which he did not explicitly quote from. This new edition includes both an introduction by the renowned cultural critic and writer Christopher Hitchens as well as Peter Gay's classic biographical note on Freud.1Trying to find Freudian echoes in Lawrence may appear somewhat contrived insofar as Freud published his book after D.H. Lawrence’s death. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only Norton's Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, was authorized by Freud himself.

Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization's trajectory? Freud's theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Written in the decade before Freud's death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work.

Freud's seminal volume of twentieth-century cultural thought grounded in psychoanalytic theory, now with a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

Civilization and its discontents penguin