Sigmund Freud first developed psychoanalysis as a theory of the individual psyche. But as the first decades of the twentieth century unfolded, bringing about the First World War, the fall of empires, an epidemic, and a global financial crash, Freud turned his gaze from the individual to the question of civilization. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud asks why people have always murdered each other—or, to put it another way, what prevents them from doing so all the time. The psyche, for Freud, exists in its own state of perpetual war, between conscious and unconscious wishes, constructive and destructive drives, guilt and pleasure. Civilization, for its part, depends on people’s repression or sublimation of their innate aggression: it protects us, on the one hand; and generates deep unhappiness, on the other. Does peace, therefore, depend on dissatisfaction? And if Freud’s account is so pessimistic, why has Civilization and Its Discontents proven so fruitful for thinkers on the Marxist and socialist left?
In this course, we will read Civilization and Its Discontents, as well as Freud’s continued meditations on aggression and civilization, including the posthumously published Moses and Monotheism. We will locate Freud’s ideas in their historical and geographical context and examine their relevance to our own traumatic moment. What are the structures that organize our societies? What makes us follow certain leaders? Do our social institutions and political leaders shield or oppress us, or both? And how do the drives identified by Freud undergird, integrate, or contradict modern collective impulses for social transformation?
