In closing, the need for a meta-theoretical mediation of psychoanalytic insights and historical materialistic knowledge in making a concrete analysis of the social conditions of neuroses is emphasised. With this opening, the contradiction between conscious and unconscious objectives in neuroses appears abstractly as a manifestation of the contradiction of subjects in which society finds itself. Finally, in the author’s proposing to open psychoanalysis onto historical materialism, Freud's concept of sexual instincts is deciphered in the light of Laplanche’s considerations as a naturalistic mystification of the unconscious. The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A Story of Science, Sex and Psychoanalysis. Written in the decade before Freud’s death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. This is followed by an examination of Freud’s arguments against historical materialism, and a further reasoned rejection of those objections Freud did not withdraw. Nevertheless, despite a century of progress in neuroscience since Freud, the relationship between what is conscious and unconscious in our brains remains deeply mysterious. Freud’s seminal volume of twentieth-century cultural thought grounded in psychoanalytic theory, now with a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

Since the premises on which Freud bases his cultural theory are untenable, it is argued that this justification cannot be supplied by it. Its a complete chapter-by-chapter summary of Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (1930) for the fields of Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Psychology. His three main contentions are 1) Christianity’s victory over pagan religions (and its low value placed on earthly life) 2) primitive tribes discovered by Europeans who appeared happier living in a state of nature 3) scientific identification of neuroses caused by modern society’s demands. The author questions the extent to which Freud's theory of culture can justify Freud’s postulated claim concerning the social causation of neuroses. CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS Sigmund Freud translated from the German by JOAN RIVIERE a brief excerpt: PSYCHO-ANALYTIC work has shown that these frustrations in respect of sexual life are especially unendurable to the so-called neurotics among us.

Freud culture and its discontents