Prologue: If I Were Writing Civilization and Its Discontents Today, What Would I Write?

In 1929, Freud began to write Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1930) using his most up-to-date psychoanalytic thinking to explore the relationship between humans to their culture, society, and civilization. This has been a theme that he had been exploring for several years. He had written the Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927) two years before, in which he argued that man's relationship to God finds its origin in the child's relationship to his or her father, who can protect the child from the vulnerability and helpless of the exigencies of life. Actually, several years after writing Civilization and Its Discontents, he continued with this theme in Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939), applying myths based on psychoanalytic discoveries. He hypothesized that Moses was an Egyptian who discovered the Jewish People and chose them to promulgate his new religion. He became the great leader of the Jewish people, but was murdered by his followers, who became jealous of his authority and then guilty of what they had done. The memory of the murder and the guilt ran deep into the unconscious of his followers, which became the source of religious experience and subservience and expiation which religion offers.

The reader of the monograph can follow Freud's line of thought as he grapples with questions of why individuals suffer not only as separate entities, but as part of a living society. One can also follow the richness of his thinking as he goes into tangents of religion, ubiquity of human suffering, the limitations of achieving happiness, and the problems of ethics as guides to living one's life. One of the paradoxes in the book is that, although the manifest theme reeks with pessimism about the human condition in society—Freud was eighty years old, suffering from cancer, mourning the loss of a daughter, and mastering the carnage of World War I—as he experienced suffering, helplessness, and facing death, he had the courage, energy, creativity, and love to give the gif