Civilization and Its Discontents (tr. Joan Riviere, 1930)

Their wordsThe impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life.

Their wordsWe can only be sure that it is more the rule than the exception for the past to survive in the mind.

Their wordsThe derivation of a need for religion from the child’s feeling of helplessness and the longing it evokes for a father seems to me incontrovertible, especially since this feeling is not simply carried on from childhood days but is kept alive perpetually by the fear of what the superior power of fate will bring.

Their wordsLife as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.

Their wordsIt simply cannot be put into execution, the whole constitution of things runs counter to it; one might say the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the scheme of ‘Creation’.

Their wordsOur possibilities of happiness are thus limited from the start by our very constitution. It is much less difficult to be unhappy.

Their wordsThe religions of humanity, too, must be classified as mass-delusions of this kind. Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such.

Their wordsWe are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love-object or its love.

Their wordsThere is no sovereign recipe in this matter which suits all; each one must find out for himself by which particular means he may achieve felicity.

Their wordsAt such a cost—by the forcible imposition of mental infantilism and inducing a mass-delusion—religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more.

Their wordsLaying stress upon importance of work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work he is at least securely attached to a part of reality, the human community.

Their wordsBeauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.

Their wordsEros and Ananke were the parents of human culture, too. The first result of culture was that a larger number of human beings could then live together in common.

Their wordsThe bit of truth behind all this—one so eagerly denied—is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.

Their wordsI once interested myself in the peculiar fact that peoples whose territories are adjacent, and are otherwise closely related, are always at feud with and ridiculing each other, as, for instance, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and South Germans, the English and the Scotch, and so on. I gave it the name of ‘narcissism in respect of minor differences’, which does not do much to explain it. One can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless form of satisfaction for aggressive tendencies, through which cohesion amongst the members of a group is made easier.

Their wordsIt must present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and so the evolution of civilization may be simply described as the struggle of the human species for existence.

Their wordsEvery renunciation then becomes a dynamic fount of conscience; every fresh abandonment of gratification increases its severity and intolerance; and if we could only bring it better into harmony with what we already know about the development of conscience, we should be tempted to make the following paradoxical statement: Conscience is the result of instinctual renunciation, or: Renunciation (externally imposed) gives rise to conscience, which then demands further renunciations.

Their wordsThis may have spoilt the composition of the work; but it faithfully corresponds to my intention to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the evolution of culture, and to convey that the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.

Their wordsEthics must be regarded therefore as a therapeutic effort: as an endeavour to achieve something through the standards imposed by the super-ego which had not been attained by the work of civilization in other ways.

Their wordsMen have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man.