Freud and Civilization

I'm a bit behind on grading discussions, but will attempt to get caught up this week.

Here are a few remarks about the discussion of Freud:

Generally your answers about Freud's views on religion were spot on. A lot of you disagreed with his assertion that religious people are essentially stuck in an "infantile" stage of development whereas atheists are fully "mature" individuals, but almost everyone seemed perfectly clear that that was indeed Freud's position.

However, there was some confusion about his views of the origins of civilization. Put simply: Freud believes all humans naturally seek to gratify our own desires. We want food and sex and other pleasurable things. He doesn't believe that we want to please other people or make them happy. However, in a state of nature (that is, before civilization) only the strongest people (strongest men really) can get all the food and drink and sex that they want. Everyone else gets nothing or very little. No one thinks twice about killing anyone weaker who gets in the way of satisfying his desires. Now that's an untenable situation for the vast majority of humans. So in order to get SOME of their desires met (and to not be killed by the strongest people) they form societies in which there are laws to protect the weak and to regulate people's desires. That's civilization. Lots more people get to have sex, BUT the catch is NO ONE gets to have as much sex as they really want. Sexual desire has to be channeled into marriage and becomes forbidden outside marriage. If you get mad at someone, you have to restrain your desire to kill them. Civilization is necessary (and even good in Freud's view), but civilized humans are never truly happy because we have to suppress our natural desires in order to live within the bounds imposed on us (or which we impose on ourselves).

As a number of you noted, that's a pretty pessimistic view of human nature! It's a lot more pessimistic than, for example, Darwin's view of human beings, especially his view of "civilized" human beings. Many of you disagreed with this view, which is perfectly reasonable. Tyler Christian noted (quite accurately, I think) that Freud's pessimism is very much connected to the fact that he was writing immediately after the first world war and before the second. Freud was Jewish (by ancestry - he was not a practicing Jew), and was eventually forced to flee Austria for England when the Nazis took over. It's fair to say his pessimism was not entirely misplaced.