Civilization and Its Discontents

Abstract

Having first encountered Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 2005) as a college student sometime around 1963 or 1964, I can dimly recall focusing especially intently on the book's first few pages in which the “oceanic feeling” is discussed. These pages, however, appear, at least at first glance, to have little relationship to the major themes dealt with in the rest of the book, and seem to have largely served as a means of linking Freud's analysis of the consoling functions of religion in The Future of an Illusion to the more general discussion in Civilization's second chapter of the “palliative measures” that help make human suffering more endurable (Freud, 2005, pp. 49–51). Moreover, despite careful acknowledgment of his respect and esteem for Romain Rolland, who had brought the oceanic feeling to his attention, Freud was rather dismissive of this state of mind, both in terms of its moral value and its scientific importance. For, apart from the personal moral distaste and condescension signaled by his inclination to regard it as an effort to bring about “the restoration of total narcissism” and by his association of it to trances, ecstasies, mysticism, and other “regressions to primordial states of mind,” he was quick to dismiss Roland's suggestion that the oceanic feeling had great scientific significance as a fundamental source of religious feeling (Freud, 2005, pp. 46–48).

Notes

¹As Gay (1988, p. 396) points out, Freud posed this same question himself, asking in the New Introductory Lectures: “Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive drive?”