Civilization and Its Discontents in Anthropological Perspective, Eight Decades On

Abstract

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; henceforth CD), as its author readily admits, is a sprawling work with numerous side paths and detours that can easily tempt a commentator into exploring them further. In this article, I resist an such temptation and attempt instead to discern the central argument sometimes hidden in the thicket of rhetorical false starts and extended digressions. Once having laid out relatively briefly what I take to be the main argument, I examine it from the perspective of contemporary anthropology, including both evolutionary and cultural points of view, to determine its current validity and usefulness as a way to think about the relationship between nature and culture in human life. Having done that, I then present an alternative view that conserves many of Freud's insights but is not subject to some of the problems in his original analysis.