The Civilization of Discontent

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Notes

In distinguishing despair from integrity, the preferred mode of experience at this phase of the life cycle, Erikson wrote, “Such a despair is often hidden behind a show of disgust, a misanthropy, or a chronic contemptuous displeasure with particular institutions and particular people—a disgust and displeasure which … only signify the individual’s contempt of himself ” (p. 98). I hope to show that Freud’s choice of the term Unbehagen expresses something more significant than despair thus defined.

I am referring to the aesthetic as defined by neo-Kleinians, such as Meltzer & Harris Williams (1988), who consider psychic life impossible without a comfortable capacity to balance, regressively shift and disorganize, and then rebalance the experiences of “good” and “bad,” whole and part, and the ugly and the beautiful in the context of the earliest encounters with the face and ambit of the primary caregiver.

In the original German, the phrase “you and not I” conveys this dissociation even more powerfully, since it actually contains a glossed-over typo. It reads: “daß Sie und nicht ein [sic] den englischen Title zu finden haben.” The translator glosses over this error, assuming that Freud intended to write Ich instead of ein, which is, of course, likely. However, Freud may also have had in mind some specific category, which he “forgot” to write, such that the sentence would have read as follows: “daß Sie und nicht ein Anderer” (“you and not someone else, an other ”), as if to say, “I am glad that the English title must be produced by you and not by my unconscious mind, my internal ‘other,’ which might translate all too well and thereby reveal too much.”.

In a scholarly essay preceding the publication of his Concordance to the Standard Edition (1984), Samuel Guttman (1980, p. 490) happened to use the case of Unbehagen to illustrate the kind of distortion that results from an infelicitous or problematical translation. Guttman asserts that if one insists on defining Unbehagen as “discontent,” one will be discomfited to discover that the word discontent occurs only once in the entire English translation of the book—in the title! Yet many similar words that bear the same general meaning would need to be referenced in order to get a full sense of the theme of Unbehagenkeit, and Unbehaglichkeit, which runs throughout the book. (I should point out, by the way, that this is not completely accurate, for the term Unbehagen does in fact appear once more in the essay, yet in that location in the Standard Edition (p. 135) it is translated as “malaise.” I will discuss it further on. One wonders if the translation in this instance had Riviere’s consent!) To illustrate this, consider a little gem hidden in “Two principles of mental functioning” (1911, p. 224), where, speaking of the artist and his unique way of dealing with the renunciations demanded by the ego, Freud states, “But [the artist] can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself part of reality.” This observation clearly presages the central theme of Civilization, but the word dissatisfaction reads as Unzufriedenheit in the original German. The term Unbehagen seems not yet to have exercised Freud’s psyche.

And most certainly the essential instigator of the book’s inception, as one can see from the intense correspondence the two men shared between 1926 and 1930 (Parsons, 1999, pp. 171–179; Vermorel & Vermorel, 1993).

Freud’s reference to himself as a Landtier or “land animal” was intended to emphasize the droll psychoanalyst’s more modest, land-grounded investigative aspirations, as opposed to the lofty theosophical aspirations of his fellow correspondent (see Fisher, 1976, p. 40).

Feisty as ever, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who also received a copy of Civilization for Christmas, wrote back to Freud (January 4, 1930), “Your ‘Uneasiness’ I have read with ease” [Ihr “Unbehagen” hab Ich mit vollem Behagen gelesen], or “with contentment.”.

Save for two short comments by Macalpine (1949), long ago, and Simmonds (2006), and two scholarly comments by Grossman (1988) and Joseph H. Smith (1990).

As in the terms Nebenprodukt, byproduct, and Nebenwirkung, marginal effect.

This idea reappears later in “The Project” (p. 366) when Freud discusses the rudimentary pathways of instinctual satisfaction “that acquire a secondary function from the fact that it draws the attention of the helpful person (usually the wished-for object itself) to the child’s longing and distressful state; and thereafter it serves for communication.”.

As for Freud’s tendency to pull up the analysis of religious illusion into the realm of the paternal-oedipal theater, see Moloney (1954), Parsons (1999), and Rizzuto (1998).

In fact, Freud later expressed his own awareness of this tendency, and one example emerges precisely in the context of his postpublication analysis of the final shape of Civilization and Its Discontents (as recorded by Sterba, 1978, p. 184). Freud states: “The book does not deal exhaustively enough with the subject [namely the Unbehagen in our culture]. And on top of this rough foundation is put an overdifficult and overcompensating examination of the analytic theory of the feeling of guilt. But one does not make such compositions, they make themselves, and if one resists writing them down as they come, one does not know what the result will be. The analytic insight into the feeling of guilt was supposed to be in a dominant position.”.

Freud commits an additional error: he seems to have added the phrase “sweetfaced dear old woman” in its initial appearance in the English translation of the letter. Strachey assumes that the content of the letter was handed over to Freud incompletely (Freud, 1928a, p. 169), but doesn’t explain why Freud would not have owned or seen the original autograph. Alternatively, it may be that the English document in fact contained this phrase, but this means that Freud accidentally deleted it from his own German rendering, as it appears in the G. W. version of this essay. No copy of the American physician’s letter is known. Grossman (1988, p. 733) offers an excellent analysis of how translation and editing modifications effectively masked the intensity of Freud’s personal overidentification with the preoedipal maternal complexes within the experience described.

Freud states in “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919, p. 224): Das Göttliche zu verhüllen, mit einer gewissen Unheimlichkeit ohne umgeben, “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain uncanniness.”.

For further discussion of the maternal and possibly earlier roots of religious experience, see Eigen (1981), Harrison (1989), and Parsons (1999). I must forgo here a significant tangent, but I wish to mention that Freud’s relationship with Romain Rolland seems to have drawn deeply from preoedipal as well as oedipal dynamics (Vermorel and Vermorel, 1993). This comes to light dramatically through Freud’s decision to write the short essay “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis” (1936) in Rolland’s honor, which was their last substantial bit of correspondence. This essay is redolent with screen phenomena having to do with maternal and “oceanic” themes, whose writing seems to have come about thanks to a waning of Freud’s steadfast overuse of the filial piety-superego structures, and to an increased awareness, though in a state of semidissociation, of the impact of the experience of maternal awe (Harrison, 1979).

See Aragno (1997), Lasky (2002), and Wright (1991), who outline the developmental and dynamic links among maternal mirroring, separation and the basic symbolizing functioning of the mind, and the subsequent oedipal dimensions that oversee the gradual movement from primary symbolification (Spero, 1996, 1998) to symbolic equation to metonymic symbolization and finally to metaphoric symbolization.

Freud’s own definition of the uncanny, which he often linked with death (see his analysis of the theme of the “three caskets” [1913, p. 300]), focused on the sense of a “harkening back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to the time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people” (1919, p. 236). This is again the realm of the maternal.

Kavka (1980) and Spero (2001, 2009), with completely distinct evidence and emphases, conclude that Freud’s obsession with the “Moses” sculpture did not emanate primarily from the paternal role of Moses as Lawgiver, though this was clearly one dimension of his conflicted idealization, but more from the principal aesthetic properties of this sculpture and its hidden nursing motif and deeper maternal strains.

See Anzieu (1975); Grubrich-Simitis (1991, 1993); Spector (1973, p. 70).

In the majority of these instances, symbols or metaphors of mirroring, vision, nudity, and shame figure prominently (such as in the case of the eyes of the dolls in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” that Freud analyzes in “The ‘Uncanny’” [1919]), chief characteristics of the preoedipal phenomenology of shame (Lewis, 1971; Morrison, 1989; Wurmser, 1981) and later, on the more internalized level, of the observatory role of the “inward eye,” the superego.

As an aside, though Freud does not write too much about shame in his work in general, as compared to the attention he devotes to guilt, as the aforementioned authors all point out, it is surely not accidental that Civilization and Its Discontents is home to two of Freud’s largest footnotes, both devoted to the evolution of the upright posture in man and the affect of shame (pp. 99–100n, 105–107n).

In Richard Sterba’s (1978) stealthily recorded notes of the meetings at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he relates that on March 20, 1930, after the book had been published, Freud levied his own criticisms at Civilization and Its Discontents. In particular, Freud wondered why no one had noticed his failing to consider the one condition in which full happiness could be achieved (he ironically excused himself because he had the unconscious need to make the omission). Sterba (pp. 184–185) quotes Freud as saying, “This [single] possibility of happiness is so very sad. It is the person who relies completely upon himself. A caricature of this type is Falstaff. We can tolerate him as a caricature, but otherwise he is unbearable. This is the absolute narcissist. This unassailability by anything is only given to the absolute narcissist. This omission of mine is a real defect in the presentation.” I think we would concur that Freud was mistaken in presuming that what interests us in general is some ideal state of absolute happiness—that of the delirious psychotic—unalloyed by the depressive dimension. I have tried to show, however, that his selection of the term Unbehagen reveals his deeper appreciation of the depressive dimension of normative psychological experience, yet from Sterba’s notes we can see that the matter was far from resolved.

See also Jones (1953), pp. 382, 393. The actual German words Freud wrote to Fliess (April 16, 1896) are ” weil sich das zur intensiven Arbeit nötige Mittelelend nicht einstellen will.” The word Mittelelend, which one could translate as “[a modicum of] middle misery,” is a portmanteau Freud created by punning on the term Mittelschmerz, the pain experienced by women at the time of ovulation, that is, in the middle of the menstrual cycle.

My thinking on these points is influenced by the work of Ehrenzweig (1967), Fuller (1980), and Rhode (1994), each of whom, in different ways, takes us closer to the edge of the abyss than any psychoanalytically oriented author I know.

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Moshe Halevi Spero

Director, Postgraduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Weisfeld School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University; Senior Clinical Psychologist, Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, and Department of Psychiatry, Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital; Scientific Associate, American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry.