Discontent in culture

The Malaise of Culture is one of Freud’s most philosophical works, which deals with the antagonism between the instinctual needs of human beings and the restrictions that culture imposes on them.

Freud was a great follower of Nietzsche and his theory that The man in his purest state is the one who follows the precepts of the Dionysian.; the one who lets himself be carried away by his most primal instincts. The strongest drives in man, according to psychoanalysis, are the sexual drive (eros) and the death drive (thanatos).

Freud takes up the Nietzschean conception of the Dionysian man and builds his most philosophical work in 1930, Discontent in culture. This work was conceived in difficult and turbulent times; Three years later would be the end of the Weimar Republic and Hitler would rise to power. Definitely, These were not times for optimism..

Discontent in culture

The main theme of Discontent in culture is he antagonism between the instinctual needs of the human being and the restrictions that culture imposes on them.

The contradiction between culture and drives lies in the fact that culture tries to establish peaceful societies by restricting the satisfaction of sexual and aggressive drives. Precisely because of these restrictions, These drives would end up transforming into a feeling of guilt.

“…the feeling of guilt is the most important problem of cultural development, and to show that the price of cultural progress must be paid with the deficit of happiness caused by the elevation of the feeling of guilt.”

-Discontent in culture. Chapter VIII. Page 130-

The man mutilated by culture

For Freud, Culture can only be fully realized when it suffocates the most primary instincts of man.. Culture lives in perpetual discomfort because the only way for it to exist is for man to repress himself; that mutilates that animal part that would make him that free and ferocious beast that Nietzsche admired.

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Nietzschean Dionysianism is bound by the rules set by culture, rules that serve so that we can live together in supposed “harmony.”

The cultural human being is neurotic

The consequence of all these repressions that culture imposes are psychologically serious: the human being enters a state of neurosis, sick from pure repression.

The feeling of guilt not only represses instincts, but punishes them from within. and turns man into a pusillanimous and malleable being.

The drives against the Cartesian cogito

For Sigmund Freud, the cogito Cartesian made right has resulted in a bourgeois society that represses man’s instincts/drives, turning him into a sick person. Man cannot develop completely, he cannot feel full, free and vital.

The gray life of culture, the routine marked by a world in which there is an eternal truce between the drives of one and another, would relegate us to a gray life. If liberated men kill each other, it is logical that the imposition of a culture seems necessary so that they can live together in peace.. This is how culture generates sick human beings.

Love and hate in the malaise of culture

Freud admits that it is difficult to accept that man has this instinctive predisposition to vitality at the same time that he has this drive for death and destruction; but The suppression of this last instinct would be the true cause of the need for restrictions in society. Life and civilization are born and develop from the struggle between these two interpersonal forces of love and hate.

Human beings need to submit to civilization and try to get rid of their instincts in exchange for a little security, as Hobbes had already explained years before.

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In Discontent in culture and in Moses and the monotheistic religion, Freud explains the natural tendency toward evil and cruelty that comes from primordial hatred and has disastrous social consequences..

Man satisfies his aspirations by evading laws and human rights. He exploits by humiliating, martyring, killing and appropriates the property of others; but as he must give up fully satisfying this aggressiveness in society, he regains a certain sense of control in tribal or national conflicts.

“Man tries to satisfy his need for aggression at the expense of his neighbor. (It is necessary to give meaning to the words anyway). “To exploit his work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to appropriate his property, to humiliate him, to inflict suffering on him, to martyr him and kill him.”

-Discontent in culture-