Civilisation and Its Discontents
Freud's epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of the self, and founded
the theories of psychoanalysis; here he presents his theory of an innate "death
drive" - arguing that civilization distorts natural aggression to impose a terrible
burden of guilt upon us.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four
and eighty-two his home was in Vienna: in 1938 Hitler's invasion of Austria forced him to
seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year.
His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of
the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in
Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in
Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his
creation, psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by
investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the
workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to
demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the
basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious
forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions.
Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist
disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half-century.
116 pages, Paperback