Civilization and Its Discontents

In 1929, nearly seventy-three years old, sick and famous, Sigmund Freud wrote a short book. Instead of treating one patient at a time, he tried to understand why civilization as a whole still leaves people with a background discomfort, even when life is in order on paper.

The question grew out of an exchange of letters with a friend, the French writer Romain Rolland, but it expanded into an investigation of the price we pay to live alongside other people: jobs, family, homeowners' association rules, all of it holds coexistence together and charges an emotional fee that almost nobody stops to add up.

The book promises no solution and no recipe for happiness. It describes a conflict that, for the author, never fully goes away: what a person wants for themselves and what the group demands of them pull in opposite directions.

Romain Rolland told Freud that the true root of religion was not fear of a judging god but a feeling that is hard to describe: the impression of being one with the universe, with no boundary between self and world. Freud answered, honestly, that he had never felt anything like it.

Instead of dismissing his friend's experience, he tried to explain where it came from: every baby is still unable to tell its own body apart from its mother's arms, because the boundary between self and world is learned gradually, and only later does the adult come to feel their own skin as the clear limit between themselves and everything else.

Freud's hypothesis is that this feeling of unity would be a remnant of that time before separation, not proof that the religious experience is false or true. It is a psychological attempt at an explanation, and the author makes clear he is speculating.

Freud lists three origins of human pain. The first is our own body, which ages, gets sick, and in the end dies. The second is the external world, which can turn against us with a rain that floods the street, a heat wave that ruins the crops, or a disease that spreads before there is a cure.

The third, he says, is the most painful of all: our relationships with other people. A boss who humiliates you in front of the team, a business partner who cheats you, a spouse who betrays you. Unlike nature, suffering caused by another person also carries a sense of injustice, because it could have been different.

The techniques humanity has invented to seek relief, which we'll see in the following chapters, reduce the impact of one of these three fronts, but none closes all three at once. That is why the pursuit of complete happiness is always a half-finished project.