Freud: Memory, Repression, and the Discontent of Civilization

For this session, we’ll be reading Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” and “A Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad.” These texts together show Freud’s effort to grapple with the psychic cost of cultural life and the mechanisms of memory that make this cost bearable.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud examines the tension between the individual’s instinctual drives and the demands of communal life. Civilization secures safety and cooperation by repressing aggression and regulating sexuality, but this repression produces guilt and discontent. The superego internalizes social prohibitions, ensuring order at the price of psychic unease. Freud diagnoses civilization itself as an ambivalent achievement: it raises us beyond instinctual life while entangling us in repression, neurosis, and dissatisfaction.

In The Mystic Writing-Pad, Freud uses the metaphor of a child’s writing toy to illustrate how memory works. The wax slab can be inscribed, erased, and inscribed again, with faint traces always remaining. Consciousness is like the surface that can be cleared, while the unconscious preserves permanent impressions beneath. This device captures Freud’s central claim: that psychic life is marked by permanence of traces, layered inscriptions, and the return of what seems forgotten.

Taken together, these essays highlight Freud’s dual project: an account of the structural conflict between instinct and culture, and a model of the psychic apparatus that explains how repression, memory, and the unconscious preserve this conflict within the individual.

The texts can be found here and here