Chapters 7 & 8 of Civilization and Its Discontents

In the final chapters of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud continues to explores the psychological and cultural evolution of civilization, focusing on the development and role of the sense of guilt within individuals and societies. He investigates how civilization manages human aggression, the origins and mechanisms of conscience and guilt, and the interplay between individual and collective development in cultural processes.

In chapter seven Freud describes how exactly people are able to maintain civil societies in spite of the overwhelming presence of the death-drive between persons in those societies. He believes that Eros, the love-drive, is not be sufficient to hold societies together. He closes the chapter with a discussion of the development of the super-ego in children.

Freud begins chapter eight by defining guilt “as the most important problem in the development of civilization” and attempting to “show that the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” He ends his essay by wondering whether the development of civilizations mirrors the development of children into adults—do societies age and mature just as humans do?

Please read chapters seven and eight Civilization and Its Discontents (*.pdf pages 67 – 89.) The reading is about 9,000 words and may take 40 or so minutes to read. The Internet Archive has a theatre view of the work. Chapter seven begins on *.pdf page 106; chapter eight begins on *.pdf page 125. Additional *.pdfs are available here and here.

YouTube is flooded with videos about this work, so if you find videos helpful, go check them out. This video gives an overview of each chapter; chapter seven begins around the 15:37 mark. A “Sigmund Freud” YouTube search also returns many results.

This article gives a helpful interpretation of Freud's explanatory system: Mechanisms and fundamental principles in Freudian explanations.

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