Reading Questions for week 6: Freud
Civilization and its Discontents
****Take good notes on the text as you read. The final question asks you to produce your favorite and your least favorite passages.
1. What is meant by “the oceanic feeling” and how does Freud explain it scientifically (11-13)
2. Freud does not give you formal definitions of the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle, but you can can deduce these from context. What do these principles do?
3. Why does Freud say that our present ego-feeling is a “shrunken residue” of a much more inclusive feeling?
4. What does Freud mean by “preservation in the sphere of the mind”?
5. We will be watching Freud the rhetorician as he makes his argument and I will ask you to describe or even criticize his rhetoric. Please comment on Freud’s analogy between the city of Rome and the mind. Should he have edited himself or does this advance his argument?
6. How does Freud connect religious feeling with the need for a father’s protection? (20-21)
7. Review Chapter I and outline the main points. Can you tell where Freud is going with his discussion of the oceanic feeling?
8. Chapter 2 opens with a tirade against religion. Why does Freud find religion so distasteful?
9. By p. 23, Freud has already quoted Goethe, Schiller, and Fontane. Watch his literary references. What is the effect on his prose?
10. (24-25). What does Freud say about the purpose of life?
11. What are the three possible sources for human unhappiness? (26)
12. What is Freud’s objection to intoxicants as a remedy for suffering or unpleasure?
13. What is the disadvantage of making love the center of everything?
14. Read the last paragraph of Chapter II very carefully (36). What does Freud mean when he says that the believer could have spared himself the detour?
15. What is the rhetorical effect of Freud’s “admission” that everything he has said up to now is common knowledge on p.37? Look also at p. 50, where he appeals to the common and the universal.
16. Watch Freud’s definitions. How does he define civilization (42)?
17. Why does Freud assert that man has become a “prosthetic God”? (44)
18. What is Freud’s definition of order? (46)
19. Read the first full paragraph on p.59 and compare it with what you know of Hegel’s reading of Antigone.
20. 65-68. Freud’s critique of the Christian imperative, ‘Love
thy neighbor as thyself.’ Is very important to his argument here and to
the theory of aggression that he will unfold. What are his objections?
I have not asked you to read Chapters VI and VII. Here are some highlights:
Chapter VI: Freud opposes the “death instinct” or “instinct
of destruction” to Eros which seeks to combine and expand. The expression
of this death instinct is aggression. Freud writes: “[C]ivilization is
a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose it is to combine single human
individuals…into one great unity, the unity of mankind….But man’s
natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against
each, opposes this programme of civilization (81-82).
Chapter VII: Here Freud describes the origin and development of the superego.
How does civilization inhibit the aggressiveness that opposes it? Conscience,
which also involves the aggression of the individual against himself. As the
individual develops (in analogy to civilization), his aggression is internalized
and a portion of the ego develops into the superego—as if civilization
had installed a guard or a policeperson in each individual. Small children learn
to fear a loss of love if they do not behave and gradually this authority is
internalized. Civilization is inextricably bound up with a sense of guilt.
21. Freud writes that with the development of civilization and the superego, “the difference between an aggression intended and an aggression carried out lost its force.” (101). What does he mean by this?
22. What are Freud’s reservations about analyzing a communal neurosis? (110)
23. Please take a moment to look at your notes and then answer the following: