Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

hello her settling in for another lecture by well another lecture on a text that someone wrote not quite as close to the end of his life as Nietzsche did but fairly late in his life Freud wrote this text in 1930 and he died in 1939 so it is one of his later texts and it suffers from some of the same kind of issues as Nietzsche's text only in the sense that it it does imply a number of things that including a birthing is that it would be better if you knew more about Freud to really get a good grasp on so part of my job today is to tell you a little bit more about Freud to help you get a good grasp on those things because the text itself is pretty easy to understand right that he doesn't share with Nietzsche I think Freud is is much easier of a writer I think that he consciously wanted to be more accessible for the public he gave a lot of public lectures on psychoanalysis I think he wanted his views to be easily understood at least to an educated public and I think you can see that in his writing it is much clearer than each's but nevertheless there are still some things in the text that I think could use a bit more background so that's gonna be part of what I do today and part of what I do today will be to talk about repetition that's the theme of our course and you may have noticed that the title of our course is taken from Freud repetition compulsion the rest of the title is why do we remake the past but Freud is the one who introduced the idea of repetition compulsion so in fact that's where we're going to start and I don't have my little remote control today so I'm have to go back and forth between the computer and talking to you so repetition compulsion it's only mentioned a couple of times in our text on pages 30 and 55 which I'm not going to open up and point to because it's really a very brief mention and he doesn't in one place he assumed that you've read one of his other texts to really understand where it's coming from why he's talking about it and in another place he's talking about our compulsion for order and cleanliness and how this is a kind of compulsion for repeating or a compulsion to repeat but in earlier text in 1920 and it's called beyond the pleasure principle Froy talks about it as a compulsion to repeat unpleasant or traumatic experiences in particular this is where the first idea of repetition compulsion came to him in the sense that it was puzzling that why would you have an experience that was unpleasant or even traumatic very very unpleasant and yet your psyche still seems to repeat it over and over and he noticed this he's writing in 1920 after World War 1 he noticed this in what he called the war neuroses in soldiers who had come back from fighting and had dreams of their traumatic experiences that just would not stop they just kept coming over and over and today we see this sort of thing in PTSD which might not just be in dreams but even in flashbacks when you're awake the same scene over and over and it's just as difficult to deal with now as it was in Freud's day they're not really sure exactly what the best treatment is we're working on things some things are helping some things are not it's a puzzle and for Freud this puzzle was why in the world with the psyche you want to repeat things that are painful what is it in us that causes that to happen now what he ends up doing with this is positing the death Drive or Thanatos out of this idea and we'll get back to that later but that's the original idea of repetition compulsion which made me think okay well here's another text that shows us ourselves in an unflattering lights our presence our civilization maybe not quite as bad as Rousseau maybe not quite as bad as Nietzsche but Freud also is saying you know look you could think that civilization is this wonderful thing that we've reached such a pinnacle and we're improving constantly but there's also a lot of discontent going on and there are also problems with civilization and by the end of the text it doesn't look terribly hopeful it doesn't look like he's picturing civilization in an extremely flattering light it looks like we're just gonna kind of waffle back and forth between coming together and breaking apart as he describes with eros and the death Drive perhaps that a continual struggle forever so it is kind of another picture of presenting ourselves in an hour present and our culture and our society in a way that we might not want to look at which makes me wonder do we have a compulsion to repeat such arguments or do we have a compulsion to assign them to you in traumatic experiences to show you over and over look at how problematic civilization is look at how problematic we actually are when we think we're heading towards grandeur and perfection I don't know if that's the case I just find it interesting that we're repeating this theme multiple times and so do many philosophers and of course there's repetition in this text in that Freud's ideas many of them I think are reminiscent of some of the things that we've read I'm not going to draw a picture of Freud's mirror but you could do the same kind of thing Freud looking at himself he sees a number of other philosophers and I don't know to what extent he's repeating those as a traumatic experience I'm not ready to go that far but he definitely does repeat a lot of the same ideas and and that's what I'll talk about today - so outlined for today as I mentioned first I'll be giving a little bit of background some of his some ideas some of his theories that I think he goes over briefly but not in any great detail in this text it might be helpful to have more about those and then I'll jump into the text our discontent with civilization what are those and in that section I want to talk about how he repeats other philosophers we've read or repeats those views and then lastly I want to look at a kind of repetition of the beginning in the end because I find the beginning a little bit puzzling to this text the very first section it seems a little strange to me because it raises something that just seems to get dropped entirely and I want to say that by the end we can kind of see a bit of returning to that theme if not exactly a repetition so that's the plan for today so Freud's there's his dates I don't want to say a whole lot about his life but a little bit of backgrounds might help he was born in what's now Czech Republic but was then Moravia and when he was four his family moved to Vienna and he spent the rest of his life almost in Vienna explain when he moved away from there so he was in Austria for a good portion of his life and one of his biographers Peter gay-rights that when he moved to Vienna in 1860 this was the opening phase of the Habsburg Empire's Liberal era Jews only recently freed from onerous taxes and humiliating restrictions on their property rights professional choices and religious religious practices could realistically harbour hopes for economic advancement political participation and a measure of social acceptance the idea being Freud's family was Jewish Freud was Jewish and moving to Vienna at this time was a good move because there was a good deal of freedom a good deal of possibility for Jews to advance in education in professions and that's what his father was trying to do and Freud managed to get an incredibly good education went to university to study medicine and studied the nervous system for a good period of his life and he at first thought I mean we later think of him as a psychologist as someone who studies the mind the psyche psychological issues but in his early life he was convinced that all of those issues were related to biology that there was some sort of physical cause now that changes over time nevertheless he continues in much of his work especially the earlier work to tie both psychological causes and physiological causes together as much as he can but by the time he's writing this he is focused more on what happens to your mind what happens to your psyche through experiences that you've had in your past but he he says unfortunately in university I found referring back again to his Judaism I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew and this is a part of his autobiographical study that he wrote in 1924 so he felt alienated never even though Jews were having a significant degree more of freedom I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or as people were beginning to say of my race however this alienation for it also says in his autobiographical study helps him this idea of being different than the rest of being an opposition of not going along with the crowd because they wouldn't let him helped him to develop an independence of thinking that allowed him to come up with new and creative and original ideas and not to worry too much when people disagreed with him which they did for a good portion of his life very early on in psychoanalysis and the theory is that Freud came up he had lots and lots of opposition from other doctors from other psychologists who were calling them social psychologists at the time and he was not considered to be somebody who knew what he was doing for a long portion of time but this didn't bother him he was used to it eventually people started gathering around him eventually they're sort of becoming a group who agreed eventually they started creating journals etc but he claims that his early experience of alienation in university prepped him for this idea of being alienated later he got engaged after university realized he needed money decided to go work as a physician and did that more or less for the rest of his life so he was a physician treating nervous disorders neuroses that sort of thing often seeing women who had many of these at the time and continued to do that for long period of time while also writing copiously journal articles books throughout his life trying to explain what psychoanalysis is trying to justify it trying to show how it works in case studies he's got a voluminous body of writings in 1938 however the Nazis occupied Vienna and started persecuting the Jews and Freud had to leave his all of his family managed to get out they moved to England and that is where he died in 1939 he died of cancer of the mouth from apparently smoking and I don't know if it was cigars or a pipe that he mostly smoked I he did smoke cigars I'm not sure if that was the only thing he's knows and he had cancer of the mouth really early on in his life from 1923 to 1939 and by the time he died in 1939 it had gotten so painful that he asked a friend to help him commit suicide with an overdose of morphine and that's exactly what happened so a friend gave him an overdose of morphine and he decided to end his life all right a little bit backgrounds then of Freud but I also want to look at some important terms that aren't defined in the text or at least not defined perhaps as clearly as I wanted maybe you think they're clear instinct instinct is words that's also default translated sometimes as Drive and we see this a lot in the text and on other Freud's writings so we'll see the sexual instinct will see the sexual drive we'll see the death instinct the life instinct and you may have a sort of fuzzy idea of what an instinct is I kind of have a fuzzy idea of what an instinct is but here's what Freud says about it himself it is an impulse that originates in the body and is transferred to the mind and drives our actions so instincts are somehow originating from our physiology there's something in our physiology that makes us have what we later call when we think about it in our mind an instinct or a drive so this is just one of his quotes instincts are the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus now there's lots of them and these are just a few of the kinds of instincts or drives that he mentions sexual instinct or sexual drive the nutritive meaning hunger right desire to eat food self-preservation the life instinct and aggression or the death instinct the idea being that with all of these something physiological is driving you towards and that's nice thing about the word drive moving you to do something it's something that originates in the body is understood in the mind and then drives you to do something now there's a particular kind of instinct called sexual instinct and he often uses the term libido in regards to it and I've read so much Freud where he just uses the term libido and I have a fuzzy idea of what that means so I spent some time trying to figure out exactly what he means by libido and I'm not sure I've got it exactly but you'll see it in this text several times he'll use the word and the idea seems to be that whatever the sexual instinct is it originates in a body and in the body and is transferred to some sort of ideas in the mind and makes you do things there's some sort of energy attached to it there's some sort of impulse and this would be the kind of thing that Freud in his early understanding of neurons and the nervous system would think about as a kind of energy that would move from one neuron to another that would that would move from the neuron to the muscle that would make the muscle move this is how I'm understanding libido as energy and this is a nice quote I think on the exact analogy of hunger we use libido as the name of the force in this case that of the sexual instinct as in the case of the hunger that of the nutritive instincts by which the instinct manifests itself so some kind of force some kind of energy but it has specifically to do with the sexual instincts so he's always talking about something to do with sex and sexuality when he's talking about libido but what's interesting for Freud is that sex and sexuality are not tied only to activities you might consider to be sex not only tied to activities with your genitals so the sex instinct has to do with it starts in in childhood it has to do with erato genic zones he calls them we when I call them props erogenous zones areas of the body that will later become associated with sexuality but that in early childhood are just seeking pleasure and that even at that point Freud calls these areas of the body and a pleasure that you seek through them sexual so the mouth for example being an errata genic zone that for young children they seek pleasure through it by eating by sucking for for milk by putting things in their mouths when they're babies and Freud calls this a manifestation of the sexual instincts that you are trying to get pleasure from a zone of the body that as it turns out will later become part of the sexual function and the same with he also called the breast obviously being something that will later connect to sexuality and the anus as well children who are young get pleasure when they're learning how to potty train from holding in what needs to come out in the body to not be too you know crude about it and choosing when to let it go this is a kind of sense of mastery and they feel good about this they are in control of their bodies Freud says at that point and this to this pleasure that you can get from the anal region Freud calls it a kind of sexual pleasure it will later be connected to sexuality so Freud says in another one of his texts sexuality is divorced from its to close connection with the genitals and I regard it as more of a comprehensive bodily function having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the ends of reproduction so pleasure in various areas of the body sexuality not just being about reproduction and not just being about genitals so a lot of things in our lives can be connected to the sexual instinct according to Freud more than one might think he goes on the sexual impulses are regarded as including not just what you think of as sexual impulses but all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word love the sexual instinct is also involved in friendship and in love but we'll see how that's the case it occurs through sublimation which is another word I think we need to get a good decent sense of so the libido the energy attached to the sexual instinct can be sublimated and it is through sublimation that it turns into our affectionate feelings for others friendship love whether sexual or otherwise sublimation I think this may be the last of my terms yeah the capacity to exchange the originally sexual aim for another which is no longer sexual but psychically related to the first is called the capacity for sublimation this is in our book but it's in the short essay at the end there's a couple of places and that short essay where I think he describes sublimation pretty well and this is one of them the idea being you can take the energy the libido from the sexual instinct and you can guide it towards a different goal so this libido this energy can be detached from its original goal of pleasure in maybe your erotic gist righto Jetix owns or pleasure with your genitals and it can be moved to some other goal that pleasure that energy of that pleasure can be moved to some other goal that is not sexual but somehow related to it going on directing the instinctual forces away from their sexual aim and towards higher cultural goals so sublimation for Freud is not just taking your desires or whatever energy you have attached to your sexual goal and moving it to something else usually he talks about it as taking that energy from your sexual instinct moving it to some other higher cultural goal and he talks about it as this is a good thing it gives an example when he analyzes Leonardo da Vinci he's got this essay called Leonardo da Vinci in a memory of his childhood and he argues that we can see from various sources that Leonardo da Vinci was not terribly into sexual activity that he found it disgusting and what we can see instead is that he sublimated his desires his sexual desires his pleasures his energy associated with that two other activities some of them being friendships very close friendships with other men some of them being his desire to do art some of them being his desire for knowledge and all of those things can be examples of sublimation so you can not fulfill a certain goal not fulfill a certain instinct in the way it's usually fulfilled but that an energy can be directed towards something else and that's he claims what Leonardo did and in our text we've got a couple of examples of sublimation he also calls us sometimes aim inhibited libido so whenever you see a min hibbett 'add or a min habited libido that's usually another way of saying sublimation because you're not fulfilling the first aim that's being inhibited you're going towards something else so in this example we can see an aim inhibited libido can reinforce the communal bonds of civilization with ties of friendship so it is possible to sublimate one sexual instinct into affection into friendship instead of just having sex with everybody you can be friends with other people and similarly also in our text you can change the aim of the libido so that you direct love quote not to individuals but to everyone in equal measure so you could have a readiness to love mankind the world in general this is another example of sublimation of your sexual instinct which Freud actually criticizes he has a bit of a problem with this particular one but that I'm just giving it as an example of sublimation all right any questions on any of that so far yes sure I'd love one okay oh dear that sounds too Freudian to me yeah that's really interesting not something you would tend to hear as much these days yeah but still I mean he had to be a hundred year olds analysts to say that yes and in fact in Nietzsche there is a section in twilight of the idols where he talks about spiritualizing the passions or the desires so he says the church doesn't ask how to spiritualize or beautify desire it just cuts it out is his claim right and we could spiritualize sensuality and call it love and we can spiritual eyes hatred for your enemies by recognizing the value of such a hatred and I'm not sure if he's talking about exactly the same thing but it's a similar kind of idea and that you take you take the instinct but you aim it at a different goal right or you do something slightly different with it and so some degree this may be Freud being Nietzschean to some extent but I don't know enough about the Nietzschean version to say exactly how that happens and Freud I don't also know enough about Freud sublimation to say exactly how you can do it because it may not even be conscious that's the thing and that's what we'll get to next I was going to say he also says not very many people are good at this so sublimation is not something that is accessible to a lot of people he even says that in this text that this might be a useful way to deal with some of the problems of our unhappiness in life you can sublimate your desires or rather than trying to lemon ate them but this is a really difficult task and not everybody's up to it so but I do think there is a possible connection with Nietzsche there yeah I should look into that further ok time for a bit more about Freud's past theory behind before he writes his texts and the first part I'm gonna look at is from his earlier theory and then he adds on more things later so the first earlier on in his life he just writes about the mind as having three aspects which again later writes about it as having three aspects three they need to be a common number especially with consider Plato in his view of the psyche but at first he just thinks about the conscious the unconscious then something in between called the preconscious and then when he talks about the ego the it'd and the super-ego those get in a way superimposed upon this earlier view perhaps with some modifications but not ones that we're gonna focus on today so this is supposed to be an iceberg I know it's not beautiful I have trouble drawing in these slide show things but you get the idea right it's supposed to be nice bird with the water over it why there's two kinds of waves you know think of the water is having two levels this is my best attempt I will try and do it better next time but one of the things that Freud is most well known for is this idea of the conscious versus the unconscious and it wasn't the first one to think there is such a thing as the unconscious but he really was focused on it and encouraged people to believe it and argued for it and it was a crucial part of his like Oh analytic theory and in one of his early texts where is that I think it's in 1915 or 1917 he writes why should we think that there is an unconscious at all what should make us consider that there even is such a thing as unconsciousness because at the time that was pretty radical there were people who had mentioned it but a lot of people thought the mind the psyche the mental is consciousness there is nothing else besides that but he just gives us some pretty simple examples and says doesn't this suggest there might be something more one of those examples is what he calls para practices or slips of the tongue has anybody heard of this before you can give an example you Freudian slip can you give an example you don't have to it's hard to come up with specific examples yes but the the idea of a Freudian slip it he didn't color fortieth thought because he was for it he called it a pair of praxis or a slip of the tongue which is when you mean to say one word but something else comes out and yes that something else is meaningful it's not just some random word it actually means something and quite often it means something embarrassing yeah yes good job yes one example he gives which is not nearly as colorful as that and somebody who is opening a session of Parliament saying this session of Parliament is now closed meaning be they meant to say it was open but they didn't want to open it because I didn't want to be there right a very simple example another example he gives is of a wife who is talking to somebody else about her husband whose doctor has given him a particular diet and she says it's actually a really great diet he can eat anything I want Freud calls this a slip of the tongue so the idea being there are times when our conscious mind wants to say one thing something else comes out and it's not just random it seems to suggest some other process going on so that was Freud thought maybe there's something behind our conscious mind temporary gaps in memory like when you know a word this happens to me all the time as my seminar can attest what is the word what is the word I know the word and you know it and it will eventually come but where was it it's not conscious yes yes no no no no it's happening yes and that's true but why should that happen necessarily right where is it where does it go where is that memory when you drive or walk somewhere automatically and you don't really pay attention to what you're doing but you get there anyway or you're trying to go someplace but you body just actually drives you to the place you usually go instead so a number of these examples are things that that Freud said look there might be something more than just consciousness right and what he ended up describing was three levels there is the conscious which is pretty clear it is that which we are aware of at any given moment so that is pretty restricted consciousness is is pretty small actually that's why it's the top of the iceberg underneath that is the preconscious and the preconscious is all that stuff like the words you can't remember but do come to you all that stuff that could become conscious pretty easily but isn't at any given moment Freudian talks about something interesting with the preconscious and actually let me get to that in a minute sorry the unconscious being then all those things that are not accessible to you not even with attempts like trying to remember something they just aren't there it's completely dark so the interesting thing that Freud says about the preconscious is that everything was originally unconscious except for what we get from the outside like our perceptions all of our thoughts are originally unconscious and it's the role of the preconscious to censor to decide what gets to come through from the unconscious up to the consciousness or even into the preconscious so there is what he calls a night watchman and he has this nice image she says the unconscious is like a large entrance hall and whence the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals adjoining the entrance hall there is a second narrower narrower room a kind of drawing-room in which consciousness two resides but on the threshold between the two rooms a watchman performs his function he examines the different mental impulses acts as a sensor and will not admit them into the drawing room if they just please him so there's some kind of entity there's some kind of sensor that decides what gets to come into consciousness and what doesn't and he puts that in the preconscious originally and that he later calls repression so if the if the sensor decides I don't want this to become conscious it's going to become repressed which is pushed back it attempts to come up but it's pushed back into the unconscious and we don't have access to it at least in its original form however there is a bit of a problem maybe not a problem but it can lead to problems and that what is repressed continually attempts to return sometimes we'll hear this as Freud's idea of the return of the repressed he says that which is repressed exercise is a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious it continually attempts to come up so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter pressure and what happens when the counter pressure keeping it down doesn't work is that whatever we're trying to repress whatever we don't want to know of in our conscious mind is if there's some part of us that's protecting us this sensor it doesn't always stay down it will come out in other ways it's similar to Nietzsche you try to get rid of the will to power it's going to come out in other ways you try to repress something sometimes it'll work sometimes it comes out other ways now it can come out through sublimation you can take that drive that instinct that energy or whatever sort of fantasy you might have or thought that you don't want to let into your conscious mind the sensor could not let it come consciously in its original form but direct it towards something else that would be sublimation it can also come out through neuroses that's a problem way that it can come out so we've got in civilization and its discontents on page 45 a reference to this and it's kind of an oblique reference but I think this is what he's talking about beginning of section 5 psycho analyst analytic work has taught us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life which he is gone on and described whom those we called neurotics cannot endure neurotics creates substitute of satisfactions for themselves in their symptoms but these either create suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering by causing the subjects difficulties in their relations with their surroundings and society so when you attempt to restrict your sexual impulses maybe you can sublimate them for it says this is really hard for a lot of people maybe you're gonna end up with neuroses and that's the situation where that energy that libido that instinct comes out in another way but in a way that is harmful to you or to others in a way that can lead you to to be neurotic like perhaps depressed anxious obsession only describes obsessional anxiety as being a way to try to keep down the thing that's attempting to come up another neurosis that he describes in this way is hysteria and it's a word that it's had a particular medical meaning at the time doesn't anymore but hysteria hysterical patience who are trying to keep down certain memories or thoughts or fantasies usually sexual and they would come out instead through their bodies in particular kinds of symptoms like inability to speak paralysis a nervous tic coughing that has no other explanation try to think of another example numbness and other sorts of things so the repressed material comes back repetition it can come back in a way maybe you can sublimate it sometimes it can come back through your dreams and maybe that's gonna be good enough sometimes it comes back through neuroses and it's gonna make you sick and it's gonna depend on how strong your psyche is whether you can keep the stuff down or which way it comes out all right later he adds in the it'd echo and super-ego which he talks about in this text and you're probably familiar with this one I didn't draw this one I it was I did find a free wine online so and this is somebody trying to input impose in a way the idiy you go and superego on the earlier conscious preconscious and unconscious picture the idea being that it is entirely unconscious and the super ego and the ego both have conscious aspects and unconscious aspects the edge is a translation actually I think Latin of the it in German dust s so it's I think it's interesting to think of it as an it because it now just means the Freudian term in but it it kind of is really evocative to me and one of the things that I read about Freud says that he borrowed a term from George grow deck G ro d de CK who wrote a book called the book of the it and grow deck defines the it thus I hold the view that man is animated by the unknown that there is within him an S and it some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does and what happens to him the affirmation I live is only conditionally correct it expresses only a small and superficial part of the fundamental principle man is lived by the it I really find that evocative so inside of us there is something that we can only describe as it not as me not as I but as something unknown something that doesn't have a name something that is just a generic it's and it is what is in charge and Freud takes this over to some degree certainly the word dust s it but also the idea that it is unknown it's completely unconscious and that it plays a very strong role in our lives that instincts desires drives energy libido things coming from that part of our psyche are driving us in ways that we don't even necessarily understand that we try to sublimate that we try to change that our ego tries to control in various ways but it can't ever completely control the it'd which you get at the end of this text Freud says that civilization asks us to control the heed in ways that are impossible for us it assumes we have more control over the end than we do and that this can lead to problems so I like this idea of this uncontrolled separate alienated it inside us and what is in there it contains he says Freud's everything that is inherited that is present at birth that has laid down in the Constitution above all therefore the instincts and also what has been repressed by the ego so when you repress it goes down into the it'd and now sensor the sensor I wasn't quite sure where to put the sensor it's still in the preconscious and it's it's either in the ego entirely or somewhere in the ego and the super-ego so but repression pushes things down into the 8th is the idea with this section of the picture the ego or in German does if the I the self this is the part of us that we think of as the self we don't think maybe in a super-ego we think a bit of as the self and the super-ego is part of the ego these lines between ego and super-ego or it shouldn't be that strong because they do blend into each other but the ego has the purpose of trying to allow the aid to express its instincts or to try to fulfill its instincts in connection to the external world such that the ego has to mediate between what's going on out there and what the it wants and decide when the instincts are going to be expressed or fulfilled and when they're not now Freud describes this relationship between the two with terms called the pleasure principle versus the reality principle which you also see in your text the it'd operates on the pleasure principle meaning it simply seeks pleasure it seeks immediate gratification it doesn't care about reality your heed is the place of your need for immediate fulfillment of whatever your desires are the ego is what brings in the reality principle the ego is what has to pay attention to what's actually out there in reality what's possible for you to do what's desirable for you to do because if you do that what are the consequences going to be so all that stuff means that the ego reality and and what do I want to say I want to say it see it's that word thing its hilter's there we go it's filters the edge through reality so here's a quote the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the aid and its tendencies and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the aid the ego represents what may be called reason and common sense in contrast to the aid which contains the passions there's a way in which you might think of the ego is more related to reason I mean if we have reason anywhere in our psyche it would be in the ego whereas the it is more like the passions more like the instincts the ego also has the task of self-preservation so anytime you're worried about danger from inside or outside it is the ego that takes care of that and it is in charge of voluntary movements lastly the super ego or the uber eek the over eye or the super eye Freud calls this an actual part of the ego it's like it's it's the ego that has been kind of separated off a little bit but it's not completely separated and this one you're probably familiar with it results from an identification with your parents most specifically for it talks about your father being those people who told you rules prohibitions requirements on how you ought to live including moral rules but other kinds of rules as well and eventually you take those into yourself as part of your psyche and you give those rules to yourself that being the super-ego Freud says in 1917 in one of his books that the super-ego works very much like your parents your parents gave you rules they govern you by offering proofs of love and by threatening punishments and the super-ego does the same it gives you rules it governs you it ought it offers love and it also offers punishment to me that means whenever you feel like you feel good about yourself because you've done something good you've done something that you ought to do you get this sense of love you get this sense of approval you get this sense of self affirmation for it seems to be suggesting that's coming from the super-ego and whenever you've done something that you're not supposed to do you feel guilt it's a kind of punishment as your parents would have punished you but other authority figures beyond your parents also affect your super-ego so your teachers you know your role models and society government leaders if you think of them as role models in any way those kinds of ideas those kinds of images would also help to form the super-ego so here's Freud's picture of this IDEO and super-ego and unconscious conscious and preconscious so the aim is entirely unconscious the ego is somewhere in between the unconscious and the preconscious and so is the super-ego and I like this picture because the super-ego is kind of like just a part of the ego it's not completely cut off from it and the consciousness is the PC ptcs on top that means perceptual perception consciousness it's just a little tiny bubble on the top and Freud says on the text that this comes from the space occupied by the unconscious it ought to have been incomparably greater than that of the ego or the preconscious I hope that you will fill that in in your minds he says so other than that this is the way he does the picture the poor ego then has to struggle with three masters he says it has to struggle with the external world which poses reality it has to struggle with the it'd which says I want I want I want and I want pleasure all the time and it has to struggle with the super-ego which imposes beyond reality other rules especially moral rules you may not do this I don't care what the aid wants I don't care what reality is you may not do it so Freud talks about the ego as being kind of battered on all sides and struggling to remain coherent and continually being threatened with anxiety when it can't do that all those things okay next one is Eros and Thanatos and I will wait on that one until after the break so yeah let's take a 10-minute break and we'll come back and then after this I think I'm getting into the book more carefully okay so back to a little bit of background which isn't so much background anymore because now we're starting to get into the text Eros and Thanatos Roy doesn't actually use the word Thanatos in this text he uses the word death instinct but you do hear the word tharros excuse me Thanatos in connection to the death death instinct sometimes so I'm ice I may put that on here occasionally the life instincts what does that mean well it means just exactly what it sounds like self-preservation so we have an instinct to life we have an instinct to preserve our life but also are also in 1920 he said it has to do with self assertion and mastery so that somehow not just preserving your life but being self assertive mastering things could be part of the life instinct and I wish I had my thingy my remote unification the idea of putting things together bring things together is also part of what he describes as eros or the life instinct and in ego and the end which i think was from 1923 there is this quote Eros by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed aims at complicating life and at the same time of course at preserving it now when he's talking in this particular section of the ego in the ED he is talking about organic life coming together in bigger and bigger entities so single-celled organisms coming together in multiple celled organisms coming together into bigger organisms so that there is this instinct to life that works even on a cellular level he says and some of his earlier works in such a way that it leads them to come together now this is partly metaphorical because it's not like every time you get a group of little individual cell organisms together they're gonna clump into a larger multi-celled organism it's partly his sort of origin story of life beginning with a single-celled organism and eventually moving to multi-celled organisms but his point is that this moves through whatever the history of that evolution of life is it moves through unification that we start with small we bring the particles more and more together maybe it doesn't continue forever maybe we're not gonna you know continue to have larger larger units but that he claims is the way it worked but it also works in communities because in civilization is discontent he's talking about eros being the drive to come together in communities of individuals so it's not just on an organism level but also between organisms a nice quote from 55 eros is the drive to preserve the living substance and bring it together in ever larger units not just organisms but also communities and lastly eros includes the sex drive so sometimes he'll talk about eros and Libya Oh together but you can also think about this just you know just make sense if you're thinking about eros is unifying as bringing together the sex drive brings together the sex drive preserves life in the form of reproduction right so the sex drive is also going to be part of eros Thanatos the death instinct this is an interesting one because he says basically what happens is there is an instinct to return to what has been before namely the inanimate state that there is something in us in all organic creatures and all organic beings that strives to move towards the the sort of prehistory of life inanimate States lack of life death and that's true of individuals as well there's something in us as individuals that pushes us towards death and this and the life instinct are both there and they fight and they struggle so that in some ways we're pushing ourselves to be preserved and in other ways we have this drive towards death very interesting the death instinct is also a matter of breaking apart if the eros or the life instinct is unifying the death instinct breaks apart it seeks to on page 55 break down these units that are formed by eros and restore them to the primordial organic state you can think about death in this way that is a breaking apart of our pieces of our body maybe not literally in when we die but eventually it starts to break apart and goes back to its primordial organic state but it also happens in communities the death instinct is that which even though we try to bring ourselves together drives us apart in communities so that it pulls us apart from actually being friendly and working together and the aggressive drives are part of the Deaf instinct and the death instinct as aggression comes from turning in a way your desire for death towards yourself its aggressive towards yourself but you can also turn it towards others and be aggressive towards others so our desire for address aggression Freud says this is instinctual it's something we can't get rid of comes from this death Drive comes from the drive to destroy the drive to be cruel is related also to the death Drive so we can do it against ourselves the super-ego engages in aggression against the ego whenever the ego does something that the super-ego says it shouldn't you can engage in aggression against yourself through guilt he also describes masochism masochism is an interesting combination of eros and the death drive because eros is involved in masochism insofar as masochism is a sexual activity so you're bringing together but at the same time you're mixing it with the death drive and the aggressive drive which is the masochistic part of the sexual activity similar with sadism but turning the aggression towards the other person and interesting mixture for it says of sex eros and the death drive aggression putting together in a single activity or you can just be aggressive towards others in other ways that are not sexual right so just being cruelty destruction all right think of in other words lastly he posits the death Drive as existing part we from that's the whole idea from this compulsion to repeat compulsion to repeat a traumatic experience something that was unpleasant something that it makes no sense why the body or the mind would want to repeat this thing over and over again why might that be how can we explain that Freud comes up with the death Drive the death instinct Thanatos the aggression the idea being we aggress against ourselves there is something in us that seems to need or want or pushes us towards self aggression and even towards death and disrupting ourselves in destroying ourselves which would explain he says the idea of the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences he can't think of any other explanation for it it's not therapeutic it doesn't help in any way repeating it over and over and over and over again doesn't make you any better he says maybe there's something in us that forces us to do that and he calls it a death instinct and this is pretty late in his life when he comes up with both of these and they're not terribly popular for everyone as he admits in this text but I think it's a really evocative idea that within us there is this struggle between wanting to preserve life and wanting to get rid of it I mean Freud even says at one point that you know part of us is is pushing as hard as we can to preserve our lives and part of us is it's drawing us back from that and moving us in the other direction and there's a sense of of tension continually this also reminded me of the same picture I showed for Nietzsche last time which was my description of reading Nietzsche and the way that the M the book feels to me it feels like it's in fragments and he just twilight of the idols and I think of the death drive as continually trying to destroy unities trying to break things up into fragments and the eros is trying to put them back together but the death Drive breaks them back apart so that that picture just came to mind again so what we get is life as a struggle in 58 the struggle between eros and death between the life Drive and the drive for Destruction is the essential content of all life which is a kind of depressing picture but perhaps not it is certainly something that goes against what Plato wanted in a way as the unity of the psyche that we should have this harmonious psyche as harmonious self that is not breaking up into different parts that the reason should be in charge and the spirit should follow what the reason says and the appetite should be under control and it should all be this nice harmony that's not really exactly what's going on with Freud's and his picture of life at least in terms of the life instinct in the death instinct okay I want to get into the text no bit more and through this discussion of the text I'm also going to try to point to where I think Freud is repeating or at least revisiting some of the same ideas as other philosophers so I want to ask you to picture Freud obviously what other philosophers did you get reminded of by reading this text and how is there anything in Freud that reminded you of something somebody else has said uh-huh okay Rousseau believes what I'm sorry I missed yeah Freud is not quite as down on civilization as her so is but I think he still criticizes some aspects of it right so it is not the boon the wonderful thing we are not we have not reached joy through the fact that we are civilized but it's not I think what he's not quite as negative as Rousseau on its but yeah I think of her so exactly can't get rid of it yeah well I mean a waiver so also he hasn't stated it's the necessary people but for Rousseau we can't go back so we're kind of stuck with it too yeah yeah and I wonder to what degree it ego and super-ego might be might be similar to that I mean that's something you can think about further but that does remind me of Plato of it - yeah anything else yes yeah exactly yeah that's something I want to talk about here in a bit definitely so there's resonance as a play-doh for sure there's you know returning to the same ideas as Rousseau do anybody pick up on anything else just curious yeah yes yeah yep yeah he definitely does not think private property is the main reason why we are aggressive I think is where that came out whereas for Rousseau you can get the sense in his text the private property is a big turning point okay yeah in this description of human beings being savage beasts and not not being gentle only unless they need to defend themselves I came over exactly where that is I think I have it on a slide and sounded very much like Hobbes you know that we don't just we're not just gentle creatures who are not worried about other people we'll only defend ourselves if we need to which kind of more sounds like we're so but rather you know we will stand up for each other we will kill each other we will be cruel to each other which sounds more like Hobbes and of course the idea that we need civilization in order to be able to have security - there's one point in the text in which he says you know we may have be unhappy with civilization but it we've traded some of that unhappiness for a good measure of security which is really important then that also sounds like Hobbes okay well here are the people that I thought of so Freud's behind Freud's I got Anita I have a lot on Nietzsche so maybe it's just because I just lectured on each other but I think there's a ton of stuff that's similar to Nietzsche in here so I'll go over that I've got Rousseau I'm just going back in chronologic he is talking about the same kinds of things as Rousseau he's talking about you know some of the problems with civilization but again not nearly as bad as Bruce oh thanks and then I've also got Plato so there's a lot of Plato in here - I didn't put Hobbes down I didn't really think about it as much but that's a resonance as well so all those people I'm going to talk about and whatever time I have left first I wanted to say something briefly about the title of the book which puzzles me a bit when I first read it I thought civilization and its discontents the civilization have a discontent consideration be discontent what does that mean it didn't just like grammatically didn't make sense to me and then I thought well it's probably individuals being discontent but what are they discontent with or they just couldn't was a civilization and they discontent was something else I don't know and then I read the press this to our text and I am assuming we all have this same one but I think some of us might not this is penguin modern classics and so the preface if you have a different version may not be there but in the preface to our text the translators preface he points out that the German if you were to translate it directly into English would be unease or malaise or discomfort in civilization which then drive makes more sense to me it is how we are uncomfortable in civilization right how we have discontent in civilization and apparently for it suggested this English translation man's discomfort in civilization but that isn't what ended up happening at civilization and its discontents so I it took me a while to figure out what I thought the title might mean but I think these this helps me understand what he's trying to get to which reminds me of or so people are discontent we have disease we have malaise in civilization that being the same kind of thing that we're so is talking about but the discontents are very different for Freud's these are the discontents that I found there may be more these are the ones I'm emphasizing am I making that noise should I not move I don't think I can do that ok I'll try not to move as much ok so there may be more discontent these are the ones that I came up with one being from page 51 the holding back the inhibiting of our instincts specifically he mentions two one is our sexual instincts and also our aggressive instincts which come from our death Drive if civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality but also on his agra civet ii we are in a better position to understand why it is so hard for him to feel happy in it so somehow some of the problems with civilization the reason why we feel discontent are due to inhibiting our instincts and the individual and cultural super egos this is at the end of the text make demands that we can't fulfill they require us to control the edge further than is possible and when we can't do that that leads to guilt and guilt he says the sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization and the price we pay for cultural progress is a loss of happiness or rising from a heightened sense of guilt so on page 71 he's actually saying you know it may seem like I'm talking too much about guilt in this text I mean it seemed like the whole text has been has been talking about something else but now I'm just emphasizing guilt he says but that's actually the point and this is the beginning of for those of you who have a different version it's the beginning of section eight I think yeah he says the intention of this study is to present the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the development of civilization this being one of the crucial aspects of what he's trying to say so first there's the problem that we try to inhibit our instincts then and in relation to this the super-ego of our individual self and of culture is asking us to make demands that we can't fulfill by asking us to inhibit these instincts and the result of that is guilt and guilt is the big problem apparently with civilization okay I want to do a little bit of introduction to these discontents by looking at Plato some of this you've already got and I'll move pretty quickly through this so both Freud and Plato think the self and the psyche are I mean sorry the Celsus IKEA and the community are similar and this is going to be by way of introducing how we got to the point where we are so discontent with civilization so in Plato justice is the same in both the soul and a city have three parts and they are analogous and as Tom said earlier for Freud there are similar per aims and processes excuse me similar aims of the processes of civilization and the development of the individual the one being to create a unified Mass consisting of many individuals the other to integrate the individual into such a mass and what he says about the ego in this regard is interesting sorry he talks about the ego or the individual trying to unify itself as well so the community tries to unify itself the individual tries to unify itself and the ego tries to do that by bringing about and this is in a different book harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it so that the ego needs to try to bring the demands of the aid and the external world and the super-ego into harmony which is similar it's what the community tries to do when it tries to bring the parts of the community into harmony the struggle of Eros and the death Drive occurs in both the individual and the community so there's another analogy between the self and the community and the community also has a super-ego the individual has a super-ego the community has a super-ego so whatever ethics that community has is like coming from the community having a super-ego which can also punish you or reward you if you don't get it right so that's just showing how I think for it we're similar in looking at the community and the self as being analogous in a way but then there's also a similarity with Freud and Plato on this idea of unity I think that's where I have this quote that I was trying to look for so for Plato he emphasizes unity in the state and in the person the state should be unified we should avoid civil war the soldiers and the producers should all follow the rulers and we should all think that the ruler should rule we shouldn't try to have families between the rulers and the soldiers but we should all think of ourselves as a single family live together in communities in barracks so that we don't start to think of each other as separate we don't want to have Plato says in the state very rich people in very poor people because that could lead to a dis vision in the state between rich and poor so there's numerous ways in which the state should be unified and a psyche or the soul for Plato should also be unified as I've already mentioned reasons should be in control other parts should agree with that and it should all aim towards doing the right thing or being just but similarly for Freud and here's the quote I was looking for earlier the psyche also should be unified the ego tries to bring about the harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it so similar to Plato in that regards and another point that's saying almost the same thing an action by the ego is as it should be if it satisfies simultaneously the demands of the edge of the super-ego and of reality that is to say if it is able to reconcile their demands with one another so that the ego has the charge of trying to harmonize everything trying to put every aspect of ourselves together in some kind of coherent picture which is constantly struggling to do and it's very difficult to do but that's the the job of the so I think there's some similarities at to Plato there and unity and community for Freud's these are quotes from the text so you don't necessarily have to write them down you can just write down the page number the community as well as with Plato should be unified civilization seeks to bind the members of the community libitum libidinal ii to one another meaning take that libido take that energy from the sexual drive and use it sublimate it in order to bring people together into bonds of community bonds of friendship civilization seeks to do this favoring any path that leads to strong identifications among them and summoning up the largest possible measure of aim in hibbett of libido in order to reinforce the communal bonds with ties a friendship a quote that I had already put up there earlier similar to Plato and then another nice quote from page 58 civilization is a process in the service of eros whose purpose is to gather together individuals than families and finally tribes people and nations in one great unit humanity so now we've got eros in here bringing together people not just in a community but in larger communities and then eventually into humanity that's the point of civilization or that's what it tries to do but last point to do this we have to inhibit our address our aggression our drive to aggression which is where I come to Nietzsche and I think there's a lot of Nietzsche in this text and Freud says in in his autobiographical study from nineteen the 1920s he says something like I've I purposefully not read some of the philosophers whose thoughts I are are similar to I own or you know who people tell me our thoughts are similar to my own I purposefully haven't read them for a long time because I want to make sure I'm coming up with my own ideas and I want to make sure that I'm I'm describing what really works with the evidence and what really works with the theory but he mentions and II just specifically and he had he did eventually read Nietzsche as being someone that his work is very similar to and to some degree obviously not everything but I do see a lot of Nietzsche in here and I see it specifically in aggression or aggressivity the drive to aggression which sounds to me like the will to power and a quote from page 48 the reality which many would deny is that human beings are not gentle creatures in need of love and most able to defend themselves if attacked on the contrary they can count a powerful share of aggression among their instinctual endowments and I read in this I read or I hear maybe an echo of Rousseau or of a criticism of Rousseau rather where in Russo's what's a called original origin of inequality he says that he criticizes Hobbes for thinking that humans are naturally going to be attacking each other because in the state of nature it's a state of peace mostly because we're living independently and we don't actually interact with each other very much but also Rousseau says because we have compassion or pity and compassion leads us to not want to harm another fellow being it's that sense of of distress when we see another fellow being being harmed so Rousseau says we wouldn't naturally be aggressive we wouldn't naturally be cruel and I think this is saying the opposite along with Nietzsche there is in our nature not just because of civilization the drive to cruelty the drive to aggression this is true of Nietzsche as well you know we're so agree that we do eventually start to become aggressive we do eventually start to fight we do eventually start to become competitive and warlike but he blames it on civilization if we didn't have civilization that would never happen naturally that wouldn't be the case both Freud in nature saying naturally it would be the case that's part of our nature so another nice quote that feels to me a bit like Hobbes Spain page if the circumstance is favourites if the psychical counter forces that would otherwise inhibit it have ceased to operate it's the death Drive aggression manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man is a savage beast that has no thought of sparing its own kind a little bit of Hobbes much more of Nietzsche I think here okay now if we're gonna have a civilization we have to curb this if civilization is going to bring people together we have to curb this aggression how do we do it I see some of Nietzsche in this as well there are several ways we could curb our aggression we can give it an outlet for expression outside the community so we curb it inside the community but we let it out outside the community and for it as a couple of interesting passages in the text about how look we can be perfectly content being peaceful and kind and United within our community so long as we have outlets for our aggression to outsiders always quite possible to bind quite large numbers of people together in love provided that others are left out as targets for aggression which he notes we see all the time and I think we can agree with that but I think we can also compare this to Nietzsche in one section of the twilight of the idols where he's talking about the ancient Greeks and he says here's a quote you don't have to write all this down because I am sending you these slides I saw all their institutions ancient Greeks arise from security measures in order to make themselves safe in the face of each other's inner explosives their will to power so they too were trying to curb aggression curb the will to power curb cruelty etc of violence and they did it through their civilization but the immense internal tension then discharged itself in ruthless and frightening hostility the city's eight states ripped each other to shreds so that the citizens might each of them attain peace with themselves so one way you can curb aggression if you're gonna have a civilization if you're gonna have a society that hangs together is to just send it off somewhere else right don't be aggressive inside be aggressive outside because it's not like we can just get rid of aggression entirely right it's very difficult and I see a bit of Nietzsche and that one here's another way to curb aggression we can turn it in words if we don't discharge it outwards whether against other people in our society or against people outside our society then it turns inwards and this is from civilization and its discontents I should say that page 60 the aggression is then interjected internalized actually sent back to where it came from in other words it is directed against the individuals own ego the idea being again you can't get rid of our aggressive drives you can make them outwards to other people if you don't do that they can be turned inwards against yourself and this is where the aggression of the super-ego against the ego in the form of guilt comes in why do we have guilt why do we punish ourselves in part it is the natural aggressive Drive being turned inwards against ourselves which should I hope ring a bell with Nietzsche as well the super-ego becomes aggressive towards the ego through the sense of conscious conscience and I think I have it on another another slide but this is very similar to Nietzsche so I'm just gonna jump to another slide sorry we're running out of time so I'm gonna jump to Nietzsche for it in each on the return of the repressed his remarkable Freud says that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe that is aggressive re-type oh he becomes in his ego ideal and he just says something similar that you you cannot get rid of the will to power if you try to it's going to come out in other ways including against yourself so the more you try to check it outside the more it becomes severe inwardly and similarly on page 65 of our text any aggression whose satisfaction we forego is taken over by the super-ego increases the latter's aggression towards the ego can't get rid of it it's gonna go inwards and a nice quote from Nietzsche and this is not from our text that we read from Nietzsche it's from the genealogy of morality but I think it's very similar all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves in words it's exactly the kind of thing that for it is saying hostility cruelty pleasure and persecution and assault and change in destruction aggression all of that turning against itself all of that turning itself against the possessors of such instincts that is the origin of bad conscience which is also for Nietzsche guilt it's almost exactly the same thing that Freud says guilt is aggression against the self coming from the inability to express that aggression towards the outside and finally I think we get the same idea of sickness from both Nietzsche and Freud for Nietzsche again this is from the genealogy rather than the text we read I take bad conscience or guilt to be the deep sickness into which man had to fall under the pressure of that most fundamental of all changes he ever experienced the change of finding himself enclosed once and for all within the sway of society and peace when we enter into civilization we have to curb some of our instincts we have to curb some of our instincts to the Wills of power and when we do that if we can't express them outward they turn inward we develop self-loathing we develop aggression towards ourselves we develop hate towards ourselves we become sick that is very similar to what Freud says in this text as well about one of the problems with civilization which is related to guilt so I'm going to skip something here because running out of time ok for Freud's holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness if you try to keep from doing it if you try to get rid of it it's gonna lead you to an illness and in our text the cultural super-ego or our ethics asks us to curb our drives more than we are capable of doing and such impossible demands can provoke the individual to a rebellion or neuroses or make him unhappy so Nietzsche talks about us getting sick from trying to get rid of our drives Freud talks about us getting sick from trying to get rid of our drives and specifically the illness that we fall into from civilization has to do with guilt from being aggressive against ourselves by not following what the super-ego says we ought to do which comes from civilization but civilization is asking for too much we can't do everything the civilization asks we can't love our neighbor as ourselves we can't continually stop our aggressive instincts and thus we end up with sickness with neuroses you can try to sublimate all that to something else but sublimation only works for some people it's very difficult and for many other people they're going to end up with neuroses thus the entire society or even humanity itself might be suffering from a neurosis maybe we have become neurotic under the influence of cultural strivings perhaps culture is asking too much of us and perhaps all of humanity to the degree that we have become civilized maybe becoming neurotic reminds me of Nietzsche it reminds me of Rousseau this is not civilization is not a beautiful happy place it's actually maybe something that's required but nevertheless is leading us to problems I want to jump to the last bit I have some more stuff on religion here but I'm going to just put that online I have about three minutes so just hold off if you have to go go that's fine because you have to get someplace but otherwise let me finish please okay I fine I'm a little puzzled by the beginning because in the beginning he's talking about this oceanic feeling that is maybe related to religion but not entirely and he says he talks about this oceanic feeling and then it just sort of drops and I wonder why he starts the text with the oceanic feeling and this is my possible answer and I think it's a way of repeating the beginning in the end so the oceanic feeling is of course a feeling of being connected to everything a feeling of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the world outside yourself of being one with the universe and it feels like like this wonderfully beautiful like what's interesting is Freud says he has no such feeling in himself and I want to emphasize that he describes how it might come about it might come about because in our pre childhood in our infancy we did not distinguish between the world and the self the ego and the ID's and the super-ego were not all distinguished and we felt oneness with the world and maybe this oceanic feeling is a remnant of that so that we still feel you know to some degree this oneness with the world at times but I'm gonna skip some this Freud has no such feeling and I really picked up on this I wonder if by the end of the text we have no such feeling the beginning in the end by the end of reading the text we too may have no such oceanic feeling of being at one with the universe there's no sense of ultimate unity or connection in or in self or community no sense of full unity arrows continually struggles with Thanatos we have breakage we have splitting apart we have fragmentation we have unification we have fragmentation so there is no oceanic truth that doesn't exist civilization is only partially successful in binding us together and even when it does it can lead us to illness so the idea of being one with everybody I can see why Freud doesn't have that feeling and religion that the oceanic feeling can connect to is just a way to delude ourselves into thinking such a unity as possible that's from some slides I didn't get to so I wonder by the last paragraph I can see why Freud doesn't have an oceanic feeling it's not clear that we're gonna get unity the very last paragraph is very ambiguous and very ambivalent things have gotten to the point where we can kill each other very easily as news readiness of course in 1930 is after the first world war where you know things are heating up again slowly towards the Second World War we are breaking apart we can kill each other with ease and now it is to be expected that the other of the two heavenly powers immortal arrows will try to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary but who can foresee the outcome we might hope that there's gonna be unity but who can foresee the outcome it's probably just gonna be a continual struggle Freud can't see the oceanic feeling by the time I'm done with this if I agree with him I don't have it either it's just a delusion everything is struggle of unity and breaking apart unity breaking apart okay I think that is it I managed to make it to the end by skipping some stuff so thank you very much

Channel: Arts One Open

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Keywords: Sigmund Freud (Author), Civilization And Its Discontents (Book), Psychoanalysis (Field Of Study), Friedrich Nietzsche (Author), Plato (Author), UBC, Arts One, Arts One Open, lecture

Id: WyfyMtuXvZA

Length: 95min 40sec (5740 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 27 2015