The discomfort in culture

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The Uneasiness in Culture is the title of a paper by Sigmund Freud published in 1930 . Alongside mass psychology and the analysis of the ego from 1921, the work is Freud's most comprehensive treatise on cultural theory; it is one of the most influential writings on culture criticism of the 20th century. The theme is the contrast between culture and instinctual impulses. The culture strives to form ever larger social units. To this end, it restricts the satisfaction of sexual and aggressive drives; she turns some of the aggression into guilt . In this way culture is a source of suffering; their development leads to a growing discomfort.

Title page of the first print

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Overview

The treatise begins with an addendum to Freud's work The Future of an Illusion from 1927. Freud confirms the thesis developed there that the longing for the father is the basis of religion. Romain Rolland had objected that the ultimate source of religion was the “oceanic feeling”. Freud reconstructs this feeling as primary narcissism with no boundary between the self and the outside world, and he admits that this narcissism may have gotten into a relationship with religion. However, its importance for religion is secondary. (Part One)

After that Freud on the Treatise on - the relationship between culture and "discomfort", that Un loss , suffering , unhappiness . He begins with a discussion of the various sources of displeasure. The purpose of life is in fact set by the pleasure principle , that is, by striving to increase pleasure. However, this principle is not feasible; the outside world, social relationships and one's own body are sources of displeasure. Therefore the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle , the striving to avoid pain by influencing the sources of the pain. However, this path also has its limits. (Part II)

An important source of misfortune is culture. They distinguish humans from animals and they have two goals: the control of nature and the regulation of human relationships. Culture is built on the denial of instinctual satisfaction. This is in contrast to individual freedom, which provokes hostility towards culture. (Part III)

At first glance it looks different, because the basis of culture is, in addition to the division of labor, love and thus the satisfaction of instincts. Historically, love leads to the formation of the family, not only love in its sexual form (relationship between man and woman), but also in its "goal-inhibited", tender form (relationship between mother and child). However, there is also an opposition between love and culture. The family opposes the goal of culture, the formation of ever larger social units. And culture subjects sexual life to severe restrictions, so that the sexuality of the civilized person is severely damaged. (Part IV)

The culture is based on the energy of the sex drive, the libido . She uses the libido predominantly in a "goal-inhibited" form, namely to create larger social units through identification . However, this kind of use of the libido is at the expense of sexual life, and the failure of sexual satisfaction leads to neurosis . This raises the question of why culture depends on the goal-inhibited sex drive. Freud's answer is: in order to suppress another drive: the tendency to aggression. The cultured man exchanged a piece of happiness for a piece of security. (Part V)

Freud assumes that man is endowed with two basic instincts, eros and death . Eros appears in two forms, as narcissism and as object love. The death instinct also appears in two forms; a primary tendency is that of self-destruction; by distraction to the outside, this leads to a tendency towards aggression and destruction. (Part VI)

Aggression is not simply suppressed by culture. They use part of the suppressed aggression to produce a psychological quantity that is important for the culture: the sense of guilt (or feeling of guilt or conscience). The sense of guilt arises from the fact that the aggressive relationship with an external authority is internalized through identification with the authority. This identification leads to the differentiation of the super-ego from the ego, and the conscience is based on the aggression of the super-ego against the ego . The sense of guilt is often unconscious, it then expresses itself as a need for punishment. The guilt feeling has its historical origin in the murder of the sons of the original horde of the forefather and thus ultimately in the ambivalence of eros and death instinct in the relationship with the father. (Part VII)

This brings Freud to the main thesis of the treatise: The price for cultural progress is the increasing loss of happiness due to the growing sense of guilt. - The essay closes with a reflection on the relationship between ethics and neurosis. According to Freud, cultures, like individuals, have a superego. The culture superego makes demands on the relationships between people; these demands - summarized in ethics - demand the control of the instincts, and indeed to a degree that is not possible for humans. Perhaps that is why some cultures have become “neurotic” overall. Freud ends with the question of whether they can be treated; he leaves this question open. (Part VIII)

Indispensability and unsatisfiability of the pleasure principle (Part II)

The purpose of human life is, in fact, to seek pleasure and, in that sense, happiness; the purpose of life is thus set by the pleasure principle . However, this program is impracticable; “One would like to say that the intention that man be happy is not contained in the plan of 'creation'.” (208) We are arranged in such a way that we cannot enjoy the duration, but only the contrast intensely. "The program that the pleasure principle forces us to become happy cannot be fulfilled, but one must - no, one can - not give up efforts to somehow bring it closer to fulfillment." (214 f.)

Under the pressure of the possibilities of suffering, the striving to increase pleasure is replaced by the striving to avoid discomfort, just as the pleasure principle is replaced by the more modest reality principle . Since there are three sources of discomfort: one's own organism, external reality and social relationships, there are three ways of reducing suffering:

  • influencing one's own organism,
  • reshaping external reality and
  • the eroticization of social relationships - "one of the manifestations of love, sexual love, has given us the strongest experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and thus given us the model for our striving for happiness" (213).

However, all of these options are limited; neither on the way of gaining pleasure nor on the way of avoiding discomfort can we achieve everything we desire.

  • The influencing of the organism by intoxicants, killing the instincts, control of instincts, sublimation or substitute satisfaction from illusions (art) goes hand in hand with a weakening of the possibilities of happiness and is usually not strong enough to make one forget real misery.
  • Anyone who desperately revolted against external reality falls into madness. "It is claimed, however, that each of us behaves in some way like the paranoid, corrects a side of the world that we cannot tolerate by forming a wish and brings this delusion into reality." (213)
  • The life technique based on the happiness value of love makes you dependent on others and is therefore at the same time a source of suffering.

Religion ensures the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering through a distortion of reality that is the same for everyone: a mass madness. This saves the individual neurosis, but at the cost of psychological infantilism.

Contrast between culture and individual freedom (Part III)

Some claim that culture is itself a source of unhappiness, and we would be happier if we gave up culture. One reason for this hostility towards culture is the discovery that instinctual failure as imposed by culture cannot be tolerated by man and leads to neurosis, which undermines the little happiness that the cultured person is capable of. Another cause is the experience that advances in science and technology have not made us happier.

So what is culture? It consists of those facilities that distinguish us from animals. These institutions have two functions: they serve to protect against nature, and they regulate the relationships between people.

Features of the culture are:

  • Science and technology - man has become a kind of "prosthetic god" (222),
  • Beauty, cleanliness and order,
  • Achievements that result from higher psychological activities: science, art, religion, philosophy, training of ideals,
  • the regulation of social relations, in particular through the law, thus the replacement of the power of the individual by that of the community.

Individual freedom, on the other hand, is not a cultural asset. "It does not seem that man can be induced to change his nature into that of a termite by any kind of influence, he will probably always defend his claim to individual freedom against the will of the masses." (226)

A good part of human wrestling is about “finding a purposeful, i. H. To find a happy balance between these individual and the cultural mass claims is one of their fate problems, whether this balance can be achieved through a certain design of the culture or whether the conflict is irreconcilable. "(226)

With the development of culture, the human instincts have changed; this process is similar to the libido development of the individual. The most important instinctual fates are

  • the development of certain character traits , e.g. B. in the form of the anal character ,
  • the sublimation of instinctual goals
  • and the unsatisfaction of the instincts, the "cultural failure " (227), which dominates social relationships and leads to cultural hostility.

Love as the basis and counterpart of culture (Part IV)

At the beginning of the cultural development stood the upright gait; in an “organic repression” (229) it led to the suppression of olfactory eroticism, to the predominance of facial stimuli, to the visibility of the genitals. This allowed for the continuity of sexual arousal and gave the male a motive to keep the sexual objects with him. From this the primal horde developed under the command of a tyrannical father who kept all women to himself; Freud falls back on a thesis that he had already developed in Totem and Tabu of 1912/13. The sons rejected by the father banded together and murdered the father. Out of remorse for the deed, in an act of subsequent obedience, they issued the first taboo regulations and thus the first right.

Culture enables a greater number of people to remain in community. This expansion of community life has two bases. On the one hand, it is based on the compulsion to work, i.e. on external need, on "Ananke" (Greek for 'necessity'). The basis of the community is at the same time the “power of love”, called “Eros” (230) by Freud. It forms a foundation of culture in two forms, in the form of genital love with direct sexual satisfaction in the relationship between man and woman and in the form of "goal-inhibited" love, tenderness, in the relationship between mother and child.

However, between love and culture there is not only a fundamental relationship, but also a conflict. Culture strives to form larger and larger units, but the family does not want to release the individual; women enter the service of the family and sexual life, and cultural work becomes a matter for men.

Conversely, culture is linked to the tendency to restrict sexual life, from the prohibition of incest to the prohibition of homosexuality and perversions to monogamy. “Culture behaves against sexuality like a tribe or a stratum of the population that has subjected another to its exploitation. The fear of the rebellion of the oppressed drives strict precautionary measures. ”(233) Through all these prohibitions, the culture cuts off many from sexual enjoyment“ and thus becomes a source of grave injustice ”(234). This leads to the fact that the sexual life of the civilized person is severely damaged, "it sometimes gives the impression of a function in decline" (234).

But it is possible that not only culture, but also something about the nature of the sexual function itself, denies us full satisfaction. Through the devaluation of the sense of smell, the whole of sexuality, not only anal eroticism, threatens to become a victim of repression, “so that since then the sexual function has been accompanied by a reluctance that cannot be further substantiated, which prevents full satisfaction and pushes it away from the sexual goal to sublimations and libido shifts ”(235).

Suppression of aggression through goal-inhibited libido (Part V)

The contrast of culture to the sex drive is based on the fact that culture strives to form larger social units and that it is not satisfied with the mutual dependence through division of labor. Rather, it seeks to establish libidinal bonds between members of the community through identification. In order to build a community, culture uses libido, sexual energy, but in the form of goal-inhibited libido. This mode of use inevitably comes at the expense of immediate sexual libido, and sexual frustration leads to neurosis in some.

Why is it not enough for culture to base community formation on external necessity, why does it try to bind the members of the community to one another through goal-inhibited libido? The cause is the drive to aggression.

The commandment “ You shall love your neighbor as yourself ” refers to them . This commandment is a reaction against the human tendency to aggression.

“The part of reality behind all this, which is often denied, is that man is not a gentle being in need of love, who at most is able to defend himself when attacked, but that he can count on his instinctual gifts also a large proportion of the tendency to aggression. As a result, his neighbor is not only a possible helper and sexual object, but also a temptation to satisfy his aggression on him, to use his labor without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to take possession of his belongings, to humiliate him to cause him pain, torture and kill. "

- Part V, p. 240

The primary animosity has the consequence that the cultural society is constantly threatened with disintegration. And that is precisely why it is not sufficient to hold the community together only through the division of labor and the mutual dependence that goes with it. Culture must muster a force against the tendency to aggression which is stronger than the rational interest, and this force is the instinctual passions.

“Hence the array of methods that are intended to drive people to identify and target-inhibited love relationships, hence the restriction of sexual life and therefore also the ideal commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself, which is really justified by the fact that nothing else from the original is so contrary to human nature. "

- Part V, p. 241

However, this cultural endeavor has not achieved much so far. Communists believe that man is inherently good and that hostility will disappear with the abolition of private property. But that is an illusion - private property is just one of many tools that aggression uses.

The advantage of having a smaller culture is that it allows hostility to be directed against outsiders.

“It is always possible to bind a large number of people together in love, if only others are left to express aggression. [...] In this way, the people of the Jews, who are scattered everywhere, have earned creditable services to the cultures of their host peoples (...). "

- Part V, p. 243

After the apostle Paul had made universal human love the basis of the Christian community, the extreme intolerance of Christianity towards those outside was an inevitable consequence.

“It was not an incomprehensible coincidence that the dream of Germanic world domination called for anti-Semitism to supplement it, and it is understandable that the attempt to establish a new communist culture in Russia finds its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeoisie. One wonders what the Soviets will do after exterminating their bourgeoisie. "

- Part V, p. 243

The discomfort in culture is based on the fact that it makes great sacrifices not only to sexuality, but also to man's tendency to aggression. What he gains is security. It can be expected that changes in culture can be implemented that better meet our needs. But one must also familiarize oneself with the idea that there are instinctual restrictions that are inherent in the nature of culture and that will not give way to any attempt at reform.

Culture as a struggle between Eros and the death drive (Part VI)

Freud underpins his explanation of discomfort in culture by distinguishing between two basic instincts, the eros and the death instinct, which ties in with the instinct theory that he introduced in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle .

According to Freud, the two instincts are active in all living beings, beginning with the unicellular organisms; their opposition to one another creates the different phenomena of life. What both instincts have in common is that they are "conservative": Both strive to restore an earlier state, and this explains the phenomenon of repetition in humans .

Eros, also known as the “life instinct”, aims to maintain the living substance and to combine it into larger units; its energy is called "libido". The death instinct consists in the urge to dissolve larger units and to return them to an inorganic state. Eros appears in two forms, as narcissism and as object love, and the death drive also has two forms, the inward tendency towards self-destruction and the outward tendency towards aggression and destruction, also called the “destructive instinct”. In both basic instincts, the inward striving is primary: object libido is ego libido that has been diverted to objects, and destruction is based on the fact that the instinct for self-destruction has been diverted to objects.

Eros and the death instinct never appear in isolation from one another, they are always connected to one another. Masochism and sadism are expressions of the death instinct mixed with eros. In the case of masochism it is the drive to self-destruction that has united with eros, in the case of sadism it is the outwardly directed aggression drive.

Culture is a "process that takes place over humanity" (249), a process in the service of eros that seeks to bring people together into larger units. The natural instinct of aggression, the outwardly distracted representative of the death instinct, opposes this program of culture. The meaning of culture is therefore the struggle between eros and the death instinct.

Transforming Aggression into Guilt (Part VII)

Aggression is not simply suppressed by culture. Rather, culture uses repressed aggression to build culture, by turning aggression into a sense of guilt . The discomfort in the culture is based not only on the dissatisfaction, caused by the suppression of the two basic drives, but also on the consciousness of guilt (or "feeling of guilt" or "conscience") associated with the culture. The development of culture - the unification of people into ever larger masses - inevitably goes hand in hand with an increase in the feeling of guilt, to a level which may be unbearable for the individual.

The child's sense of guilt develops in two stages.

  • At the first level, it refers to an outside authority. The child is prevented by this authority from the earliest and most significant satisfaction of needs; it reacts to this with a considerable tendency to aggression, and for fear of losing love it refrains from satisfying this aggression. The feeling of guilt here is based on "'social [r]' fear" (p. 251) of authority.
  • The child helps itself out of this difficult situation by taking the unassailable authority into the ego through identification in the second phase. The external authority thus becomes the super-ego , which opposes the ego and directs its aggression against the ego . The feeling of guilt thus takes on the form of a bad conscience; it is based on the fear of the ego of the superego.

So the feeling of guilt is a type of fear. Fear is behind all symptoms, it is partly unconscious, and therefore it is conceivable that a sense of guilt is also largely unconscious and is only accessible to consciousness in the need for punishment.

The severity of the superego has two sources. On the one hand, it stems from the harshness that the child experienced from external authority, but it also represents the aggression that the child directed against the not yet internalized parental authority. Even children raised in a liberal manner can therefore develop a cruel superego.

At first the conscience becomes the source of the impulse renunciation; later the renunciation of instincts becomes the source of conscience: the greater the renunciation of instincts - the more virtuous the ego - the stronger the bad conscience. This is the case because the aggression of the super-ego is no longer directed only against the deeds performed, but already against the mere impulses to act, against the indestructible libidinal and aggressive desires. The severity of the super-ego is also reinforced by mishaps, since fate is interpreted as a substitute for the parent authority, in a religious context, for example, as an expression of divine will. The internalization of authority leads to the fact that the renunciation of instincts no longer has a fully liberating effect; “For a threatening external misfortune - loss of love and punishment from the part of the external authority - one has exchanged a persistent internal misfortune, the tension of the consciousness of guilt." (254) The feeling of guilt is the most important problem of the cultural development.

The historical origin of the feeling of guilt is the primordial father murder, as Freud had portrayed it in 1912/13 in Totem and Taboo . In this case the aggression was not suppressed, but carried out. How was it possible that the sons felt remorse for the deed, that is, developed a feeling of guilt afterwards? The prerequisite was a feeling of ambivalence towards the father; the murder brought about the change from hatred to love, from one side of the ambivalent attitude to the other; in repentance love emerged. Ultimately, the feeling of guilt goes back to the emotional ambivalence towards the father and thus to the conflict between the death instinct and eros.

While the repression of the death drive creates the feeling of guilt, the repression of eros leads to the symptom , such as the obsessive-compulsive thoughts of the obsessive-compulsive neurotic or the delusions of the paranoid.

The Unpsychological Ethics of the Culture Superego (Part VIII)

Similar to an individual, a community also forms a superego, under whose influence the culture develops. It is based on the impression made by great leaders, often those who were cruelly treated during their lifetime, such as Jesus. The culture superego makes strict ideal demands, non-compliance with which is punished by a feeling of guilt. Those demands that affect the relationships between people are summarized as ethics. Their main aim is to remove the greatest obstacle to culture, the constitutional aggressiveness of man.

The ethical demands of the culture superego are unpsychological. It

“Does not care enough about the facts of the human mental constitution, it issues a commandment and does not ask whether it is possible for a person to obey it. Rather, it assumes [...] that the ego is entitled to unlimited dominion over its id. That is a mistake, and even with normal people the control of the id cannot be increased beyond certain limits. If you ask for more, you create rebellion or neurosis in the individual or make him unhappy. "

- Part VII, p. 268

For example, the commandment “ love your neighbor as yourself ” cannot be carried out. A real change in ownership would be more of a remedy than such a requirement.

Culture is similar to the development of the individual; so some cultures may have become " neurotic " overall . Could these neuroses then be examined with the help of psychoanalysis and therapeutic suggestions added?

“I could not say that such an attempt to transfer psychoanalysis to the cultural community would be nonsensical or condemned to sterility. But one would have to be very careful not to forget that these are only analogies […]. And as for the therapeutic use of insight, what would the most accurate analysis of social neurosis help, since no one has the authority to impose therapy on the masses? Despite all these complications, one can expect that someday someone will venture into such a pathology of cultural communities. "

- Part VII, p. 269

The fateful question of the human species is whether their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of coexistence through the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.

“Humans have now come so far in mastering the forces of nature that with their help it is now easy to exterminate each other down to the last man. They know that, hence a good deal of their current unrest, their unhappiness, their mood of fear. "

- Part VII, p. 270

classification

Freud began writing The Uneasiness in Culture in the summer of 1929; At the beginning of November of that year the manuscript was given in typesetting. It appeared that same year, although the title page bears the year 1930. The first chapter was published somewhat earlier than the remaining parts in the journal Psychoanalytischebewegung , Vol. 1 (4), November – December 1929; the fifth chapter appeared as an independent article in the next issue of this journal.

Freud already occupied himself with the subject of culture in his letters to Wilhelm Fließ . On May 31, 1897, he wrote: “'Holy' is what is based on the fact that people have sacrificed some of their sexual and perversion freedom for the benefit of the larger community. The loathing of incest (nefarious) is based on the fact that as a result of the sexual community (also in childhood) the family members stick together permanently and become incapable of contact with strangers. So it is anti-social - culture consists in this progressive renunciation. ”Freud's earliest publication on the conflict between instincts and culture is the essay The“ cultural ”sexual morality and modern nervousness from 1908. He pursues the topic further in Totem and Tabu (1913 ) and contemporary articles on war and death (1915). The question of cultural hostility concerns him in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud initially regarded the aggression instinct as a component of the sexual instincts or the instincts of self-preservation; in the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905) both ideas are found side by side. In the case study of "little Hans" he wrote, against the views of Alfred Adler : "I cannot make up my mind to adopt a special instinct of aggression alongside and on an equal footing with the self-preservation and sexual instincts that are familiar to us." ( Analysis of the phobia of a five-year-old boy , 1909) Only in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1920 does he accept an independent instinct for destruction; even here he assumes that the outwardly directed aggression is secondary and emerges from the diversion of an original tendency to self-destruct.

The origin of the feeling of guilt is discussed in detail by Freud in the fifth part of Das Ich und das Es (1923). In the essay The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) he deals with the difference between unconscious guilt and moral masochism.

The assumption that there is an organic repression that paved the way for culture was also advanced by Freud in the Fließ letters (letter of November 14, 1897); There is already the idea that the upright gait and thus the predominance of the sense of sight over the sense of smell could be involved in this organic repression. In the published writings this possibility is mentioned in the analysis of the "Rat Man" ( Remarks on a Case of Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis , 1909) as well as in the essay On the General Humiliation of Love Life (1912).

A kind of continuation of The Discomfort in Culture is the short text Why War? from 1933.

Defense against the politicization of psychoanalysis

Freud's reluctance to face practical consequences

From the beginning, Freud was, as he said, not so much a doctor of the soul, but rather a " conquistadorial temperament ", someone who wanted to conquer as yet unexplored spiritual continents. In doing so, however, he reached his inner limits early on. Because although after conquering the continent of the unconscious he had basically made "all of humanity a patient" through his theory of neuroses - if only because of the worldwide spread of religions and their secular substitute ideologies - he shied away when it came to practical consequences from this view went: Concrete social criticism , political steps to neurosis prophylaxis he leaned his inner attitude after starting.

Otto Gross

The first of his students who began to draw conclusions from Freud's findings, Otto Gross , Freud literally banished from the circle of his students. Back then, in 1908, Freud sealed the process with his theoretical counter-script The 'cultural' sexual morality and modern nervousness.

Wilhelm Reich

The suppressed impulse revived among some of his students in the 1920s, this time more strongly in the form of so-called Freudo Marxism . The theoretically and politically most active Freudo Marxist was Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s . Reich wrote in his academic autobiography: "Very few people know that Freud's discomfort in culture arose in the aforementioned cultural discussions [in the inner circle of Freud] to ward off my flourishing work and the 'danger' it posed."

Freud's book clearly confirms, especially on the last pages, that it was created in the course of dealing with Reich. When Reich did not give in, however, he too was excluded from the circle of psychoanalysts by Freud in 1934.

Frankfurt School and 1968

Another socio-critical and political approach to the connection between Marxism and Freud's thinking and to the criticism of the uncomfortable contrast between nature and culture developed from the late 1920s in the form of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School . Leading personalities here were primarily Max Horkheimer , Theodor W. Adorno , Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm .

With the 1968 movement , the approach of the Frankfurt School, which placed particular emphasis on research into the authoritarian personality , temporarily gained influence in the humanities and social sciences. The non-open conflict between Freud and Reich, which once prompted Freud to expound his position, was not discussed in detail in these discourses.

literature

expenditure

Sigmund Freud: The Uneasiness in Culture .

  • International Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1930. (first print)
  • In: Sigmund Freud: Collected works, arranged chronologically. Vol. 14. Ed. V. Anna Freud with the assistance of Marie Bonaparte. Imago, London 1948, pp. 421-516.
  • In: Sigmund Freud: Study Edition, Vol. IX. Questions of society, origins of religion. Edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richard, James Strachey. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-10-822729-7 , pp. 191-270. (With preliminary editorial note and notes; cited above after this edition)
  • In: Sigmund Freud: The unease in culture and other writings on cultural theory . With an introduction by Alfred Lorenzer and Bernard Görlich. Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1994 and more often, ISBN 3-596-10453-X , pp. 29-108.
  • Ed. V. Lothar Bayer and Kerstin Krone-Bayer. Reclam, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-15-018697-8 . (With line comment and afterword)

Secondary literature

  • Herbert Bickel, Helmwart Hierdeis (ed.): " Uneasiness in culture". Variations on Sigmund Freud's cultural criticism. Lit, Vienna, Berlin, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-1869-2 .
  • Margret Dörr, Josef Christian Aigner (ed.): The new unease in culture and its consequences for psychoanalytic pedagogy . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-40204-7 .
  • Erich Fromm: The Human Implications of Instinctivistic "Radicalism". A reply to Herbert Marcuse. In: Dissent, 1955, pp. 342–349 (criticism of Marcuse's interpretation of "The Uneasiness in Culture")
  • Gerhard Gamm: Interpretation. Sigmund Freud: The Uneasiness in Culture. In: interpretations. Major works of social philosophy . Reclam, Ditzingen 2001, ISBN 3-15-018114-3 , pp. 108-133.
  • Bernard Görlich: The bet with Freud. Herbert Marcuse reads 'The Uneasiness in Culture'. In: Ders .: The bet with Freud. Three studies on Herbert Marcuse. Nexus, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-923301-39-1 , pp. 55-107
  • Peter Imbusch : Sigmund Freud's Uneasiness in Culture . In: Ders .: Modernity and Violence. Civilization-theoretical perspectives on the 20th century . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-8100-3753-2 , pp. 87–162
  • Franz Kaltenbeck: Sigmund Freud: Still uneasy in culture? Diaphanes, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-03734-069-1 .
  • Pierre Kaufmann: Freud: The Freudian theory of culture. In: François Châtelet (Ed.): History of Philosophy, Vol. 8: The XX. Century. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1975
  • Jacques Le Rider , Michel Plon, Gérard Raulet, Henri Rey-Flaud: Autour du "Malaise in la culture" de Freud . Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-13-049405-6 .
  • Herbert Marcuse : Drive Structure and Society . A philosophical contribution to Sigmund Freud. Translated by Marianne von Eckardt-Jaffe. 17th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-01158-8 (first published in 1955 under the title Eros and civilization , contains an interpretation of "The discomfort in culture" based on Max Horkheimer )
  • Raul Páramo-Ortega: The discomfort with culture. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Munich a. a. 1985, ISBN 3-541-14211-1
  • Gunzelin Schmid Noerr On the critique of Freud's concept of culture. In: Psyche 47 (1993), pp. 325-343
  • Elmar Waibl: Society and Culture with Hobbes and Freud. The common paradigm of sociality . Löcker, Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-85409-018-8
  • Stefan Zweig : Freud's new work “The Uneasiness in Culture” , in: Reviews 1902–1939. Encounters with books . 1983 ( E-Text )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The numbers in round brackets are here and in the following page numbers after: Freud: The uneasiness in the culture. In: Ders .: Study edition, vol. 9. Frankfurt / M .: Fischer 1974, pp. 191–270
  2. ↑ Preliminary editorial note on The Uneasiness in Culture . In: Sigmund Freud: Studienausgabe, Vol. 9. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 193
  3. ^ Sigmund Freud: Letters to Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904. Ed. V. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Adaptation of the German version by Michael Schröter. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 269
  4. ↑ Sigmund Freud: Analysis of the phobia of a five-year-old boy. In: Ders .: Study edition, vol. 5. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 117
  5. ↑ A concise description of the process can be found here
  6. ↑ Wilhelm Reich: The function of the orgasm. (1942) Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1969, p. 181
  7. ↑ See e.g. B. Bernd A. Laska : Sigmund Freud versus Wilhelm Reich