 Hello, a 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 kinds of issues as Nietzsche's text only in the sense that it does imply a number of things and include a number of things 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. That he doesn't share with Nietzsche. I think Freud is much easier of a writer. I think that he consciously wanted to be more accessible to the public. He gave a lot of public lectures on psychoanalysis. 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 Nietzsche's. But nevertheless, there are still some things in the text that I think could use a bit more background. So that's going to 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 going to 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 in point two. Because it's really a very brief mention. And he doesn't, in one place he assumes 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, in a text called The Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud 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 I. 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 would the psyche 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 light, our present, our civilization. Maybe not quite as bad as Rousseau, maybe not quite as bad as Nietzsche. But Freud also is saying, 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 going to kind of waffle back and forth between coming together and breaking apart, as he describes with Rousseau and the death drive, perhaps at a continual struggle forever. So it is kind of another picture of presenting ourselves in our 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 gonna 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 that's what I'll talk about today too. So outline for today. As I mentioned, first I'll be giving a little bit of background. Some of his terms, some ideas, some of his theories, that I think he goes over briefly, but not in any great detail in this text. And it might be helpful to have more about those. And then I'll jump into the text, our discontents with civilization. What are those? And in that section, I wanna 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 wanna 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 wanna say a whole lot about his life, but a little bit of background 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 spent the rest of his life almost in Vienna. I'll 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 writes 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 practices, could realistically harbor 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 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, Freud also says in his autobiographical study, helped him, this idea of being different than the rest, of being in 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 with. He had lots and lots of opposition from other doctors, from other psychologists, who weren't calling themselves 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 started becoming a group who agreed. Eventually, they started creating journals, et cetera. 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. 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. He did smoke cigars. I'm not sure if that was the only thing he smoked. 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, little bit of background then of Freud. But I also wanna 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 a word that's also translated sometimes as drive. And we see this a lot in the text and in other Freud's writings. So we'll see the sexual instinct. We'll 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 the 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 regard 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 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 instinct, by which the instinct manifests itself. So some kind of force, some kind of energy. But it has specifically to do with the sexual instinct. 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 childhood, it has to do with erotogenic zones, he calls them, we would now call them perhaps erogenous zones. Areas of the body that will later become associated with sexuality. But that in early childhood are just seeking pleasure. And then even at that point Freud calls these areas of the body and the pleasure that you seek through them sexual. So the mouth, for example, being an erotogenic zone that for young children, they seek pleasure through it by eating, by sucking for milk, by putting things in their mouth when they're babies. And Freud calls this a manifestation of the sexual instinct. 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 calls 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 too, 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 too 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 would 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 in that short essay where I think he described 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 erotogenic zones 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. He 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 to 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 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 it sometimes aim inhibited libido. So whenever you see aim inhibited or aim inhibited 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 that you could have a readiness to love mankind and 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 I'm just giving it as an example of sublimation. All right, any questions on any of that so far? 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 100 year old's analyst 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 a desire, it just cuts it out, it's his claim. And we could spiritualize sensuality and call it love and we can spiritualize 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 in that you take the instinct but you aim it at a different goal 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 also know enough about Freud's 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. But what was I gonna 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 rather than trying to eliminate 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. I should look into that further. Okay, time for a bit more about Freud's past theory before he writes this text. 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 he again later writes about it as having three aspects. Three seeming to be a common number especially with if you consider Plato and his view of the psyche. But at first he just thinks about the conscious, the unconscious and something in between called the pre-conscious. And then when he talks about the ego, the id and the superego, 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 slideshow things but you get the idea, right? It's supposed to be an iceberg with some water over it. Why there's two kinds of waves. Think of the waters 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 he 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 psychoanalytic 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 parapraxis or slips of the tongue. Has anybody heard of this before? Can you give an example? Yeah, Freudian slip. Can you give an example? You don't have to. It's hard to come up with specific examples. Yes, but the idea of a Freudian slip, and he didn't call it a Freudian slip because he was Freud, he called it a parapraxis or a slip of the tongue, which is when you mean to say one word but something else comes out. And yet, 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 is somebody who is opening a session of parliament saying, this session of parliament is now closed. Meaning they meant to say it was open but they didn't want to open it because they didn't want to be there. 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. It's probably not heard of aging. Yes. Yes. I know you're too young for that. No, no, no, no, no, no, it's happening. Yes, and that's true but why should that happen necessarily? 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 your body just actually drives you to the place you usually go instead. So a number of these examples are things 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 pretty small. Actually, that's why it's the top of the iceberg. Underneath that is the pre-conscious. And the pre-conscious 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. Freud talks about something interesting with the pre-conscious. And actually let me get to that in a minute, sorry. I won't come back to it. 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 pre-conscious 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 pre-conscious to censor, to decide what gets to come through from the unconscious up to the consciousness or even into the pre-conscious. So there is what he calls a night watchman. And he has this nice image. He says, the unconscious is like a large entrance hall in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining the entrance hall, there is a second narrower room, a kind of drawing room in which consciousness too resides. But on the threshold between the two rooms, a watchman performs his function. He examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor 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 censor that decides what gets to come into consciousness and what doesn't. And he puts that in the pre-conscious originally. And that he later calls repression. So if the censor decides, I don't want this to become conscious, it's gonna 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 in 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 exercises 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 gonna come out in other ways. You try to repress something, sometimes it'll work, sometimes it comes out in 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. It's kind of an oblique reference but I think this is what he's talking about. Beginning of section five. Psychoanalytic work has taught us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life which he has gone on described. Whom those we call neurotics cannot endure. Neurotics create substantive satisfactions for themselves in their symptoms but these either create suffering in themselves or become sources of suffering by causing the subject's difficulties in their relations with their surroundings and society. So when you attempt to restrict your sexual impulses, maybe you can sublimate them. Freud 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 be neurotic like perhaps depressed, anxious, obsessional. He 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's had a particular medical meaning at the time, doesn't any more but hysteria, hysterical patients were ones who were 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 tick, coughing that has no other explanation. Trying 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 id ego and superego which he talks about in this text and you're probably familiar with. This one I didn't draw. This one I did find a free one online so. And this is somebody trying to impose in a way the id ego and superego on the earlier conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious picture. The idea being the id is entirely unconscious and the superego and the ego both have conscious aspects and unconscious aspects. The id is a translation actually I think Latin of the it in German das es. So I think it's interesting to think of it as an it because id now just means the Freudian term id but 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 Grodeck, D-R-O-D-D-E-C-K who wrote a book called the book of the it and Grodeck defines the it thus. I hold the view that man is animated by the unknown, that there is within him an s, an 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 and it is what is in charge and Freud takes this over to some degree. Certainly the word, thus s, the 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, which you get at the end of this text. Freud says that civilization asks us to control the it in ways that are impossible for us. It assumes we have more control over the it 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, everything that is inherited that is present at birth, that is 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. And now the sensor, the sensor, I wasn't quite sure where to put the sensor, it's still in the pre-conscious and it's either in the ego entirely or somewhere in the ego and the superego, so. But repression pushes things down into the it is the idea with this section of the picture. The ego or in German, das ich, the I, the self. This is the part of us that we think of as the self. We don't think of the id as the self. Maybe the superego, we think a bit of as the self and the superego is part of the ego. These lines between the ego and superego 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 id 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 id wants and decide when the id's 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 id operates on the pleasure principle, meaning it simply seeks pleasure. It seeks immediate gratification. It doesn't care about reality. Your id 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 takes reality and what do I want to say? I want to say it's, see? It's that word thing, right? It happens all the time. Getting older. It filters, there we go. It filters the id through reality. So here's a quote. The ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle, which reigns unrestrictedly in the id. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense in contrast to the id, which contains the passions. So there's a way in which you might think of the ego as more related to reason. I mean, if we have reason anywhere in our psyche, it would be in the ego. Whereas the id 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 movement. Lastly, the superego, or the uberich, the over-eye, or the supereye. Freud calls this an actual part of the ego. 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, Freud 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 superego. Freud says in 1917 in one of his books that the superego 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 superego does the same. It gives you rules, it governs you, 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 superego. 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 superego. So your teachers, your role models in 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 superego. So here's Freud's picture of the idigo and superego and unconscious, conscious and pre-conscious. So the id is entirely unconscious, the ego is somewhere in between the unconscious and the pre-conscious and so is the superego. And I like this picture because the superego is kind of like just a part of the ego. It's not completely cut off from it. And the consciousness is the PCPTCS on top, that means perception, consciousness. It's just this little tiny bubble on the top. And Freud says on the text that this comes from, the space occupied by the unconscious id ought to have been incomparably greater than that of the ego or the pre-conscious. 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 imposes reality. It has to struggle with the id, which says I want, I want, I want, I want. And I want pleasure all the time. And it has to struggle with the superego, which imposes beyond reality other rules, especially moral rules. You may not do this, I don't care what the id 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 all those things. Okay, next one is aerosyntheticos 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. Aerosyntheticos, Freud doesn't actually use the word thanatos in this text, he uses the word death instinct, but you do hear the word theros, excuse me, thanatos in connection to the death instinct sometimes. So I may put that on here occasionally. The life instinct, 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 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. Wish I had my thingy, my remote. Unification, the idea of putting things together, bringing things together is also part of what he describes as eros or the life instinct. And in Ego and the Id, which I think was from 1923, there's 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 and the Id, 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 in 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-celled 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. And maybe it doesn't continue forever, maybe we're not gonna continue to have larger and larger units, but that he claims is the way it worked. But it also works in communities because in civilization and its discontent, he's talking about arrows being the drive to come together in communities of individuals. So it's not just on an organism level, but also between organisms. And a nice quote from 55, arrows is the drive to preserve the living substance and bring it together in ever larger units, not just organisms, but also communities. And lastly, arrows includes the sex drive. So sometimes he'll talk about arrows and libido together, but you can also think about this, just make sense if you're thinking about arrows as unifying, as bringing together. The sex drive brings together. The sex drive preserves life in the form of reproduction. So the sex drive is also gonna be part of arrows. 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 sort of prehistory of life, inanimate state, 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 arrows 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 arrows and restore them to their primordial organic state. You can think about death in this way. Death is a breaking apart of our pieces, of our body, maybe not literally 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 death instinct. And the death instinct as aggression comes from turning in a way your desire for death towards yourself. It's aggressive towards yourself. But you can also turn it towards others and be aggressive towards others. So our desire for 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 superego engages in aggression against the ego whenever the ego does something that the superego 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 in so far 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 Freud 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 it would just be cruelty, destruction. Think of another word. Lastly, he posits the death drive as existing partly 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 and 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 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. Now 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 part of us is pushing as hard as we can to preserve our lives and part of us is drawing us back from that and moving us in the other direction and there's a sense 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 book feels to me, it feels like it's in fragments, the Nietzsche's 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 arrows is trying to put them back together but the death drive breaks them back apart so that picture just came to mind again. So what we get is life as a struggle. It's 58, the struggle between arrows 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, this 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 and his picture of life, at least in terms of the life instinct and the death instinct. Okay, I wanna get into the text now, a bit more and through this discussion of the text I'm also gonna 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, let's 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? Okay, Rousseau believes what? I'm sorry, I missed. Yeah, Freud is not quite as down on civilization as Rousseau is but I think he still criticizes some aspects of it. 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, he's not quite as negative as Rousseau on it but yeah, I think of Rousseau. So you mean civilization, so you mean civilization. Exactly, I can't get rid of it. Yeah, well I didn't weigh Rousseau also. He doesn't say it's a necessary evil but for Rousseau we can't go back, so we're kind of stuck with it too. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I wonder to what degree it ego and superego might be similar to that. I mean that's something you can think about further but that does remind me of Plato a bit too. Yeah, anything else? Yes, yeah exactly, yeah that's something I want to talk about here in a bit. Definitely, so there's resonances of Plato for sure. There's returning to the same ideas as Rousseau. Did anybody pick up on anything else? Just curious. 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 that private property is a big turning point. Okay, yeah and his description of human beings being savage beasts and not being gentle only unless they need to defend themselves. I can't remember exactly where that is but I think I have it on a slide. Sounded very much like Hobbes. You know that 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 Rousseau but rather 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 too there's one point in the text in which he says you know we may be unhappy with civilization but we've traded some of that unhappiness for a good measure of security which is really important and that also sounds like Hobbes. Okay well here are the people that I thought of. So Freud's behind Freud. I got Nietzsche, I have a lot on Nietzsche. So maybe it's just cause I just lectured on Nietzsche 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 chronology. So I think he is talking about the same kinds of things as Rousseau. He's talking about some of the problems with civilization but again not nearly as bad as Rousseau thinks. And then I've also got Plato. So there's a lot of Plato in here too. 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 gonna talk about in 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 it's discontent. Does civilization have a discontent? Can civilization be discontent? What does that mean? It didn't just grammatically didn't make sense to me. And then I thought well it's probably individuals being discontent. Well what are they discontent with? Are they discontent with civilization? Are they discontent with something else? I don't know. And then I read the preface to our text and I'm assuming we all have the 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 translator's 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 makes more sense to me. It is how we are uncomfortable in civilization. How we have discontent in civilization. And apparently Freud suggested this English translation man's discomfort in civilization but that isn't what ended up happening. It's civilization and it's discontent. So it took me a while to figure out what I thought the title might mean but I think this helps me understand what he's trying to get to. Which reminds me of Rousseau. People are discontent. We have disease. We have malaise in civilization. That being the same kind of thing that Rousseau was talking about but the discontents are very different. For Freud, these are the discontents that I found. There may be more. These are the ones I'm emphasizing. Am I making that noise? Driving me nuts. Should I not move? I don't think I can do that. I'll try not to move as much. Okay. So there may be more discontents. 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 aggressivity 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 reasons 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 id 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 arising from a heightened sense of guilt. So on page 71 he's actually saying it may seem like I'm talking too much about guilt in this text. It may seem like the whole text has been talking about something else but now I'm just emphasizing guilt. And he says but that's actually the point. And this is the beginning 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 in relation to this the superego 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 wanna do a little bit of introduction to these discontents by looking at Plato. Some of this you've already got and I move pretty quickly through this. So both Freud and Plato think the self and the psyche are similar. I mean sorry the self, the psyche and the community are similar. And this is gonna 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 the city have three parts and they are analogous. And as Tom said earlier, for Freud there are similar 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 it's not there. 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 id and the external world and the superego into harmony. Which is similar to 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 superego. The individual has a superego, the community has a superego. So whatever ethics that community has is like coming from the community having a superego, which can also punish you or reward you if you don't get it right. So that's just showing how I think Freud and Plato are 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 had 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 rulers 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 and very poor people because that could lead to a division in the state between rich and poor. So there's numerous ways in which the state should be unified. And the psyche or the soul for Plato should also be unified, as I've already mentioned. The reason 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 regard. 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 id, of the superego, 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 job of the ego. So I think there's some similarities to Plato there and unity and community for Freud. These are quotes from the text. You don't necessarily have to write them down and 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 libidnally 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-inhibited libido in order to reinforce the communal bonds with ties of 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 arrows whose purpose is to gather together individuals, then families and finally tribes, people and nations in one great unit, humanity. So now we've got arrows 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 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 his autobiographical study from the 1920s, he says something like, I've purposefully not read some of the philosophers whose thoughts are similar to my own or 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 describing what really works with the evidence and what really works with the theory. But he mentions Nietzsche specifically and 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 Rousseau's, what's it called, 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 distress when we see another fellow 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. Rousseau agrees 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 and Nietzsche are 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. Same page. If the circumstances favor it, if the psychical counter forces that would otherwise inhibit it have ceased to operate, it, the death drive, aggression, manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast that has no thought of sparing its own kind. 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 gonna 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 can 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 Freud has 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 an outlet 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, and here's a quote and you don't have to write all this down because I am sending you these slides. I saw all their institutions, the 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, et cetera, violence. And they did it through their civilization, but the immense internal tension then discharged itself in ruthless and frightening hostility. The city 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. Don't be aggressive inside, be aggressive outside because it's not like we can just get rid of aggression entirely. It's very difficult. And I see a bit of Nietzsche in that one. Here's another way to curb aggression. We can turn it inwards. 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 it's just condensed, I should say that, page 60. The aggression is then introjected, internalized, actually sent back to where it came from, in other words, it is directed against the individual's 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 conscience. And I think I have it on 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. Freud and Nietzsche on the return of the repressed. It is remarkable, Freud says, that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior, the more severe, that is aggressive, alright, typo, he becomes in his ego ideal. And Nietzsche says something similar, that you cannot get rid of the will to power if you try to, it's gonna 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 inwards. It's exactly the kind of thing that Freud is saying. Hostility, cruelty, pleasure and persecution, and assault, and change, and 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 will to 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 gonna skip something here because we're running out of time. Okay, for Freud, 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 superego, where our ethics asks us to curb our drives more than we are capable of doing, and such impossible demands can provoke the individual to rebellion or neurosis 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 superego 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 neurosis. 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 gonna end up with neurosis. 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, may be 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. Now I wanna jump to the last bit. I have some more stuff on religion here, but I'm gonna just put that online. I have about three minutes, so just hold off. If you have to go, go. That's fine, because you might have to get someplace. But otherwise, let me finish, please. Okay, 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 and 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 this wonderfully beautiful feeling. What's interesting is Freud says he has no such feeling in himself. And I wanna 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, and the superego were not all distinguished. And we felt oneness with the world. And maybe this oceanic feeling is a remnant of that, that we still feel, to some degree, this oneness with the world at times. But, I'm gonna skip some of 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 and the end. By the end of reading the text, we too may have no such oceanic feeling of it being at one with the universe. There's no sense of ultimate unity, or connection in our self or community. No sense of full unity. Eros continually struggles with Anatos. 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 dilute ourselves into thinking such a unity is 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, he says. And he's writing this, of course, in 1930s. This is after the First World War, where 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 Eros, 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.