The Connection between Civilization and Individuals in "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Sigmund Freud

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In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes primarily to examine the relationship between the individual and society. Through Freud's examination of the relationship, a deeper understanding of the complexity of mental life is realized. Freud begins to develop the relationship early in the work by depicting the most primitive realizations of self and the most primitive realizations of the external world. He further develops this relationship through the musing of sexual desire and its connections to love, which he claims, lead to the formation of families and then later groups of humanity that came to comprise civilization as a whole. Through questions raised concerning society, culture, history and the self, Freud is able to depict a sort of map of the mind. This map that Freud depicts further enables him to develop an understanding of the relationship between civilization and the individual. Freud begins to create the map of mental life through the ideas of the ego, the id, and the superego. The ego, or consciousness, is the manner in which a person first realizes tha...

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