Thomas Aaron

HUM M10B

Professor Slattum

Freud Reading Response

This excerpt from Civilization and Its Discontents focused on what Freud called our three

sources of suffering: the power of nature, the feebleness of our bodies and the inadequacy of our

relationships with others in the family, state, and society. After stating these three sources, Freud talks

about how we use civilization as a kind of defense against suffering, but that this fails to do so. He then

describes that we created civilization to separate man from his more barbaric ancestors and to protect

man from nature. Next, Freud describes man as a prosthetic God and that he puts on all these artificial

organs and while they make man seem better, they bother him greatly. Freud goes on to talk about the

importance of cleanliness and beauty in civilization and that any kind of dirtiness or trash is seen

negatively. Finally, Freud says that in order to find the value in civilization, man must ask himself what

civilization's origins are and how it arose.

This reading addresses the fact that although man created civilization to try and ease his

suffering and to improve his life, it has not actually gotten rid of suffering just replaced the suffering of

his barbaric ancestry with a more superficial suffering that he can try and explain away. Also, even

though man has tried to remove himself from nature, even in a civilized society Freud points out that

we can still see some base instincts of man showing through the civil facade. What Freud means when

he talks about the superior power of nature is the face that nature can and will outlast man no matter

how long it takes.

 The next part where Freud talks about man becoming like God he doesn't mean that we are

becoming more Godlike or that we are ascending to some greatness, but that we are trying to create

artificial things to make us appear Godlike. In fact he even equates man to what he calls a prosthetic

God and that in the future man will likely make more advances toward this ideal. When Freud says

that man puts his artificial organs and that they make him better but also trouble him greatly, he is

talking about the things we invent to make our lives easier and to further remove ourselves from nature

and our more natural instincts. This translates further with our loathing of dirtiness and love of

cleanliness and beauty as we have created civilization to make our lives more clean and so to us, more

beautiful. The last part of this reading makes us ask ourselves where civilization came from and what

influenced it which is the one of the most important questions we have to ask ourselves if we want to

reduce our suffering.