Civilization and Its Discontents Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Civilization and Its Discontents - Essay ExampleThis shows that Civilization and its Discontents is a great contributor to the Western cultures literature. Freud commences his reflections with ruminations based on spiritual values, and tries to bring out responses to the question as to why human beings are possessed with the feeling of being with the passion of construction, oceanic feelings. An in-depth understanding of the reasons as to why Freud describes this type of feeling as oceanic gives two separate explanations he intended to establish the view of the superstitions, infantile and mystical religious ways which culture defines as valuable while based on religious thought, and the scientific, analytic, and rational ways. An assumption made by Freud in this situation is that the entire method of civilisation is based on humans conscious analyses of the motives of human life that are not trustworthy, and that passel do adopt analytical attitudes and methods which as a result lead to a truer, a healthier understanding of the motives, high levels of consistency, and a summary giving a brief on why and how people do it. The common human characteristics is that people have the notion of religious belief which they hold so dearly and use it to organize their actions and value-systems, though their grounds for this religion value, based on scrutiny, resulted into being explicable through unconscious psychic drivers and processes. Chapter two of the same book shows how the fact that religion exists is an illustration and a disclosure of infantile origins of human beings in the seeking of a father figure to secure them against the worlds pains and depression. Further still, this depicts that civilization has an immensely deep and systematic discontents in the human life, for without them, region would not be a thing of practice since there would be no need for it in eternity. On the contrary, though, there is need for religion since life as it is found by human is quite hard as it brings too much pain, impossible tasks, and disappointments. Therefore, for the advise of keeping by it, human cannot dispense with such palliative measures (Freud, S., 2002, p. 23). These measures are threefold deflection of needs, intoxicants, and substitutions for needs. To expound on this, Freud moves on to elaborate on the main purpose of life, overhauled in religion. He, in his own perspective, sees no cosmic purpose to the human life but sees an internal psychic purpose upon which anyones psychic economy is based, as the credit line of happiness or experience of pleasure. Pleasure principle is denoted by an individuals imperative towards the pursuit of pleasure, but the minds pursuit of happiness being in loggerheads with the entire worlds happenings. Religion plays an important role of trying to restrict peoples efforts by interminably imposing its moral codes upon people who are naturally characterized to have different ways of trying to negoti ate their ways to happiness, even though, the project may all in all experience drawbacks.