Civilization and Its Discontents

During the summer of 1929, Freud worked on what became this seminal volume of twentieth-century thought. It stands as a brilliant summary of the views on culture from a psychoanalytic perspective that he had been developing since the turn of the century. It is both witness and tribute to the late theory of mind - the so-called structural theory, with its stress on aggression, indeed the death drive, as the pitiless adversary of eros.