Freud's theories of “Civilization and its Discontents” in “Frankenstein” and “The Secret Agent”

Introduction

Civilization and Its Discontents, which Freud composed in the summer of 1929, compares "civilized" and "savage" human inhabits in order to contemplate upon the significance of civilization in general. Like numerous of his subsequent works, the term paper generalizes the psycho-sexual theories that Freud presented previous in his vocation - the Oedipal confrontation, the theories of sexy impulses, repression, displacement and sublimation. Whereas before Freud was interested in exact neurotics, one might say that in Civilization Freud expands his interest to identifying the neurotic facets of humanity itself. He extends his investigation from man-in-particular to man-in-general. (Homans P.12)

Civilization and its Discontents

The work is candidly pessimistic in tone, and many commentators have attributed this dark outlook to the devastating know-how of the First World War. This awful confrontation seems to have justified his insistence on the violent and fiendish nature of humanity. Earlier, in Beyond the Pleasure standard (1920), Freud modified his previous thesis that human beings are propelled by a desire for erotic fulfillment by proposing that humans are equally driven by a yearn for destruction. This theory of the "death-drive," which Freud formulated in the midst of the conflict, finds a broader application in Civilization. (Grylls p.13)

From a chronological viewpoint, this essay expands most directly on Freud's reflections in The Future of an Illusion (1927), in which Freud recounts coordinated belief as a collective neurosis. Freud contends that belief performed a large service for civilization by taming asocial gut feelings and conceiving a sense of community around a distributed set of beliefs, but it has also exacted an tremendous psychological cost to the one-by-one by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal dad figure embodied by proceed. An avowed atheist, Freud refines his ideas in Civilization and Its Discontents to outline more emphatically the relative between psychoanalysis and belief, as well as between the individual and civilization. (Gilbert P.12)

Published in 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents has never been out-of-print. It was perhaps Freud's most widely-read term paper throughout his lifetime and it extends to be amidst his most influential studies. It stands as an authoritative investigation of heritage and human civilization, made more relevant by the atrocities committed in the following decades, particularly the Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist genocides, and nuclear blasting devices fallen on citizen populations in Japan. Some have pointed to the prophetic environment of Freud's observations about the destructive currents running all through human civilization; really, Adolf Hitler's 1933 rise to power by popular majority discovered in Freud an individual chronicled witness to the occurrence that he had before tried to account for in psychoanalytic periods in his writings. (Tillyard p.19)

Theory support for Frankenstein

Freud starts this work by taking up a likely source of religious feeling that his previous book, The Future of an Illusion, unseen: the oceanic feeling of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity. Freud himself will not experience this feeling of dissolution, but notes that there do really exist different pathological and healthy ...