Stephen Marmer: Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud | The Book Club

[Music] welcome back to the book club I'm Michael nolles this month we will be discussing civilization and its discontents by Sigman Freud but first in our fast-paced world it is tough to make reading a priority at least it used to be at thinker. org they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction they give you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form you can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like Dale Carnegie's had to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers such as Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life if you want to I don't know let's say challenge your preconceptions I don't in particular but maybe you do you could do that if you want to expand your horizons again or if you and I think this is a seller want to sound smart at cocktail parties then you've got to go check out thinker that is t h i n k.org no e we don't have time for an e start your free trial put your mind in motion we will be putting our minds in motion I know very little about Freud I know of course that a Freudian slip is where you say one thing and mean your mother but I know little else so we have invited Dr Steven marmer a clinical professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and a practicing clinical psychiatrist here in Southern California Steve thank you for being here my pleasure now Steve I have just read Freud for the first time I have I have fallen into the oceanic feeling that Freud is describing I'm swimming in all of these new ideas can you summarize the book in one minute that's like can I summarize PR in one minute the first thing that I want to say though before summarizing it is don't believe anything in the secondary ources you must tangle with Freud in his own words he was an amazing writer don't even take my word for it go read it yourself now the gist of this book is how do people come together to master their aggressions their desires their lusts in such a way as to be able to get along be productive live in harmony and maximize the amount of Happiness they have and minim minimize the amount of unhappiness they have and the answer is you can't do it without paying a price because there's always a tension Arc between your gratification and the restraint that you have to exercise in order for civilization to exist and in this sense Freud is very unsentimental very anti-utopian and that's a lot of why in the modern world many people don't like Freud because they would rather think that everybody is good and everything is going to turn out great and we can achieve Utopia and Freud says no this is a Perpetual struggle and a Perpetual Balancing Act between love and the Death Drive between the love and the Death Drive and our need to direct redirect and restrain each one of them so that our safety and our Harmony require that we give up some of our happiness and so we're ticked off because we don't want to restrict our happiness and we don't want to restrict our aggression but we have to in order for civilization to exist civilization brings happiness but it also brings unhappiness so he's presenting not some here some here's The Simple Solution five bullet points on a napkin follow what I say and everything will be great he is presenting these Eternal problems these compromises that we're going to have to find as we individuals try to come into civilization and he presents a sort of paradox which is as you say we don't start out in civil ation we start out in some kind of pre civilizational hodg podge of people we we come together and create civilization to make ourselves happier and in a sense it does make us happier but then in the suppression of our desires and our instincts we become unhappier and we develop Neurosis which is why all of us in Civilization are complaining all the time that is absolutely correct so why did we why did we start the civilization in the first place we needed to do it for safety because there's people working together as a much more productive way of living than people not working together uh if we don't have civilization then whoever is the strongest person and the most dominant person at the moment will get their way or they'll kill you it's kind of similar to hobbs' state of nature so we band together and we create certain sense of justice and certain sense of rules and we could call it Law and Order to restrain people to restrain their regression and to restrain their greed and to restrain their pursuit of happiness because maybe I want your wife or maybe I want your house and it'll make me happy to do that but if I do that then you're going to come back and you're going to retaliate against me or I'm going to make you unhappy and so we have to create structures internally in our own minds in the form of conscience and externally in terms of Law and custom to restrain people from doing exactly what they want to do so that there's an eternal tension between personal gratification and the advancement of civilization and if either one is turned up too high you're going to be unhappy now this this question of conscience is the the part of the book that I I was most interested in sort of like someone in person inting Freudian interesting very very interesting that's what what I kept going back to Freud says at the end the sense of guilt is the most important problem in the development of civilization and we see the price that we pay for our advance in Civilization is a loss of Happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt and we call the sense of guilt uh if we have a a wrong desire uh or or a sense of remorse if we've committed an action that we would call sinful U this comes To Us by way of our conscience Freud is a committed firm DieHard atheist I am a Catholic so when I read this I think well it's true we have a conscience we have a guilt I'm Catholic so I love guilt I think guilt is great we need more of it I'm Jewish very similar teammates so is it when when I read that I thought is is Freud kind of putting the cart before the horse here is conscience something that we just develop as a kind of personal protection against this or that threat that comes to us from society or is conscience just a a way and he even describes it as something kind of outside of of our it feels like it's outside of ourselves is conscience just a a way to measure an objective moral reality and is is guilt on in that way sort of a a good thing to put us back on the right path he would say that guilt comes from disappointing the father and uh maybe incurring the father's wrath and of course we smile because isn't that what we think about God isn't God the father of All Fathers and so that's a fascinating thing about why he's an atheist I don't I don't know whether he's an atheist because he was oppressed by the Catholicism of Vienna and the anti-Semitism of Vienna in during his lifetime uh or uh because in many many ways his psychology is very very Jewish uh and so it's it's a whole other subject to talk about his atheism and even his biography in that he had this father who was much older than his mother Freud's mother I I think was Freud's father's third wife yes Freud had had nephews that were older than him I believe so right I mean it was uh so as long as he's saying that all these Early Childhood experiences have uh you know strong effect on the rest of your life one could ask lots of questions about Freud's biography but Freud was quite learned and his father gave him as a gift uh a copy of a very famous edition of The Bible called The philipsson Bible and wrote a Hebrew acrostic uh using Freud's Hebrew name so I believe that Freud was much more knowledgeable about Judaism and about religion than he wanted to let on and kind of hid his uh sense of Judaism and his own kind of covert religious beliefs from the public uh but that's a again that's that's an interesting subject the guilt thing comes from not wanting to disappoint or arouse the retaliation of the Primal father so we develop a sense of guilt as a way of restraining our aggression and restraining our lust and our desires so that we get along better and don't provoke other people to retaliate against us but at the same time the ferocity with which we exert that guilt can sometimes cause neurosis and can sometimes actually uh cause destruction to other people if if you feel that somebody else is doing something wrong you can attack them with a ferocity that uh is is amazing and that has to be restrained now in this description of neurosis and guilt Freud seems to suggest that we need to blow off a little steam every now and again that we civilization causes us to repress some of our desires and this makes us unhappy and so we we would like to pursue those desires at some if be they sexual or be they aggressive or anywhere in between this seems to me to run counter to the classical account of the mind and virtue which is that actually repressing disordered desires and vice say and pursuing and practicing virtue it's not that it makes us unhappy it actually in the might make us unhappy in the short term but in the long run it will make us happier the sort of Aristotelian idea that the more we the more we practice virtue the easier it will be and the easier it will be to avoid Vice it would you do you think it's fair to say that Freud is reacting against that that he's turning that on its head I think that Freud would say that it only works if you can discharge your aggression and discharge your libido through sublimation that if you don't have an outlet of one kind or another then you're going to become neurotic so yes be virtuous by virtue of creating beauty or doing good for other people or productive work uh he uh is once said that uh happiness comes from the combination of love and work and so if you don't have sublimation of your drives you're going to be a miserable person you you can't just bottle it up and and this point on work that you rais is so striking too when he writes about work in Civilization and its discontents it seems to turn on its head the modern American view of work which is we work work work so that one day we can retire and not have to work anymore he feels the opposite he feels that work Works to the extent that you get satisfaction out of it and to the extent that it gives you a healthy outlet for your aggression and a a healthy outlet for your libido the the more you enjoy your work the more you it it enhances your sense of well-being to be a good worker the better off you're going to be and the more stable and less neurotic you're going to be and then the the other word that you had just mentioned is love and this is early on in the book Freud mentions that love is this weird circumstance where we lose sense of ourselves as discrete units that that in love we unite our elves with the object of our love and we say all sorts of weird things like you and I are one you and I are are united somehow what is it about love that causes us to lose the very boundaries of our self uh love is a kind of temporary insanity if it's that intense and romantic love especially and sexual romantic love we do almost become one when we are involved in love making we are as close to merging our bodies as is physiologically possible um and this same kind of love also suffuses a lot of the Eastern religions where we feel at one with the universe when we feel that we are at one with everyone else we have pure love no aggression and we feel secure however that's unsustainable there's no way that you can maintain that kind of love and still get along in the world first of all it makes you vulnerable what if you the person you love dies then it's or or rejects you that's excruciatingly painful and secondly uh you can't love everyone equally uh as a matter of fact he has a very entertaining thing about why it's impossible to love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor might not be a very nice person in fact he may want to really hurt you and he might not be worthy of your love and probably he thinks the same of you and so and why would you want to dilute the meaning of Love through inflation by loving two billion people when really it's only the people that you're really close to that you want to love so again there's a tension Arc you want to spread love to a wider uh Circle including friends and Associates and so forth but if you spread it to the entire world then you're diluting it into something meaningless what does Freud think about good and bad and right and wrong or or does he even think about that and is it really just more about our our desires and how we can all kind of get along in This Love and Death filled joke of a world uh good is that which is productive and enhances people's ability to cooperate with one another to form bonds and ties without being excessively destructive and without losing entirely your sense of self and bad is when destruction dominates and you are unreasonable in the exercise of your aggression so I do think that he has a good and bad uh we might also say that uh it's good when you're in alignment when the forces within you are in alignment there's a saying in psychoanalysis the ego or the self serves three harsh Masters the super ego or your conscience which is very tough on you uh the ID which is your desires and your wish for gratification and reality and you can't satisfy all three at the same time so good is when the three are in Balance so that you can be productive have relationships and bad is when one or another of them is disregarded can can you not serve the three because just because your ID your teeming raging Tempest of Desire is is just not in accord with the moral strictures of your super ego or because it's not in accord with reality yes all of the above okay uh and usually reality is the the thing that defeats us uh you know you can't have uh your loving relationship with your spouse and satisfy your sexual desire with everybody you can't retaliate against your enemy or even your friend you can't be too greedy and be too destructive and still have a world so we have to tame all of these things but if we tame them too much then we're unhappy if we don't tame them enough then we bump into reality so then then what are we to do about this if he if he says this problem here is we we really want to tame in particular our aggression which he says derives from this very early prehistoric Act of the children getting together and killing their father or he describes the edus complex or he describes all of these I don't even know if I would say scientific IDE mythical kinds of ideas mythical is correct and the whole idea about the Primal horde and murdering the the Primal father uh I have to say that that's pretty fanciful uh I think it's more metaphorical than anything it's the desire of the Next Generation to defeat the the the restraints of the previous generation which by the way we see uh every generation is willing to burn the city down in order to defeat the then generation that's in charge you see this with the the phrase okay Boomer yeah this is one just one that would be a mild example yeah uh and and so we we want and actually you can look around in the world today how how much is there a desire to destroy the current structure of civilization just for the sheer Joy of destru destroying it not not with any necessarily good alternative to put in its place and not with any awareness of the reality of what we would lose if we burned everything down just that unrestrained Death Drive unrestrained death drive so I think that the Primal father thing is his metaphorical way of representing that Primal Death Drive the need to clear the forest of all the traces of those who came before so that we can be unrestrained but that is going to lead to Doom when I read these metaphors when I when I read Freud and I think that point you made at the very top is so important you you've got to read him because he's different than you think he would be he's different than and when I when I open up this book it doesn't read like a science textbook to put it mildly it it reads like I don't know like U not quite poetry but he's such a good writer and it it reads like myth and it reads like a little bit of philosophy and it reads like so then from from your perspective as a professor of a scientific field and a clinical practitioner what gives is the man a scientist is it not scientific is he a poet is he so what what is he um he's a moral philosopher who takes a psychological perspective on morality based on his experiences of the struggles of his patients in figuring out the right balance so is he scientific he aspired to be scientific is he truly scientific in Carl Popper's sense of uh you have to have a hypothesis that you can disprove no no no but neither is philosophy neither is any effort to explain human behavior uh we we we can't first of all it would be immoral for us to conduct the experiments that that might yield the answer but I don't even think that they would yield the answer so he's trying to use scientific reasoning and scientific principles and squeezing this into a scientific format but is it science science like like uh Nuclear Physics is science no no well it's the only thing that irks me in his writing which I generally find extremely captivating is is the pretentiousness about of using a kind of scientific affect when in fact he's doing something that seems to be much much broader than that and in in many ways much deeper than that I agree with you on that and uh I think that part of it is a pose to contrast it more with religion uh you know right religion is just faith and belief and where I'm scientific and I'm going to give you the at least he tries to uh expose internal self-contradictions within his thinking yeah uh which is I think more than some other branches of thinking do now since you you are practicing and you're a faculty member at UCLA how much does this guy matter today I I and how much did he matter even at the time I I feel that sometimes people today don't fully appreciate just how significant this man was in his own time and for decades afterward absolutely um he really introduced to the west and to the world the idea that a lot of what we do is not what we think the reasons are for doing it and that along with whatever our professed thoughts are there's a layer of unconscious motivation highly related to our childhood experiences and the reliving of those childhood experiences in various forms which you call the transference Neurosis uh and that we are driven by these forces so the whole idea that there's an underlying Uh current of whether it's volcanic or whether it's a river uh whether it's lava or water uh or both he introduced and he introduced it through his clinical study and he introduced it through the interpretation of dreams but the one that really was the thing that made it stick was his book jokes and the relation to the unconscious in which he introduces the Freudian slip and and he's able to expose how jokes contain a lot of hostility how the surface meaning of things is not necessarily the whole meaning of things and so I think that he awoke Western Civilization to this way of thinking and we've taken it for granted and now we don't think it's so special from a from the perspective of today do you think that his claims about Early Childhood experiences I'm being a slightly glib here but you know wanting to kill your dad and Sh up your mother these kinds of very um the ideas that we just associate in the popular Consciousness with Freud do they hold up do they are they do are they still valid today or no they are very unpopular today today uh we would not like to believe that we have so much aggression that's innate uh we would like to believe that it's somebody else's fault it's not really in me but it's in society and therefore if we could change society then I'd be okay I don't have to change myself so he puts the Locust of all of this in the individual and that is an unpopular idea he wants everybody to be taking responsibility for their own uh destructiveness and their own lust and their own desires and greediness and so on and so forth uh and um yes those of us who work with patients know that the patterns and the uh template for how to live and what the world is like and how my mind works and how I process my emotions is laid down in the early years of life and that still holds up whether the edle uh situation is exactly the way he described it I think I prefer to think a bit more in the way that I described before we all want to get rid of the older generation get it out of the way so that we can be the ruler so yes I think that childhood Early Childhood as The Twig is bent so grows the tree I am not going to beat that that is a terrific place to end not to end your reading but to end this episode we will see you next month however I'm Michael nolles this is the book club thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on prageru prageru is a 501c3 nonprofit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much for