conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Civilization and Its Discontents about CDs with the genre: Health, Fitness & Dieting, Psychology & Counseling.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Will be shipped from US. Used storys may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Civilization and Its Discontents
  Freudians will of course continue to read Freud's works either in German or in the English of the Standard Edition. I hope, however, that my versions will make these twentieth-century classics marginally more accessible to the readers of the twenty-first century.
  It is impossible to resist the impression that people commonly apply false standards, seeking power, success and wealth for themselves and admiring them in others, while underrating what is truly valuable in life. Yet in passing such a general judgement one is in danger of forgetting the rich variety of the human world and its mental life. There are some individuals who are venerated by their contemporaries, but whose greatness rests on qualities and achievements that are quite foreign to the aims and ideals of the many. One may be inclined to suppose that these great men are appreciated after all only by a minority, while the great majority have no interest in them. However, it is probably not as simple as that, owing to the discrepancies between people's thoughts and actions and the diversity of their desires.
  One of these outstanding men corresponds with me and in his letters calls himself my friend. I sent him a little piece of mine that treats religion as an illusion, and in his reply he said that he wholly agreed with my view of religion, but regretted that I had failed to appreciate the real source of religiosity. This was a particular feeling of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of 'eternity', a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were 'oceanic'. This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion.
  I have nothing to suggest that would decisively contribute to the solution of this problem. The idea that a person should be informed of his connection with the world around him through an immediate feeling that is used for this purpose from the beginning sounds so bizarre, and fits so badly into the fabric of our psychology, that we are justified in looking for a psychoanalytic – that is to say a genetic – derivation of such a feeling. The following train of thought then suggests itself. Normally we are sure of nothing so much as a sense of self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us autonomous, uniform and clearly set off against everything else. It was psychoanalytic research that first taught us that this was a delusion, that in fact the ego extends inwards, with no clear boundary, into an unconscious psychical entity that we call the id, and for which it serves, so to speak, as a façade. And psychoanalysis still has much to tell us about the relation of the ego to the id. Yet externally at least the ego seems to be clearly and sharply delineated. There is only one condition – admittedly an unusual one, though it cannot be dismissed as pathological – in which this is no longer so. At the height of erotic passion the borderline between ego and object is in danger of becoming blurred. Against all the evidence of the senses, the person in love asserts that 'I' and 'you' are one and is ready to behave as if this were so. What can be temporarily interrupted by a physiological function must of course be capable of being disturbed by morbid processes also. Pathology acquaints us with a great many conditions in which the boundary between the ego and the external world becomes uncertain or the borderlines are actually wrongly drawn. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, indeed parts of his mental life – perceptions, thoughts, feelings – seem alien, divorced from the ego, and others in which he attributes to the external world what has clearly arisen in the ego and ought to be recognized by it. Hence, even the sense of self is subject to disturbances, and the limits of the self are not constant.
  A further consideration tells us that the adult's sense of self cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have undergone a process of development, which understandably cannot be demonstrated, though it can be reconstructed with a fair degree of probability.3 The new-born child does not at first separate his ego from an outside world that is the source of the feelings flowing towards him. He gradually learns to do this, prompted by various stimuli. It must make the strongest impression on him that some sources of stimulation, which he will later recognize as his own physical organs, can convey sensations to him at any time, while other things – including what he most craves, his mother's breast – are temporarily removed from him and can be summoned back only by a cry for help. In this way the ego is for the first time confronted with an 'object', something that exists 'out there' and can be forced to manifest itself only through a particular action. A further incentive to detach the ego from the mass of sensations, and so to recognize a 'world outside', is provided by the frequent, multifarious and unavoidable feelings of pain (or absence of pleasure), whose termination and avoidance is required by the absolute pleasure principle. A tendency arises to detach from the ego anything that may give rise to such unpleasurable experience, to expel it and so create an ego that is oriented solely towards pleasure and confronts an alien and menacing world outside. The limits of this primitive pleasure-oriented ego are inevitably corrected by experience. After all, some of the things that give us pleasure and that we are loath to forgo belong not to the ego, but to the object, and some of the torments that we wish to expel prove to be of internal origin and inseparable from the ego. We learn how to distinguish between the internal, which belongs to the ego, and the external, which comes from the world outside, through deliberate control of our sensory activity and appropriate muscular action. This is the first step towards establishing the reality principle, which will govern subsequent developments. The distinction between the internal and the external naturally serves a practical purpose, in that it provides protection against unpleasurable experiences and the threat of them. The fact that the ego employs exactly the same methods to expel certain unpleasurable sensations from within as it does to repel others from without becomes the starting point for significant pathological disorders.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The love that founded the family remains effective in civilization, both in its original form, in which direct sexual satisfaction is not renounced, and in its modified form as aim-inhibited affection. In both it continues to perform the function of binding together fairly large numbers of people, and it does so more intensively than would be possible on the basis of a common interest in work. The careless way in which the language uses the word 'love' can be justified historically. The word denotes not only the relation between a man and a woman, whose genital needs have led them to found a family, but also the positive feelings that exist within the family between parents and children, and between siblings, though we are bound to describe the latter relation as aim-inhibited love or affection. This aim-inhibited love was in fact once a fully sensual love, and it still is in the individual's unconscious. Both fully sensual and aim-inhibited love extend outside the family and create new bonds with people who were previously strangers. Genital love leads to the formation of new families, and aim-inhibited love to 'friendships', which become important for civilization because they avoid some of the restrictions of genital love, such as its exclusivity. But as it develops, the relation of love to civilization ceases to be unequivocal. On the one hand, love comes into conflict with the interests of civilization; on the other, civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions.
  This rift seems unavoidable, but its cause is not at once discernible. It first manifests itself as a conflict between the family and the wider community to which the individual belongs. We have already noted that one of civilization's chief endeavours is to bring people together in large units. However, the family will not give up the individual. The closer the solidarity of the family, the more often its members tend to cut themselves off from other people and the harder it is for them to enter into the wider circle of life. The phylogenetically older mode of living together – the only one that exists in childhood – resists being superseded by the civilized one that was acquired later. Detaching oneself from the family is a task that faces every young person, and society often supports him in performing it with puberty and initiation rites. One has the impression that such difficulties attach to any psychical development, indeed to any organic development.
  Moreover, women soon come into conflict with the cultural trend and exercise a retarding, restraining influence on it, even though it was they who first laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love. Women stand for the interests of the family and sexual life, whereas the work of civilization has become more and more the business of the menfolk, setting them increasingly difficult tasks and obliging them to sublimate their drives – a task for which women have little aptitude. No person has unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, and so he has to accomplish his tasks through an expedient distribution of the libido. Whatever energy he expends on cultural aims is largely denied to the opposite sex: his constant association with men and his dependency on this association even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father. The woman therefore sees herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and adopts a hostile attitude to it.
  Civilization's tendency to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency – to extend the cultural circle. The first phase of civilization, the totemic phase, already involves the prohibition of incest in the choice of one's sexual object; this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation that man's erotic life has experienced throughout the ages. Taboo, law and custom create further restrictions, affecting both men and women. Not all civilizations go to the same lengths; and the economic structure of society influences the degree of sexual freedom that remains. We already know that in this respect civilization follows the dictates of economic necessity, because it deprives sexuality of much of the mental energy that it consumes. Civilization thus behaves towards sexuality like a tribe or a section of the population that has subjected another and started exploiting it. Fear that the victims may rebel necessitates strict precautionary measures. A high point in such a development can be seen in our western European civilization. It is psychologically quite justified to begin by prohibiting expressions of infantile sexuality, for there is no prospect of curbing the sexual appetites of adults unless preparatory measures have been taken in childhood. Yet civilized society cannot in any way be justified in going further and actually denying these phenomena, which are easily demonstrable, indeed striking. The sexually mature individual finds that his choice of object is restricted to the opposite sex, and that most extra-genital gratifications are forbidden as perversions. The demand for a uniform sexual life for all, which is proclaimed in all these prohibitions, disregards all the disparities, innate and acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings, thereby depriving fairly large numbers of sexual enjoyment and becoming a source of grave injustice. The result of such restrictions might be that in normal persons – those who are not constitutionally inhibited – all sexual interest would flow, with no loss, into the channels still left open to it. But what is not outlawed – heterosexual genital love – is still limited by legitimacy and monogamy. Present-day civilization makes it clear that it will permit sexual relations only on the basis of a unique and indissoluble bond between a man and a woman, that it disapproves of sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and will tolerate it only as the device – for which a substitute has still to be found – for the increase of mankind.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Even if it is conceded that such damage is caused by civilized sexual morality, it can still be argued, in answer to our third question, that what civilization gains from such an extreme sexual restriction probably more than balances these sufferings, which affect only a minority to any serious extent. I have to declare that in this matter I cannot properly balance gains against losses, but in assessing the losses I might put forward a number of other considerations. Going back to the question of abstinence, I have to say that it has other damaging effects apart from those pertaining to the neuroses, and that the importance of these neuroses is usually not fully appreciated.
  The retardation of sexual development and sexual activity, which is the aim of our education and civilization, is certainly harmless at first; it is seen to be necessary when one considers the late age at which young people of the educated classes become independent and start to earn their living. Here, incidentally, one is reminded of how closely all our cultural institutions are interconnected and how difficult it is to change part of them without regard to the whole. However, abstinence that is prolonged much beyond the age of nineteen is no longer without its dangers for a young man and leads to harmful effects, even if not to nervous illness. True, it is said that the struggle with such a powerful drive and the emphasis that is necessarily placed on all the ethical and aesthetic forces in the mind 'steels' the character, and this is indeed true of some natures that enjoy a specially favourable constitution. It also has to be conceded that the differentiation of individual characters, which is so marked in our time, has become possible only with the imposition of sexual restrictions. In the great majority of cases, however, the struggle against sensuality uses up all the energy available to the character, and this at the very time when a young man needs all his forces if he is to win his rightful place in society. The relation between possible sublimation and necessary sexual activity naturally varies a good deal from individual to individual and even between different callings. An abstinent artist is almost inconceivable, but an abstinent young scholar is certainly no rarity. The latter can, through self-restraint, free the energy he needs for his studies, while the former's artistic achievements are probably greatly stimulated by his sexual experience. I do not in general have the impression that sexual abstinence helps produce energetic, independent men of action or original thinkers, bold liberators and reformers. Far more often it produces well-behaved weaklings who later merge into the great mass of those who habitually, if reluctantly, follow the lead given by strong individuals.
  The stern demands of civilization and the difficult task of abstinence have combined to make avoidance of the union of the male and female genitals the essential feature of abstinence and to favour other forms of sexual activity that amount, one might say, to a kind of semi-obedience. Since normal sexual intercourse is so relentlessly persecuted on grounds of morality – and of hygiene too, in view of the possibilities of infection – the so-called perverse forms of heterosexual intercourse, in which other parts of the body take over the role of the genitals, have undoubtedly increased in social importance. Yet these activities cannot be judged to be as harmless as similar deviations in love relationships: they are ethically objectionable in that they degrade a love relationship between two human beings from something serious into a convenient game that entails no danger or spiritual involvement. As a further consequence of the difficulties to which normal sexual life has become subject, one must mention the spread of homosexual satisfaction; those whose homosexuality is due to their constitution or was acquired in childhood are now joined by many others, for whom, in their maturer years, the mainstream of the libido has been blocked off and the homosexual side-channel has consequently widened.
  I call upon all informed persons to confirm that I am not exaggerating, but simply describing conditions of which any number of equally bad examples can be observed. The uninitiated find it quite incredible that, among couples subject to our civilized sexual morality, normal potency is found so rarely in the husband and frigidity so often in the wife, that marriage involves such a degree of renunciation, often for both partners, and that married life, the happiness so fervently longed for, is reduced to so little. I have already shown how, under these conditions, the most obvious outcome is nervous illness; but I will add a word about the continued effect on the child or children – there are seldom more than one – who are born of such a marriage. At first sight we appear to have a case of hereditary transmission, but on closer inspection it is seen to be the result of powerful infantile impressions. In her role as a mother, a neurotic wife who is unsatisfied by her husband becomes over-affectionate and over-anxious towards her child, transfers to it her own need for love and thereby awakens it to sexual precocity. The poor understanding between the parents stimulates the child's emotional life and arouses in it, at a very tender age, intense feelings of love, hate and jealousy. A strict upbringing, which refuses to countenance any expression of sexuality, awakened so early, supplies the suppressive force, and this conflict, at this age, has all the makings of lifelong nervous illness.
  Let us add that in general the restriction of sexual activity in a nation goes hand in hand with an increase in our anxiety about life and our fear of death, which impairs the capacity of individuals for enjoyment and puts an end to their readiness to embrace death for any purpose, which results in a diminished inclination to procreate children and excludes the nation or the group in question from any share in the future. If this is so, we may well ask whether our 'civilized' sexual morality is worth the sacrifices it forces on us, especially if we have not yet sufficiently freed ourselves from hedonism to be able to resist including a modicum of individual happiness among the aims of our cultural development. It is certainly not for the physician to come forward with proposals for reform, but I think I might emphasize the urgency of such proposals if I supplement Ehrenfels's description of the harmful effects of our 'civilized' sexual morality by pointing to its significant role in the spread of modern nervous illness.