255 definitions
The book's index
Civilization and Its Discontents
164 concepts · 255 definitions
- aesthetics1
- affection1
- aggression7
- ambition1
- America1
- anal character1
- antisemitism1
- anxiety2
- art2
- asceticism1
- bad conscience1
- badness1
- beauty1
- being in love1
- bipedalism1
- bisexuality1
- body1
- bourgeois1
- camera1
- Christianity1
- church1
- civilization13
- cleanliness2
- community2
- conscience6
- consolation1
- control over nature1
- creativity1
- criticism1
- cultural superego2
- death drive2
- delinquency1
- demon1
- destructiveness1
- devil2
- dirt1
- discontent1
- disgust1
- disillusionment1
- dog1
- education2
- ego2
- enjoyment1
- equality1
- eros2
- erotic love2
- ethics2
- evil1
- external world1
- family3
- fate1
- feces1
- feeling1
- fetish1
- fire1
- forbidden fruit1
- forgetting1
- forgiveness1
- freedom1
- friendship1
Civilization (n.) is the child of Eros and Ananke — love and necessity.
Civilization (n.) would build the great human community most successfully if it paid no attention at all to the happiness of the individual.
Civilization (n.) is blamed for our misery — yet everything we use to protect ourselves against misery is part of that very civilization.
Civilization (n.) is the struggle of Eros and Death played out in the human species — a battle of giants that nursemaids try to lull with their song about Heaven.
Aggression (n.) is the death instinct turned outward: the organism destroys something else instead of destroying itself — so restraining it increases self-destruction.
Aggression (n.) rides along with erotic love — few beloveds are as tolerant as the peasant woman who complained her husband no longer loved her, since he had not beaten her for a week.
Aggression (n.) is so potent an obstacle to civilization that the defence against it causes as much unhappiness as aggression itself.
Aggression (n.) was not created by property: it reigned when there was almost none, and shows itself in the nursery before property has outgrown its anal form.
Guilt (n.) is the price of progress: we pay for our advance in civilization with a loss of happiness through the heightening of guilt.
Guilt (n.) comes whether one kills one's father or not — it is the expression of ambivalence, the eternal struggle between Eros and death.
Guilt (n.) is only ever aggression suppressed and handed over to the super-ego; a thwarted erotic wish breeds guilt only by first breeding anger at whoever thwarted it.
Guilt (n.) is at bottom a topographical variety of anxiety — later on, simply fear of the superego.
Love (n.) makes us more defenceless against suffering than anything else — never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost the loved object or its love.
Love (n.) is deserved when the other is so like me that I can love myself in him, or so much more perfect that I can love my ideal self in him.
Love (n.) is a protection against the authority's punitive aggression, so fear of losing it amounts to fear of punishment.
Love (n.) is the art of living that refuses weary resignation and holds fast to the passionate striving for happiness — and perhaps comes nearer to it than any other way.
Conscience (n.) grows more severe the more virtuous a man is, so that the saintliest reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness.
Conscience (n.) grows severe from two things together: frustration, which unleashes aggression, and being loved, which turns that aggression inward.
Conscience (n.) is the result of instinctual renunciation, not its cause: renunciation imposed from without creates conscience, which then demands still more renunciation.
Conscience (n.) is aggression sent back to where it came from: turned on one's own ego with the same harshness one longed to vent on others.
The Superego (n.) takes its first severity not from the father's harshness but from the child's own vengeful aggression against him: 'If I were the father and you the child, I'd treat you badly.'
The Superego (n.) ends the fear of being found out, because nothing can be hidden from it, not even thoughts.
The Superego (n.) is civilization's garrison in a conquered city, set up within the individual to watch over his disarmed aggression.
The Superego (n.) torments the sinful ego with the old anxiety and watches for chances to get it punished by the outside world.
Love thy neighbor (n.) is a commandment no one can fulfil: so vast an inflation of love only cheapens it and solves nothing.
Love thy neighbor (n.) would be acceptable if it ran: love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.
Love thy neighbor (n.) is justified only by this: nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man.
Love thy neighbor (n.) becomes a case of Credo quia absurdum when the neighbour is unworthy and your enemy.
Happiness (n.) is not included in the plan of Creation; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it.
Happiness (n.) is the sudden release of a need long dammed up — by nature only an episode; prolonged, it fades into mild contentment.
Happiness (n.) is a problem in each person's libidinal economy; no golden rule fits all — every man must discover for himself how he can be saved.
Happiness (n.) is essentially subjective: we cannot feel our way into the galley-slave or the Jew awaiting a pogrom, nor guess how stupefaction and lost expectation reshaped their capacity for pleasure and pain.
Religion (n.) is a mass delusion — and no one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
Religion (n.) springs not from a feeling of oneness but from infant helplessness and the longing for a father, kept alive by fear of Fate.
Religion (n.) spares many people an individual neurosis by fixing them in psychical infantilism and drawing them into a mass-delusion — but hardly anything more.
Religion (n.) worthy of the name is the common man's religion; the rest is pitiful rearguard action.
Neurosis (n.) perhaps always hides a quota of unconscious guilt, which fortifies the symptoms by using them as punishment.
Neurosis (n.) is the last technique of living — a flight into illness, usually made while still young, that at least brings substitute satisfactions.
Neurosis (n.) that is collective is hard to diagnose: when a whole group shares the disorder, there is no 'normal' background to contrast it against — and no one has authority to impose the cure.
Neurosis (n.) is a struggle between self-preservation and libido in which the ego wins — at the price of severe sufferings and renunciations.