Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.ĭr. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself the rest were prepared under his supervision. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey.įreud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. The result is a pervasive and familiar guilt. But culture inhibits his instinctual drives. Man, by nature aggressive and egotistical, seeks self-satisfaction.

In it he states his views on the broad question of man's place in the world, a place Freud defines in terms of ceaseless conflict between the individual's quest for freedom and society's demand for conformity.įreud's theme is that what works for civilization doesn't necessarily work for man.

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.Ĭivilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. 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.

Freud society and its discontents