Freud and Modernity

Modernity, Culture, & Civilization

Standardization & Efficiency

Freud and Modernity

Sigmund Freud

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents

Standardization and Efficiency meant predictability, a well organized social system. Weber would identify this as Rationality.

DOB: May 6, 1856, Příbor, Czech Republic

DOD: September 23, 1939, London, United Kingdom

Freud uses Psychoanalysis on a cultural level.

Books: Psychoanalysis,

The Ego and the ID, Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, Three Essays, on the Theory of Sexuality, The Psychopathology of the Everyday, to name a few books.

The Return of the repressed in Social Life

Crisis of Modernity

There are a number of similar processes among those which the analytic investigation of mental life has made known to us (1929)

1. Psychological structure to work within

a developing consciousness,

2. Psychopathology allows them

to understand both the negative impact

of modern society, and the failure to develop

a revolutionary consciousness,

3. The possibilities of psychic liberation.

Definitions

Modernity

Contributions to the phenomena we are regularly made by the mechanisms that lead to a neurosis (ibid).

Brought two World Wars within a generation.

Culture, according to Raymond Williams, has had various meanings, two of the most popular definitions of culture:

1. Culture is all its early uses was a noun a process:

the tending of something, basically crops or

animals,

2. In the early 16th century, culture was used to

denote a process of extending the process of

human development.

World War II

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended in an important respect (1929).

Civilization is generally used to describe an achieved state or condition of organized social life, according to Raymond Williams.

War World I

Modernity could best be characterized as progress in: 1) Technology, 2) Industrialization, 3) Living Standards, 4) Spread of Democracy,

& 5) Consumer Culture.

Modernity could be defined as that culture in which people are promised a better life--one day (Lamert, 1999).

-Mechanization of weapons

-Chemical Weapons

-Mass Production of Weapons

-Rise of Nationalism

-Completed Mechanization/

Industrialization of Society

-Increased efficiency of

killing/ Production/

Distribution.

-Eventually ignited the Cold

War between the Soviet

Union & the the United

States.