Modern Society Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Modern Society - Essay ExampleFor Freud was pleased with the critical review that his Italian disciplehad come up with I am glad you have shown yourself to be courageous and honest, as always. Roazen 2000, page 4However, the closer we may seem to be in easily understanding his kit and boodle and get to a conclusion of our own, the more complicated our thinking process about him becomes. As for citing an example, the following citation goes In his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he would fudge no bones about why he thought the love for humanity was both unrealistic and undesirable. In a way Freud had given apart his true sentiments even in his letter to Rolland, when he put the love of mankind on the same level as the necessity for technology, which Freud like opposite Europeans of his time looked on with at best mixed feelingsRoazen 2000, page5. Further, His book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is one of the most complicated ones he ever wrote, and attracts li ttle guardianship nowadays. That text is littered with examples of the worldly wisdom which can be communicated through jokes. Freuds dry cynicism was frequently reported. We know a bit about how much he appreciated Mark Twains public appearances in Vienna. Like all complex figures Freud had his multiple contradictions, but he harnessed them into making the great literature he left which is still capable of enlivening debates today. It remains for the future to determine whether Freud will in the end succeedin ranking with thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and others who broken the sleep of the world Roazen 2000, page 8. By withdrawing all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will... The citizen in modem society, laboring, according to Freud, under a heavy burden of unconscious guilt, does not recognize it he only feels a sort of inquietude or discontent for which other motivations ar e ought.The patient does not recognize this esthesis of guilt either. As far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb it does not tell him he is guilty he does not feel guilty, he feels ill.4 Freud seems to suggest, however, that the pale guilty or criminal from a sense of guilt, can, in fact, partially recognize his unconscious guilt. This type of criminal, Freud tells us, does not feel guilty because he commits crimes rather he commits crimes because he suffers from an oppressive pre-existing sense of guilt which he cannot account for. Freud implicitly did, the idea of unconscious guilt as a means of changing and restructuring society? I suggest that they did, that the crisis of pestilence was also an opportunity, an opportunity to topple rulers, banish ones political opponents, and change the form of regime. The process of purification was an integral part of classical politics. Freud last comes to the conclusion, in Civilization and Its Discontents, that since society will not see that it is sick, and would resist treatment, in any case, the only hope for society lies in its being coerced into receiving therapy. each problem which society experienced could be explained as the result of an unconscious sense of guilt, due to the fathers having sinned even centuries earlier.