Identity of Individuals or Groups Under Civilization and Its Discontents

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the outbreak of the First World War marked an unprecedented and catastrophic event between highly developed, supposedly civilized nations. Despite the advancements of industrialization, the supposed "civilized" people engaged in a barbaric massacre. The resulting radical and often abrupt changes in society caused the disappearance of traditional civilized life. The world was left feeling powerless in the face of this massive jolt and collapse.

Consequently, post-war society was characterized by a state of chaos and confusion, with a pervasive sense of disillusionment and moral decay. People's sense of self-identity was in constant flux, making it increasingly difficult to escape the influence of others. As a result of the instability of civilization, people were incapable of trusting others. Instead, the alienation and wariness towards others bred hostility and hatred, leading to further violence and crisis.

Amid this backdrop of human tragedy, Freud reflected on the relationship between civilization and humanity in his work, Civilization and Its Discontents, he notes that the eternal dilemma of human beings is that they cannot survive outside of civilization, but the price of being sheltered by civilization is the repression of their desires. The more refined civilization becomes, the stronger the repression of human nature, leading to an increasing sense of frustration with civilization that is deeply buried in the subconscious. Until one day, people's dissatisfaction with civilization will burst completely. Freud's thesis explores the dense and subtle, yet contradictory relationship between humanity and the civilization that both shelters and constrains us. Ultimately, he asks how we should define this civilization that has both blessed and chained us.

The civilization that Freud primarily considered differentiates man from animals and consists of two major components: the first being the unique knowledge and ability of man to understand and transform nature, and the second being the social rules of mutual aid that regulate the relationship between individuals in the face of nature's powerlessness and fear. The former represents the individual's offensive need against nature, while the latter embodies the individual's defensive measure against nature. In other words, the former is associated with the destructive instinct of eros or libido, while the latter represents the other instinct of eros, or death instinct, which expresses the potential relationship between love desire and civilization. The mutually restrictive relationship between civilization and human beings may have contributed to the anxiety of modern human spiritual civilization. The identity and value of human beings in society derive from their mutually restrictive relationship, which is the source of anxiety. An individual's identity is not only based on the modern sense of self but also in its value and worth to others. Freud analyzed two aspects of the emergence and development of civilization, namely its suppression of the sexual instinct and the offensive instinct. This suppression comes from the external society of the individual. According to Freud, the hominid family system cannot yet be regarded as a civilized phenomenon because this primitive family still lacks the basic features of civilization. The father, as the head of the family, is unrestrained by his will. On the other hand, the emergence of civilization has a dual root: external necessity and the power of love. As Freud notes, "in fact, originally fully sensual love, and it is so still in man's unconscious. Both fully sensual love and aim-inhibited extend outside the family and create new bonds with people who before were strangers. Genital love leads to the forming of new families; aim-inhibited love to friendships." This check and balance between individuals form the basis of group civilization.

Freud believed that civilization's restrictions on human sexual instincts were unreasonable because they did not account for individual differences in innate and acquired human sexual abilities. In addition to the repression of sexual instincts, civilization has also repressed the instinct of death. “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is not only a potential helper or sexual object but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.” Moreover, Freud concluded, "Civilization must use its utmost efforts to set limits on man's aggressive instincts and to restrain men's manifestations through psychical reaction formations. This is why methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love are used. Hence, the restriction upon sexual life and the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself - a commandment which is truly justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man." Freud believed that the origin of human misfortune lay in the limitations of civilization on human sexuality and aggressive behavior. This restrictive concern is enough to destroy the tension of natural life, to the extent that society will degrade to a lower level when civilization collapses.

The means of achieving restriction and suppression is through a sense of guilt. Guilt is composed of two main components: the first is the fear of authority, which includes not only the power of nature and the supremacy of the father, but also the power of the group. The second component is the fear of the superego, which restricts the ego's desires. This imposes a heavy burden on the individual on both inner and outer levels of the spirit. The shackle of guilt forces the individual to interact with others in order to maintain the existence of group authority and obtain the group's acceptance. In other words, an individual's sense of identity is formed in civilization through the interaction of the self with others, resulting in a balance between the solid civilizational shackles and the weaker sense of self. This process generates strong ideological shocks and powerful spiritual suffering, resulting in experiences of anxiety and hope, pain and pleasure, thus sustaining civilization. However, this balance is extremely vulnerable to imbalance and fragility, and the individual is undoubtedly very modest in this process, leading to collapse.

Perhaps Freud sought to break through the authority of the group to the pressure of individual desire for love, but from the standpoint of the origin of human civilization, the individual is subservient to the group in every aspect. The fragmentation of the relationship between human beings and the world civilization and the destruction of the connection between human beings and others ultimately leads to a crisis between individual human beings and the civilized community. Despite humanity being in such a precarious situation, the value of civilizational restraints cannot be denied. In fact, humanity has always existed in such crises and predicaments, and each time humanity has responded to the crisis, it has resulted in the progress of civilization. It can be said that Freud, from a psychoanalytic point of view, sounded the alarm for individuals to regain their "freedom" from the community. He emphasized the importance of the liberation of love desire, hoping that the entire human world would form a coherent unity under the effect of love, with not only individual freedom, but also group justice.