ABSTRACT
It is tempting to regard Freud’s ‘theory of society’ as an elaboration upon the mechanism of repression. Shame, guilt and moral repugnance are the individuated and inward expression of conventions through which society is established and maintained. Of the three great sources of unhappiness which Freud identifies in the opening pages of Civilisation and its Discontents —‘the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationship of human beings’—he does not hesitate to identify ‘what we call our Civilisation’ as the most significant cause of misery.1
The fact that society is the source of innumerable satisfactions, that it has devolved upon us God-like powers of self-mastery and domination of nature seems, in the end, to count for nothing. Society superimposes upon the primary organic repression, associated with the adoption of an erect posture and a radical reorganisation of the sensorial, further restrictions on the availability of instinctual gratification. But the acquisition of a fully internalised sense of disgust, which is the phylogenetic precondition of the power of society over us, does not in itself account for our wholly conscious unhappiness. Freud argues that it is ‘primary mutual hostility’ that is the underlying source of human antipathy to, and estrangement from, social life:
