ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Sigmund Freud's discussions of culture. In the mid-1920s Freud was embroiled in a series of sharp debates over the role of 'lay analysis'; that is, psychoanalysis carried out by those who were not medically trained. Psychoanalysis in the United States was controlled by doctors, who insisted that a medical training was a prerequisite for analytic training. Freud's well-known phrase 'Civilization and Its Discontents', which is taken from the standard translated title of his book of that name, is often read as a diagnosis of the particular forms of Western culture in which psychoanalysis itself took root. Civilization refers to the particular set of technical accomplishments that we use to define a society. Culture is what the infant enters as they navigate the Oedipus complex as a basic structure of dependency and then autonomy for the individual, and the title of Freud's study is actually 'the uneasiness inherent in culture'.
