First English publication in a translation by Joan Riviere by the Hogarth Press and Institute of Pscyho-Analsis, London, and Cape and Smith, NewYork, in 1930.
In an often pessimistic reflection on the conflict between instinctual demands and the restrictions of civilization, Freud discusses the origins of religious feeling, the frustrated desires that underlie social structures, the “economic” costs of renouncing pleasure and the existence of an aggressive instinct entirely independent of the sexual and self-preservational instincts. As with all his work on culture, he postulates a similarity between the libidinal development of the individual and the development of social formations. The process of civilization mirrors the m…
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