Chapter 3: Congestion and Its Discontents

The title of this chapter is taken from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, (1930) which is one of his most famous works. The book’s central theme is that “the conflict between sexual needs and societal mores is the source of mankind’s propensity for dissatisfaction, aggression, hostility and ultimately, violence” (Davidson, 2002). After the horrors of World War I, Freud rejected the “common Enlightenment view of human beings as naturally sociable and of social life as a reflection of the spontaneous harmony of a natural world governed by laws established by God and discoverable by reason…. [H]uman beings, he believed, are driven by extremely powerful instincts, the full satisfaction of which is incompatible with social life” (Garrard, 1996).