Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud's argument that civilization is built on the repression of instinct; that the progress of society requires individuals to renounce their drives, generating inescapable neurosis. It is among the bleakest and most clarifying frameworks for understanding the modern condition. Short, accessible, still profoundly relevant.
Readers with psychology backgrounds describe the method as backwards, conclusion first and then an anecdote reached for as support. The primal father murdered by his sons “is beyond simplistic. It's stupid.” His model of desire as pressure that builds and must be released is where it stops reading as science, and a reader locating human aggression in fixed nature objects that “this largely removes credibility, responsibility from the actual source.” His assumptions about women and homosexuality date it badly, leaving him “a hidebound reactionary, sexist, homophobic” and demonstrating “why Freud is no longer taken seriously.” The back half is “a longwinded discussion of guilt,” and one dismissal stings: “if I wanted a third-rate Nietzsche, I'd just read Foucault.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
