Interim Report No.1

This by way of an interim report on reading Freud’s famous essay, of something under a hundred pages, at reference 1. It is organised into eight chapters of roughly equal length. There is a lengthy summary at reference 2.

A reading which was perhaps sparked by Cormac McCarthy, as noticed at reference 3. This led, in turn, to reference 4. And there have already been three posts. Reference 5 concerns a love story mentioned by Freud in chapter 4, about the restraints society, aka civilisation, places on sexual and romantic relationships. Reference 6 reports on a report about working on a production line, aka assembly line. A down-side of civilisation. Reference 7 attempts to summarise the prevalence of belief in some kind of afterlife, which bears on chapters 1 and 2.

I might add in passing that, following Richard Church, the love story is set in Dartmoor. I suppose that a hundred years ago Dartmoor was a much bigger destination for walking holidays than it is now. Also riding holidays, if the disused stables behind the Forest Inn at Hexworthy are anything to go by. For which see reference 8.

Digital copies

My copy of this essay (reference 1) was turned up by Bing and came from the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. Without having checked properly, I believe it to be a good quality rendering of the standard Strachey translation.

While my copy of the collected works (reference 9), all four and a half thousand pages of it, is widely available on the Internet and is the work of one Ivan Smith. It appears to be a perfectly respectable collection – except that I have failed to find anything about it or about Ivan Smith. It is as if he has gone to some trouble to keep it all private. Maybe there is a copyright issue, but I would have been happier with a bit more background, with a bit of provenance.

Gemini, for once, apart from offering some general advice on such matters, was unable to be more specific.

The collection is searchable but is copy protected. You can cut out snaps from the text using Microsoft’s Snipping Tool, but you can’t cut and paste text. At least, I can’t. While the essay from Philadelphia allows both.

Sport 

Freud writes a good deal about aggression in this essay, which he believes to lurk in all of us, and the various strategies of individuals and societies to modify it or contain it.

Against this background I find it odd that he has nothing to say about competitive sport, which one might have thought was a very good channel into which to divert native aggression, either by participation on the pitch or by watching from the stands, as it were.

The word ‘sport’ does not occur at all in this essay and occurs less than twenty times in the collected works, mostly, for some reason, embedded in ‘transport’. And there is no ‘football’ at all.

By way of example, organised football has been around in this country since at least the second half of the nineteenth century. Probably in Germany since around the same time. And I imagine a good proportion of the male population of Europe, not to say elsewhere, now watch football on television.

So why did Freud not include sport in his travels?

Noting in passing that there is more to watching sport than aggression. I remember a clip on television involving, I think, Paul Gascoigne who, when being tackled for the ball, managed to do something which was both very skilful and very funny.

Private aggression

I might think of myself as not being very aggressive and not being very competitive. And while I may have done games at school and have taken in the odd football match over the years, I watch very little sport on television. Pretty much down to vanishing point.

However, I do not have to lift many stones before I find plenty of aggression, or at least derivatives of same – and I dare say an analyst would find plenty more. So Freud is clearly right to that extent.

That said, there is very little aggression, competition or violence in my dreams – I might go so far as to say none. Although it is quite possible that writing about it now will prompt something of the sort.

Maybe some part of my super-ego stays online while most of the rest of me is asleep?

On the other hand, I do, along with plenty of other people, watch plenty of police dramas and murder mysteries on television. And while, as with sport, one can think up various reasons for doing this, it is, I think, difficult to argue that vicarious consumption of violent death and violence in general is not part of it.

While as young persons, we used to watch lots of silly horror films, usually quite late in the evening, the sort involving beautiful, scantily clad maidens being ravished by evil doers, some rather monstrous. A combination of lust and aggression. I used to settle for sublimation rather than promotion - but as I type this, I am not for sure: to be thought about.

Parallels

Lots of people drew parallels between the evolution of animals and the development of individual animals. It used to be said, not very accurately as it turns out, that development encapsulated evolution. See for example, reference 10.

While Freud sees a parallel between the development of an individual and the development of a civilisation. At the very least, the super-ego of a properly brought-up individual is apt to reflect the social and legislative climate in which that individual is brought up. One might also talk about the aggression of countries as a whole, perhaps personified in a strong leader – with there being plenty of this around just presently.

But I continue to reflect on how much this parallel buys us.

Conclusions

I have attempted to clear away some of the undergrowth, before getting onto the essay proper.

PS 1: this morning’s offering from the chaps at Google. To think that when gmail started out, it was completely ad-free. I guess someone has to pay, but I would just as soon pay for the service in what used to be the ordinary way. Perhaps you can still do that if you bother to look.

PS 2: Gemini tells me that the answer for me might be Google Workspace, designed for business but available to individuals. To be looked into later today.

References

Reference 1: Civilization and its discontents – S. Freud – 1930. This version appears to be a digitised version of the Strachey translation. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents.  

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/two-mccarthys.html. 

Reference 4: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man – Marshall McLuhan – 1962.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-apple-tree.html.   

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/hanging-tongues.html. 

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/03/afterlives.html.  

Reference 8: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/fine-dining.html. 

Reference 9: Freud: Complete works – Ivan Smith – 2000-2011. 

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory.