Freud and the Miseries of Politics

Sigmund Freud was an ambivalent man, especially when it came to politics. He often held conflicting views of political ideologies: For example, he expressed sympathies for socialism (“anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty,” he wrote, can understand why fighting “against the inequality of wealth” was necessary), only to reject it elsewhere as antithetical to human nature. He similarly supported Zionism (even serving on the founding board of the Hebrew University) while simultaneously criticizing it as “baseless fanaticism.” Few works embodied this ambivalence better than Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud’s most all-encompassing reflection on social matters. Discussing everything from religion to technology to bodily odors, he provocatively concluded that life in society is destined to be tragic: Whatever people gain from their social web, from safety to a sense of belonging, always comes at the price of unhappiness. Even his hair-raising escape from the Nazis, who in 1938 occupied Freud’s home country of Austria, evoked mixed feelings. “The triumphant feeling of liberation,” he wrote in a letter from exile, “is mingled too strongly with mourning for one had loved the prison from which one has been released.”