Françoise Davoine and Eyal Rozmarin Speaking About Civilization and it’s Discontent

This is an edited transcript of a conversation held between Françoise Davoine and Eyal Rozmarin about Freud’s seminal work, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” We explore Freud’s attempt to explain how social forces shape individual psychology, his understanding of aggression and violence as inherent to civilization, and the evolution of his notion of the death drive from a biological to a social one. We consider the circumstances of Freud’s life at the time of writing—his illness, his personal losses, and the political tensions of life in 1930s Europe—and how these might have informed his ideas. We then veer into Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory. We wonder about this abandonment in the context of incest and its denial. We wonder, more generally, about how trauma and its repression underlie the theory of society that Freud was able to conceive.