Quarreling with Culture and the Value of Discontent

One of the fundamental challenges we face throughout our lives is that of pursuing our hopes, longings, and goals when the norms, beliefs, values, and ideals we have internalized from our culture thwart our desires. When we are stymied in pursuit of our wishes, we can feel discontented with our culture. While Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), emphasized that the self must capitulate to the strictures of cultureFootnote1 (Freud resisted the distinction between “culture” and “civilization”)—and cannot therefore achieve true happiness—knowledge we have gained (in evolutionary biology, attachment theory, and psychoanalysis) since Freud wrote his classic text provides a more sanguine and expansive vision of how we can feel more personally fulfilled while living in civilization.Each of us, I propose, has an amicable and an adverse relationship with culture. We have an intrinsic desire to engage with culture and an equally intrinsic desire to disengage from culture. These desires correspond to our social self and our asocial self—the part of us that strives to be free from influence by external reality (Winnicott, Citation1963). Because of the double-edged nature of our relationship with culture, we are continually challenged to find ways to live with dual—at times dueling—longings. Negotiating this dual relationship and creating a viable balance between the two dimensions poses a major psychological challenge throughout our lives. It requires the capacity to quarrel with culture and use our discontent to create a fluid, versatile self that can traverse two realms of experience: being a part of culture and being apart from culture. Cultivating a dual relationship—in which engagement and disengagement with culture are vital—enables us to feel greater contentment.