This new edition includes both an introduction by the renowned cultural critic and writer Christopher Hitchens as well as Peter Gay’s classic biographical note on Freud. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library 's Center for Scholars and Writers (19972003). 6 The process allowed the writer him/herself to emerge from their introversion and return to the public world. Peter Joachim Gay ( n Frhlich J May 12, 2015) was a German-American historian, educator, and author. Of the various English translations of Freud’s major works to appear in his lifetime, only Norton’s Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, was authorized by Freud himself. Freud saw the aesthetic principle as the ability to turn the private phantasy into a public artefact, using artistic pleasure to release a deeper pleasure founded on the release of forbidden (unconscious) material. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization’s trajectory? Freud’s theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work.

A fresh, illuminating perspective on one of the pivotal figures of our time. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. A magisterial contribution to the history of ideas.

Written in the decade before Freud’s death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. Freud’s seminal volume of twentieth-century cultural thought grounded in psychoanalytic theory, now with a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

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