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Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939

Moravian-born Austrian physician, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis

 

Freud on Too small a Share

from The Future of an Illusion

If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognised. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favored ones their priveleges and that they will do everything in their power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not gone beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority -- and this is the case of all modern cultures -- it is intelligble that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalisation of the cultural prohibitions among the oppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even on the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.

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