Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In Freud’s late work Civilization and Its Discontents, the human inclination to aggression is seen as an original instinctual disposition, one that constitutes, for Freud, the greatest impediment to civilization. Thus the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure for Freud: it is the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the drama of the human species. Freud ended his work with what seems profoundly relevant to the study of Greek and early modern English tragedy: “The fateful question for the human species”, Freud writes, is “whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (92). This essay examines Freud’s core thesis on aggression and self-destruction through the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and Milton.