Sexual frustrations create neuroses. The neurotic tries to deal with these frustrations through substitutes that cause him suffering in themselves, or they cause problems in his relationships, which causes suffering for him. But civilization demands other sacrifices besides sexual satisfaction.

Freud has traced the difficulty of cultural development through the disinclination to give up libido. The antithesis between civilization and sexuality can be seen as this: sexual love is a relationship between two that doesn’t permit a third. Whereas civilization depends on relationship between lots of individuals. When a love relationship is at its height, there is no room for another, even the child that will come from it. Here Eros clearly betrays its own purpose of making one out of more than one (the feeling of oneness that comes from two people being in love), but when it is achieved, it wants to go no further.

It’s easy to imagine a civilization concocted of such pairs of individuals, loving each other and working together with common interests. But that has never been reality. Civilization is not content with the ties it has allowed us. It instead summons its strength to build friendship relationships for communal bonds. For this, restrictions on sexuality are unavoidable. But what is the necessity that forces civilization along this path?  

Perhaps the impossible axiom- Love your neighbor as yourself, will provide the clue. At first glance, this is a surprising edict. Why would someone waste love, which is an expensive emotion requiring sacrifice, on everyone indiscriminately? Strangers are not worthy of any particular respect, and most would, if they had only half a reason, take advantage of us. And indeed, there is a further commandment to love my enemies, which is even worse.  

The elemental truth is that men are not gentle creatures simply longing for love, they are aggressive creatures, and any of us who has lived a little will recognize this as truth. This tendency towards aggression is an disturbance with our relationships and forces civilization into a high expenditure of energy to counter it. Aggression perpetually threatens civilization with disintegration. Society has to make efforts to hold the aggressions of mankind in check by inducing them to friendships, which means restrictions on sexuality, which leads to this command, which is an ideal, justified purely by the fact that it runs so counter to human nature.

At some point, we each have to give up our hopeful expectations of man being good. While strife and competition are undoubtedly indispensable, society still needs to take measures to eliminate them.

The communists believe they have found the path of deliverance from our evils through the abolition of private property. According to them, man is god and well-disposed to his neighbor, but private property has corrupted his nature. If it were abolished and everything held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill will and hostility would disappear. But Freud says, I can recognize this is an untenable illusion. Abolishing private property deprives human aggression of one of its instruments, but it can’t remove the differences in power and influence misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created with private property. It reigned without limit in primitive times, and shows itself in today’s nurseries.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people through love, as long as there are others left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. If society imposes restrictions on man’s aggressiveness as well as his sexuality, it’s easy to see why he finds it hard to be happy in society. In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions to his freedom. But the trade-off is that his prospects of enjoying this freedom for any length of time were slender. Civilized man has traded a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security.

In studying peoples who are primitive to this day, research has shown that their instinctual life is not as free as imagined, but governed by different types of restrictions, perhaps even greater than those of civilized man.

Perhaps we need to recognize there are trade-offs inherent in the nature of civilization that can’t be reformed to allow us the freedom we want.