In his book Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud examines the cultural frustrations which are brought about by the conflicts between the demands of the instincts of man and the prohibitions of civilization. The structure of culture, Freud finds, is designed to restrict the instinctive life of man, the instinctive life being one of egoistic self-satisfaction and aggression or destruction. To delve into every aspect of this antagonism that Freud studies would be too great a task for a paper of this length, therefore, I would like to focus my attention on the sections of Civilization and its Discontents dealing with suffering, love, happiness and the pleasure principle, and aggression and guilt, since these were the most valuable to me in understanding Freud’s theory. In dealing with any of these, one undoubtedly overlaps principles which deal with …