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Freud's Theory Vs. Levi's Experiences

Freud’s Theory vs. Levi’s Experiences
In the book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud maintains that human beings are inherently aggressive. That love for all of humanity is far from an inherent state of the human mind. Other important concept of this book is the human instinct of aggression towards each other, Eros vs. the Death Drive and the super-ego. In which Freud attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Religion has performed a great service for civilization by taming asocial instincts and creating a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, Freud argues. But it has also demanded an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him permanently subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God. An acknowledged atheist, Freud refines his theories in “Civilization and Its Discontents” to outline more emphatically the relation between psychoanalysis and religion, as well as between the individual and civilization. Freud explains his ideas of Aggression, Individual and Civilization, Eros and Death Drive, and the Conscience and the Super ego through the depiction of Primo Levi’s experiences in “Survival in Auschwitz.” Therefore, I believe that Freud’s claim does correlate with the life and death situation at Auschwitz.
The primal instinct of human beings is to act aggressively towards one another. In primitive societies, the head of the family gave free sovereignty to the instinctual manifestations of his aggression at the expense of all others. In civilized society, we have restrained our inclination to aggression through the rule of law and the imposition of authority (both internal and external), to ensure the maximum security and happiness for all. While we originally entered society precisely to escape the forces of mutual aggression and self-destruction, the requirement to oppose our aggressive instincts has controversially caused great unhappiness, an increasingly burdensome sense of guilt, and in the most...