CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death. In it he makes known his views on the broad question of man's place in the world, which he sees in terms of the never-ending conflict of the claim of the individual for freedom and the demands of society.
Writing of the book, The Spectator says: "The theme is a very simple one which has often been foreshadowed in Freud's earlier work. Civilization is only made possible by individual renouncement.
The instinctive life of man is one of aggression and egoistic self-satisfaction. The whole structure of culture has been designed to put prohibitions and curbs on him.... The sense of guilt has become the maker of civilized humanity.... The theme is developed with the greatest richness of content and one might use many columns without exhausting the invaluable dicta of men and their institutions which strew the book."
Throughout the period when Freud wrote his major works, various translations and editions, differing widely in the accuracy of their texts and the quality of their content, made their appearance.
Increasingly, as the body of Freud's work achieved commanding stature, the need arose for a definitive and uniformly authentic English language edition of all his writings. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was undertaken to achieve this goal. The work is under the general editorship of James Strachey and he himself has made new translations of many of the writings, supervising the emendation of others and contributing valuable notes, both bibliographical and explanatory. The result is to place this edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions—which are in fact rendered obsolete.