When this work is first published in 1930, Freud is already ill and weakened, while the Nazi threat forces him to emigrate and seek refuge in London. For some years now, he has given a new direction to psychoanalytic thought by proposing the idea of the death drive.

Moving along the trajectory of this bold idea, which encounters reactions even within psychoanalytic circles, is the text of Civilization and Its Discontents. According to this, aggression and destruction are biologically inherent elements of human constitution and trace back to the murder committed by the sons against the primitive father in unremembered times.

The sense of guilt that arises in this way will explain the birth of conscience, cultural evolution, and the individual's discontent within civilized societies. Among other things, Freud expresses some reservations about applying psychoanalytic terms at the level of cultural studies, while he doesn't hesitate to engage, always with the 'friendly neutrality' of the psychoanalyst, in a humanistic type of reflection on the place and future of the individual in modern societies, which refuse to acknowledge that violence is part of the real conditions under which they have been established.

With this work, through a philosophical impetus, psychoanalysis is not only proposed as a psychological theory and therapeutic practice but also as a key to understanding history and culture.