I don't believe in any interpretation of dreams. I don't want to believe in dream interpretation. I will not touch this last freedom.
— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock
To begin, what I hope will be a surprise: in what follows, I will not be talking (much) about sex and its societal vicissitudes. A surprise because the linkage of Freud's name with the theme ‘civilization and oppression’ will immediately suggest to many a discussion of Freud's theories in Civilization and Its Discontents. It is there that Freud famously argues that civilization, necessary for security in the fulfilment of basic sexual instincts, is made possible only by the restriction of expression of those very same instincts. Worse, the erotic impulse that drives individuals together into community can achieve this limited (“aim-inhibited” — i.e., anti-incestuous, monandrous, monogamous, heterosexual, family-oriented) satisfaction only if the other set of basic human instincts — toward aggression — is also severely inhibited. Civilization's frustration of sexuality is experienced in individuals as neurosis, and its repression of instinctual aggression is achieved by turning the instinct inward, back on its source, in the form of guilt, anxiety, an excoriating conscience, a punishing super-ego.