Freud, seventy-three years old and diagnosed with cancer, looks unflinchingly at human civilization and asks what it costs us. His answer is not comforting: we have traded instinctual freedom for security, and the repression makes us neurotic. The pleasure principle versus the death drive, Eros versus Thanatos, the super-ego as internalized aggression against the self. Written in the shadow of World War I and the gathering darkness of fascism, this slim volume reads now as prophecy. Freud's prose is lucid, almost beautiful, even as it delivers its bleak diagnosis.