The violence of the (de)civilising process and the psychic economy as the expression of social conflicts

Abstract

Instead of thinking of civilization as a point of arrival, Norbert Elias and Sigmund Freud broke with the ideals of the civilized individual, revealing its dark sides full of contradictions and ambivalences. Both thinkers included barbarism within civilization. And, in this way, they rewrote the destinies of societies. The civilizing process, then, comes to be seen with advances and retreats, constructions and destructions, civilization and barbarism, caused by civilizing and decivilizing forces. And the experiences of violence produce social traumas that are transmitted between generations. The collapse of civilization is then shown as one of the inevitable fates of the civilizing process.