Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the few twentiethcentury works which attempt to grapple with the phenomenon of evil, and of those few it is one of the most profound. It is also exemplary in its dismissal of much previous thinking on evil: this chapter's epigraph is Freud's epitaph for previous thought about evil, which he saw as little more than a collection of mythologies symptomatic of our own ingrown self-destructiveness. In the wake of the First World War, Freud suggested, we needed to “grow up” about evil – to recognize, beyond all mythological consolations, that it is an ineliminable fact about us. He offered a “scientific” analysis of our predicament, which built upon his postulate of a primordial “death drive” attending all living creatures; it was this death drive, working in darkness and silence, which fuels, both directly (through acts of aggression) and indirectly (through repression) the seething anarchy at the base of the human psyche. And it is this drive's “titanic” struggle with the principle of love which Freud described as “this battle of the giants” – and which, he thought, when understood with cold objectivity, reveals the essential uselessness, indeed infantilizing consequence, of religious “lullabies.”