In his final years, Freud devoted most of his energies to a series of highly ambitious works on the broadest issues of religion and society.

As early as 1908, he produced a powerful paper on the repressive hypocrisy of 'civilized sexual morality', and its role in 'modern nervous illness'. Deepening this analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that civilized values - and the impossible ideals of Christianity - inevitably distort our natural aggression and impose a terrible burden of guilt. It is also here that Freud developed his last great theoretical innovation: the strange and haunting notion of an innate death drive, locked in a constant struggle with the forces of Eros.