Freud second lecture
A. Left over from Chapter II: the pleasure principle and the reality principle (pp. 25-6). "The programme of the pleasure principle" (p. 25) is to strive for more pleasure and less unpleasure. The reality principle figured in Chapter I's discussion of acquiring a sense of oneself. Learning to act with a view to specific goals requires being able to form the thought of a desired state of affairs. Now the reality principle requires one to distinguish that from awareness of the state of affairs itself (otherwise a wish would be as good as its fulfillment). This is the first move in separating some of what one finds in one's consciousness from oneself.
B. Opening of Chapter III: why is it so hard for human beings to be happy? Three sources of difficulty: external nature, our own bodies, human relationships (p. 37, repeating something from Chapter II). The suspicion arises that the third is inescapable: "a piece of unconquerable nature" leads to frustration on the part of individuals living together in civilized society. One source of this suspicion is the apparently idyllic life of primitive peoples; Freud suggests (p. 41) that this sort of comparison ("Are they happier than we are?") is harder than one might think. (It's no good looking at their life from the point of view of our wants and sensibilities; that doesn't tell us how happy they, who don't have our wants and sensibilities, are.)
C. The marks of civilization (pp. 41-50):
1. Technology.
2. Concern with "what has no practical value whatever, what is useless" (p. 45); specifically beauty. Freud connects this with caring about cleanliness and order; they aren't useless, but he suggests that isn't enough to account for how they matter to us. (See pp. 33-4 about beauty; the suggestion is that this is all a result of redirected sexual impulses.)
3. "Higher mental activities": religion, philosophy, value systems.
4. Regulation of social relationships: Freud gives a Hobbes-like picture of pre-civilized freedom giving way to a civilized life involving limitation of freedom. He wants to depict a tension between an individual aspiration to liberty and the requirements of society.