 Freud himself, towards the end of his life, turned his attention to collective psychology. In a small but passionate book called Civilization and its Discontents, he examined the febrile, almost hysterical state of Europe in the 1930s, when irrational hatreds were being stirred up to serve political purposes. It seemed to him that civilization itself was on the brink, and Freud began to argue that repression had its uses.