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Sigmund Freud: The World of the Unconscious
Sigmund Freud: The World of the Unconscious 1. What was Freud’s scientific quest? 2. According to Freud, what forces drive human behavior? 3. How did he believe that neuroses develop in our behavior? 4. How did Freud believe that we could probe the unconscious? 5. What is “the id” and what does it want? 6. Why did we develop “the superego”? 7. What is the result of the constant struggle between the id and the superego? 8. How did World War One prove for Freud the validity of his theories? 9. How was Freud’s theory of human nature different from Nietzsche’s?
(excerpted from An Intellectual History of Modern Europe by Marvin Perry, Houghton
Mifflin, 1992, pp. 311- 320) Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) asserted in
scientific language that reason is not the mainspring of human activity. Like
the philosophes of the Enlightenment, Freud identified civilization with
reason and regarded science as the avenue to knowledge. But in contrast to
the philosophes, Freud asserted the massive power and influence of
non-rational human drives. Where Marx argued that economic considerations
determine how we think and act, Freud argued that our conscious thoughts,
which we believe are freely arrived at, are, in truth, determined by hidden
forces, namely unconscious impulses. Nietzsche had glorified these irrational
impulses, but Freud recognized the irrational’s potential danger, sought to
comprehend it scientifically, and, finally, hoped to regulate it in the
interests of civilization. Freud said that the essential task of
psychoanalysis was ‘to struggle with the demon’ of irrationality in a ‘sober
way’ and make the unconscious ‘a comprehensible object of science’. He believed in research conducted according
to scientific methods, not in revelation, intuition or divination. The
Unconscious Freud held that people are not
fundamentally rational; human behavior is governed primarily by powerful
inner impulses that are hidden from consciousness. These primitive drives,
strivings, and thoughts constitute the greater part of the content of the
mind; they influence our behavior often without our awareness so that we may
not understand the real reason for our actions. We may think that a
particular action is motivated by friendship, duty, honor or faith, but in
reality and unknown to the conscious mind, a wish for power or
self-punishment might be the true determinant of our actions. Freud
considered not just the external acts of a person but also the inner psychic
reality that underlies human behavior. Freud did not discover the unconscious.
Romantic poets had sought the wellspring of creativity in a layer of mind
below consciousness. The Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, among others, had all penetrated the hidden and
tangled world of the passions and marveled at its elemental power. Freud’s
great achievement was to explore the unconscious methodically and
systematically with the tools and temperament of a scientist. Freud specialized in the treatment of
nervous disorders. He encouraged patients to speak to him about their
troubles. These investigations led him to conclude that childhood fears and
experiences, often sexual in nature, accounted for ‘neuroses’: disorders in thinking, feeling, and behavior that
interfere with everyday acts of personal and social life. Neuroses can take
several forms: hysteria, depression, obsession, anxiety, etc. Freud believed
that neuroses arise from the repression of painful and threatening childhood
emotions and experiences; these thoughts and feelings have been banished from
conscious memory into the realm of the unconscious. To treat neuroses, it was
necessary to look behind overt symptoms and bring to the surface emotionally
charged experiences and fears resulting from childhood traumas that lay buried in the
unconscious, interacting with our most primitive impulses. Freud probed the unconscious by urging
his patients to say whatever came to their minds. This procedure, called free association, rests on the
premise that spontaneous and uninhibited talk reveals a person’s underlying
preoccupations, his or her inner world. These demons are at the root of the
person’s emotional distress. A second avenue to the unconscious is the
analysis of dreams. Dreams, said Freud, reveal an individual’s secret
wishes, often socially unacceptable desires and frightening memories. Too
painful to bear, we lock them up in the deepest dungeons of the unconscious;
these repressed thoughts and feelings constitute the greater part of the
unconscious. But even caged, the demons remain active, continuing to
haunt us and generate conflicts. Our distress is real, even excruciating, but
we do not know its source. Because these memories and feelings find an outlet
in dreams, said Freud, the
interpretation of dreams is the path par excellence to knowledge of the subconscious. Freud held that the ‘id’, the subconscious seat of the instincts, is a ‘cauldron
full of seething excitations’ that constantly demand gratification. The id is
‘untamed passion’: primitive, infantile, asocial and illogical. It knows no
values, no morality; it has no awareness of good and evil. It is a restless
and tormented force that perpetually strives for the gratification of its
needs in accordance with the pleasure principle and without regard for
others. When the id is denied an outlet for its instinctual energy, people
become frustrated, angry and unhappy. Gratifying the id is our highest
pleasure. But the full gratification of instinctual demands is detrimental to
civilized life. So the price that we pay for a civilized world is the
frustration of our deepest desires. Conflict
Between Civilization and Human Nature Freud postulated a harrowing conflict
between the restless strivings of out instinctual nature and the requirements
of civilization. Civilization, for Freud, demands the renunciation of
instinctual gratification and the mastery of animal instincts, a thesis he
developed in Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930). Human beings derive their highest pleasure from
sexual fulfillment, said Freud, but unrestrained sexuality drains off psychic
energy needed for the creative artistic and intellectual life. Hence society,
through the family, the priest, the teacher and the police, imposes rules and
restrictions on our animal nature. These rules, duties and expectations are
internalized; they become our conscience, or what Freud calls the superego. Freud posits an
immensely painful and irremediable conflict between the id and the superego,
for our instincts, unable to tolerate confinement in the unconscious, resist
the regulations that the superego imposes on them. The very institutions and
rules that preserve civilization are also the source of our discontent:
society saddles us with expectations and rules that human nature finds
enormously difficult to fulfill. The human belong is caught in a tragic
bind. Society’s demand for the denial of full instinctual gratification
causes terrible frustration; equally distressing, the violation of society’s rules
under the pressure of instinctual needs evokes terrible feelings of guilt.
Either way people suffer; civilized life simply entails too much pain for
people. It seems that the price we pay for civilization is neurosis. Civilization imposes great sacrifices
not only on human sexuality but also on our aggressiveness. According to
Freud, people are not good by nature as the philosophes had taught; on the
contrary, we have an aggressive desire to dominate others. Our first
inclination is not to love our neighbor but to
During World War One, Freud said,
For Freud, “the inclination to
aggression is an original self-substituting disposition in man... that...
constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” Civilization attempts
For Freud, an unalterable core of human
nature is ineluctably in opposition to civilized life. To this extent
everyone is potentially an enemy of mankind. Freud did not celebrate the irrational
in human nature, as Nietzsche did, but he did respect it. He sought truth
based on a highly scientific analysis of human nature. He believed that
reason was the best road to social improvement. He lambasted religion as an
expression of a child-like inability to break away from a demanding father.
Even so, his gloomy vision of human nature hearkened back to the Christian
conception of original sin. He saw evil as rooted in human nature rather than
as a product of a faulty environment. Education could not eradicate evil, nor
could the abolition of public property. Freud believed that the definition of human nature as rational and good seemed hopelessly naive, yet he wanted reason to prevail. Man’s best hope was to counteract the forces of the Id with the Ego.
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