I wrote this essay in college after studying Freud for 4 months… his ideas are very interesting but his understanding of human nature caught my attention the most.
Imagine you are all alone in the world. There is no technology, no civilization, and no government. Your life is focused on eating, sleeping, and trying to survive each day. When you see another person, what will you do? How will you behave? This thought experiment has come to be known as the State of Nature. Many ancient philosophers have written about how people might act in such a situation and how government was formed. Different perspectives on the State of Nature determine different views on what human nature is like. The way human nature is viewed determines what government people need, how religion will affect people, and how a person should act. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, believed in the primitive man. He believed that human nature was composed of natural instincts that drove people to satisfy their most base desires. If this is true, how do people become good? Many philosophers see religion as the means for men to become moral despite their natures. Freud believed that the solution to overcoming the primitive man is through psychoanalysis and not religion.
Sigmund Freud treated patients, listened to dreams, and collected data that led him to conclude that people repress certain emotions and experiences. In his writings he proposes that all people have two instincts; the sexual instinct and the death instinct. The sexual instinct drives a person to gratify their most base sexual desires. The death instinct leads people to negative, destructive, or risky behavior. These two instincts are similar to what Freud calls the “pleasure principle” which motivates people to immediately satisfy instinctual impulses like sex, hunger, and thirst. As an example, Freud defined the Oedipus complex as a sexual desire of a young boy for his mother. All of these instincts live in the part of the person Freud calls the Id and together they create what Freud calls the “Primitive Man.” This is Freud’s view of human nature.
When people think or act on their natural instincts, the result is strong feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings are repressed from the conscious into the unconscious allowing people to live a normal life without acknowledging their instinctual desires. These repressions sometimes manifest themselves in strange dreams, behavior, and symptoms. An unconscious sense of guilt can even lead people into criminal behavior. Freud strives to find a solution where people can acknowledge their instinctual desires but not act on them. He proposes that there is a second part of human nature called the Ego which prevents the Id from determining the actions of a person. He writes in his work The Ego and the Id “Human nature has a far greater extent, both for good and for evil, than it thinks it has.” With this statement, Freud joins countless philosophers in the state of nature debate.
In Freud’s worldview, the Id of all people desires to act on their most base instincts and to be evil but can also become the complete opposite through the Ego. They can become good through psychoanalysis and bringing unconscious repressions back to full consciousness. This process helps the patient understand their base nature and make a decision to not act on those desires. He believes that psychoanalysis can provide the same results as religion. Freud writes, “Psycho-analysis has been reproached time after time with ignoring the higher, moral, suprapersonal side of human nature. The reproach is doubly unjust, both historically and methodologically…there has been a general refusal to recognize that psycho-analytic research could not, like a philosophical system, produce a complete and ready-made theoretical structure, but had to find its way step by step along the path towards understanding the intricacies of the mind by making an analytic dissection of both normal and abnormal phenomena.” (“The Ego and the ID”) Freud believed that though religion had played a part in helping people deal with their natural instincts, it must be overlooked in favor of reason and science. Psychoanalysis was his science and through working with the psyche, people could understand their primitive natures and choose to develop good instincts instead of bad. He writes, “So long as we had to concern ourselves with the study of what is repressed in mental life, there was no need for us to share in any agitated apprehensions as to the whereabouts of the higher side of man.” (“The Ego and the ID”) Freud believed that psychoanalysis could make people good.
This conclusion was opposed by one of Freud’s collaborators Carl Jung. Jung’s view of human nature was very similar to Freud’s. His opposition though was that only religion can make people good not psychoanalysis. He wrote that “psychic life always found expression in a metaphysical system of some sort.” (Jung 1933, 203) and, “The modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare, and humaneness.” (Jung 1933, 204) Jung believed that religion was the only method of dealing with the guilt and shame that comes from repression and that psychoanalysis was only a small part of that process; similar to a doctor treating a wound. At the time his book was published in 1933, he observed the religious system declining. He noticed that the inner self wanted repentance and forgiveness but the outer self rejected those ideas in favor of reason and science. He wrote. “The inner man wants something which the visible man does not want.” (Jung 1933, 202) Jung believed that the only way for human nature to be good was by developing moral virtues through religion. His thoughts are similar to Aristotle’s who writes in the Nicomachean Ethics that, “it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.” (Ross, n.d.) Being good is not an instinct but a habit that is encouraged through religion.
Jung wrote that “Every personal secret has the effect of a sin or of guilt–whether or not it is, from the standpoint of popular morality, a wrongful secret. Another form of concealment is the act of “withholding” it being usually emotions that are withheld. As in the case of secrets, so here also we must make a reservation: self-restraint is healthful and beneficial; it is even a virtue. This is why we find self-discipline to have been one of man’s earliest moral attainments.” (Jung 1933, 33) Not only does religion teach us what is good, it teaches that not all restraints of natural instincts are bad. Freud views repression as negative domination of human nature whereas Jung believes it to be a virtuous triumph over the primitive man.
Both Freud and Jung believed that people have instinctual impulses to gratify their most base desires. Freud believed that by understanding those instincts and uncovering all repressions a person can choose to become good. Jung believed that man will always have to battle his base desires and that through religion he will learn how to restrain his natural impulses. Religion has always been the only cure for absolving shame and guilt. Aldous Huxley shares this sentiment through the words of his savage character in Brave New World. The savage is presented with an idealistic life where people are free from oppressive moralities. Freud echos this same life; one in which you can live according to your desires and be free of human nature. But this is not possible. The savage cries; “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” (Huxley 2005, )
References
“The Ego and the ID (1923) by Sigmund Freud – PDF EBook.” n.d. Sigmund Freud. Accessed October 20, 2022. https://sigmundfreud.net/the-ego-and-the-id-pdf-ebook.jsp.
Huxley, Aldous. 2005. Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Edited by Christopher Hitchens. N.p.: HarperCollins.
Jung, Carl G. 1933. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. N.p.: Harcourt Inc.
Ross, WD. n.d. “Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.” The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October 20, 2022. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html.