Nadia Khatib Prof. Nadim Khoury Sysem Both Genesis and Freud's Civilization and its Discontents tell stories of the origin of guilt and shame. Compare and contrast the two accounts. Both Freud and Nietzsche presented almost the same interpretations of human nature and the society they lived in. Though, the societies in which they lived in were different. Freud and Nietzsche’s thoughts may be similar, but human nature constantly changes. Freud is more aware, he examines into the past to find reasons that make life more civilized, however Nietzsche is more doubtful, he sees that humans should be led by a hero. Human nature as they both analysis is affected socially; it’s not a separable characteristic. It is knocked by achievements, failures, happiness, desire, pain, and pleasure and not followed as beliefs and traditions. Freud tends to show the inner struggle for the human in his analysis, but Nietzsche shows the outer struggle. Nietzsche’s society depended more on the human’s strength, human nature was seen weak if someone lacks to specific strength. And so because of the society’s stresses and pressures, humans were seen as machines. There was the sense of frustration to be original and creative and that’s why Nietzsche thought that human should be led by a hero. "The feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society" (Freud) Freud also thinks that there’s sense of frustration in finding happiness. To him, humans were more independent and had more freedom and liberty before the existence of civilization as it limits a lot of someone’s needs and desires. “Our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and tha... ... middle of paper ... ...e had thoughts of the ideal man stems coming from the anger about his society who treated humans as machines and animals. Freud was more like a therapist for giving every problem for the human’s unhappiness and frustration, solutions to have life that is more livable. Freud saw the inner struggle which was affected by the civilization and society, but believed that there’s potential ways to satisfy one’s self. Unlike Nietzsche who saw the outer struggle not the nature of the human, who focused more on what the society, religion who led to frustration “To call either man optimistic about human nature would be stretching a point. They point out flaws, and Freud, at least, attempts to find a means to cure them. According to both, the human spirit simply does not soar, and frustrations and unhappiness continue to keep human nature from finding happiness.” (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant and outspoken man who uses ideas of what he believe in what life is about. He did not believe in what is right and wrong because if who opposed the power. Nietzsche was against Democracy because how they depend on other people to make some different or change, while Nietzsche believe they should of just pick the ones that were gifted and talent to choose what to change. Nietzsche also does not believe in Aristocracy because how they depend on an individual person to create the rules or change those benefits for him. As you see Nietzsche did not like how they depend on one person to decide instead of each person to decide for himself for their own benefits.
Nietzsche uses an elevated level of diction to help him achieve his purpose, he uses Latin in many passages to make the reader look to the bottom of the page and thus think about what he is proposing. His combination of elevated diction along with deductive reasoning can sometimes lose the reader, but just as fast as the reader is lost Nietzsche offers forth a formula which helps the reader follow his thinking. Nietzsche believes that a person’s "virtue is the consequence of happiness," or that a person’s emotions are the product of their beliefs. Nietzsche’s uses consequence to mean something more like cause than effect. He interchanges monosyllabic and polysyllabic - in the form of metaphors - words in connotation to sometimes differ the reader from the beaten track of thinking. He believes in a set course "that he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness," for humans and that they cannot deter from it (this is very far left in a time of conservative Europeans, late 19th century). Even in his "formulas" Nietzsche’s meaning is not as straight forward as it seems. It seems that he believes that individuals genetically are means to an end, but this is more of a metaphor for humanity, or that humanity is their own means to an end.
Freud presents an interpretation of how individuals fall ill. He states that when individuals have an unpleasant idea they repress these ideas into their subconscious. Here the idea grows and festers and can lead to neurotic behaviors. Through psychoanalysis Freud was able to alleviate these problems but also came to the conclusion that these repressed ideas actually were not the root of the problem but in fact sexual frustration from the patient’s childhood or teenage years is the true cause. Individuals then fall ill when the libido is unsatisfied and refuses to accept that reality can offer them satisfaction. The result is that individuals fall into fantasies in order to properly achieve wish-fulfillment since they cannot seem to find satisfaction in the real world. One can avoid becoming neurotic by channeling these desires into pieces of art. But if they fail they will fall into a neurotic state. While in this neurotic state we begin to regress to our infancy, when obtaining pleasures were easier. Thus, the flight to illness is the easy way out since it allows for an individual to simply bypass the troubles of society, moving to a state where they can instantly obtain pleasure. The illness Nietzsche writes about is bad conscience.
As children we start off with believing that the world is good and our parents are perfect. As we grow we realize that our parents can and will make mistakes and everything is not as good as it seems. According to Freud we then need something to compensate for the anxieties of o...
Sigmund Freud took a different approach to the question of human happiness. In an excerpt from his book, which is titled Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud identified what he felt were the three main sources of human suffering. He says “...the three sources from which our suffering comes: the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our bodies and the inadequacies of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human being in the family, the state and society” (Zwann, Junyk, & Zielinski, 2010). That is to say that Freud identified the origins of human suffering in rejecting and controlling our natural human instincts, the limitations of our human bodies, and the conflict between being true to ourselves and being a civilized individual. Furthermore, Freud was of the opinion that though we eventually accept, though are dissatisfied with the first two components of struggling, we are constantly at war with ourselves due to the last attribute. I find that I can agree with Freud on quite a few topics in his discussion, but that a lot of questions are ultimately raised from his thoughts. I plan on discussing and addressing all of these issues in this paper.
Prior to the Enlightenment period, many individuals relied on God to spare man from igniting the evil spirit within their conscious. Whereas, the nineteenth century sparked a turning point in the ideology that characterized individuals as their own saviors. This idea stemmed from the Counter Enlightenment Movement. These Counter Enlightenment thinker’s believed that previous policies have damaged man, misguided individuals from fulfilling their true destiny. Intellectuals began to redefine the self and strip all external banisters from existence. The key for Counter Enlightenment thinkers was to reveal the damages of the Enlightenment period and offer a solution. During the Nineteenth century, two thinker’s emerged Nietzsche and Freud. The
According to Sigmund Freud, what we do and why we do it, who we are
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes primarily to examine the relationship between the individual and society. Through Freud's examination of the relationship, a deeper understanding of the complexity of mental life is realized. Freud begins to develop the relationship early in the work by depicting the most primitive realizations of self and the most primitive realizations of the external world. He further develops this relationship through the musing of sexual desire and its connections to love, which he claims, lead to the formation of families and then later groups of humanity that came to comprise civilization as a whole. Through questions raised concerning society, culture, history and the self, Freud is able to depict a sort of map of the mind. This map that Freud depicts further enables him to develop an understanding of the relationship between civilization and the individual.
The aim of this essay is to clarify the basic principles of Freud’s theories and to raise the main issues.
For this essay I shall look at the claim made by Nietzsche: Nietzsche claims that psychology is “the road to the fundamental problems” ( Beyond Good and Evil, section 23 ). Reconstruct and assess Nietzsche’s argument for this. Nietzsche made this claim in his book called Beyond Good and Evil, through the course of this essay I will examine the argument that built up to Nietzsche finishing off part one of his book with the statement:
He believed everyone is born with the id. All humans when they are babies, according to Freud, are pleasure seeking and concerned with having their needs met. This is the original or unconscious personality. The ego is where decision-making occurs, judgments are made and memory is stored. Lastly, the superego contains the individual’s values, beliefs, and morals, which they get from their parents. According to Freud, women get their morals and beliefs from their mothers and men get it from their fathers. He also believes that...
...ot resent during Nietzsche's lifetime. However his ideas of how individual perspectives and will are shaped or influenced within a given culture are very much observable in these media forms. Mass culture as propagated by the media has imposed certain moral considerations and values on individuals that they may not necessarily have subscribed to. In effect this has led to individuals how function like zombies, following blindly concepts carried by the media as the only real issues. The mass culture advanced by the media has advanced some form of complacency that has restricted issues under consideration and that need attention by human beings. The scope of human thinking, as well as their autonomy in making decisions, has been taken away as individuals continue to operate like robots being directed by other entities, perhaps for easy political and social management.
Sigmund freud hypothesised the theory of psychoanalyse to treat the symptoms of neurosis and mental illness. Freud “contradicted and in some ways, reversed the prevailing opinions of the learned as well as the common people on many issues of human existance and culture”(Wollheim 1995 p9) Freud gave the common man the opportunity to question thoughts and analyse their own needs and desires through their unconcious. (Lear 2005). Freud's beyond the pleasure principle writings (1920) and later in his The Ego and the ID (1923), stressed the importance of the unconcious and how the mind was built upon a tripartite structure of the ID, Ego and Super-ego. Freud believed that the ID, a biological component of the personality concentrated on the pleasure principle. Freud described this as “everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the consitution” (freud 1923 p61) freud hypothesises that these are instinctual and that impulses should be satisfied instantly, irrespective of the conseqence. Freud believed that the Ego mind aimed to control the ID by being logical in thought, aiming to mediat...
His philosophy brings up ideas such as the id, ego and super-ego. The id would be the brute instinct and nature of humans; aggression (of many instincts this is the one he will focus on). The ego wants to satisfy the natural instincts and act in relation to long term (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 26). The super-ego is a portion of the ejected aggression directed inward on the ego; this would be due to external causes such as society, and would reflect the cultural standards set in place. This would position the super-ego to be a moral value over the ego, (Freud, 114). Freud’s view on morality can be seen through the statement, “His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized [....] There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego….” Morality in general is the regulation of aggression; a function of the super-ego. This would make it reasonable to say the super-ego is the moral values instilled by external forces. Freud would believe that morality is the effect of society. The aggression discussed in this quote would be that natural instinct Freud believes we desire to sate, however is unacceptable due to externalities (the social values set in place at that time). Freud then explains that this aggression is turned inward to the ego (as is the desire to sate aggression), this would present guilt. Guilt is a byproduct of morality; it is the aggression on the aggressor. Morality then could be said to function as a higher order to regulate natural instincts for the betterment of a society. The effects of such are focused much more internally and psychologically; guilt. In relation to the quote, Freud sets up a hierarchy for the levels of our mind. We can see that the id (aggression) would be at the mercy of the ego. The ego is under control by the super-ego. If the ego wanted to sate the aggression, the
Sigmund Freud was one of the original pioneers in the field of Psychology. The work that he accomplished throughout his lifetime laid a foundation for many theorists after him. The theorists that worked in Psychology, after Freud, were able to form their own thoughts, ideas, and hypotheses about the human mind after learning from his work. Sigmund Freud’s major contribution in the field of Psychology was his theory about the human psyche; which he called the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego. This theory was based on the human personality and its formation. Many of Freud’s analysis strategies became common practice in the field of Psychology and are still used today. Sigmund Freud will always be one of the most influential figures in the