20th Century
Sigmund Freud
1856–1939
“the first task of education is to teach the child to control his instincts”
Sigmund Freud was a Viennese physician who founded psychoanalysis and treated dreams, slips, and symptoms as meaningful expressions of unconscious wishes. In he argues that social order requires renunciation of instinct, and that art and culture offer substitute satisfactions for drives civilization forbids. Conflict runs deep. The psyche divides among id, ego, and superego. He reads works of art as texts in which repressed desire can be recovered by interpretation. Later ethics and aesthetics still debate whether culture is mainly a compromise with that renunciation.
In the Conversation
21 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Good and Evil
Conscience is the internalized aggression of civilization. Good and evil are psychological residues, not eternal truths.
Happiness
Happiness is not included in the plan of creation; civilization itself is bought at the price of our discontent.
Love
Love is libido: sexual energy displaced, sublimated, and everywhere disguised.
Desire
Desire operates beneath consciousness as libido, shaped by repression, sublimation, and the conflict between the pleasure principle and reality.
Emotion
Affects are derivatives of repressed instinctual drives; unconscious emotion shapes conscious life from below.
Pleasure and Pain
The pleasure principle governs mental life by driving toward the reduction of tension, but the reality principle and the death instinct complicate the picture beyond any simple hedonism.
Habit
The repetition compulsion reveals habits formed below consciousness, before deliberate choice was possible — and they are the hardest to break.
Temperance
Civilization is built on instinctual renunciation — the temperate behavior it demands is purchased with chronic unhappiness.
Custom and Convention
Civilization rests on the renunciation of instinct; custom is the price we pay for social life, and the source of our discontent.
Theology & Metaphysics
Epistemology
Mind
The mind is mostly unconscious; ego, id, and superego contend beneath the threshold of awareness.
Memory and Imagination
Forgetting is often repression; unconscious memories persist and shape behavior until brought to light through analysis.
Sign and Symbol
Dreams, slips, and symptoms are symbols of unconscious wishes; the mind speaks in a language it does not consciously understand.