Freud And Marx :: Sigmund Freud Karl Marx compare Essays

Freud and MarxFreud and Marx it can be argued were both, as individuals, dissatisfiedwith their societies. Marx more plainly than Freud, but Freud can also be seenas discontent in certain aspects such as his cynical view of human nature. Eachwere great thinkers and philosophers, but both seemed unhappy. Perhaps thesocial ills and chafe each perceived in the world about them were only thereflections of what each of the thinkers held within themselves. Each personobserves the same world, but each of us interprets that discipline in adifferent way. They both saw the world as world injust or base. Each understoodthe disfunctions in society as being caused by some aspect of human greed or different similar instinct. They did however, disagree on what the vehicle for theseinstincts corrupting influences are. Freud claimed that tension caused by thestuggle to gag anti-social instincts eventually was released and caused thesocial evils he observed. Marx also saw instincts at work but not the tensionsand Id that Freud saw, Marx simply credited mans greed and the subsequentoppression of other men as the root to all that was wrong with civilization. Itis interesting to note that both Freud and Marx saw conflict but each traced itback to sources each was independently educated in.Freud was a Psychoanalyst and his understanding of the mind was veryconflict oriented. He saw man as a kind of glorified animal who had the samedesires and needs as both other animal. The only true difference between thehuman-animal and other animals was that the human-animal possessed an intellect.Freud divided mans psyche into three parts, the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo. Whatdiffered the human-animal from any other animal was the SuperEgo, which arosefrom mans intellect. The Super-Ego as Freud theorised it is the values of onesparents internalised. He went further to then explain that unhappiness in lifeis caused by the conflict between the Id and the SuperEgo. As stated, all ofFrueds philosoph y was very conflict oriented so it is not difficult tounderstand then how Freud applied this view macrocosmically to society as awhole.Freud addressed this in his essay, Civilization and Its Discontents.In it, Freud claimed that civilizations are developed through the channeling ofanti-social erotic and aggressive urges into constructive outlets. He wentfurther and explained that social ills are caused by those members of societywho are not satisfied with the substitutes supplied by the channelling of anti-social instincts into social creative energies. Such repression causes a certaintension which after awhile cannot be repressed and is released in socially