Term Papers on Freud And Marx

Term Paper Title	Freud And Marx
# of Words	1036
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.14

Freud and Marx

Hey! I got an A- on this paper, so I guess it's pretty good! I put my own
personal spin to it in that not only did I compare Freud and Marx's viewpoints,
I stated that perhaps what they saw in society was just a reflection of their
own biases and personal inner feelings.

     Freud and Marx it can be argued were both, as individuals, dissatisfied
with their societies. Marx more plainly than Freud, but Freud can also be seen
as discontent in certain aspects such as his cynical view of human nature. Each
were great thinkers and philosophers, but both seemed unhappy. Perhaps the
social ills and trouble each perceived in the world about them were only the
reflections of what each of the thinkers held within themselves. Each person
observes the same world, but each of us interprets that information in a
different way. They both saw the world as being injust or base. Each understood
the disfunctions in society as being caused by some aspect of human greed or
other similar instinct. They did however, disagree on what the vehicle for these
instincts' corrupting influences are. Freud claimed that tension caused by the
stuggle to repress anti-social instincts eventually was released and caused the
social evils he observed. Marx also saw instincts at work but not the tensions
and Id that Freud saw, Marx simply credited man's greed and the subsequent
oppression of other men as the root to all that was wrong with civilization. It
is interesting to note that both Freud and Marx saw conflict but each traced it
back to sources each was respectively educated in.

     Freud was a Psychoanalyst and his understanding of the mind was very
conflict oriented. He saw man as a kind of glorified animal who had the same
desires and needs as any other animal. The only true difference between the
human-animal and other animals was that the human-animal possessed an intellect.
Freud divided man's psyche into three parts, the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo. What
differed the human-animal from any other animal was the SuperEgo, which arose
from man's intellect. The Super-Ego as Freud theorised it is the values of one's
parents internalised. He went further to then explain that unhappiness in life
is caused by the conflict between the Id and the SuperEgo. As stated, all of
Frued's philosophy was very conflict oriented so it is not difficult to
understand then how Freud applied this view macrocosmically to society as a
whole.

     Freud addressed this in his essay, "Civilization and It's Discontents".
In it, Freud claimed that civilizations are developed through the channeling of
anti-social erotic and aggressive urges into constructive outlets. He went
further and explained that social ills are caused by those members of society
who are not satisfied with the substitutes supplied by the channelling of anti-
social instincts into social creative energies. Such repression causes a certain
tension which after awhile cannot be repressed and is released in socially
unacceptable behaviour. As Freud explained it, "Civilized society is perpetually
menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one
another". Freud saw humanity as being destined to stuggle as long as humanity
exists. In his own words, "This struggle is what all life essentially consists
of and the evolution of civil...

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