human nature

psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

sociologist

is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities.

What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature.

is another method of learning how to endure the loneliness produced by culture.

is re-education in so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life.

Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life.

views human nature not so much as a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities.

Philip Rieff

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Philip Rieff