Sigmund Freud is a well known psychologist and philosopher. He is widely known for his strange psychological reasoning and comparisons of children and sex. But for the purpose of this essay, the focus will be more on his philosophical views of determinism in his book, Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
A lot of philosophers view Sigmund Freud as a hard determinist. Most, though, consider him more of a soft determinist. To fully understand his views, a few things need to be defined first. To get things going, you need to know what free will, determinism, and freedom really mean in the idea of philosophy. Free will is the apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined. Determinism is the belief that all events are caused by things that happened before them and that people have no real ability to make choices or control what happens. Freedom is the quality, especially of the will or the individual, of not being totally constrained or able to choose between alternative actions in identical circumstances. Freedom can be broken down into three main degrees: libertarianism, soft determinism, and hard determinism. Libertarianism is the view that freedom exists. In other words, you have a choice in everything you do-choose your own fate. A soft determinist (also known as compatibilism) is one that believes that determinism is true, but that freedom and responsibility can exist despite the truth of determinism, or you have a choice in which path you take. A hard determinist is one that believes freedom and responsibility do not exist, or in other words, you have no choice over your fate.
Now that the main definitions out of the way, the course to understanding Freud can continue.
Freud took a step sideways into...
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...something, or is made or driven to do something, he speaks of the Id" (Palmer 228). What Peters is saying is that Freud cannot make up his mind. Freud tries to do ego and id at the same time when it does not work. Peters believes that only one or the other can explain something at one time. A person cannot be driven by animal instinct (id) and conscious thought (ego). Peters makes a very valid point in this aspect.
Freud is a very confusing man. He wants one subject matter to work out two different ways, which is a very hard thing to do. His thoughts on the unconscious being determined, while the conscious is free will makes excellent points. But Hospers and Peters interpretations debunk Freud's thoughts on how a person has a free and determined life outcome. Some may think that Freud has no idea as to what he was talking about and should just stick to psychology.
In Nancy Holmstrom’s Firming Up Soft Determinism essay she set out to prove that people can have control over their desires and beliefs, and therefore are in control of the sources of their actions. She believed it was possible to carry on the view of soft determinism and still hold that we are free to choose and we are at times able to do otherwise. She believed that the standard soft determinist position was inadequate. Her thought was that soft determinists had too limited of a notion of what is required for an agent to be in charge of their actions. The common soft determinist stance was that the
In determining the free will of a human’s nature many philosophers want to solve the dilemma of determinism. The dilemma of determinism is as follows (Rowe, p.587):
ABSTRACT: There are good reasons for determinism — the option for pure freedom of will proves to be a non-tenable position. However, this collides with the everyday experience of autonomy. The following argument will attempt to show that determinism and autonomy are compatible. (1) A first consideration going back to MacKay makes clear that I myself cannot foresee in principle my own determination; hence fatalism has lost its grounds. (2) From the perspective of physical determination, I show that quantum-physical indetermination is not at all in a position to explain autonomy, while from the perspective of systems theory physical determination and autonomy is well-compatible. (3) The possibility of knowledge denotes a further increase of such autonomy. From this perspective, acting is something like designing-oneself or choice-of-oneself. (4) Consciousness of not being fixed in principle now becomes a determining condition of my acting, which appears to be determined by autonomy. This explains the ineradicable conviction that freedom of will is essential for human beings. (5) I conclude that the autonomy of acting is greater the more that rational self-determination takes the place of stupid arbitrariness.
Thornton, Stephen. "Freud, Sigmund [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 16 Apr. 2001. Web. 08 Mar. 2011. .
The power of acting without necessity and acting on one’s own discretions, free will still enamors debates today, as it did in the past with philosophers Nietzsche, Descartes, and Hume. There are two strong opposing views on the topic, one being determinism and the other “free will”. Determinism, or the belief a person lacks free will and all events including human actions are determined by forces outside the will of an individual contrasts the entire premise of free will. Rene Descartes formulates his philosophical work through deductive reasoning and follows his work with his system of reasoning. David Hume analyzes philosophical questions with inductive reasoning and skeptism with a strong systematic order. Neither a systematic philosopher nor a rigid thinker, Nietzsche offers his own nihilistic spin on the topic of free will. The three different approaches of free will by Nietzsche, Hume, and Descartes all obtain their strong suits as well as their pitfalls. Nietzsche insists free will is created by theologians and therefore denies its existence, while Descartes embraces free will, and Hume individualizes the meaning of free will.
Determinism currently takes two related forms: hard determinism and soft determinism [1][1]. Hard determinism claims that the human personality is subject to, and a product of, natural forces. All of our choices can be accounted for by reference to environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary (biological) causes. Our total character is a product of these environmental, social, cultural, physiological and hereditary forces, thus our beliefs, desires, values and habits are all outside of our control. The hard determinist, therefore, claims that our choices are determined by these factors; free will is an illusion because the choices and decisions we make are derived from our character, which is completely out of our control in creating. An example might help illustrate this point. Consider a man who has just repeatedly stabbed another man outside of a bar; the other man is dead. The hard determinist would argue that there were factors outside of the killer’s control which led him to this action. As a child, he was constantly beaten by his father and was the object of ridicule and contempt of his classmates. This trend of hard luck would continue all his life. Coupled with the fact that he has a gene that has been identified with male aggression, he could not control himself when he pulled the knife out and started stabbing the other man. All this aggression, and all this history were the determinate cause of his action.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. Standard. Vol. 22. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Sigmund Freud believed that he “occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and marks a turning point, it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being in depth-psychology” (Jones). Psychoanalysis is a theory or therapy to decode the puzzle of neurotic disorders like hysteria. During the therapy sessions, the patients would talk about their dreams. Freud would analyze not only the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers) of the dreams, but the disguise that caused the repressions of the idea. During our dreams, the decision making part of personality’s defenses are lowered allowing some of the repressed material to become more aware in a distorted form. He distinguished between
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Pribor in the Austrian Empire (“Sigmund Freud” n. pag). During his education in the medical field, Freud decided to mix the career fields of medicine and philosophy to become a psychologist (“Sigmund Freud” n. pag). During his research as a psychologist, he conceived the Structural Model Theory, which he discussed in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The theory states that the human psyche is divided into three main parts: the id, ego, and super-ego (“Id, Ego, and Super-ego” n. pag). He concluded that the id was the desire for destruction, violence and sex; the ego was responsible for intellect and dealing with reality; and the super-ego was a person’s sense of right and wrong and moral standards (Hamilton, n. pag). Freud argued that a healthy individual will have developed the strongest ego to keep the id and super-ego in check (“Id, Ego, and Super-ego” n. p...
Freud’s theory is based on the idea that ones personality is derived from conflicts that stem from both our conscious and unconscious mind. To better understand how these conflicts arise he divided the mind into theoretical categories which include the id, ego, and superego.
All in all, each view about the philosophy of free will and determinism has many propositions, objects and counter-objections. In this essay, I have shown the best propositions for Libertarianism, as well as one opposition for it which I gave a counter-objection. Additionally, I have explained the Compatabalistic and Hard Deterministic views to which I gave objections. In the end, whether it is determinism or indeterminism, both are loaded with difficulties; however, I have provided the best explanation to free will and determinism and to an agent being morally responsible.
Freud, Sigmund. 1953-74. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols, trans. James Stachey. London: Hogarth.
Sigmund Freud was a very prominent neurologist and is known as the father of psychoanalysis and being a prominent thinker of his time in the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. His theory of human personality is a well-known theory of the nineteen hundreds. His theory, describes prominence of what is known as the id, ego, and superego. His theory largely differs from another well know thinker known as George Herbert Mead. Mead is well known for his theory of self. Mead’s theory is more accepted than Freud’s theory in today’s society due to the increase of knowledge of the human persona. I will analyze the differences in theories based on which theory allows for more free will in human beings.
Sigmund Freud is one of the most influential people of the twentieth century for exploring the human mind more thoroughly than anyone before his time. His contributions have become embedded within the vocabulary of western society not only influencing psychology, as well as literature, art, and the parenting mechanisms of everyday people. He is the founding father of psychoanalysis which is often known as the talking cure, a method for treating mental illness and a theory which is intended to explain human behavior. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a theory of the minds structure. Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and cultural artifacts has had
The psychodynamic theory focuses on the unconscious mind. Freud’s credence is that different mental forces operate in the mind. The unconscious mind can be described as being like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg represents the part of the mind that is conscious, everyday thoughts. The iceberg just below the water’s surface represents the pre conscious, thoughts and information that can be retrieved easily. And finally the base of the iceberg is the unconscious part of the mind where fears, traumas and bad experiences are contained, almost impossible to retrieve.