Analysis Of 'Man's Place In The Animal World'

According to Freud, the id is the most primal province of the human psyche. Operating on what Freud calls the pleasure principle, it is the part of the mind that is constantly striving to obtain gratification by whatever means possible, without regard to future consequences and punishments (Meyers, 2008). It is the first province of the mind that forms. As a fetus, one has no context of the social and moral laws of the society around it, and so it only pursues its emotional and physical needs, much like an animal.
To better emphasize Freud’s ideas, one can look to the infamous author Mark Twain and his essay on “Man’s Place in the Animal World” written in 1898. Twain explains in this essay that man is the only animal on earth that has the ability to be evil—no other creature possesses the neurological advancement needed to construct an idea of a moral sense. In short, humans alone have created and distinguished between the concepts of “right” and “wrong” and thus have cursed themselves to be able to choose between the two (Twain & Budd, 1992). In example, a human that kills another human is inevitably labeled as evil, yet an animal that kills another animal evades judgement because it has no moral sense. Freud would argue that animals do not yet possess

This is called classical conditioning. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Pavlov used dogs for his experiments. The dogs would be presented with a neutral stimulus, a clicking noise, and then they were given food, which caused them to salivate and increase their dopamine levels. After this process was repeated a number of times, it was discovered that the dogs would salivate upon being presented with the neutral stimulus, the click, only. This means that they began to associate the clicking noise with