Values and Goals in Freud's Psychoanalytic Concepts
Psychoanalysis is a characteristic expression of Western man's spiritual crisis, and an attempt to find a solution. This is explicitly so in the more recent developments of psychoanalysis, in "humanist" or "existentialist" analysis. But before I discuss my own "humanist" concept, I want to show that, quite contrary to a widely held assumption Freud's own system transcended the concept of "illness" and "cure" and was concerned with the "salvation" of man, rather than only with a therapy for mentally sick patients. Superficially seen, Freud was the creator of a new therapy for mental illness, and this was the subject matter to which his main interest and all the efforts of his life were devoted. However, if we look more closely, we find that behind this concept of a medical therapy for the cure of neurosis was an entirely different interest, rarely expressed by Freud, and probably rarely conscious even to himself. This hidden or only implicit concept did not primarily deal with the cure of mental illness, but with something which transcended the concept of illness and cure. What was this something? What was the nature of the "psychoanalytic movement" he founded? What was Freud's vision for man's future? What was the dogma on which his movement was founded?
Freud answered this question perhaps most clearly in the sentence: "Where there was Id-there shall be Ego. " His aim was the domination of irrational and unconscious passions by reason; the liberation of man from the power of the unconscious, within the possibilities of man. Man had to become aware of the unconscious forces within him, in order to dominate and control them. Freud's aim was the optimum knowledge of truth, and that is the knowledge of reality; this knowledge to him was the only guiding light man had on this earth. These aims were the traditional aims of rationalism, of the Enlightenment philosophy, and of Puritan ethics. But while religion and philosophy had postulated these aims of self-control in, what might be called a utopian way, Freud was-or believed himself to be-the first one to put these aims on a scientific basis (by the exploration of the unconscious) and hence to show the way to their realization. While Freud represents the culmination of Western rationalism, it was his genius to overcome at the same time the false rationalistic and superficially optimistic aspects of rationalism, and to create a synthesis with romanticism, the very movement which during the nineteenth century opposed rationalism by its own interest in and reverence for the irrational, affective side of man.3
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