Although poets and mystics had revealed a world of unconscious
and irrational behavior, many scientifically oriented
intellectuals under the impact of Enlightenment
thought continued to believe that human beings responded
to conscious motives in a rational fashion. But at
the end of the nineteenth century, Viennese doctor Sigmund
Freud (1856 –1939) put forth a series of theories
that undermined optimism about the rational nature of
the human mind. Freud’s thought, like the new physics,
added to the uncertainties of the age. His major ideas
were published in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams,
which laid the basic foundation for what came to be
known as psychoanalysis.
According to Freud, human behavior is strongly determined
by the unconscious—former experiences and inner
drives of which people are largely oblivious. To explore
the contents of the unconscious, Freud relied not
only on hypnosis but also on dreams, which were dressed
in an elaborate code that needed to be deciphered if the
contents were to be properly understood.
Why do some experiences whose influence persists in
controlling an individual’s life remain unconscious? According
to Freud, repression is a process by which unsettling
experiences are blotted from conscious awareness
but still continue to influence behavior because they have
become part of the unconscious. To explain how repression
works, Freud elaborated an intricate theory of the inner
life of human beings.
Although Freud’s theory has had numerous critics, his
insistence that a human being’s inner life is a battleground
of contending forces undermined the prevailing
belief in the power of reason and opened a new era of psychoanalysis,
by which a psychotherapist seeks to assist a
patient in probing deeply into memory to retrace the
chain of repression back to its childhood origins, thus
bringing about a resolution of the inner psychic conflict.
Belief in the primacy of rational thought over the emotions
would never be the same.
World History
