freud

At the end of Wednesday's class (the day we learned about Freud), Cas asked, "Do you guys think Freud was a product of his time?". I have to say, yes, I definitely think that he was. At first, I was upset at Freud's assumption that people are "creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness" (from "Civilization an Its Discontents"). However, Freud was writing this after witnessing World War I, one of the worst, most brutal wars the world had ever seen. The atrocities committed during that war were enough to horrify anyone and send anyone concerned with the human condition searching for explanations as to how humans could be so awful to one another. Freud thus decided that it was human nature to act in this way.

Likewise, Freud was working with people in a time when anxieties in the mind would have been on a sharp up-rise due to the new problems posed by modernization. The majority of people no longer lived quaint, farm lives and hadn't for a while. But as time went on, cities expanded, class struggles showed themselves with union problems and the like, and political atmospheres changed. Europe was becoming a completely different place at the turn on the century, and this new era brought with it, what seemed to be, mostly struggle. Thus, Freud dealt with and explained these anxieties as they were happening around him, making him a product of the time he lived in.