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Freudian Psychoanalysis has many sources and many applications but the two publications of primary political interest are Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Civilisation and its Discontents. Freud’s experience of the first world war and the anti-semiticism leading up to the second world war also probably played a role in his political beliefs. One of the the burning issues of Freud’s era was the classical issue of Reality versus phantasy, and this was of concern to the scientist, the artist, and the politician. The science of his day was too narrowly conceived to immediately embrace his ideas. Also the politics of his day which in its turn was almost completely disconnected from the very real values inherent in classical ethical discourse(Aristotle and Kant), was to reveal a value-system almost devoid of values.
We know Freud borrowed terms from the ancient Greeks which might suggest that his world-view was similar to the philosophical views of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that triumvirate of philosophers, all sharing a teacher-pupil relation. What all three philosophers shared was a concern for a multi-dimensional reality that required the understanding of a number of disciplines and the principles(arché) of these disciplines. Virtue was one of characteristics of man that Freud must have been considering as part of this view of the world ,and the theory of reality constituting this view.
Know thyself was both a Delphic challenge to humanity and an Aristotelian epistemological challenge that is met by a series of hylomorphic reflections on the soul, ethics, and politics. Freud, too, answered these challenges with his form of transcendental Psychology and its relation to a neo-Kantian Anthropology that is based on a philosophical view of science and a philosophical view of virtue which acknowledges the importance of duty. These philosophical views were certainly necessary, if rationality was to replace the chaos and turmoil of a soul “sick” with passion, anxiety, aggression, and fear. The duties connected to the commitments to love and work required of the ego, of course, involve the superego, the external world and a “Reality Principle”. The emphasis upon the Reality Principle was a manifestation of Freud’s conviction that Psychoanalysis was a “science” because one of its primary concerns was to gather, monitor, and explain a totality of facts. Future generations of scientists, however, would contest this claim on the grounds that scientific observation ought to be free of the presuppositions involved in “describing” certain phenomena which, for example, could, (in the view of the Greeks(e.g. Aristotle) and Freud), only be characterised teleologically.
It was another citizen of Vienna, Ludvig Wittgenstein, that would, in his later theorising, support this Greek-Freudian view that the telos or purpose of certain actions and deeds is constituted by the reason the agent gives for doing the action/deed. On Aristotles view this was a kind of “causal” account and here it is important to note that the Greek word “aitia” can be both translated as “cause” and as “explanation”. There are two issues involved here, one of which relates to why a particular agent in particular circumstances did a particular action, and the second of which, relates to the Concept of Action and its ontological constitution.Now whilst it is undoubtedly true that the material and efficient conditions of action are necessary to consider answering the question “What is action?, the formal and final conditions of action are equally necessary if one needs to explain Why, in general, action occurs. Such conditions must meet the criteria of being both necessary and sufficient conditions of action. Kant’s position on this matter is clearly Aristotelian and embraces all four kinds of explanation(material efficient, formal and final). On this topic, Kant specifically claims that insofar as human action and deeds are concerned the explanations/justifications fall into two different metaphysical zones–the theoretical natural science zone, and the practical ethical zone. This means that theoretically we can refer to the cause-effect relations between events. and practically we refer to reasons-for doing what was done. Now Freud, earlier on in his career, concerned himself with the material and efficient causes when he investigated the neuronal substrate of psychological activities, but as his career progressed, he moved more toward the philosophical position of reasons-for the patients symptoms and syndromes. Both types of explanations/justifications, together with the principles operating in these different kinds of case would be required for a complete account of action-phenomena.
A Phronimos, for Aristotle, was a great-souled man whose knowledge (epistemé) stretched over all the sciences necessary for leading a good-spirited flourishing life. The Phronimos was particularly adept at phronesis, or practical intelligence, and this idea comes very close to the idea of the good will that Kant places at the source of all dutiful virtuous action. The Freudian idea of the superego is also related to both the good will and phronesis, but Freud in his charting of the phases or stages of the formation of the superego gives us an invaluable psychological perspective in relation to ethical activity. Freud speaks of “moral standards”and the guilt or anxiety that arises because one does not do what one believes one ought to do. This places the superego in close relation to the Greek idea of areté, which many translate as virtue, and this is correct, but what is not sometimes sufficiently emphasised is the fact that areté often means “doing the right thing in the right way at the right time”. The ego remains the key agency in this constellation of agencies, but both agencies use the reality principle as their primary standard by which to measure the worth of the agent or what Kant referred to as the “dignity ” of a person. The political dimension of Freud’s analyses remains in the background, but the Aristotelian strategy of grounding social relations in the constellation of the family is a notable feature of Freud’s account and we ought to recall, in this context, that for Aristotle, the idea of the lack of self-sufficiency motivated larger social constellations such as the village and city to meet the needs of the family.
Areté, doing the right thing at the right time in the right way stretches over all of these social and political constellations and aligns itself naturally with the idea of diké (justice) which in Plato’s Republic was characterised as every one doing what was appropriate to their nature and circumstances in the context of philosophers ruling the city (because of their superior wisdom and knowledge). The City is also used by Freud as a means of illustrating the depths of the mind. Just as Rome’s constitution and history could only be revealed by the careful work of archeologists, so the eternal city of the mind in which phases or stages of the city in a sense exist simultaneously on/in one site, could only be made manifest by the systematic work of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s city was Vienna, and he documents his encounters with the rampant anti-semiticism of his student period, a process that must have provoked political deliberations which probably continued until Freud decided to flee to London to spend his last living months. The experience of Tyranny and the dark and dangerous forces it unleashes, must have provoked many of the technical analyses we encounter in “Group Psychology” and “Civilisation and its Discontents”, and provided us with a distinctive face to the aggressive death instinct ,Thanatos, fighting to destroy our cities.
Anti-semiticism was of course just a symptom of a more malignant underlying political disease(tyranny) . Plato identified the cause of this disease and claimed that its source lay in the emergence of unnecessary and unlawful desires in the mind of a tyrant obsessed with the idea of power without fully understanding its political function. Arendt, a Jew born in the Kantian city of Königsberg was also, around this period, forced to flee to the United States persecuted by the same German tyrant who had mastered the art of manipulating the masses in Germany and Austria into believing that the Jews were a major political problem requiring a final solution. Arendt engaged theoretically with this period of history in her major work entitled “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, but the form of her engagement was less psychological and more political, social and historical. Arendt was younger than Freud when she was forced to flee and therefore lived to see the implementation of the “final solution” of the problem of the Jews, as well as the feared implementation of scientific technology in the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian civilisations.
For Aristotle the key criterion of all forms of government whether they be monarchy, rule by the few, or rule by the many, is understanding and respect for law and order. Tyrants are monarchs ruled by their own unlawful desires, and the rule by the few and the many that are guided by unneccessary and unlawful desires (whether they be related to the accumulation of money or freedom), are all perverted forms of government violating the standards of areté and diké and arché( the principles associated with both).
All the available evidence speaks for the the thesis that Freud was a law abiding citizen who respected law, order and authority. He also charted the origin and nature of these ethical attitudes in his work on the superego. Carl Schorske in an article entitled “The Psychoarcheology of Civilisations” in “The Cambridge Companion to Freud(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) refers to the fact that Freud was an Anglophile, attending Brentano’s lectures on Philosophy and naming his son Oliver after Cromwell. The latter suggests an admiration for English Parlimentarianism. Apparently Schorske also claimed that in the 1880’s Freud considered emigrating to England to join relatives there.
Brentano’s Form of Philosophical Psychology was of course inspired by both Aristotle and British Empiricism. In the former case Brentano’s hylomorphic idea of the intentionality of emotional attitudes can be found in Freud in the form of an implicit appeal to Aristotelian formal/final causes. Emotions, for Freud ,and Aristotle, are appropriate or not, in relation to whether or not the object of the emotion is appropriate or not. For example, whether or not a particular object is loved or hated will then be related to a reason which the agent will give, and that reason can be judged as a good reason or not, (i.e. both the love/hate and the reason given can be praised or blamed, as Aristotle claimed,) primarily on the grounds of the appropriateness of the object and the reason.
The Ego’s primary responsibilities, apart from the protection of the body, relate to the capacity for love and work, and both of these are intentional activities in Brentano’s sense. Freud, we know, analysed the appropriateness of the maxims that one ought to love ones neighbour and ones enemies, and judged such maxims to not be universally appropriate as intended. His argument rested on the nature of love as conceived of by the Ancient Greeks (Eros), especially Plato and Aristotle. The object of a mental act is causal in the Aristotelian sense (related to formal and final causation) but not causal in the sense of material and efficient causation, i.e. we are not here dealing with an object in the external world which causes the impressions or experiences we have of it. This mental object is nevertheless real, and subject to judgements which can be appropriate or not: the truth of which can be accepted or not. Brentano’s, English form of inductive empiricism inspired by Mill, is not, of course compatible with the rationalism of Aristotle and Kant, which Freud embraced to a greater extent than Brentano in his later work. Indeed both Aristotle and Kant provided us with decisive arguments against the implied materialism of Brentano’s empiricism. Kant, in his Anthropology, provided Freud with a decisive argument against the empiricist approach via his motivations for the ontological distinction between what a freely acting agent makes of himself via his actions and judgements, and what nature makes of the human being (e.g. what happens to the agent in the form of events over which his will has no control). I cannot, for example will to see the colour green as green but I can will to see no green by closing my eyes. My will/desire to close my eyes is a mental act which is without identifying criteria for external observers, but, for me, the act of closing my eyes has its reasons which I can provide, if questioned. My reasons can then be accepted, or not, on the grounds of appropriateness. The empirical methodology of observation, Kant argues, cannot assist us in answering the primary aporetic question of Philosophical psychology, namely “What is a human being?”, because observation changes what is being observed whether it be for reasons of dissimulation or habit or some other reason. The major issue of the Kantian pragmatic point of view considers issue of character, whether it is good or not, and the more far reaching issue of the future of the human species. We know Brentano was critical of Kantian metaphysics, and, at least insofar as Brentano’s Philosophical Psychology was concerned, Kant would have criticised the lack of attention to the distinction between sensible phenomena and intelligible noumena. Brentano might have been accused of sensibilising essentially intellectual acts. For Kant there is a moral sense that is connected to the operations of the will which it is the task of Anthropology to explore, but given the fact that the ought of the categorical imperative implies that the agent “can” do what he intends to do, the reasons why an agent is doing his duty are primarily and categorically connected to rationality and the intellect. Anthropology ought also to be concerned with the sociological and historical aspects of moral action. Virtue is a term that Kant uses in the context of this discussion, particularly in his work Metaphysics of Morals where the “good character “, so important in Anthropological reflections, becomes the somewhat more abstract and holistic “virtuous person” who then becomes defined in terms of the maxims this person upholds as important, e.g. the supreme maxim to be truthful to oneself and others. This recalls the one golden rule of psychoanalysis that the patient must always say what is going on in their thoughts.This is also interesting from the viewpoint of Freud’s superego which is concerned not with the the various, seemingly pluralistic virtues, but rather with the holistic standards or principles of a great-souled man or Phronimos. The term areté, however, can be conceived holistically from the point of view of action in terms of doing or thinking the right thing at the right time in the right way, and this implies a relation to arché which in most contexts can be conceived of as meaning “principle”. The term phronesis which in some contexts can be translated as practical wisdom and sound judgement is also obviously very relevant to the profile of the great-souled man or Phronimos. From a Kantian point of view the great-souled man will be that dutiful soul who possesses a good will together with practical understanding and sound judgement but it is not clear that such a soul will “suffer” from the form of discontentment Freud referred to. Perhaps this state of affairs was a result of the questionable regressive change to the way in which nationalistic political parties “served”.
It has been claimed by Manfred Keuhn in his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology that Kant has produced a variation of virtue theory but,
” It is sometimes suggested that this virtue theory is close to that of Aristotle, but the Anthropology suggests that this is a mistaken view. The virtue ethics presupposed by Kant is definitely not Aristotelian in character: rather, it is an example of the kind of ethics prevalent in Europe and North America during the eighteenth century. It possessed (almost inevitably) some Aristotelian features but it was much more influenced by Christian and Stoic doctrines and imbued with local Prussian convictions.”(Anthropology, P.xxviii)
This view risks oversimplifying the complex relation between critical and hylomorphic theory where they share the view that in ethics the search for the end in itself is of crucial significance for ethical theory, whether that be the good will of the individual or the cosmopolitan end of the kingdom of ends for the human race. Also shared is the view of the relation of principle to content and the relation of form to material. Indeed the journey of the human individual toward their individual end is of less concern for Kant than the journey toward rationality and a cosmopolitan end or telos for the species. Christianity and its conception of a judgement day for mankind as a whole, is pessimistic about the evolution of human rationality and rests the idea of the end of all days on divine intervention and justice. In this respect this message from the Roman Empire, which never fully understood the greatness of Ancient Greece, continued into the dark ages and was transfigured in the Enlightenment by a commitment to human daring and freedom which celebrated the human capacity to shape its own destiny. Stoicism of course has its roots in Ancient Greece, going all the way back to Heraclitus and his idea of Logos, which explains, for example, why the road up and the road down are the same. To suggest, however, that the determinism of Stoicism influenced the freedom-loving Kant more than the celebration of choice in action we find in hylomorphic theory, is perhaps questionable. Stoicism contains a form of materialism that is not as coarse as our modern forms, but both Aristotle and Kant would remain skeptical to the predominance of the material over the formal and final aspects of explanation. Insofar as the Prussian convictions are concerned one can only speculate as to what Kuehn means in this context but perhaps he is reflecting upon the military concept of duty which in ancient Greece was partly identified with the term Xenia which means stranger. Indeed one of the primary duties of Zeus was the protection of strangers and even today Greece is still world renowned for their hospitable reception of tourists. This fits in well with the Kantian prophecy of a future cosmopolitan world society which would still retain the idea of a God guaranteeing a good-spirited flourishing life, but the life in question one imagines would be largely secularised.
Kant’s Anthropology is also well aligned with the above position which builds on the ancient prophecy of the oracles, namely, that the most important challenge for humanity is to “Know thyself!”:
“Such an anthropology, considered as knowledge of the world, which must come after our schooling, is actually not yet called pragmatic when it contains an extensive knowledge of things in the world, for example, animals, plants, and minerals from various lands and climates but only when it contains knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world.- Therefore even knowledge of the races of human beings as products belonging to the play of nature is not yet counted as pragmatic knowledge of the world, but only as theoretical knowledge of the world.”(P.4)
We know that during the rise of the Nazi’s “scientific-theoretical” issue of “race” dominated the political agenda rather than the pragmatic matters of freedom and justice, (e.g.treating people as an end-in-themselves and law and order). Kant continues on this theme and discusses the difficulties inherent in trying to construct a theoretical account of human nature using, for example, the methodological medium of observation which, as we discussed above, is doomed to failure because the observed party either becomes embarrassed, dissembles or is acting habitually.
Theoretical reasoning, for Kant, functions best in the medium of the quantification of physical phenomena such as motion. It becomes more problematic in the realm of mental phenomena such as thought, which has relations and qualities that cannot be reduced to quantities. Conceptual thinking, insofar as it aims at the truth which occurs at the level of thinking something about something, is regulated by the categories, and the principles of reasoning. Insofar as conceptual thinking aims at the Good, e.g. via ought-statements such as “We ought to keep promises”, it too relies on the truth(in the sense of appropriateness) and principles regulating concepts. For Kant, one of the absolutes in his system of ethics is the good will, which requires both a first person understanding of its operation, as well as the third person operation which undoubtedly must rely on observation, but not for the purposes of the quantification of action. We do not, for example, rely on observation to guarantee the truth of the premise “We ought to keep promises”. There is a role for observation in relation to a minor premise relating to an individual making a promise but in moving to the conclusion that the individual in question ought to keep their promise, the activity we observed of making the promise is regulated and explained by the major premise and not by the observation. The conclusion we draw that the individual ought to do what they promised to do is, however, explained by both the major premise which has the form of a principle, and the minor premise which appeals to observation of an event of promising.
All the above also implies an anthropological account of the understanding we have of first-person consciousness:
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all the other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e. through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things such as irrational animals with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I”, because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I”. For this faculty(namely, to think) is understanding.” (P.15)
Kant goes on to point out that, before the child begins to use this word “I”, he can already speak fluently, and this first person reference to himself replaces reference to himself in the third person via his/her name. Upon doing so, Kant claims that egoism proceeds unchecked until this egocentric form of thinking is replaced with a form of thinking that is cosmopolitan and pluralistic, concerning itself with the whole world. This is recognisably Freudian and passes over the work that is involved in transitioning between narcissism and the love for reality as an end in itself. The above reference to the unity of consciousness and remaining the same person throughout fundamental change, recalls the Aristotelian principle of change which states that any conceptualisation of change requires, that from which something changes , that toward which the change is proceeding, and that something which remans the same throughout the change. In this case the “I think”(about the world) is the active agent in the process of change. So, the mere possession of consciousness that animals possess, is not sufficient to maintain that they “think”. What is further required is a unity of consciousness, which in the case of the veritative synthesis of thought, requires both a priori forms of intuition, the imagination and the categories of the understanding. Animals could never be moral agents because these fundamental conditions are missing and because of the fragility of this unity of consciousness(which can be pathologically disrupted). We can, of course, as Aristotle maintains, still be the worst of the animals. Freud’s theories obviously fit into this space in Kantian and Aristotelian theory about the rational animal capable of discourse.
Kant further notes that an obsession with observing oneself can lead to madness and Freud’s case studies contain pathological symptoms of paranoia which testify to why one should refuse to accord observation a primary position in the work of attempting to achieve self -knowledge. Kant’s claim here is that much of self-knowledge is not observationally based, but rather comes from a conceptual form of knowledge and a power of reasoning, less concerned with observing the world, and more concerned with explaining and justifying phenomena by reference to principles. Kant elaborates upon this in the following way:
“To observe the various acts of representative power in myself, when I summon them, is indeed worth reflection: it is necessary and useful for logic and metaphysics.- But to wish to eavesdrop on oneself when they come into the mind unbidden on their own (this happens through the play of the power of the imagination when it is unintentionally meditating) constitutes a reversal of the natural order in the faculty of knowledge, because then the principles of thought do not lead the way(as they should) but rather follow behind. This eavesdropping on oneself is either already a disease of the mind(melancholy) or leads one to the madhouse..”(P.22)
The play of the conscious and preconscious aspects of the mind are taken up by Kant when he asks whether we can have representations that we are not conscious of. He answers in the affirmative and claims that we can have what he calls “obscure representations”, which we are, as he puts it, indirectly conscious of. Seeing a human at a distance in a meadow when they are too distant to discern all the features which make this object human, requires that we are indirectly conscious of these features that cannot be seen—i.e. we know non-observationally that they are part of this holistic representation we have. This knowledge is part of the preconscious mind which is connecting representations in accordance with a concept and/or principle. There is an obvious unity of consciousness or apperception involved in this experience, and Kant claims that both the imagination and understanding are involved. The sensible part of the mind receives sense data into consciousness and the preconscious begins to organise and connect the manifold of representations into a unity.
On the other hand, in thinking about action, for which there is an ethical reason, the role of sense data in formulating a maxim of action is minimal, and conceptual and principle relations play a larger role in a context of explanation/justification. This is the context in which the Freudian superego and its “standards” operate.Freud, however, is more concerned to chart the contours of the pathological operation of the superego which brings in the operations of the unconscious/instinctive part of the mind, in particular the death instinct and its manifestations in aggression. His characterisation of the superego as a “cruel captain” manifests the operation of a superego that is not seamlessly integrated into the ego activities of loving and working and protection of the body. The pathological operation of the superego is a consequence of developmental difficulties in the course of the journey of desire during a long childhood. The child desires a special relation with the opposite sex parent which is impossible and as a result the wounded ego abandons this desire and substitutes a desire to be like the same sex parent: a process Freud calls identification. Identification is a defence mechanism that is also used in political groups led by an aggressive tyrant in situations where the group they are leading has little choice in listening to what they are saying. In such circumstances, where the rational capacity is somewhat inhibited, it suffices to introduce a real or imagined threat in order for the masses to respond to the words they are witnessing with both diminished levels of consciousness and a diminished rational capacity. The effect of the words in such circumstances is Hypnotic, and this, of course, reminds us of the effect of post-hypnotic suggestion which was operating with respect to the patients Freud was treating early on in his career using the method of hypnosis.
The effect of being in a crowd, (a collection of bodies designated thus, just because they occupy contiguous positions in the space-time continuum), is ambiguous, and given the fact that identification is responsible for the bonding process(being like each other and the leader), the emotions generated are more contagious than the manifestations of higher mental processes that strive for what is true or good. Hysteria is always waiting in the wings to make an entrance in the name of “acting out”, as is projection, if a suitable object makes its appearance. The question to raise in this context, is whether a crowd is the same as an audience, and the answer must be in the negative. The audience of the Shakespeare play is a cultural group where the instincts and emotions are under control and the normal pragmatic relation to the events one witnesses is suspended. On the other hand, the crowd listening to the politician at a rally may be an audience until the politician actively engages the emotions and instincts for his/her purposes. Freud, according to Ricouer, in his work “Freud, and Philosophy”, defines Culture in terms of the renunciation of instinctive wishes and desires: desires which generate childhood-fantasies that persist into adulthood. The long childhood of man and the long period of the play of the instincts and emotions during the developmental actualisation process of various powers such as language and rationality, plays a considerable role in the actualisation of a superego that is concerned with so much more than the matter of the renunciation of instincts. The teleological aspect of this developmental process of the superego opens up a wider horizon of possibilities, that stretches far beyond the domain of prohibition and punishment : the domain of the “cruel captain”. “Standards” are practical principles that both constitute and regulate communities, they are both the ends of communal living and the beginnings of the building of civilisations.
The Greek term arché captures well this dual-character of a first principle, and material foundation. First Principles are, to use Platonic terms, both good in themselves and good in their consequences, insofar as the practical aspect of human activity is concerned: they have, that is, both archeological and teleological aspects. For both Plato and Aristotle the telos of action is “The Good” which is what all human activities aim at. The relationship between the desire/intention and the state of affairs one wishes to bring about must, at the very least, be conceptually subsumed under the principle or arché of “The Good”. For Kant two different kinds of imperative are involved in bringing about practical states of affairs via practical activity, namely hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives. With respect to the latter form of imperative, treating persons as ends-in-themselves is one formulation of several. The telos of so acting for Kant is described as the summum bonum, a Roman expression for the highest good. This expression is perhaps somewhat more abstract than its Ancient Greek equivalent, namely eudaimonia, which, in most contexts, means leading the good-spirited flourishing life: a life based on discourse and reason. This activity is clearly cognitive in that it is active. The cognitive faculty, according to Kant’s Anthropology, is composed of a receptive lower faculty and an active higher faculty, and insofar as the lower receptive faculty is concerned, one can either affect oneself or be affected by an object. This covers the region of the instincts, emotions and passions. The higher cognitive faculty Kant describes as the pure active consciousness of our thinking(P.29,) and this is linked to understanding rather than apprehension: it is, as Kant describes it, a logical form of consciousness in which the rule or principle is given and leads the way for the thought process that ensues. This logical consciousness is the “I think” that manifests our noumenal self which is contrasted to that phenomenal self in which I sense or observe myself as an object or phenomenon. The Ego of Freud must largely be composed of the logical consciousness involved in protecting the body, and thinking about my objects of work and love. The superego of Freud, on this argument, is constituted of the rule or law of the categorical imperative. In other words the “I think” in this ethical context is aiming at the Good via its activities and action which, by definition, meet the criteria of being both good-in-itself and good-in-its consequences. This “I think ” also gives us understanding of the “I” as it is in itself–in its essence— a rational form of life capable of discourse. The Kantian rationale in this argument is consonant with hylomorphism but perhaps is expressed in somewhat different terms which reflect Kants innovative elaboration upon Aristotle:
“Everyone shows the greatest respect for understanding, as is already indicated by the very name higher cognitive faculty…..The passive element in sensibility, which we after all cannot get rid of, is actually the cause of all the evil said about it. The inner perfection of the human being consists in having in his power the use of all his faculties, in order to subject them to his free choice……without sensibility there would be no material that could be processed for the use of legislative understanding.”(P.34-5)
The powers would include the sensory powers, the memory, the imagination, the understanding, language, judgement and reason. These powers would then be used by both the Ego and the Superego in their free choices of the states of affairs they want to being about. Sensory representations, on this view, are ordered by the understanding. When we claim that there is a form of judgement which is intuitive, this is a misleading claim because the power of sensibility is not a judging power. What we are witnessing in these circumstances is an obscure operation of the understanding, and this is the reason the senses are unable to deceive us, because the material of the senses is what it is and cannot therefore be in error. Sensory representations are ordered in Time,and if they are simultaneous, they cannot be experienced as sequential, and if they are sequential, the “before” cannot be experienced as either simultaneous or as coming after “the after” in the sequence. The activity of thought, on the other hand, orders this sensory material in its process of thinking, by, first, thinking something in accordance with the rules constituting the conceptual subject of the thought, and thence by thinking something about something and relating another predicative concept to the subject-concept. This occurs in two forms, either firstly, as a so called veritative or truth-making synthesis, or, secondly as a synthesis of concepts relating to human activity aiming at the Good.
The ancient Greek idea of aletheia (unconcealment) is involved in both kinds of discourse, and logic governs both the theoretical and practical reasoning that are used to illuminate our understanding. The Greek framework of psuché, epistemé, areté, diké, arché,techné, eros, thanatos, ananke, and eudaimonia is the framework that best reveals our relation to what Kant refers to as the two principal domains of metaphysics, the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals. For Kant, as for Plato and Aristotle, it was the metaphysics of morals that brings us closer to a complete understanding of ourselves and our socio-political world. Freud’s theories actually fit more comfortably into this Hylomorphic-Critical framework than that of the more positivistically inclined science of his time. His medium was the cathartic discourse of the “talking cure” and an improvement in the quality of life of his patients was the telos of this activity, (or the Good that was being aimed at). In a certain sense, then, psychoanalysis is both a technical-medical activity and an activity of practical reasoning based on Freud’s Metapsychology which was certainly anti-Metaphysical in the Kantian sense, but embraced a critical view of metaphysics. The critical view of Metaphysics was largely hylomorphic and based on first principles and there is no doubt that Freud’s work articulated a dimension of the knowledge we had of psuché or the soul in a way that advanced our understanding considerably. This was testified to by the extensive influence Freud’s work had on many different regions of our Culture. Richard Boothby in his work “Freud as Philosopher”, after regretting the diminishing of the importance of Freud’s Metapsychology, quoted one of Freud’s letters to Fleiss:
“when I was young the only thing I longed for was philosophical knowledge, and now that I am going over from medicine to psychology I am in the process of attaining”.(Letter no 44)
Boothby points out that the consequence of the discarding of Freudian Metapsychology is a loss of the philosophical depth of psychoanalytical theory (P.2, Boothby, R., Freud as Philosopher,London, Routledge, 2001). As to the nature of the philosophical content, it has been maintained that Kant is the main influence, but Aristotle’s hylomorphism is also an important element, given the importance Aristotle attached to self-knowledge and the human form of psuché he defined in terms of a rational animal capable of discourse. Boothby, believes, as we do, that Freud’s work must be understood in relation to a categorical framework, but he does not fully appreciate the rationalist commitment to principles we find especially in the later work. Boothby appeals rather to the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Nietzsche and Husserl to provide this essentially phenomenological framework, but what these authors have in common is a disregard of rationality and principles that would have made Freud uneasy. Boothby further claims that it is the concept of psychical energy that lies at the foundation of the metapsychology, and whilst it is doubtful that one concept can have such significance in the Freudian system, it is nevertheless the case that the energy-regulation-principle is one of three principles that together define the realm of psuché in all its forms, but especially its animal and human forms. The instincts, of course, come from a reservoir of energy forms, but given the complexity of human nature, it is rather the vicissitudes of the instincts that are of particular interest to Freud and his work. These vicissitudes are also partially determined in their form by the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle in its mythical form of Ananke. The idea or the ideal of the good-spirited flourishing life may have been more attainable in the eyes of the ancient Greeks than it is in the discontented eyes of “modern man”, contending directly with considerable evidence for the oracular pronouncement to the effect that “Everything created by man will lead to ruin and destruction.” Freud died during 1939, immediately before the “final solution” to the Jewish problem was launched by Hitler, and before two atomic bombs were ordered to be dropped on two centres of civilian population in Japan by president Truman. We know how Freud would have analysed the actions of the agents behind these phenomena and the possible diagnoses he would have argued for, and there is even a hint that Kant was alluding to the mental state of tyrants when, in the Anthropology, he claimed:
“But how to regard the vainglorious claim of powerful men, which is not based on mere temperament: “What the human being wills, he can do”? It is nothing more than a high sounding tautology: namely what he wills at the order of his morally commending reason, he ought to do, and consequently can also do…However some years ago there were fools like this who also prided themselves on taking the dictum in a physical sense, announcing themselves as world-assailants: but their breed has long since vanished.”(Anthropology, P.39)
This breed vanished only to return again with a vengeance during the 20th century. Hannah Arendt classified such agents as “the new men”, powered by their multiplying appetites, soaring imaginations and belief in the persuasive power of language to accomplish almost everything that can be wished for or desired: such activities and beliefs were situated in the Kantian faculty of sensibility and contributed to the character of those “world assailants” that emerged when the political party system collapsed in the West. The authority and status of Religion and Philosophy were also collapsing during this period, partially thanks to the onslaught of the “new men” embracing positivistic atomistic science and economic power. Military power and economic power walked hand in hand, but it was in fact the global military power of Nato that attempted to work together with the UN to prevent war and major conflicts from sapping economic resources that were needed elsewhere.The creation of this latter ,International Organisation, as a matter of fact was a prediction/prophesy of Kant’s Political Philosophy at the end of the 18th century.
A half-way house conception leading to the establishment of the Kantian idea of United Nations was the American- Wilsonian dream of a League of Nations that he hoped would bring permanent peace to a Europe torn apart by the First World War. The differences between the dream of the League of Nations and the Reality of the United Nations created after a second World War and the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations, was a difference between two different principles of mental life which Freud postulated and used in his treatment of his mentally ill patients. Freud wrote very little about the mental health of the new men of his age but he did co-author a book on one of these new men, the President of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Freud’s contribution was one of providing us with a psychoanalytical insight into the mind of a world leader who created the conditions for the second world war and the dreadful atrocities associated with that conflagration. This work was one of his latest, and stands as a testament to the cultural breadth of psychoanalytical theory. Hannah Arendt, in her work on the “Origins of Totalitarianism”, pointed to the power of the “new men” to ignore traditional cultural and legal boundaries via the use of a power of imagination and language that ignored the claims of the principles of rationality. These powers were not exercised in the spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), but rather in the spirit of what can be imagined can be done or what can be said. Freud’s psychological profile of Woodrow Wilson is not based on the usual consulting room therapeutic transactional activity that occurs between an analyst and an analysand. but instead relied heavily on public documents, public reporting, his co-authors intimate knowledge of Wilson and Wilsons private correspondence. Wilson, we know, was a public figure whose actions had a public dimension in a context in which he was surrounded by observers and witnesses who had knowledge of the principles and rationality of political activity. William Bullitt, the co-author to the book, was politically active in the sphere of influence of Wilson who was known to be, like most new men, contemptuous of facts and prized only what he called human motives , opinions. and “noble” intentions. These intentions did not, however include the respect for the truth and knowledge (epistemé) and their role in the social and political affairs of the communities affected by the actions and words of a democratically elected President. Words were measured not by the categorical tests related to the Good and the True, but rather by hypothetical tests related to perceived or wished for consequences. Instrumental principles relating to choosing the means to unquestioned ends became the focus of areté. Freud’s contribution to this categorical framework, which we can assume Freud accepted given his claim that his Psychology was Kantian, amounted to a complex psychological theory, in which a topography of consciousness, preconsciousness and the unconscious was overlaid by an agency triad of the ego, id and superego, complemented by the powers of Psuché (Eros and Thanatos) and the world-power of Ananke. This conceptual structure was then both constituted of and regulated by three principles: the energy constitution and regulation principle, the pleasure- pain principle and the reality principle. This structural/functional network was supported by the knowledge of the brain Freud accumulated whilst conducting research at Vienna University. The concept of the libido was the major psychological concept alongside the ethical concept of the will.
In his “analysis of the character of Wilson Freud laid down three axioms:
“We begin with the axiom that in the psychic life of man, from birth, a force is active which we call libido, and define as the energy of Eros…….
All human beings are bisexual. Every individual, whether man or woman, is composed of elements of masculinity and femininity
In the psychic life of man two chief instincts are active….the Eros…and..the Death Instinct” (P 36-38)
Narcissism is an important concept in relation to these axioms because the principle of self love is very much tied to both the energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles, and these principles were very active in the life of Wilson, who was not a physically healthy man. In the course of the development of a normal life, this self love often gives way to object love which, if the choices of objects are sound, introduce the reality principle into the triangle of desire which is a triangle of demand-refusal-wounded ego. As development in this direction proceeds, the will becomes more and more important, especially its operation in relation to the Aristotelian maxim that all activities of man aim at the Good. The Good and Bad objects relate then to areté, and doing and saying the right thing at the right time in the right way. The only problem with the characterisation of these three axioms is that instead of adhering to the hylomorphic life principle, Freud retreats to a materialistic mechanical metaphor of “storage”:
“The libido must be stored somewhere. We conceive that it “charges” certain areas and parts of our psychic apparatus, as an electric current charges a storage battery and accumulator; that like a charge of electricity, it is subject to quantitative alteration; that dwelling without discharge, it shows tension in proportion to the quantity of the charge that seeks outlet.”(P.37)
It has been argued in a work entitled “Philosophy and AI: Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents”(James, M.,R.,D., Lambert Academic Press, 2024) that mechanical analogies are not useful for describing and explaining the activity of living organisms. At the level of energy regulation there is a huge difference between the activities of a purely electrical system and an electro-chemical system such as the brain and the human body. The energy regulation system of the brain is primarily a chemical process in which an impulse continues from one part of the brain to another because of a chemical transaction at the synapses of the neurones. This entails that, for constitutional reasons, a purely electrical system could never give rise to the state of consciousness, or indeed to any psychological state, even if electrical systems such as computers may be able to simulate certain outcomes of consciousness(e,g. the use of language). It does appear, both from the point of view of the use of language, and the principles of rationality, that the concept of libido belongs necessarily to the category of the psychological (psuché), and must therefore be characterised in terms of the categories of the hylomorphic framework in which formal and final causes play a much more important role than material and efficient causes. Kantian critical Philosophy is also very relevant in the charting of the contours of teleological judgement and its relation to the “I think” and its categories . This in its turn is related to the ideas/principles of reason, and a priori intuitive representations of space and time.
It s also important to note, in the context of this discussion, that the concept of the will cannot be embedded in a deterministic mechanical-electrical system in which the Kantian concept of self-causation is self-contradictory. The idea of reason, freedom, is intimately tied to this idea of self-causation. Interestingly enough the reverse is not the case, namely, there is no contradiction in claiming of a being that causes itself to do something , that an external cause has brought about a psychological state of such a free, living organism. Kant connects the idea of the principle of self-love to happiness, and the idea of the categorical imperative to the more important ethical principle of the worthiness of the individual to lead a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). It would be absurd to claim that a mechanical device could either be happy or even worthy of happiness. Given these remarks and Freud’s claim that the categories of the active and the passive are decisive for the characterisation of the activities of human forms of life, we can see clearly the relevance of Brian O Shaughnessy’s dual-aspect account of the will. On this account, the will is intimately related to the active aspect of the psychological: the passive aspect relates to sensations one may or may not be conscious of. The Kantian notion of “I think” obviously also relates to the active aspect of being human.
Eros is also involved in the therapeutic interventions of the analyst in the treatment of the analysand and this fact in turn raises questions of the ethics of this transactional exchange between the parties. Transference-love in which the analysand wishes to be liked, and be like the analyst, brings with it certain unrealistic demands which the analyst is trained to refuse. According to the triangle of desire this refusal connects in turn to the wounding of an already fragile ego, and this process must therefore be handled with care. Is this a kind of manipulation of the desire of the patient, for the ends of the analyst? The fact that the patient desires to lead a good-spirited flourishing life, and the fact that this need is intimately related to the strengthening of the ego in its dealings with the external world, the id and the superego, indicates that the whole process is not best described as treating the analysand as a means to an end, but rather in terms of assisting the analysand in a process of adaptation to the demands of reality(which surely must be described as treating the analysand as an end-in themselves). The demands of areté (virtuous activity) and epistemé (knowledge) are both involved in this attempt to educate the analysand into the ways and means of “The Good” which in Platonic terms are both good-in-themselves and good -in- their- consequences. Both of these aspects of the good must be responsible for the universality and necessity of the Kantian categorical imperative. The final determiner of the ethical value of therapeutic treatment must be the only absolute in the Kantian ethical system, namely a good will. There is no necessity for the analyst to deceive the analysand about what is happening in the process of the treatment. Neither is there a necessity to inform the analysand every step of the way as to what is happening in the therapy from the analysts point of view. One would, however, expect candid answers to direct questions from the analysand concerning the point of what is going on. The qualities of activity and passivity are connected with masculinity and femininity, and identification plays a key role in the formation of the superego: the agency responsible for the communication of social/political values in the polis.
Freud argues that Wilsons superego possessed such grandiose ideals that the demands made upon the Ego were impossible to fulfil, and he also points out that Wilsons father was a minister of the church and wished for Thomas to be the same. Freud connects Wilsons tendency to ignore or deny facts with this idealisation of the superego and Freud also points to the identification of Wilsons father with God. Freud openly admits that the strength of Wilsons libido remained an open question because such a question may not be decidable by the information provided by the people surrounding him. Freud notes that Wilson frequently in his career made use of the narcissistic type of object-choice but given that he had the good fortune to be loved by female sisters and cousins, his relation to women could be normal. His relation to authority figures was more problematic, indicating a repressed hostility to the father he so worshipped. Achieving, as he did, the position of President of the USA, the constellation of his identifications and other defence mechanisms led him to identify himself with the Saviour of mankind:
“All his life he enjoyed daily acts of submission to that God: morning prayers, evening prayers, grace before each meal and Bible reading every day”(P.66)
This activity may have sufficiently displaced or sublimated the energy from the death instinct and prevented the onset of paranoia, although Freud maintains Wilson lived his life on the boundaries between neurosis and psychosis. He never, however, developed a “persecution mania”. Freud points out that Wilson resembled his mother in both character and physique, suffering from physical ailments(nervousness, dyspepsia, headaches and no less than 14 “breakdowns”) for most of his life, indicating that there was some form of identification with his mother.
Wilsons relations to his inferiors were harmonious as long as they manifested a little brothers air of obedience. Bullitt notes that Wilson performed poorly in school and maintained an interest in subjects which were connected to his desire for making speeches. Freud claims that Wilsons memory:
“was of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.”(P.73)
This would partly explain his favouring of the practical transactional meaning of language over more rationally constituted language based on facts. Freud cites the example of Wilsons final view(after embracing the opposite contradictory position and claiming that he would fight for it) that the Treaty of Versailles was a guarantor of peace in the name of “absolute justice”(P.79) This in turn favours the function of the imagination and its tendency to “picture” an end state of affairs that may be more or less realistic as measured by areté(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way), which in its turn relates both to the facts relating to what it is possible to do but also to reasons which have a different form of justification.
We saw in Philosophy shortly after the Treaty of Versailles that Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of meaning” (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus) was based on a questionable foundation of logical solipsism that Wittgenstein was forced to eventually abandon in favour of a more social position which emphasised forms of life and so called grammatical justifications supported by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. In this characterisation of the “new men” of our modern times we claim that the Aristotelian essence specifying hylomorphic definition of human nature, namely “rational animal capable of discourse” can be discerned in certain aspects of Freud’s theorising. For Aristotle, the elements of discourse and rationality qualifying our animality are not independent powers but are rather intimately related to each other. On this characterisation, the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are both constitutive of our discourse and perform a regulative function that Wittgenstein captured well in the so called perspicuous representations of his philosophical investigations. In his earlier work Wittgenstein avoided the idea of the “I” or the self being an object in the world and claimed mysteriously that it lies at or outside the limits of our world, and this expression is also used in his characterisation of the importance of language:
5.62 This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth. In fact what solipsism means is quire correct, only it cannot be said, it shows itself. That the world is my world shows itself n the fact that the limits of the language(the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.”(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein L., New York, Cosimo Publications, Trans Ogden, C., K.,)
Wittgenstein is not talking of the experience I have of myself, neither is he speaking of the psychological self or soul , but rather of a metaphysical subject about which nothing can be said. He uses the analogy of the eye and its visual field and argues that there is nothing in the visual field which allows one to deduce the presence of the eye. The eye like the “I” is at the limit or outside the limits of the field. Having claimed earlier that logic is transcendental, Wittgenstein goes on to claim that both ethics and aesthetics are also transcendental. The will of the ethical subject, he claims, cannot be spoken of, and thereby demarcates Philosophy from Science. This is concretised, when he maintains that when all the questions of natural science have been answered the problems of life will not have been touched(6.52). At first glance this may appear to legitimise the position that Philosophy can attempt to somehow characterise the problems of life and possible solutions, but this appearance dissipates when Wittgenstein subsequently claims that any such discourse would not strictly speaking have meaning He provides us with the image of the medium of a ladder which requires climbing up and through before one can attain the world-view of a world which, according to proposition 1, is a totality of facts not of things. The “I” is obviously neither a fact nor a thing, and is also connected to both life in general , and the ethical form of life in particular. The problem with the later Philosophy and its shift toward forms of life is that the accompanying concept of language-games may seem unnecessarily transactional, and encourage anti-rational interpretations, in spite of the insistence by Wittgenstein that grammatical investigations provide us with the essences of the objects of investigation.
One of the problems of life has to do with the strident demands of our appetites and the role of the imagination in relation to these demands. Will-power is required if these demands are to be refused without the wounding of the ego and the power of the will must also be related to the power of practical knowledge in the practical arenas of the world which are not factually structured but rather structured as a system of instrumentalities and causal relations between them and my body. Such a state of affairs is partly constituted and partly regulated by the Freudian reality principle. If this structure is not present then the imagination plays the primary role in the attempt to satisfy the demands of desires in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle. The libido in this constellation of powers becomes accustomed to certain forms of outlet, but the problem for the pleasure pain principle in such circumstances is that of the conflict of desires. Freud classifies Wilson as less than wise and claims:
“Wilsons immoderate superego, which demanded from him the impossible, was alone enough to condemn him to lifelong discontent, and the excessive quantity of libido which charged his passivity to his father demanded outlets difficult to find and to retain….We have seen that he had found an outlet for both his activity and passivity to his father trough identification of himself with Gladstone, and during his college course all other interests were subordinated to this desire to make himself a Christian statesman.”(P.87)
This is Freud’s portrait of one of the “new men” Hannah Arendt referred to in her work on the Origins of Totalitarianism. Whether one wants to characterise Wilsons narcissism as solipsism is an open question, but what is clear is that the imagination played a significant role in Wilsons political transactions at the expense of the demands of rationality and the reality principle. Wilson clearly enjoyed lecturing and Freud argues that this enjoyment was largely narcissistic. Wilsons discontent also manifested itself in his daily prayers and his difficulty in forming lasting friendly relationships, as well as in his neurasthenic symptoms and breakdowns. After each breakdown, Freud notes, there is a surge of aggression.(P.108) connected to unresolved conflicts and desires in relation to his father. These surges of aggression and hatred also appeared when his “friends” let him down, indicating that he regarded them as his disciples and regarded their disappointing behaviour as the betrayals of a Judas(P.123)
Freud’s eagle-eyed categorisations of Wilson and his discontented life led him to give us a part-explanation of why the new-men had been so successful politically:
“Throughout human history so many neurotics have risen suddenly to power that Wilsons achievement is far from unique but is extraordinary. Life often demands the qualities which a neurotic possesses in greater measure than normal men. Thus from the point of view of “success in life”, psychic disturbance may actually be an advantage.” (P.130)
Part of the conditions of success then may involve discarding traditional respect for facts and rationality and embracing a power of imagination tied to a transactional use of language in which Knowledge of facts and Knowledge of “the Good” play ever diminishing roles. Freud, also, however indicates that these qualities of the new men can as quickly be responsible for their rapid decline in popularity and turn their life and work into a fiasco(P.131). Kant pointed in his analysis of political man to the fact that man was so constituted (his “crooked timber”) that he was in need of a master which he did not want because he preferred to “master” his own affairs. Such an unstable desire entails that he is always looking for reasons to abolish masters from his life.
Wilsons time at Princetown was filled with intrigue, conflict hatred and narcissistic object choices, which resulted in him standing in the way of a million dollar donation for a much needed Graduate College. Having left Princetown for the political life his lack of knowledge of the world made itself more and more apparent:
“..he remained astonishingly ignorant of European Politics, geography and racial distribution. Even after he had made his great speeches in international affairs his knowledge of the continent of Europe remained elementary. He learned enough facts to make his speeches but often did not understand the implications of his own words. On the “George Washington” when he was in his way to the Peace Conference, he said that he intended to give Bohemia to Czechoslavakia. When he was asked what he intended to do with the three million Germans in Bohemia, he replied “Three million Germans in Bohemia! Thats curious! Masaryk never told me that!”. At dinner in the WhiteHouse in February 1916 there was a discussion of the Jewish race. Wilson insisted that there were at least one hundred million Jews in the world. When he was told that there were less than 15 million, he sent for the World Almanac, and even after seeing the figures could scarcely believe that he had been mistaken. He gave the Southern Tyrol to Italy because he did not know that there were Austrians of German blood south of the Brenner Pass.”(P.153-4)
Having been against the stringent reparations-spirit of the Treaty of Versailles he suddenly “compromised” in a fight he had promised to see through to the end (in accordance with his 14 point plan), convincing himself of improbable likelihoods such as the League of Nations reversing the decision. This debacle, according to Freud and Bullitt’s work, may have been the result of a nervous breakdown.(P.260). But the subsequent rationalisations were according to Freud and Bullitt:
“based on the ignoring of facts, and facts are not easy to ignore.”(P.262)
The mechanism which enabled him to do this was:
“Again and again he painted word-pictures of what would happen if he should fight and withdraw from the Peace Conference rather than compromise. He described the French army marching into Germany, obliterating whole cities by chemical warfare, killing women and children, conquering all Europe and then being submerged by a Communist revolution. Again and again he repeated “Europe is on fire and I cant add fuel to the flames.”…By this somewhat circuitous route he managed to bring further support to his conviction that he had sacrificed himself for the welfare of humanity, and therefore resembled Christ.”(P.262-3)
Without the information in relation to Wilsons religious convictions and the part they played in his daily routines for his whole life such an interpretation of Wilsons decision would not stand up to critical questioning, but many other features of Freud’s diagnosis lead us in the same direction. The narcissism of the new men had many different manifestations and took many different forms, but Wilson’s public and private life had been well documented and there was much support for the thesis of the above interpretation.
A critical point had been reached in the life of Wilson. Freud and Bullitt summarise the situation in the following words:
“..he had preached like a prophet who was ready to face death for his principles; and he had quit.If, having quit, instead of inventing soothing rationalisations, Wilson had been able to say to himself. I broke my promises because I was afraid to fight, he would not have disintegrated mentally, as he disintegrated after April 1919.”(P.263)
There is no doubting the accuracy of the above fact that Wilson was suffering and the situation deteriorated when he collapsed during a tour to promote his compromises. His trip had to be cancelled but upon returning to the White House he collapsed, his left side paralysed by a right-hemisphere thrombosis. His activities for his remaining term as President were largely discharged by Mrs Wilson and he finally died in his sleep, February 1924.
Freud in his work Civilisation and Its Discontents(1929) was very critical of the USA and its role in the affairs of Europe believing as many others that this Treaty of Versailles was going to lead to another European conflagration. His analysis of Wilson was not gong to be published until after his death out of respect for Mrs Wilson. Both authors agreed that the work could only be published after her death. Freud also criticised the Soviet Union in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and, given what subsequently happened in the rest of the century and 24 years into the next, his judgements proved to be prophetic. The dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations by the order of Truman after the new men of science managed to create a weapon of mass destruction which would be used to define who would sit on the security council of the UN, were defining moments in the History of the World in this era: an era which ought to be dubbed the “Age of Discontentment” in memory of Freud.
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