The Anthropology of Freud and Woytyla

While Sigmund Freud was not really writing on the issue of anthropology, it may be posited as he bequeathed us with more or less a revised and yet novel anthropology.  Writing at the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, Freud inserted a new angle of understanding human beings, which used to consider men and women as simply entities of body and soul.  Freud boldly asserted that men and women are clearly sexual beings, and their development is similarly sexual.  He similarly held that human beings are in the state of evolution – as Darwin believed, too – but psychically – clearly preempting de Chardin.  Further, Freud’s literature would also tell his belief that men and women are actually determined, having tripartite psyche composed of the ego, the id and the superego (mirroring opaquely Plato).

Interestingly, Karol Wojtyla began his anthropology with similar assertion: that human beings are sexual beings, apart from their having body and soul as constitutive elements.  But, immediately, he deviated from Freud as he passionately believed the inherent dignity of the human person, which has made his anthropology more reasonable and more positive in its tone.

In his seminal work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud stated the need for avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure.  In his later works, he moved forward to and from the pleasure principle – that is, he did not abandon it; he modified it.  Introducing the reality principle, he was trying to bring out that there is actually more to human beings than pleasure and pain.  In fact, men and women would sometimes forego pleasure for particular reasons that go beyond the pleasure principle, which is just sensory.

In formulating his developmental theory, Freud delved into the psyche, the mind, the unconscious, and called humans sexual beings.  Accordingly, infants are in their oral stage where they derive sexual pleasure from being at the breast; and, the children are in their phallic stage where they are fascinated with the male genitalia, go through the time of the Oedipus or Electra Complex where the male children sexually desire their mothers and the females their fathers.  Then, children move into a latency period, where sexuality is not apparent but which is revived with puberty and maturity in adulthood.

Freud similarly subscribed to Darwinian (and Lamarckian?) evolution.  This is apparent in his ideas about omnipotence of thought, or the over-estimation of psychic processes as opposed to reality.  Evolving in phases, Freud believed that the primitive phase of human development is characterized by animism in which the primitive men and women project spirit culled from themselves onto all others.  With this, human being is held to be the omnipotent one.  This phase must make one reminiscent of Plato and his theory of forms and belief that everything has spirit.  The succeeding phase is religious, where the projection of spirit moves to a being(s) that is/are greater than human beings (who is/are obviously the more omnipotent one).  Finally, there is the phase of science which eliminates altogether the notion of spirit and the omnipotence.  In contradistinction, though, to Darwin, Freud saw human evolution not as physical but as psychic.  That is, human evolution according to Freud has to do with man’s relation to the world around him.  Anyone who’s familiar with Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere would detect some degree of preemption here.