The Anthropology of Freud and Woytyla

Aside from human dignity, Wojtyla believed that human beings are self-determined.  Human beings have free choice or free will.  This runs counter to Freud’s determinism, obviously.  Impliedly, Wojtyla maintained that even the unconscious is not determinate for the retrieval of repressed experiences takes an act of the will either from the patient or from the psycho-analyst.

Wojtyla saw the person as sexual.  As human beings are either male or females, he held that human beings are equal. That is, no one is more of a person than another.  Freud, however, showed some indications of negative view of women.  According to Freud, the inferiority of women starts early in the developmental stages, where – firstly – the mother as a woman is the object of desire for the much younger male child (Oedipus complex).  One may infer that this is a degradation of her dignity as an object of desire.  Besides, in the phallic stage of the girl, Freud held that she has penis envy.  Clearly, man is the envied individual; man is the more important of the sexes.

Wojtyla asserted the uniqueness of being woman.  He showed the connection of motherhood to the mystery of life, making women rise to an attitude toward human beings. 

The former Pontiff similarly taught that sexes have their individual qualities as masculine or feminine, allowing attraction and an object of love (not [just] of desire).

Now, about love, which Wojtyla sees from the perspective of the Gospel.  For him, love is the personalistic norm.  For a person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.  In love, one reaches to the other person in a self-donating manner.  Freud on the other hand viewed love from the viewpoint of the broken experience of male/female intimate relationships.  For him, love goes with conditions.  There’s a need for an injured third party, because a pure woman is less desirable and deserving of love than a promiscuous woman.  Freud stated, too, that the man or the woman is a love-object (which is countering the ideal of the personalistic norm).  As love-object, the person is stripped of his or her subjectivity as well as his or her dignity.  For Freud, love is merely psychological and physiological.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Different systems of anthropology can have powerful influence on post-modern societies.  Freud, despite its peculiarities, has had a lasting influence on Western culture.  Fortunately, we have Wojtyla, whose positive anthropology serves as a bright and shining light in the darkness of Freudian anthropology.