Freud, Sartre, and Humanism

¶ … Freud and the existentialists are too pessimistic about human nature? Are humanistic psychologists closer to the truth, or too optimistic? According to Freud, all desire is a form of displacement. First, the young boy desires his mother. However, unable to realize this desire because of societal conventions, he shifts the focus of his affection to another woman and tries to become like his father instead and find a substitute mother/woman.

Similarly, the young girl shifts her desire for a penis onto a male, which becomes her way of 'having' a penis. Both developmental trajectories result in the child similarly never having the thing he or she truly wants. However, this form of repression is necessary to prevent incest and repression of all kinds is required for human society to function.

For Freud, society is an inevitable series of compromises: the id (and the ego, which satisfies the id's desires) is always at war with the superego, which relegates individuals to a state of constant denial. To be alive is to be neurotic or in a constant state of conflict. "The Id accounts for 90% of who we are. It is unconscious and therefore unknown to us, but it shapes our conscious life and sometimes even dominates the Ego.

We then become neurotic" when the id is denied ("Theories of human nature," n.d.). Existentialists similarly see human beings in a state of conflict with their environments. Sartre famously stated that "existence precedes essence" ("Theories of human nature," n.d.). Rather than essentializing human nature, Sartre believed that human beings had the potential to be free of constraints, but that they had tremendous difficulty exercising this freedom.

"The reality of our freedom is good and bad -- it creates anguish, it leads us to self-deception as we try to avoid our freedom. We must struggle against having our lives determined by the others -- this is inauthentic" ("Theories of human nature," n.d.). In stark contrast to Freud, Sartre sees external pressures and determination not as negative but as a threat to human freedom. Human beings create barriers for themselves that hem in that freedom. These barriers only exist in their own head and are not necessary.

Although Freud and Sartre have very different views of human nature, both see most human beings as effectively in conflict with themselves and with society. For Freud, natural desires are inevitably going to clash against the collective needs of the functioning of the family and others. Sartre stresses the need for self-empowerment, but views human beings as almost inevitably falling into inauthentic habits that leave them paralyzed and in chains. Sartre's theory is not necessarily depressing, however.

Rather it calls upon people to enact a radical reevaluation of how they relate to others. Freud also offers some hope for self-reconciliation in the form of psychoanalysis, which can help individuals reconcile their neuroses. Humanistic theories of psychoanalysis, like existentialism, reject Freudian determinism and embrace human free will but do so in a much more positive fashion. "Humanistic psychologists argue that objective reality is less important than a person's subjective perception.