Conscience

Freud - Conscience as Conflict

(13 mins)

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Freud – Conscience in Conflict
• External authority is internalised through our
upbringing aged 3-5 years. Fear of loss of love
is internalised, and the child seeks to please the
parent (or a transfers parental authority to God).
• Id – the pleasure principle
• Ego – the reality principle
• Superego – the idealising principle

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Adolf Eichmann
• Nazi, kidnapped in 1962 and tried for genocide in
Israel
• Appeals to Kant – “I had to obey orders”
• Hannah Arendt – “the banality of evil” 1963
• “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme,
and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow
and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the
surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some
depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is
frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has
depth that can be radical.”

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The Iceberg

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The Unconscious
• Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too
frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such
information was locked away in the unconscious mind. This can happen
through the process of repression.

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Freudian Ideas

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Freudian Fixation of the ego

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Eros v Thanatos
Love and hate co-exist as “ambivalence” - the life drive, Eros, struggles
against the death drive, Thanatos

Eros – creativity and libido

Thanatos – destructiveness and aggression

Self-preservation and happiness, versus self-destruction eg in matters of

love.

“Eros strives to make the ego and the loved object one, abolish all spatial
barriers between them.” Freud Copyright © 2015 Active Education
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Freud said
• “Our conscience, far from being the implacable judge moralists are talking
about, is by its origins, social anxiety and nothing more”. Sigmund Freud

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Critically Contrast Freud and Aquinas
• Note - Fisher & Greenberg (1996) concluded that there is evidence to
support Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects
of his ideas on depression (as anxiety) and paranoia (irrational fears).
They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for
Freud’s views on women’s sexuality (feelings of being a failed boy) and
how their development differs from men.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1946“What Freud says about the unconscious sounds
like science but in fact is just a means of representation”.

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