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PARTISAN REVIEW
not unfounded: Freud was a pathologist who studied aberrant behavior
as a way of gaining insight into normality. Whether he allowed for the
coloration this one-sidedness would give his work is questionable.
Freud's circumspection about the nature of man's innermost being was
undisguised, though he managed to keep it from becoming outright
cynicism. And Freud's pessimism was rooted in his basic assumptions
about man's evolution and the evolution of human consciousness - as–
sumptions that bear heavily both on his view of the individual and the
slant that view gave to psychoanalysis.
In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920), Freud develops a picture of
how consciousness must have come into being. He speculates that an or–
ganism susceptible to stimuli must once have existed in a simplified form
of undifferentiated matter, but that, with time, the barrage of stimuli the
organism received would have forced its surface to become differentiated
as a crust, a buffer that would serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Fi–
nally, Freud says, this crust
would at last have been so thoroughly "baked through" by stimula–
tion that it would present the most favorab le conditions for the re–
ception of stimuli ... it would have become capable of giving rise
to consciousness.
However compelling this explanation may be, one cannot help but
notice the conservative cast Freud's theory gives
to
man's origins. Freud
not only excludes - or at least neglects - the explanation Nietzsche
would give (that consciousness sprang spontaneously from an inherent
reaching out), but he makes the evolution of consciousness an ultra–
Darwinian event: Man is ultimately nothing more than a sophisticated
cortical response to reality, and his nature is thus thoroughly determined
by that reality.
Freud's theory of life's origins remained conservative because he never
fully pursued and developed the optimistic intuitions about human nature
(such as the concept of Eros) that forced their way past his somber cir–
cumspection. Unlike Nietzsche, he rarely talked about how higher and
higher forms of energy might be derived from lower forms. Instead, he
tended to focus on how lower forms were twisted and distorted by
stimuli, and on how such distortion caused deep disturbances in person–
ality. For Freud, man's striving for higher goals was an adaptive, rather
than a transcendent feature.
Keeping in mind this conservatism about the origins and nature of
consciousness, one can easily understand the deeper mistrust Freud
felt
abou t the moral potential in human nature itself: An organism that has
