The Anthropology of Sigmund Freud and the Personalism of Karol Wojtyla

At the end of the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth Century, there emerged a revised and yet original anthropology. Sigmund Freud, focused not on the soul or body per se but psyche, inserted a new angle at which to look at man. Man is overtly sexual. His development is sexual. Man could be seen as the evolving, an image Darwin, but evolving psychically, a precursor to de Chardin. Man is also determined. Man had a tripartite psyche, an opaque mirror of Plato, with the ego, the id, and the superego. Fifteen years after Freud’s death there emerged another brilliant mind from Poland, Karol Wojtyla. Wojtyla, a Catholic priest, had a similar idea. Man is a sexual being. However, Wojtyla splits in understanding. He sees the inherent dignity of the human person. He has a traditional Catholic understanding of the unity of body and soul. Wojtyla’s anthropology is more reasonable and leads to a more positive understanding of man.

Before Freud there was a prevalent prudishness when it came to sexuality. An overt sexuality showed up mainly in literature and art. In my limited knowledge, I have not experienced an overt sexual nature in any philosophy, except for maybe Utilitarianism, but even that is only secondary, in that sex is pleasurable. However, one can see that Freud holds fast to the pleasure principle put forth by the fathers of Utilitarianism. “Further aspects are opened up when we take into consideration the fact that the sexual instinct in man does not originally serve the purposes of procreation, but has as its aim the gain of particular kinds of pleasure.”[2] Freud begins one of his seminal works Beyond the Pleasure Principle by first stating need for avoidance of pain and seeking of pleasure. He goes on later in the work move to forward from the pleasure principle. He does not abandon it; he modifies it. He introduces the reality principle, “This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction…and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.”[3] Freud is trying to bring out that there is more to man than pleasure and pain. Because sometimes man must forego pleasure for certain reasons that go beyond the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle is just sensory. Freud wishes to delve into the psyche, the mind, the unconscious. His intention is well; he wishes to heal people of their neuroses. In formulating his developmental theory, he explicitly calls humans sexual beings. The oral stage of infants is set around the sexual pleasure gained from being at the breast. At about three, the phallic stage, children become fascinated with the male genitalia (penis envy of women). From this comes the time of the Oedipus complex, were the male child sexually desires his mother. This period moves into a latency period where sexuality is not apparent, only to be revived with puberty and matured in adulthood.[4] According to Freud, man is explicitly sexual.

Freud was convinced of the Darwinian evolution and even Lamarckian evolution which was not as popular. He also posited his own evolutionary schema centered on the “omnipotence of thought,” which is “the over-estimation of psychic processes as opposed to reality.”[5] The primitive phase is the animistic in which the primitive man projects spirit, gathered from himself, onto all other creatures. With this action man is the omnipotent one. This phase can even be seen in Plato, with his theory of forms and his belief that everything has spirit. The next phase is the religious phase. The projection of spirit, then, moves to a being(s) greater than man, and, hence, this greater being(s) is the omnipotent one. Finally, there is the scientific phase in which there is no spirit and no omnipotence. Man “has acknowledged his smallness and has submitted to death as to all other natural necessities in a spirit of resignation.”[6] This evolution of man is psychic. It is not physical. It has to do with man’s relation to the world around him. This evolution, which Freud sees as positive, could be a precursor to the psychic evolution of de Chardin’s noosphere.

Being the good materialist that he was, Freud could not help but be a determinist as well. He denied all metaphysics. Everything was determined by the laws of science. “It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon…that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.”[7] The instinct wishes to go back, to restore what was before, however, the inertia inherent in organic life, evolution, obliged man to abandon those earlier things. The existence of the unconscious and its power also helps in Freud’s determinism. “Unconscious desires or emotions can make people do things that they cannot explain rationally, even to themselves.”[8] Man does not have power, will, over himself. He is determined. He has no free will.

Also, the unconscious/conscious division is another anthropological derivation. It has the dualistic structure of Plato and Descartes. There is tension between consciousness and unconsciousness that is reminiscent of the body/soul tension. The unconscious asserts itself in reality causing neuroses and other problems that the consciousness cannot solve nor handle. The difference is that Freud has a Reductionist view of man. There is no soul, no spirit for Freud. “It might be said that in the last analysis the ‘spirit’ of a person…is the faculty of remembering and representing the object, after he…was withdrawn from conscious perception.”[9] Consciousness is housed within the brain. Freud says that what religion and primitive peoples ascribed the soul was actually the unconscious, which is within the brain.

Also, for Freud, the human psyche has a tripartite division. This heralds back to Plato's tripartite division of the soul. However, Freud’s construction is different, but still conscious of his predecessor. Freud starts out with the ego. “It is the institution in the mind which regulates all its own constituent processes.”[10] The ego is both conscious and unconscious meaning one is both aware and not aware of it. The ego is grounded in perception. The id is the appetitive part. It houses the desire of food and sex. The ego’s job is to keep the id under control. This is very similar to the charioteer image. The ego is the charioteer, and the id is the mustang. Freud even uses the image of a rider on horseback. In which the rider must hold in check the superior strength of the horse. “The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id with contains the passions.”[11] Then, there is the super-ego, the conscience. It is from the super-ego, or the ego ideal, that religious convictions originate. These three parts are co-operative within the mind. Although one could easily overpower the other, which of course would lead to neurosis. In looking at Freud’s works as a whole one can start to see his anthropological views.

Wojtyla’s anthropology has a much different background. As a Catholic priest, then bishop, then cardinal, then as pope, he had a definite Christian bias. For the sake of diffusing Freud’s anthropology, though, I will try my best to not take that part of Wojtyla, although I cannot totally dismiss it. Wojtyla’s anthropology is personalistic. He centers on the person, on the person’s dignity, the person’s free will, the objective subject of the person, and the sexual person. “Every human being is by nature a sexual being, and belongs from birth to one of the two sexes” and “a person’s whole existence has a particular orientation which shows itself in his or her actual internal development.”[12] This seems to coincide with Freud’s psycho-sexual developmental theory. Wojtyla disagrees with Freud’s ideas on child development. Freud’s focus is on the sexual urge which for Wojtyla is a natural drive in human beings. It is not an “interior source of specific actions somehow ‘imposed in advance’ but…a certain direction in man’s life implicit in his very nature.”[13] The sexual urge is not determined. It is a property of human existence, but it requires responsibility. Wojtyla even calls Freud out. For Freud pleasure is the end of the sexual urge. “The sexual urge, then, is not purely ‘libidinistic’ but existential in character…a subject endowed with an ‘inner self’ as man is, a subject who is a person, cannot abandon to instinct the whole responsibility for the use of the sexual urge, and make enjoyment his sole aim—but must assume full responsibility for the way in which the sexual urge is used.”[14] Man must take responsibility for his actions. He must take responsibility for his gift of sexual urge. Everything cannot rely solely on principle of Utility. Pleasure cannot be the end of man. Pleasure is contingent and not necessary. Therefore, to order one’s end to a contingency leaves that person unsatisfied. This is totally objective, in that another person is treated not as another subject to be love but an object or means of pleasure. It leads to problems of extreme egoism because one is always one own pleasure. Furthermore, if one holds to the pleasure principle, the dignity of the human person would eventually be degraded.

The dignity of the human person is the cornerstone of Wojtyla’s Personalism. His Personalism understands the human person as objective subject. The human person is a subject in that he or she is unique and irreducible. “Subjectivity, on the other hand, is, as it were, a term proclaiming that the human being’s proper essence cannot be totally reduced to and explained by the proximate genus and specific difference.”[15] In other words, each person has his or her own essence. This allows from the Personalism to take the forefront. There cannot be, though, pure subjectivity. The subject, the person is objective. The person is related to the somebodies and somethings outside of him or herself. This person is in reality. The human being, each person, stands above all empirical things. We, as humans, use objects. However, human person are above things; they are subjects as well as objects. “Whenever a person is the object of your activity, remember, that you may not treat the person as only the means to an end, as an instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she, too, has, or at least should have, distinct personal ends.”[16] There is the dignity of the human person which should not be encroached upon.

Not only does man have dignity but is, also, self-determined. In other words, he has free choice, or free will, because “every voluntary action is, of its nature, intentional.”[17] If every voluntary act is intentional, then no voluntary act is determined. This quiets Freud’s determinism. Even the unconscious or the sub-conscious is not determinate. For the retrieval of repressed experiences, takes an act of the will if not from the patient, then from the psychoanalyst.

Remember Wojtyla sees the person as sexual. There are two sexes, male and female. Both are equal, for Personalism does not admit in degrees. No one is more of a person than another. For Freud this is not the case. He has a negative view of woman. It starts early in the developmental stages. First the mother, a woman, is the object of desire for the much younger male child, in the Oedipus complex. This is a degradation of her dignity, first of all, as an object of desire. On the opposite end of the coin, in the phallic stage the girl, according to Freud, has penis envy. Man is the envied individual. Man is the more important of the sexes. For Wojtyla, there is uniqueness to being woman. “Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman’s womb…This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude toward human beings, not only toward her child, but every human being, which profoundly marks the woman’s personality.”[18] Each sex has it own individual qualities, influenced by masculinity and femininity, that allow attraction and an object of love. Notice I said an object of love not an object of desire.

Love is a whole other ball game. Wojtyla sees love in the gospel sense of the greatest commandment. For him the commandment to love is the personalistic norm. “Strictly speaking the commandment says: ‘Love person,’ and the personalistic norms says: ‘A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.’”[19] In love, one loves the person, the subject, and this love is self-donating. Freud’s love is very different. Freud’s understanding of love comes from the broken experience of male/female intimate relationships which are in themselves fallen. For him, there are conditions of love. There’s a “‘need for an injured third party;’ its effect is that the person in question never chooses as an object of love a woman who is unattached, that is, a girl or an independent woman, but only one in regard to whom another man has right possession.”[20] He goes on to say that a pure woman is less desirable and deserving of love than say a promiscuous woman. He frequently states that the man or the woman, mostly the woman, is a love-object. This idea of love as one can see can go against the ideal of the personalistic norm. For the personalistic norm, calls one to love person not love-object. Love-object strips the person of his or her subjectivity as well as his or her dignity. For Freud, love is psychological and physiological only.

Love is not, however, merely a biological or even a psycho-physiological crystallization of the sexual urge, but is something fundamentally different from it. For although love grows out of the sexual urge and develops on that basis and in the conditions which the sexual urge creates in the psycho-physiological lives of concrete people, it is none the less given its definitive shape by acts of will at the level of the person.[21]

Just the sexual urge can be seen as Reductionist and the person, as subjective, is irreducible. Reducing the human person to just the sexual urge is contrary to the person as person.

These concepts of the human person can have powerful influence on today. Post-modern society has a Utilitarian, pleasure seeking anthropology. Determinism and materialism, even within the mind, is prevalent. Freud, although constantly berated, has had a lasting influence on Western culture. Wojtyla’s Personalism redeems and uplifts the negative self-centered anthropology of Freud. The focus turns, then, from pleasure and avoidance of pain to a mutual giving of self which finds its culmination in marriage. Wojtyla’s positive anthropology is a bright and shining light in the darkness of Utilitarian, Freudian anthropology.

and Neurotics. Translated by A. A. Brill. With an introduction by Aaron Esman.

[1] As a side note, Freud does not have an explicit work of philosophical anthropology. Therefore, I had to synthesize my readings into an explicit anthropology. This is my understanding of Freud and not Freud himself because of the aforementioned reason.

[2] Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love ed. Philip Rieff (NY: Collier Books, 1963), 26.

[3] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle trans. James Strachey intro. Gregory Zilbourg, (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 7.

[4] Leslie Forster Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), 163.

[5] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics trans. A.A. Brill intro. Aaron Esman (NY: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 84.

[6] Ibid, 85-86.

[7] Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 43.

[8] Stevenson, 161.

[9] Totem and Taboo, 90.

[10] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id trans. Joan Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1957), 16.

[11] Ibid, 30.

[12] Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility trans. H. T. Willets (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 47.

[13] Ibid, 46.

[14] Ibid, 62-63.

[15] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being” in Person and Community: Selected Essays trans. Theresa Sandok (NY: Peter Lang, 1993), 211

[16] Love and Responsibility, 28.

[17] Kevin Doran, Solidarity: A Synthesis of Personalism and Communalism in the Though of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (NY: Peter Lang, 1996), 130.

[18] John Crosby, Personalist Papers (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 262-263.

[19] Love and Responsibility, 41.

[20] Sigmund Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love ed. Philip Rieff (NY: Collier Books, 1963), 50.

[21] Love and Responsibility, 49.