Human Nature

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the issue of human nature, as seen in three different works: Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents", Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", and Karl Marx's "The Marx-Engels Reader". The paper offers all three as they present differing views of human nature, yet together they argue that whatever freedom human beings possess is either nullified or dangerously threatened by forces much greater and more powerful than the individual human being. The writer believes that all three see aspects of the irrational (the subconscious, imperialism, historical materialism) as the enemy of human freedom, sanity and goodness.

From the Paper:

"In this social context, the psychoanalyst's role can be seen as a means of discovering the roots of the individual's traumas in order to free him to act consciously and responsibly, to help that individual to learn to adapt successfully to society and to the problems society presents, and to act more effectively with and within the institutions of society. Without social institutions controlling the individual who is ruled otherwise by unconscious forces beyond his knowledge and his control, that individual will respond mechanically and without real freedom to social conflict."

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