The Disease Called Man: The Problem

Photo courtesy of http://wneps.org/institute/gen_info.

In Norman O’ Brown’s, Life Against Death, he analyzes the concept of repression and Freudian thinking. Freud basis his entire ideology on this notion of “repression” and the various ways human beings hide their subconscious thoughts.  Specifically in chapter one of the text, O’Brown discusses the way Freud emphasizes repression and how significant this is in the “essence of the individual.”

The opening pages of the chapter look at the different ways that the unconscious psychic life of people can creep into the conscious unknowingly. For example, when people dream or have the occasional Freudian slip of the tongue, psychoanalysts will suspect that something from the unconscious is making its way into the conscious.  Currently, if an individual misspeaks and accidently implies a sexual innuendo, many people accuse the person of having “a slip of the tongue.” Even if a person does not mean to make a sexual reference, many people in today’s society would like to presume that the person is some how revealing an unconscious thought that has made its way to be expressed in the conscious.

 According to Freud, some of those unconscious thoughts are things that are hidden in the subconscious, yet many human beings are still not aware that those thoughts even exist. As O’Brown states, the way that Freud describes psychoanalysis is, “nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious mental life.”

Freud even goes further to say that some unconscious ideas have the ability to come in contact with the conscious self. However, human beings feel the need to repress these unconscious thoughts consciously and this causes great psychoanalytic conflict.
-Nidhi