Sigumand Freud And Nietzsche: Personalities And The Mind Essay

Sigumand Freud and Nietzsche: Personalities and The Mind There were two great minds in this century. One such mind was that of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In the year 1923 he created a new view of the mind. That view encompassed the idea we have split personalities and that each one have their own realm, their own tastes, their own principles upon which they are guided. He called these different personalities the id, ego, and super ego. Each of them are alive and well inside each of our unconscious minds, separate but yet inside the mind inhabiting one equal plane. Then there was Nietzsche (1844-1900) who formulated his own theories about the sub-conscious. His ideas were based on the fact that inside each and every one of us is a raging battle going on. This battle involves the two most basic parts of society, the artistic Dionysian and the intelligent Apollonian. Sometimes one being becomes more dominant than the other or they both share the same plane. Even though individually created, these theories could be intertwined, even used together. Thus it is the object of this paper to prove that the Freudian theory about the unconscious id, and ego are analogous to the idea on the Apollonian and Dionysian duality's presented by Nietzsche. "The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life..." (Freud, The Ego and the Id, 3). To say it another way, psycho-analysis cannot situate the essence of the psychial in consciousness, but is mandated to comply consciousness as a quality of the pyschial, which may be present (Freud, The Ego and the ID, 3). "...that what we call our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as he expresses it, we are 'lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces," (Groddeck, quoted from Gay, 635). Many, if not all of us have had impressions of the same, even though they may not have overwhelmed us to the isolation of all others, and we need to feel no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck's discovery in the field of science. To take it into account by naming the entity which begins in the perception system. And then begins by being the 'ego,' and by following his [Groddeck's] system in identifying ... ...ersonality were named. The Apollonian, "...music had long been familiar to the Greeks as an Apollonian art , as a regular beat like that of waves lapping the shore, a plastic rhythm expressly developed for the portrayal of Apollonian conditions," (AD, in Jacobus, 556). That "plastic rhythm" described by Nietzsche is the cardinal groundwork for the theory of the Apollonian. Apollonian people are those who are totally based in the scientific world. They have no real imagination, no abstractness to their thinking. Whereas people who are wholly Dionysian are the opposite. These folk have no real basis in the real world. They are completely out of synch with reality because they think only in hypothetical thoughts. Hence the fact the most, if not all humans have a little of both in them. Most great scientists for instance are both Apollonian and Dionysian. They are mainly Apollinistic, due to the fact that they are clearly intelligent, which according to Nietzsche is the foundation for Apollonian thought, but they are also Dionysian. This can be said if you take Albert Einstein for an example. He is probably one of the most intelligent (and thus Apollonian) thinkers