On the Essence of Human Nature

Man's search for his true nature follows many paths. Along the way, since time primordial, our ancestors caught glimpses that to them seemed so persuasive that they became perpetuated in myths, in holy writ, in philosophy, and in popular conviction. None of these glimpses contains the whole picture, which accounts for the many contradictory myths. Our longing to know ourselves has its counterpart in a strong reluctance to know and particularly to acknowledge as our own those human features that horrify us. We prefer to view them as bestial, sick, and alien.

With the advent of psychoanalysis we acquired a new vista, a welcome widening of our horizon. Unconscious processes became an acceptable concept. However, we perpetuated our age-old habit of dualistic categorizing by assigning to “the unconscious” a place in opposition to consciousness. Beyond its use as a clinical tool, psychoanalysis has become yet another view of human nature, another philosophical system or, more precisely, several such philosophical views. It was not the intent of its founder that this should be so. Rather, Freud believed that psychoanalysis was an objective tool and as such able to replace subjectively held misconceptions. This, to our chagrin, turned out to be an illusion. Different schools of psychoanalysis that have sprung up in the wake of Freud's work hold different views of human nature. All of them, including Freud's own, are based on beliefs, not on hard facts.

The manner in which humans create new concepts depends upon a preexisting conceptual world in which they live. In the past such world views or conceptual constellations were slow to change. In modern times the pace of change has accelerated enormously. Since Freud's days, in less than a century, old belief systems have been abandoned and replaced, and many more are being questioned and scrutinized. À pertinent example is the concept of “libido,” which literally means “sexual energy” and in its psychoanalytic derivation “life fo