“That Dreadful Universal Thing”*: A Review Article of Freud and Human Nature by Ilham Dilman

I What we can ascribe to human nature does not determine what we can and what we cannot make sense of; rather what we can and what we cannot make sense of determines what we can ascribe to human nature.

Peter Winch, “Human Nature”.

Just as intellectuals in the eighteenth century had to find ways of being moral without the existence of God, we have to find ways of being moral with the existence of infantile sexuality and the idea of the unconscious. While it is a rudimentary fact of the moral life that our preferences do not accord with our standards, and Freud redescribed this in unique and inspired ways, early psychoanalytic theory never yielded an explicit vocabulary of virtues and vices. Indeed this would have seemed to have been a contradiction in terms, or rather, a contradiction in scientific terms. Freud continually disclaimed that psychoanalysis was any kind of ethical theory or Weltanschauung, despite the more obvious sense in which it was a method for exploring the ethical theories of his patients; a way of understanding how people came to terms with the unacceptable in themselves, and what the terms were. Far from being exempt from these issues psychoanalysis has always been preoccupied, albeit implicitly, with the fundamental Socratic question of whether virtue can be taught. One can see the splits and factions in psychoanalysis as arising out of different kinds of answers to this question. The history of psychoanalysis then becomes a history of different fantasies of rigour; and these link up with the very various concepts of cure psychoanalytic theory has generated. With an approach derived from Wittgenstein and his follower Rush Rhees — meaning, an approach without jargon — Dilman has written a misleadingly placid and occasionally pious book that is the most interesting critique of the place of morality in Freud's work, and therefore of the aims of analysis, since Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of a Moralist.

Freud and Human Nature addresses the questio