Anxiety, Repression, and Morality: Plato and Freud

The range and suggestiveness of Freud's thought have established so many points of contact with his predecessors that a veritable prehistory of Freudianism has grown up over the years. Sometimes there is a direct parallel of specific ideas; sometimes Freud found a new solution for an old problem, and sometimes there is a less direct correspondence. In such wide applicability critics often see evidence that Freudian theory is so vague and speculative that it is applicable everywhere—and therefore nowhere. They suspect that Freud borrowed many of his ideas and that “what is true is not new, what is new is not true.” Apart from the question of whether a strictly empirical and experimental method is appropriate or possible for all psychological inquiry, it can hardly be disputed that much of Freud is metapsychology. It is this that gives his thought its flexibility and naturally leads to similarities with earlier theories, notably with Plato's psychology. A feature common to both Freudian and Platonic method is the dialectic development of a conceptual pattern out of a body of data so that as the discussion proceeds the one defines the significance of the other. Plato's data are of course not clinical, but the scientific status of clinical data used by Freud has itself been questioned. In their critical evaluation of Freudian theory Eysenck and Wilson3 have cited Plato's doctrine of the tripartite soul as an example of an idea perhaps borrowed by Freud but in any case not turned into something scientifically valid. The doctrine is actually part of a broader conception of human development, and in it we can not only observe how Plato relates specific behavioral data to a pattern that gives the data order but also detect an extensive parallel