Unconscious Desires and the Human Psyche

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) said of Nietzsche that he had "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live." In spite of this, Freud always denied that Nietzsche was an influence on his thought, in spite of his multiple references to Nietzsche in his early work. While Freud certainly drew from Nietzsche's ideas, he was an original thinker in his own right, who followed on the same path of inquiry as Nietzsche, but with the tools of empirical research and the within the scientific spirit of psycho-analysis. Freud comes to believe that the driving force of human life is libido, a sexual impulse, and that the stages of psychosexual development determine the health or pathology of one's adult life. Central to his analysis of human psychology is the Oedipus Complex, and his notion that the superego emerges to suppress it. In this episode, we also discuss the Id (Unconsciousness), the faculty of repression, the concept of cathexis, and the meaning of dreams. In spite of the ways in which Freud has been marginalized in recent years, in his work we find an extraordinary thinker who built upon Nietzsche's ideas, and truly managed to change the entire paradigm of psychological thinking.