During the Enlightenment, philosophically and spiritually, authority and the divine rights of Monarchy were overthrown and democracy ennobled the citizen, who now became free. A new Virtue, Liberty, was innaugurated and the enlightened man sought it and preferred death to the loss of it. Whether your leanings are to the crown or to liberty, you now live in a world where your inaliable rights as a human being have been fought for, won, and continue to be ensured.
After the horrors of World War I, however, the shift for many western intellectuals was from the objective to the subjective. Certain towering individuals began to realize the Great War being waged was not necessarily between despots and deprived populaces, but was being waged internally....psychologically.
This is the birth of the modern era.
Auguste' Comte, the social philosopher declared 'man poses endless need and endleess danger'. Man. As in you. Me.
Freud, this article's hero, discovered a dark, uncharted territory, the unconscious, and set about mapping out it's nebulous landscape.
The Shadow.
Freud found that we all, living under largely Victorian values, hid the worst elements of ourselves from ourselves. We repressed. Sexual desires, aggression, unseemly aspects of ourselves that were very real were simply denied, pushed below the surface and ignored. One of the principles Freud discovered about this new unconscious however, was that the psychic energy that had been repressed was not destroyed. It simply remained latent and was residing, festering, growing ever more powerful and remaining within us. The resultant 'person', the negative unconscious 'person' that contained all the traits we abhorred Freud termed the Shadow.
The Shadow made manifest.
Freud began to notice ways the Shadow would seep out from the unconscious and make itself manifest in the world. One way this was done was through Projection. Freud found we would Project our repressed unseemly and unwanted attributes onto others. The faults, sins, and deplorable aspects of our neighbors were in fact aspects of ourselves. We saw ourselves in our neighbors. Freud found that we had found the enemy, and the enemy was us.
'Progress is the harmonious balance of opposites'
Although this maxim was spoken later by another psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud found that the only way to progress as a responsible human being was to make the unconscious, on one pole, conscious, residing on the opposite pole, and then begin to develop methods of dealing with our problems. What was dark and latent had to be brought to the light and made manifest, so it could be resolved.
We are rascally and righteous and need to be whole.
Freud then set about, through psychoanalysis, to allow troubled souls to realize they were rascally and righteous. Freud found that people needed to accept all of themselves, negative as well as positive, in order to become whole and truly healthy. The implications were staggering. Now, rather than finding threat in the surrounding environment, in our neighbor, or those residing in other states, we first needed to look to ourselves and solve those problems raging within us before blaming the world for our ills.
Self responsibility.
If we now matured in realizing we were our own cause for much of our suffering, we could take responibility for our problems rather than blaming others and truly begin to progress as human beings.
This has not been an exhaustive study into the theories of psychoanalysis or Freud's work. I have not even mentioned the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, the tripartite makeup of our selves, according to Freud.
I have just attempted to honor Freud's wisdom and pass it along.
It is an old wisdom couched in modernist terms.
The worlds great spiritual traditions have always recognized the internal struggle that truly trumps any external obstacles we may encounter.
Freud just modernized, perhaps secularized this wisdom and provided a way for even the unbelieving to become redeemed.
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