What I Have in Common with Freud

 

Reading Freud - especially his clinical work - one gets the strong sense that he was fascinated, intrigued, entertained, delighted in the rich, complex, convoluted web of, as he calls them "rationalizations" that his patients constructed in order to maintain their own psyche.  I prefer the term "apologetics," rather than "rationalizations," to describe the incredibly creative work that people do to maintain their own beliefs, but I, too, love them.  

We are, in a sense, made out of these apologetics, these rationalizations.  My ego is formed, at least partly, out of them, and every person's apologetics are slightly different, like a fingerprint.  They make us distinctive, unique.

Probably the principle difference between Freud and Nietzsche: for Freud, what underlay all these rationalizations was the id.  Nietzsche recognized the id as well, but rather than putting it at the foundation of his philosophy, as he saw it, under these exertions of the will, he saw only the abyss.

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