Word: freuded
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...intellectual history. He wore a beard when beards were fashionable--an unfashionable capitulation for a Harvard man. And his massive work on psychology contains only one tiny paragraph on sexuality--an equally unfashionable oversight today. Sex leads to Vienna, however, and few writers complement each other as well as Freud and James...
...particular needs." The classification or categorization is made for its utility, for its survival value; this should recall the influence of Darwin. Animals do not have a sense of self--they live in a state prior to Cogito ergo sum. So do infants. And this leads at last to Freud and his developmental scheme. "The id," Freud writes, "contains everything that is inherited, that is fixed in the constitution--above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the somatic organization and which find their first mental expression in the id in forms unknown...
...said earlier, Freud's work highlights the contemporary relevance of James. Though this is so, James has more to offer Freudians than they can ever hope to convey to him in return. "The power of the id," according to Freud, "expresses the true purpose of the individual organism's life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs." In an analogous statement James remarks, "Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false...
...both men fulfilment appears to lie in pre-rational experience. Yet the differences are marked. The id is often negatively valued by Freud, and he tends to regard id-gratification as a matter of tension-reduction. James, however, regards pure experience as neither inherently good nor bad. Furthermore, he allows for more expansive modes of gratification than mere tension-reduction...
...religious metaphor, it was given to Freud to discover a new and provocative trinity. Yet he proclaimed, "Where id is, there shall ego be." And he could well have added, "Where superego is, there shall ego be." In short, Freud points to the trinity, and then urges us to become Unitarians. James on the other hand, found the One God--pure experience--and yet he exhorts his readers to be Trinitarians. Pure experience, principles of conduct, and mediating reason--this is the Jamesian trinity. And the greatest of these, ultimately, is pure experience...