There were two
great minds in this century. One such
mind was that of Sigmund Freud (1856-
1939). In the year 1923 he created a new view of the
mind. That view encompassed the idea
we have split
personalities and that each one have their own realm, their own tastes, their
own
principles upon
which they are guided. He called these
different personalities the id, ego, and
super ego. Each of them are alive and well inside each
of our unconscious minds, separate but
yet inside the
mind inhabiting one equal plane. Then
there was Nietzsche (1844-1900) who
formulated his
own theories about the sub-conscious.
His ideas were based on the fact that
inside each and
every one of us is a raging battle going on.
This battle involves the two most
basic parts of
society, the artistic Dionysian and the intelligent Apollonian. Sometimes one being
becomes more
dominant than the other or they both share the same plane. Even though
individually
created, these theories could be intertwined, even used together. Thus it is the
object of this
paper to prove that the Freudian theory about the unconscious id, and ego are
analogous to the
idea on the Apollonian and Dionysian duality's presented by Nietzsche.
"The division of the psychical into what
is conscious and what is unconscious is the
fundamental
premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis
to
understand the
pathological processes in mental life..." (Freud, The Ego and the Id,
3). To say it
another way,
psycho-analysis cannot situate the essence of the psychial in consciousness,
but is
mandated to
comply consciousness as a quality of the pyschial, which may be present (Freud,
The Ego and the
ID, 3). "...that what we call our
ego behaves essentially passively in life, and
that, as he
expresses it, we are 'lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces,"
(Groddeck,
quoted from Gay,
635). Many, if not all of us have had
impressions of the same, even though
they may not have
overwhelmed us to the isolation of all others, and we need to feel no
hesitation in
finding a place for Groddeck's discovery in the field of science. To take it into
account by naming
the entity which begins in the perception system. And then begins by being
the 'ego,' and by
following his [Groddeck's] system in identifying the other half of the mind,
into
which this
extends itself and acts as if it were unconscious, namely the id. It could then be said
that the id
represents the primitive, unconscious basis of the psyche dominated by primary
urges.
The psyche of a
newly-born child, for instance, is made up of primarily the id. But then contact
with that child
and the outside world modifies the id.
This modification then creates the next part
of the psyche,
the ego, which begins to differentiate itself from the id and the rest of the
psyche
(Dilman, 163).
The ego should be seen primarily as Freud puts
it is, "...first and foremost a bodily ego; it
is not merely a
surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface," (Freud, The
Ego and the
Id, 20). An analogy that could help with this
definition could be one that states the following. If
we were to
identify it with the, "cortical homunculus," (Freud, TEI, 20) of the
anatomists, "which
stands on its
head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has
its
speech area on
the left side," (Freud, TEI, 20).
Ego, the Latin word for "I," is a person's
conception of
himself or herself. The term has taken on various shades of meaning in
psychology
and philosophy.
In psychoanalysis, the ego is a set of personality functions for dealing with
reality, which
maintains a certain unity throughout an individual's life. Freud, with whom the
concept is
closely associated, redefined it several times. In 1923, Freud used the term to
refer to
the conscious,
rational agency in his famous structural model of the mind; powered by the
instinctual
drives of the id, the ego imposed moral restraints derived from the superego.
After
Freud's death,
several of his associates, including Anna Freud and Erik Erikson, extended the
concept of ego to
include such functions as memory, sensory abilities, and motor skills. It could
also be said that
there are other important functions to the ego.
It is the reality guide for one,
and conscious
perceptions also belong to it. During
the height of the phallic phase, about ages
three to six,
these libidinous drives focus on the parent of the opposite sex and lend an
erotic
cast to the
relation between mother and son or between father and daughter, the so-called
Oedipus complex.
However, most societies strongly disapprove of these sexual interests of
children. A taboo
on incest rules universally. Parents, therefore, influence children to push
such
pleasurable
sensations and thoughts out of their conscious minds into the unconscious by a
process called
repression. In this way the mind comes to consist of three parts: (1) an
executive
part, the ego,
mostly conscious and comprising all the ordinary thoughts and functions needed to
direct a person
in his or her daily behavior; (2) the id, mostly unconscious and containing all
the
instincts and
everything that was repressed into it; and (3) the superego, the conscious that
harbors the
values, ideals, and prohibitions that set the guidelines for the ego and that
punishes
through the
imposition of guilt feelings. Strong
boundaries between the three parts keep the ego
fairly free from
disturbing thoughts and wishes in the id, thereby guaranteeing efficient
functioning
and socially
acceptable behavior. During sleep the boundaries weaken; disturbing wishes may
slip into the ego
from the id, and warnings may come over from the superego (Dilman, 170). It
could thus be
seen that the id and the ego, are two separate identities upon which our whole
psyche is
dependent upon, one side is the pleasure side (id) and the other is the
reality-based
side (ego).
Then, however, Nietzsche came along and stated
that he had his own theories on the
unconscious
mind. In his first book, The Birth of
Tragedy (1872, Eng. trans, 1968), Nietzsche
presented a
theory of Greek drama and of the foundations of art that has had profound
effects
on both literary
theory and philosophy. In this book he introduced his famous distinction
between the
Apollonian, or rational, element in human nature and the Dionysian, or
passionate,
element, as
exemplified in the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. When the two principles are
blended, either
in art or in life, humanity achieves a momentary harmony with the Primordial
Mystery. This
work, like his later ones, shows the strong influence of the German philosopher
Arthur
Schopenhauer, as well as Nietzsche's affinity for the music of his close friend
Richard
Wagner. What
Nietzsche presented in this work was a pagan mythology for those who could
accept neither
the traditional values of Christianity nor those of Social Darwinism (Salter,
41-
42).
It can be visibly ascertained that by binary
opposition, Nietzsche, as well as Freud, can
thus now reveal
to us our split personalities.
"Much will have been gained for esthetics once we
have succeeded in
apprehending directly-rather than merely ascertaining- that art owes its
continuous
evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality," proposes Nietzsche,
"even as the
propagation of
the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and
periodic acts of
reconciliation," (AD in Jacobus, 550).
It is by these two, "art-sponsoring
deities,"
(AD, in Jacobus, 550), Apollo and his brethren Dionysos, the we come to grasp
the
idea of that
splinter between the, "plastic Apollonian arts and the non-visual art of
music inspired
by
Dionysos," (AD, in Jacobus, 550).
"The art impulse which has been described
he [Nietzsche] designates as the Apollinic
impulse,"
(Salter, 40). We thus recall that Apollo
is the god of dreams, "...and according to
Lucretius the
Gods first appeared to men in dreams," (Salter, 40-41). He [Nietzsche] then
regarded the
residing family of deities on Mount Olympus as a removed and exalted conception
of the,
"commanding, powerful, and splendid elements in Greek life," (Salter,
41). The
experience of the
Dionysiac is compartiavly different from that of the Apollonian. The
[Dionysiac]
experience is element for art. It is a
subject that may be virtuously treated, for, "out
of the Dionysiac
festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama; this may
briefly
characterized as
an Apollinic treatment of the Dionysiac experience- a marriage of the
two,"
(Salter 43). By
creating the art-loving Dionysian, he [Nietzsche] has also created the equal
but
opposite
Apollonian.
It would appear to be necessary to then
understand Apollo in order to understand
Dionysos, and
vice-versa. "At first the eye is
struck by the marvelous shapes of the Olympian
gods who stand
upon its pediments, and whose exploits, in shining bas-relief, adorn its
friezes,"
(AD, in Jacobus,
557). The mere conclusion that he is one
god amongst many should not throw
us into a fit of
misguided questions. But instead it
should represent that the same motive that
created Apollo
created Olympus (AD, in Jacobus, 557).
The Dionysian, the opposite of the
Apollonian would
then be considered his twin brother, cut from the same womb, but yet
different in
personality and equally independent.
Nietzsche and Freud both had similar views on the subject of the
unconscious.
Nietzsche's
though were directed primarily to the arts and the Greek gods Apollo and
Dionysos
for whom his
dichotomy of the personality were named.
The Apollonian, "...music had long
been familiar to
the Greeks as an Apollonian art , as a regular beat like that of waves lapping
the
shore, a plastic
rhythm expressly developed for the portrayal of Apollonian conditions,"
(AD, in
Jacobus,
556). That "plastic rhythm"
described by Nietzsche is the cardinal groundwork for the
theory of the
Apollonian. Apollonian people are those
who are totally based in the scientific
world. They have no real imagination, no
abstractness to their thinking. Whereas
people who
are wholly
Dionysian are the opposite. These folk
have no real basis in the real world.
They are
completely out of
synch with reality because they think only in hypothetical thoughts. Hence the
fact the most, if
not all humans have a little of both in them.
Most great scientists for instance are
both Apollonian
and Dionysian. They are mainly
Apollinistic, due to the fact that they are clearly
intelligent,
which according to Nietzsche is the foundation for Apollonian thought, but they
are
also
Dionysian. This can be said if you take
Albert Einstein for an example. He is
probably one
of the most
intelligent (and thus Apollonian) thinkers
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