What I do find compelling about Freud’s project is the attempt to give an account of our ethical capacity. What sort of biological origin can there be for an impulse to consider the needs of another person? This has been, and continues to be, one of the most compelling questions ever asked. The problem with his model, as I see it, is that he seems to have followed, unquestioningly, what I call original sin theory. This is the notion, also present in the writings of Hobbes and Nietzsche, that our aggressive tendencies go all the way down. That humans are essentially aggressive, impulsive, power and pleasure driven creatures with no natural source of restraint. That we are essentially constituted by will to power. This left Freud with the problem of how to account for the restraint of that will. I wonder what factors influenced his decision to not consider alternative models of human nature, because they certainly had been proposed many times in the course of human intellectual history?
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