808 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
destroyed the individual’s capacity for natural development and fulfillment
by imposing uniformity. He became an atheist, proclaiming, “God is
dead... and we have killed him.” He claimed strenuously that religion
was incapable of providing ethical guidance and that no single morality
could be appropriate to all people.
Espousing “philosophy with the hammer,” Nietzsche awaited the heroic
superman who, as part of a natural nobility of “higher humanity. “ would rule
through the “will to power.” Although indirectly influenced by the con
tentions of Hegel and Darwin that mankind could continue to develop to a
higher stage, Nietzsche’s thought marked a total rejection of all previous
philosophy. His “vital” force, which he believed could be found only in new
philosophers like himself, would be morally ambivalent, idealizing power
and struggle. The free man, wrote Nietzsche, “is a warrior.” Yet for all of his
talk about “master races” and “slave races” in a period marked by a growth of
racism, he castigated the herd-like instincts of frenetic German nationalists
and anti-Semites.
Freud and the Study of the IrrationalThe Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) stressed the power of
the irrational, which he placed in the human unconscious. Freud was born
in the small Moravian town of Freiberg (now in the Czech Republic) in the
Habsburg monarchy, the son of a struggling Jewish wool merchant and his
much younger wife. When Sigmund was three, his father’s business affairs
went from bad to worse, forcing the family to leave its tranquil, small-town
existence for Vienna. The younger Freud never felt comfortable in the
imposing imperial capital. But he benefited from the period of liberal
ascendancy in Austria, where Jews had received full civil rights only in
- The Viennese middle class had helped make their city a cultural
capital of Europe. That reassuring atmosphere changed with the stock
market crash in 1873, which began a period of economic depression and
culminated in the election of an anti-Semite, Karl Lueger (“I decide who is
a Jew,” Lueger insisted), as mayor of Vienna in 1895.
After beginning his career as a research scientist in anatomy, Freud fell
under the influence of the French neurologist Jean Charcot (1825-1893).
From his scientific laboratory, Freud moved to the study of the irrational,
or the “unconscious,” convinced that it could be studied with the same sys
tematic rigor as human anatomy. In the spring of 1886, he opened a small
office in Vienna, treating patients with nervous disorders.
Freud developed the method of psychoanalysis, a term coined in 1896. It
was based on the premises that the mind is orderly and that dreams offer
codes that can unlock the unconscious. To Freud, a dream represented
“the fulfillment of a [suppressed] wish”; it was the expression of an uncon
scious conflict. Freud encouraged patients to dream and to “free associate”
in order to break down their defense mechanisms (the means by which