Self and Soul A Defense of Ideals

Often throughout this study Self has been understood as the state
that stifl es Soul. The pursuit of power and plea sure and social as-
cendancy block the hope of achieving unity of being through con-
templation, compassion, bravery, or the use of imagination. Self
yearns to fulfi ll its own desires. It yearns to live as long as it pos-
sibly can and to gain all the enjoyment available to it and then (per-
haps) a little more. Self hungers for the good things in life. There
are satisfactions to be found in the Soul State, to be sure, but of a
diff erent order from those available to the Self. Soul lives not only
for itself, but also for others. The acts of the Soul benefi t suff ering
men and women. Exertions of Soul help deliver them from danger,
hunger, and ignorance and sometimes, by example, from the sor-
rows of living exclusively within time. Soul lives (perhaps) above
time.
Self often yearns for Soul. Those who live in the State of Self— the
state that takes the fulfi llment of desire as its ultimate horizon—
understand, on a level often too deep for words, that their lives lack
an essential quality. They do not create; they do not truly think; they
do not care; they are not brave. They ache internally, and to assuage
this ache they make, or participate in, a simulacrum of the world of

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Freud and the Ideal Self