Freud and the Ideal Self 239
into three parts, which can often be in confl ict with one another.
Plato’s map is a major revision of the Homeric version of identity.
What matters most to the Homeric heroes is spirit, courage, daring—
which they call thymos. Knowing a man in Homer means knowing
how brave he is: can he lead troops into battle; is he willing to risk
his life; does he have what Homer’s heroes call “staying power”?
When Plato redraws the map, he basically preserves thymos;
spiritedness is still a major ele ment in his model of the human soul.
But in the best human souls, thymos is subordinate to reason, or
nous. One thinks before one acts; one asks before the fi ght if the war
is just. (Where thymos was, Plato might have said to describe his
revision of Homer, there nous shall be.) Plato concentrates his views
on this matter in a brilliant phrase. What is courage? he asks him-
self. To the Homeric warrior, courage means completely conquering
fear; courage means rampaging through battle without being afraid
of losing one’s life. To Plato, courage means knowing what to be
afraid of and what not to fear. For Plato, all experience must be
brought before the judgment seat of reason.
Freud drops courage from the spiritual map. There is no equiv-
alent of Homeric (or even Platonic) courage in Freud’s three- part
model of the spirit. In Homer, and even in Plato, to know a person
is to know how brave or cowardly he is. What will he dare? How
readily will he risk his life? This is not part of Freud’s sense of human
nature at all. Whether one can or cannot exhibit martial bravery may
not be entirely beside the point, but surely it is not what is essen-
tial. To put it crudely but not inaccurately, an everyday man is his
ratio of repressions, to Freud; a more civilized man is his capacity
for sublimation— that is, for turning the primal energies toward
socially approved goals. A man is his capacity to love (in the
middle- class manner) and to work (in the middle- class manner). A
man is also the strength of his superego and his capacity to respond
to its demands. But a man is not his fi ghting strength. Courage may