The Mystery of Human Motive

Extract

The value of the theories of Freud, in dealing with juvenile delinquency (publicly debated recently) brings up the whole question of their assessment of the problem of abnormal moral behaviour. For Freud the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is something more than an allegory. It is also a code in which Mr Hyde figures with immense preponderance. ‘It is’, says Jung, ‘a detailed elaboration of man’s shadow-side such as had never been carried out before. It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all idealistic illusions about the nature of man’. (Integration of the Personality. Jung.) The conservative estimate of the theories of Sigismund Freud is that they contain much that is true and much that is new, but that unfortunately that which is true is not new and that which is new is not true. When Freud tells us that the media axiomata of the psycho-analytic theory of the mind rests on the assumption that the cause of all mental processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle (Beyond the Pleasure-Principle), he merely declares himself a disciple of Epicurus. He merely proclaims that the object to which all men are attracted is Pleasure and that when a pleasure is consciously rejected it is only in order to make room (albeit unconsciously) for a greater pleasure. In other words, if we take ‘Pleasure’ in its broadest sense and define the word as meaning conscious satisfaction (not necessarily sensual, and often stimulated only by the prospect of benefit) there are few who do not subscribe to the obviousness of such a limited Hedonism.