Well… Freud is.. interesting.

Okay seriously, as the first philosopher we’ve ever studied to equate practically everything we do to our desires, love and need for sex, he’s pretty darn revolutionary.  I mean Plato, Hobbes, they all talk about how desire is a bad thing.  In fact, they try to severely repress desires severely, through the Kalliopolis and the Leviathan.  Freud is probably the first to say that desires and libido are necessary or else we’ll self-destruct ourselves.  And he’s darn fascinating, in fact, his ideas may explain many things we are confused about.

I’ll get to the point, porn.  Why is porn, particularly internet porn so popular these days? Seriously, it’s skyrocketed and the adult media industry has grown hugely. The priest in my church keeps focusing on the issue, so when I read Freud, I thought of the issue.  Well if we look at Freud, its kind of explained.  Humans know that sexual love affords the greatest pleasure.  Of course, the risk (as Freud explains) is that getting married, and getting bonded to a particular love-object has great risks, particularly of betrayal, of rejection and so forth. Therefore, it makes sense why man and men of this time have become so bloody interested in internet pornography.  There are no risks.  The love-object, is anonymous, a piece of media, and it satisfies sexual desires.  Of course the attachment is very temporary, but it does explain why people are so attracted to adult media of this time.  This shows that Freud’s ideas on sex and pleasure can be quite easily applied.  I also quite liked his idea on how saints direct their desires, by diverting their love toward everything.

Then again, Freud does have his drawbacks.  I mean it seems very unlikely that EVERYTHING in the world is motivated by sexual desire.  Pain and pleasure do play a part of it and the superego as well but everything by sexual desire?  That’s a little pushing it.  However, I can’t think of a convincing argument against it yet, so I’ll leave that in the air.

I also understand why we are reading this after jekyll and Hyde.  It raises questions on what part of Hyde is Jekyll… I mean is Hyde the ego and Jekyll the superego?  But if Jekyll is the superego… that means he has to have an ego… but Jekyll is Hyde… well I’m getting off track, the point is, Freud offers some convincing explanations on how Hyde and Jekyll developed and how human conscience developed.

All in all, I found Freud very informative, though I tended to get lost as he began to explain more advanced concepts.