Sunday, February 10, 2013

2nd Body Paragraph


While Conrad uses fiction to present his hypothesis on the instinctual nature of humans, Freud began conducting scientific experiments and publishing studies on the make-up of the human psyche. The culmination of Freud’s work on the human psyche is his idea that there are three subsets of a human’s conscience: the superego, ego, and id. Freud’s system helps explain Conrad’s belief through a scientific lens. Freud believes that babies instincts are animalistic and that as they grow up, they are taught to suppress their taboo impulses into their id. The id represents the subconscious thoughts that humans tend to not realize they have mostly because the societies they live in push them to suppress those thoughts. These thoughts include incest, rape, cannibalism, and other “wrong” actions. Freud would classify Kurtz as letting out his inner id after suppressing all of his deepest and darkest desires there for so long before he began trading ivory in the Congo. When given the opportunity to live without laws, his id was unleashed and eventually led to his death to a jungle illness which messed with his sanity. 

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