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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