Sigmund Freud
1856-1939 · Human Sciences · Household name
Freud founded psychoanalysis in Austria and cast the self as a divided thing, driven by desires it will not admit. Your dreams, your slips of the tongue and the symptoms you cannot explain all leak what you are hiding from yourself. He split the mind into a hungry id, a managing ego and a scolding superego, and read religion as humanity wishing for a father. Critics ask what could ever disprove any of it.
Signature
The position Freud is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage
- Agency
- Hard Determinism
Positions on the 8 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Individualism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- leans Brain Only (25 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (4 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (0 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- leans Sublation (25 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (19 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
12 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Freud refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Other
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Pleasure / Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence / Moral Tragedy
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Other
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Rational Expertise
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Expression / False Consciousness
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Irrational Driver
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Irredeemably Corrupted
What is human nature?