Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of Freudian psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate, as an unexplored and potentially fruitful area of study, the relation of Reinhold Niebuhr's political philosophy to Freudian (including post-Freudian) psychoanalysis. Niebuhr did not write overly much on this subject, but his writings make a coherent unit all the same, with his later emendations in line with changes in other areas of his thought. His writings in this area issue from his criticism of Freudian naturalism, but also from his inability to articulate a naturalistic (or any other) structure for man within his historicobiblical view of man's freedom and political destiny. We shall see how some of Niebuhr's appraisal is illuminating, as in his criticism of Freudian pessimism (which is not yet Christian realism), some of it is ill founded (Freud cannot be locked up within a naturalistic box), and some of it (Niebuhr's later work) shows a glimmering appreciation of the writings of the later Freud and the post-Freudians (especially of Erik Erikson) in which naturalism and history are not necessarily at odds with each other. Niebuhr's extended judgment on Freudian psychoanalysis is found in his article in Freud and the Twentieth Century,1 where he begins by noting Freud's break with Enlightenment optimism. "His theories seemed to reconstruct the old pessimism about human nature upon the basis of modern science and thus gave modern man a secular view of the inevitability of egoistic corruptions of creativity."2 He did this by drawing an intricate picture of the inner relations of the self that shattered the simple confidence in reason and nature that, as Niebuhr argued in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,3 was the basis for liberal democracy. But for Freud, the "rational ego is never the simple master of the self'4 (there are the id and superego to be contended with) and the "survival impulse" is imperfectly served by the pleasure principle of the id. Freud was a naturalist, but he was not, as these terms were developed philosophically, politically and historically in Niebuhr's well-known analysis in The Nature and Destiny of Man,5 a simple rationalist or romantic.