The Relationship between Body and Soul from the Perspective of Freud's Psychoanalysis

The theme of separating the soul from the body created many concerns once it had been announced by René Descartes in his Metaphysical Meditations and Passions of the soul. We believe that Freud was able to bring something new in the philosophical thinking, overcoming the dualism between body and soul. Freud didn’t look after a solution that would start from metaphysical principles, as Spinoza or Leibniz did, but he approached the dualism in its anthropological foundations. The great discovery of the psychoanalysis father was that of the innate human behaviours. First, Freud studied the instincts, which definitely are innate, and then he moved the analysis to the level with a relative innateness, where he discovered the extremely complex universe of drives (Trieb), like sexual drive, aggressive one, territorial or that of fear, and so on. The drives are the elements that feed the behaviours which are not only the result of learning, of education. To a large extent, behaviours and the drives that underlie them overlap the instincts; in this sense, nutrition can be the support for sexual drives or death instinct that Freud discovered during the First World War can become the support of the aggressive drives. Up to Freud, the dispute was centred on the innate ideas in the context of the controversies between rationalist and empiricist philosophers. With Austrian thinker, the emphasis is on the preconceptual existential level: the basal behaviours. These ideas led C. G. Jung, whom Freud had called him ”his beloved son”, to the complex theory of archetypes as innate behavioural structures. These ideas had a great resonance in the anthropology of the twentieth century. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Lumen Research Center in Social and Humanistic Sciences, Asociatia Lumen.