Helplessness and Eros in Freud’s Conception of “Civilized Man”

Abstract

Considering that the opposition between I-not I, Subject-Object, Pleasure-Unpleasure are the pairs of opposites (tension) that throw the individual into the most significant bonds for structuring his/her soul life, the aim here is to think about a “psychophysiological organization” that ranges from (against the backdrop of the experience of helplessness) the drive stimuli to the drive destiny (so that the constitution of the real world does not become a mere abstraction). It is in this “investment circuit” that the biological nature of this drive will overflow — that is what will be sought to defend — to a symbolic universe instantiated by the presence of other human beings. Finally, it will be argued that it is at the core dynamics of the drive motions that the individual will find him/herself (fatally) connected to the enigmas of the “mass psyches”: i.e. the relationship between need and satisfaction (biological individual) and the demands of the community (culture, socialized time).