Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Modern Man in Search of a Soul was published in the early 1930s, scarcely 40 years after Sigmund Freud revolutionized mental health with his theory of the unconscious, repressed urges, and resulting neurotic behavior. Previously, people with emotional problems were referred to their local religious officials for counseling, or, in extreme cases, were placed in asylums where treatment was primitive at best and cruel at worst. In Freud’s “talking cure,” patients describe their problems to a therapist trained in his system of psychoanalysis; they try to recall events from childhood that may have caused those problems. The therapist guides the patient with suggestions on how their current problems symbolize those early traumas; the hope is that the patient can accept and release the bad feelings and move forward in life.

Freud developed his theory during the late 1800s when sexual relations in Europe tended to be strictly limited to marriage. Unwed mothers were looked down on and had to struggle to survive. It was also an age of rapid industrial development, and the cold logic of machine-age culture sparked a cultural rebellion filled with romantic ideals. Young people found themselves caught between the formal rules of society and the idea that love, rather than arranged marriage, should dictate a person’s choice of partner. This conflict between sexual urges and the need to be respectable made large numbers of people “neurotic,” and some visited Freud or his students for treatment. Seeing all these symptoms of repressed sexuality, Freud concluded that the sexual urge dominates human activity from infancy.

Freud’s student Carl Jung began treating patients and soon realized that there were other basic defining needs beyond sex, one being the will to power as defined by another ex-Freudian, Alfred Adler. Jung also decided that the unconscious source of these yearnings isn’t a seething cauldron of dark desires, as Freud believed, but a powerful, yet neutral, repository of urges that, when harmonized, lead to fully actualized adults, but, when in conflict, cause bad outcomes. Jung brought to his work ideas from Eastern practices such as yoga and Buddhist meditation.

Later generations of psychologists developed Jung’s and Adler’s ideas further. Therapist Carl Rogers, during the mid-to-late 20th century, proposed that therapists treat patients with “unconditional positive regard,” and today many, if not most, major therapeutic schools emphasize positive acceptance of feelings. (Cherry, Kendra. “Unconditional Positive Regard in Psychology.” VeryWellMind, 10 May 2020). A recent interest in Mindfulness Training descends from Jung’s ideas about accepting one’s feelings along with his interest in Eastern spiritual practices. Even Cognitive Therapy, which regards extremely negative emotions as outgrowths of irrational beliefs, regards feelings as understandable rather than somehow evil. Also, Abraham Maslow developed the idea of “peak experiences,” which fulfills Jung’s notion that human life ought not be merely normal but vibrant.