Freud's Idea of Rational Action

Alienation of the ego from the world arises out of recognition of the separation. The ego encounters conflict even as it seeks satisfaction, or happiness, and as it seeks to accommodate itself to what is other, the world, in hope of experiencing happiness. Freud cites the "dichotomy" of human aims: "man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize . . . the one or the other of these aims" (25). Man is pulled toward social interaction to avoid isolation but away from it to avoid inevitable human conflict. Impulse toward rational action is an impulse away from the experience of conflict. Freud connects it to an impulse toward social interaction, which involves "becoming a member of the human community, and with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will" (27). Another rational

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organization ad market protocols, evolved from "the spirit of Christian asceticism" (180). The common element: deliberate renunciation of physical gratification, or what Freud would call sublimation of sexual impulse, for work. Thus sublimation becomes "ascetic Protestantism" (183), i.e., the Protestant Work Ethic. This squares with Weber's focus on social structure as a consequence of rational action. He cites (Protestant) Adam Smith's economic theory, which amounts to a "moral justification of worldly activity" (81), and which famously includes the doctrine of an "invisible hand" of market order and rationality held to be a feature of capitalism. In a footnote Weber (213) also quotes Smith's explanation of general acquiescence in capitalism in terms of "self-love," or the benefits derived by rational participants who exchange what they have of value in the capitalist marketplace. These are not sexual or psychological but material benefits. For the relationship between rational action and self-interest involves formulating the compulsions of individuals in economic rather than spiritual terms, i.e., in terms of cost and benefit instead of good and evil. 4. The principal sense in which both Freud and Weber can claim that thei
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