Human Adaptive Behavior

Essentially, Freud believes that human beings are helpless before their unconscious impulses--until they are made aware of those impulses and their childhood sources, at which point they can begin to adapt with some measure of freedom as they create with the analyst a new set of adaptive tools. Marx believes that human beings are victims of historical and material forces until they are turned into virtual machines by capitalism. Instead of psychoanalysis freeing the individual to adapt independently, to Marx it is only a revolution on a society-wide scale which will free human beings from the imprisonment in the alienation of capitalism.

Despite their different conclusions about human adaptive behavior, both Freud and Marx, representing the disciplines of psychology and politics, include social forces as an important feature of their theories.

Whereas Marx's belief in eventual revolution was based on the increasingly intense socioeconomic division between the capitalistic class and the working class, Freud's belief in the healing process of psychoanalysis was based on "the intense social relationship between analyst and analysand" (Berger 104).

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ired the true consciousness of communism, and after the revolution, the Marxist adapts freely as a human being relating cooperatively and humanely with other human beings. Unlike communism, psychoanalysis believes that the individual can learn to adapt more freely as an individual and does not need to become an integrated part of a social or economic class. Marxism "is a . . . model for the study of human societies and history" (Miller 26). Marxism essentially results in the creation of a new society and a new economic system. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, results in the creation of a new identity only for the individual (Berger 104). Once that new identity has been created in an ongoing relationship with the analyst, the individual will finally be able to adapt as a free being. Until then, his only adaptation consists of a traumatized mass of neuroses and/or psychoses responding without consciousness to an environment which either threatens or appeases those hidden forces. 2. If one selects cognitive psychology and capitalism as representatives categories of the disciplines of psychology and economics, one finds similar rather than contrasting depictions of human adaptive behavior. To both the cognitive psychologist and t
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Approximate Word count = 1552
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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