The purpose of this research is to examine selected works of Marx and Freud on various issues relating to their assessment of the human condition in the modern period, i.e., the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the implications flowing therefrom for the postmodern and current period. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the context in which the thought of Marx and Freud achieved preeminence in western culture, and then to discuss the views of each with reference to certain fundamental questions that their analyses of culture raise.
The history of western culture in the twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the work of Marx and Freud. It is perhaps not too much to say that, taken together, Marx's analysis of culture and society as fundamentally social processes that imply certain social necessities and imperatives, and Freud's analysis of personality and culture as mutually interpenetrating and mutually determining processes, constitute an account of the whole of human experience. The views of Marx and Freud intersect in certain ways, although the emphasis of argument in each case is different. Marx's emphasis is on culture, or more exactly society, while Freud's ultimate emphasis is on human psychology and the social and cultural realities that derive from its reality; however, they each make philosophical claims for their treatments of the vicissitudes of human experience. In the case of Marx, there is also a moral claim at work, for the cumulative effect of his writing is a call for transformation of the realities of human experience. In Freud's work, any moral claims that become manifest have to be set beside the close description of the actual conditions of human experience and an assumption that the description so accurately conveys the problems associated with human psychology that analysis of the description implies the character that solutions to the problems might assu...