last updated 7/28/26 11:25am.

(1) Freud’s debts to S. and (2) Freud’s two fave S. quotes.

(1) Freud’s debts to S.

S. anticipated much of F. The death drive was one, but also: the framework for the interpretation of dreams, the theory of repression, and the importance of both the unconscious and the sex drive.

Everything on this page is Freud (not me) talking about Schopenhauer.

• The interpretation of dreams.

The line of argument developed by the philosopher Schopenhauer in 1851 has had a decisive influence on a number of writers. Our picture of the universe, in his view, is arrived at by our intellect taking the impressions that impinge on it from outside and remoulding them into the forms of time, space and causality. During the daytime the stimuli from the interior of the organism, from the sympathetic nervous system, exercise at the most an unconscious effect upon our mood. But at night, when we are no longer deafened by the impressions of the day, those which arise from within are able to attract attention – just as at night we can hear the murmuring of a brook which is drowned by daytime noises. But how is the intellect to react to these stimuli otherwise than by carrying out its own peculiar function on them? The stimuli are accordingly remodelled into forms occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and thus dreams arise [cf. Schopenhauer, 1862, 1, 249 ff.] (RSE 4, 33).

Schopenhauer [1851b, 1, 246] calls dreams a brief madness and madness a long dream (RSE 4, 79-80)

• the importance of the sex drive

It is some time since Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, showed [see the passage below] mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses – in the ordinary sense of the word. (RSE 7 119).

• neurosis as a turn from reality (repression)

The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity. But, in fact, every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality. [Freud’s footnote here:] [There is] a remarkably clear prevision of this causation [see the passage below] shown in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea [(1819), Part II (Supplements), Chapter 32] (RSE 12, 218)

The theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests. … [There is] a passage in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea[see the passage below] in which the philosopher seeks to give an explanation of insanity. What he says there about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides [completely] with my concept of repression (RSE 14, 12-13).

• the unconsciousness of mental life and importance of sex drive.

These two discoveries – that the life of our sexual drives cannot be wholly tamed, and that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions – these two discoveries amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house. Together they represent the third blow to man’s self-love, what I may call the psychological one. No wonder, then, that the ego does not look favourably upon psychoanalysis and obstinately refuses to believe in it. Probably very few people can have realized the momentous significance for science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not psychoanalysis, however, let us hasten to add, which first took this step.

There are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners – above all the great thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent to the mental drives of psychoanalysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of unforgettable impressiveness [see the passage below] admonished mankind of the importance, still so greatly underestimated by it, of its sexual craving. Psychoanalysis has this advantage only, that it has not affirmed these two propositions which are so distressing to narcissism – the psychical importance of sexuality and the unconsciousness of mental life – on an abstract basis, but has demonstrated them in matters that touch every individual personally and force him to take up some attitude towards these problems. It is just for this reason, however, that it brings on itself the aversion and resistances which still hold back in awe before the great name of the philosopher (RSE 17, 133).

• ‍the death drive and life drive

[In our theory, we have] two drive impulses: the life drives and the death drives… We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death is the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life’, while the sexual drive is the embodiment of the will to live (RSE 18, 48).

Schopenhauer has said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy (RSE 13, 85)

• the dominance of emotions, theory of repression, and importance of sex drive

[Regarding] the large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer: not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression (RSE 20, 52).

• the death drive

But how can this conservative characteristic of drives help us to understand our self-destructiveness? What earlier state of things does a drive such as this want to restore? Well, the answer is not far to seek and opens wide perspectives. If it is true that – at some immeasurably remote time and in a manner we cannot conceive – life once proceeded out of inorganic matter, then, according to our presumption, a drive must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to re-establish the inorganic state. If we recognize in this drive the self-destructiveness of our hypothesis, we may regard the self-destructiveness as an expression of a ‘death drive’ which cannot fail to be present in every vital process.

And now the drives that we believe in divide themselves into two groups – the erotic drives, which seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities, and the death drives, which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state. From the concurrent and opposing action of these two proceed the phenomena of life which are brought to an end by death. You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, ladies and gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research? Moreover, there is nothing that has not been said already, and similar things had been said by many people before Schopenhauer.

Furthermore, what we are saying is not even genuine Schopenhauer. We are not asserting that death is the only aim of life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognize two basic drives and give each of them its own aim. How the two of them are mingled in the process of living, how the death drive is made to serve the purposes of Eros, especially by being turned outwards as aggressiveness – these are tasks which are left to future investigation. We have not gone beyond the point at which this prospect lies open before us. The question, too, of whether the conservative character may not belong to all drives without exception, whether the erotic drives as well may not be seeking to bring back an earlier state of things when they strive to bring about a synthesis of living things into greater unities – this question, too, we must leave unanswered (RSE 22, 94-5)

(2) Two Schopenhauer quotes Freud loved.

(a) Freud said this passage “coincides completely with my concept of repression;” it represents a “remarkably clear prevision of my theory of repression.”

The description of the origin of madness given in the text will become easier to understand, if we remember how reluctantly we think of things that powerfully prejudice our interests, wound our pride, or interfere with our wishes; with what difficulty we decide to lay such things before our own intellect for accurate and serious investigation; how easily, on the other hand, we unconsciously break away or sneak off from them again; how, on the contrary, pleasant affairs come into our minds entirely of their own accord, and, if driven away, always creep on us once more, so that we dwell on them for hours. In this resistance on the part of the will to allow what is contrary to it to come under the examination of the intellect is to be found the place where madness can break in on the mind.

Every new adverse event must be assimilated by the intellect, in other words, must receive a place in the system of truths connected with our will and its interests, whatever it may have to displace that is more satisfactory. As soon as this is done, it pains us much less; but this operation itself is often very painful, and in most cases takes place only slowly and with reluctance. But soundness of mind can continue only in so far as this operation has been correctly carried out each time. On the other hand, if, in a particular case, the resistance and opposition of the will to the assimilation of some knowledge reaches such a degree that that operation is not clearly carried through; accordingly, if certain events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, because the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connexion; we then have madness. For the intellect has given up its nature to please the will; the person then imagines what does not exist. But the resultant madness then becomes the Lethe of unbearable sufferings; it was the last resource of worried and tormented nature, i.e., of the will. [Schopenhauer, The World as will and idea, vol. 2, Supplements to the Third Book, Chapter 32, “On madness.”]

• Freud characterized the following Schopenhauer passage as “words of unforgettable impressiveness,” which “showed mankind the extent to which their activities are determined by sexual impulses.”

To all this corresponds the important role which the relation of the sexes plays in the world of men, where it is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct, and peeps out everywhere in spite of all veils thrown over it. It is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints, of all unspoken offers and all stolen glances, the daily meditation of the young, and often also of the old, the hourly thought of the unchaste, and even against their will the constantly recurring imagination of the chaste, the ever ready material of a joke, just because the profoundest seriousness lies at its foundation.

It is, however, the piquant element and the joke of life that the chief concern of all men is secretly pursued and ostensibly ignored as much as possible. But, in fact, we see it every moment seat itself, as the true hereditary lord of the world, out of the fulness of its own strength, upon the ancestral throne, and looking down from thence with scornful glances, laugh at the preparations which have been made to bind it, imprison it, or at least to limit it and wherever it is possible to keep it concealed, or even so to master it that it shall only appear as a subordinate, secondary concern of life.

But all this agrees with the fact that the sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live, and consequently the concentration of all desire; therefore in the text I have called the genital organs the focus of the will. Indeed, one may say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence.

The will to live manifests itself indeed primarily as an effort to sustain the individual, yet this is only a step to the effort to sustain the species, and the latter endeavour must be more powerful in proportion as the life of the species surpasses that of the individual in duration, extension and value. Therefore sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live, its most distinctly expressed type; and the origin of the individual in it, and its primacy over all other desires of the natural man, are both in complete agreement with this. [Schopenhauer, The World as will and idea, vol. 2, Supplements to the fourth book, Chapter XLII, “The life of the species.”]