Did Plato Lay the Groundwork for Freud’s Psychoanalysis?

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) famously stated that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” While this would be an oversimplification of the extent of Plato’s contribution to Freudian thought, the connection of the former to the latter is worthy of investigation. Such is the intent of this blog.

What did Freud himself say about Plato?

In fact, Sigmund Freud makes scant reference to Plato in his published works, but just enough to make clear that he had an inclination to relate his own work to this ancient Greek philosopher. For example, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality published in 1905, Freud states that “anyone who looks down with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage-point should remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psycho-analysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato.” So, Freud does explicitly acknowledge that Plato was a forerunner of at least part of his theory. And, unless he was being facetious in calling Plato “divine,” we can only suppose that he held Plato in the highest regard.

But did Freud go far enough in acknowledging Plato? I would like to respectfully suggest that he did not, and that Freud’s famous tripartite division of the human psyche is primarily, or largely, attributable to Plato. This question has far-reaching implications for contemporary psychotherapy inasmuch as Freud's work has had a profound influence on its development.

The implication is therefore that Plato, through his influence on Freud, may have had a profound influence on the course of contemporary psychotherapy, including Freud's own contributions to the psychoanalytic tradition. This would not be shocking inasmuch as the development of other major currents in psychotherapy was also influenced by ancient philosophers. For example, the development of cognitive-behavioral therapy was influenced by ancient Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus through the work of Albert Ellis. To his credit, Ellis was quite candid about this influence.

Without dismissing the due credit Freud deserves, history sometimes has a way of failing to give credit to the early pioneers of a monumental contribution. In the present instance, I want to argue that the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, deserves more credit for the theory than either Freud himself or his disciples have tended to give him. As I will suggest, there is striking symmetry between what Plato says about the human soul and what Freud says about the human psyche.

The id, ego, and superego

Indeed, the proverbial glue that holds Freud’s systematic thinking together is his division of the human psyche into the id, ego, and superego. For instance, according to Freud, repressed thoughts “buried” in the unconscious are the result of the ego attempting to deal with unconscionable reality; and the sublimation of destructive, socially unacceptable desires is a product of the ego working harmoniously with the superego to direct the id in socially constructive directions. All roads invariably lead to Rome in the Freudian network of ideas, and this psycho-dynamic royal hub is none other than Freud’s tripartite division of the human psyche.

Plato’s theory of the human soul

Curiously, Freud never carefully compares or contrasts his model with Plato’s tripartite model, notwithstanding that his above reference to “the Eros of the divine Plato” tracks the Phaedrus, the very same dialog written by Plato in 360 BCE where Plato (speaking through his protagonist, Socrates) formulates his idea of the human soul using the metaphor of a human charioteer. There, Plato writes, “the human charioteer drives his in a pair [of horses]; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.”

In Book IV of the Republic, a dialog written by Plato about 15 years earlier, Plato (again speaking through Socrates) elaborates the roles of the aforementioned constituents of the human soul:

First, the part that directs the soul (“the charioteer”) is “the one with which man reasons,” which “we may call the rational principle of the soul” (Plato, 1888).

Second, the ignoble part “may be termed the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions” (Plato, 1888).

Third, the noble part, which Plato calls “spirit,” is, in turn, “the forbidding principle” which is “on the side of reason” (Plato, 1888).

So, the Platonic soul consists of three elements: a rational principle that drives it by constraining the irrational, ignoble desires or appetites in accordance with a noble, forbidding principle.

The comparative analysis

Now, fast-forward to 1933 when, in his lecture on The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, Freud says this:

The ego’s relation to the id might be compared with that of a rider to his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement….Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles to master its economic task of bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it; and we can understand how it is that so often we cannot suppress a cry: ‘Life is not easy!’ If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out in anxiety-- realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id (my italics).

The symmetry with the Platonic idea is glaring. Metaphorically, there is again the reference to a horse (the id) being “driven” by a rational principle or, as Freud expresses it, one that “has the privilege of deciding on the goal.”

Metaphors aside, however, here are some substantive points of similitude:

1. The superego is akin to the Platonic “noble” spirit by virtue of being a “moral” forbidding principle that tries to prevent (“confine”) the ego from being driven by the id.

2. As a result, for the Freudian ego, ‘life is not easy!” just as for the Platonic charioteer, “the driving…of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.”

3. The Freudian id resembles Plato’s “appetitive” element (Freud, 1933, Plato, 1888). According to Freud,

• The id is “chaotic” while the Platonic appetitive element is “irrational”;
• The id is “open at its end to somatic influences” and is “a caldron full of seething excitations,” while the Platonic counterpart is “the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions” and “loves and hungers and thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire";
• The id “knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality” while the appetitive is “ignoble."

4. For Freud, the main function of the ego is “bringing about harmony among the forces and influences” much as, for Plato, it is for the soul’s elements to be “in friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason and the two subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that reason ought to rule, and do not rebel” (Plato, 1888).

5. According to Plato, reason issues “commands… about what [one] ought or ought not to fear” (Plato, 1888) much as, for Freud, “owing to its origin from the experiences of the perceptual system, [the ego]is earmarked for representing the demands of the external world” (Freud, 1933).

6. And, like Plato’s reason, the ego is a rational principle, which “must observe the external world, must lay down an accurate picture of it in the memory-traces of its perceptions, and by its exercise of the function of ‘reality-testing’ must put aside whatever in this picture of the external world is an addition derived from internal sources of excitation” (Freud, 1933).

7. According to Freud, the superego punishes the ego “with tense feelings of inferiority and of guilt” when it fails to comply with the former’s moral standards (Freud, 1933). This is what Freud calls “conscience.” Freud (1933) states,

I feel an inclination to do something that I think will give me pleasure, but I abandon it on the ground that my conscience does not allow it. Or I have let myself be persuaded by too great an expectation of pleasure into doing something to which the voice of conscience has objected and after the deed my conscience punishes me with distressing reproaches and causes me to feel remorse for the deed.

Similarly, in Book IV of the Republic, Plato (1888) ascribes such a “voice of conscience” to spirit. Thus:

[W]hen a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason…

Such “reviling of oneself” is clearly the emotion of guilt (or “moral guilt”), which, according to Freud, is the expression of “the tension between the ego and the superego” (Freud, 1933). So, Plato also has a theory of guilt arising from the conflict between spirit and desire when reason fails to control the latter.

8. Last, while Plato says that “spirit is on the side of reason,” there is also a sense in which it is not clearly on its side “when a man’s desires violently prevail over his reason.” In such a case, Plato would, no doubt, have agreed that, when desire overtakes reason, spirit provides an independent voice denouncing reason’s failure to control desire. In Plato’s terms, spirit is then “angry at the violence within him” just as Freud’s “voice of conscience” reproaches the ego for not controlling the id.

Possible points of departure

One point of departure between Freud and Plato appears to be the theory of morality embedded in each view. For Plato, as is well known, moral standards are objective realities, the so-called “Forms.” Justice, for instance, is a perennial, transcendent concept that can be grasped (“intuited”) by reason. In contrast, for Freud, the morality that the superego represents is a product of socialization, especially the internalization of the standards instilled in a child by its parents. According to Freud,

young children are amoral and possess no internal inhibitions against their impulses striving for pleasure. The part which is later taken on by the super-ego is played to begin with by an external power, by parental authority (Freud, 1933).

However, as a psychological fact, this morality is just as compelling as if it were a set of eternal transcendent truths like that of the Platonic morality. Freud (1933) states:

The super-ego is the representative for us of every moral restriction, the advocate of a striving towards perfection-- it is, in short, as much as we have been able to grasp psychologically of what is described as the higher side of human life (my italics).

Thus, the Freudian ego, like the Platonic reason, perceives the moral standards imposed by the superego as having a greater status in comparison to the demands of the id inasmuch as it represents a “higher side of human life.”

As such, there does not appear to be a functional distinction between the Freudian and Platonic approaches that could be derived from the discordant views about the nature of morality entertained by Freud and Plato.

Models of mental illness

Of course, it would be an oversimplification to claim that Plato captures the complexities of Freud’s psychodynamic theory. Freud’s ego and Plato’s reason are both tasked with harmonizing the parts of the psyche/soul, and for both, it is a daunting task. However, Plato may appear to portray reason as stronger, more in control, whereas the Freudian ego is “weak,” “gets its energy from the id,” and “often fails in its tasks” (Freud, 1933). I dare not claim that such power distinctions are irrelevant, but such distinctions may be lost when the therapeutic goal is to help the dysfunctional psyche (or soul) to increase ego strength (or rational resolve). Indeed, both thinkers allow that there are dysfunctions where the three basic elements are out of sync, and there is a need for intervention.

In the Timaeus (360 BCE), Plato remarks,

[E]xcessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unseasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or to hear anything rightly; but he is mad, and is at the time utterly incapable of any participation in reason (my italics).

In Freudian terms, this same state could be expressed as the ego being unable to harmonize and maintain control over the id and superego, thereby leading to mental illness. The terms are different, but the concepts are basically the same.

Concluding remarks

I do not intend this analysis to be exhaustive of the possible points of comparison and divergence between the Freudian and Platonic models. However, I believe I have made enough of a case to conclude that Freud’s famous tripartite division of the human psyche is primarily, or largely, attributable to Plato.

As for Freud's motive, or lack thereof, for not having addressed the demonstrable symmetry between the two models, I shall not speculate. Nevertheless, if I am correct, then Plato may be accredited for having laid the foundation for Freud's development of his psychoanalytic theory through the formulation of one of the most influential models of the human psyche in the history of thought.