As human beings they shared the common human mode of participation in reality which has as an essential element consciousness of existing in an “in-between” state of living “in-between” mortality and immortality, immanence and transcendence Along with this there is the awareness of being called to attunement with the divine ground and that to be fully human one must be more than human. In treating revolutionary figures like Hegel or Marx, Voegelin placed them within an anthropological and a historical framework. So I will restrict myself to a brief outline of a Voegelian approach to Freud with some references to Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

“Phenomena in the metaxy, of an economic or psychological nature, are rashly fused in an act of libidinous transgression with the apeirontic depth in such symbols as the Marxian Being which determines Consciousness, or in the Freudian symbol of the Libido, with the declared purpose of mobilizing the authority of the Acheronta against the authority of Reason.” Ī comprehensive study of the figure of Freud would require more than an essay. In his essay on Reason, Voegelin again places Freud within the same revolutionary context: Voegelin writes: “It will perhaps not be superfluous to add that the same problem of analytical obscurity would have arisen if the example chosen had not been the construction of Marx but that of Comte, Hegel, or Freud.” He does so while explaining the way that Marx used the element of “analytical obscurity” in order to have his counter-image of reality eclipse our true image of reality. In the essay, Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme, Voegelin mentions Freud in connection with the type of analysis that he carries out on Marx. However, he did make enough comments to make it clear that he regarded Freud as falling within the same cultural matrix that produced the revolutionary figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

In his writings Voegelin makes several references to Sigmund Freud, but he never engaged in the type of sustained philosophical analysis that he carried out with figures like Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche.

Totemism freud