2nd body

Freud’s exploration of humans’ level of awareness and components of personality effectively justify Conrad’s psychoanalysis of Marlow’s journey. Consider Frederick R. Karl’s interpretation of Freud. “Confronting similar material, the scientist Freud was concerned to analyze logically the seeming illogic, the apparent irrationality, of dreams, and, on occasion, of nightmares. Both he and Conrad penetrated into the darkness, the darkness entered into when people sleep or when their consciences sleep, when they are free to pursue secret wishes, whether in dreams, like Freud’s analysands, or in actuality like Kurtz and his followers” (Karl 124). In other words, whereas Conrad perceives the darkness through the illustration of images, Freud interprets the darkness through dreams. Nevertheless, both Conrad and Freud agree that darkness exists in one’s subconscious. Indeed, Freud logically analyzes the seemingly illogic through the three components of personality: the super ego, ego, and id. He explains that the super ego contains our values and social morals, which we are often taught at a young age, the ego controls the sophisticated mental manners that conduct reasoning and problem solving, and the id encompasses our primitive drives. In fact, Freud elucidates how the id is where our darkness exists. He goes on to illustrate that the id has no sense of reality and solely seeks to satisfy its needs through primary processes such as self-defense and hunger. Furthermore, the libido, the energy storehouse, is what provides the incentives for the id. In fact, the id has two major instincts: Eros and Thanatos. Eros, the life instinct, promotes self-satisfaction tendencies. This is where sexual desires, according to Freud, originate. Thanatos, the death instinct, arouses the urge for violent motives. Evidently, both Eros and Thanatos, Freud argues, is what ultimately make up the darkness. Thus, Freud would perceive Marlow’s irrational behavior purely as acts of his id.