freud and conrad body paragraph 1

As Ross Murfin aptly points out in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, Conrad’s “darkness” and Freud’s “unconscious” are one and the same. Murfin’s book is about how authors use their books to demonstrate the phenomena that psychoanalysts use to understand psychology. This connection does not stop with Conrad and Freud. “Conrad, Freud’s contemporary, [was] a writer who meant by “darkness” what Freud meant by “unconscious” and who, like Freud, believed human beings to be largely motivated by the irrational side of the mind” (Murfin, 122). As Murfin says, Conrad and Freud talk about the same irrational and immoral core of mankind; they just have different names for it. The parallel nature of Freud’s unconscious and Conrad’s darkness becomes strikingly similar when one reads their two main works. The last line of Heart of Darkness reads: “the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad, 93). In this quote the Thames (the “waterway”), the heart of England’s empire, is used to represent the hearts of all men, the clouds are the shroud of unconsciousness preventing our moral “god” from seeing the true darkness of man (England), and the “immense darkness” is the evil that all men eventually come to. As the last line of the book, this quote has the responsibility of driving the books central message: the hearts of men inevitably drift towards evil and because men are unaware of it, there is nothing they can do to stop it. This message is strikingly similar to the unconscious Freud describes which drives all conscious behaviors. When talking man’s about the cruel, selfish violent instincts that communism naïvely seeks to eliminate by means of total equality, Freud lays out the nature of the unconscious. “This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty… it is at the bottom of all the relation of affection and love between human beings” (Freud, 3). Freud says, here, that our unconscious instincts to steal, harm, fornicate, and covet are innate and control every relationship and action we have—even love. Conrad and Freud saw at the core of men unknown desires that drive them to do evil things and control every aspect of their lives. Conrad called it darkness and Freud called it the unconscious id.