freud and conrad body paragraph 2

Freud and Conrad argue that the “darkness” at the heart of men is evil by nature: Freud says that the unconscious mind is filled with desires to do unspeakable things unto others, and Conrad uses his book to showcase the heinous behaviors that man’s darkness leads him to do.

Freud argues, in Civilization and its Discontents, that man naturally seeks to do harm unto his fellow man because of the id, and civilization is just a futile attempt to stop it. Freud describes the results of unconscious desires as such: “[Men’s] neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him” (Freud, 1). For Freud, the unconscious makes men want to kill, rape, torture, and exploit each other to fulfill desires of which they are not consciously aware. This is a true darkness at the heart of man. The similarity between this list of uses of other men is bafflingly similar to Conrad’s descriptions of white men’s treatment of the Africans. For example, Marlow sees six emaciated, despondent, mentally empty African men chained together, walking in single-file up a hill, followed by a content white man carrying a gun (18-20). These men are not working for pay, food, or their families. All of that has been taken away from them. The white men have come and gratified their aggressiveness, exploited, raped, stole from, humiliated, tortured and killed the Africans: the darkness/ unconscious at work. Kurtz, the representation of unrestrained darkness, does equally heinous things to local tribes in trying to get ivory. “’To speak plainly, he raided the country,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Not alone, surely!’… ‘Kurtz got the tribe to follow him’” (Conrad, 68). Kurtz pitted tribes against each other, enslaved them, stole from them, tortured, and killed them, all in pursuit of personal gain. This exemplification of the “darkness” perfectly parallels Freud’s description of unconscious desires and demonstrates that the “unconscious” and the “darkness” driving men are composed of the same evils. In this way, Freud and Conrad’s theories about the malevolent core of all men are the same, just from different perspectives.