Freud and Conrad conclusion

Freud and Conrad exemplified the phenomenon known as synchronicity: they thought of the same intellectual idea at the same time, but completely separated from each other. They both saw a darkness at the core of all men that manifested itself in the way people treat each other. Freud explained this darkness using psychology. He said that people’s immoral and irrational desires are repressed into the unconscious where they control our behaviors and make us want to harm others, and that we should understand and accept this dark unconscious. Conrad, in literary fashion, says that the darkness is man’s natural tendency towards evil and that we should hide ourselves from it because it is disheartening. However, both Freud and Conrad agreed that all men have a heart of darkness. The reader, then, is left with a choice: choose to believe that men are innately evil or that men are innately good. Or, as Yann Martel put it “Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” (Martel, 317).