2011-03-03, 09:04 PM
2147483647 Wrote:Psychoanalytic theory was designed to explaining the mind in terms of animal behavior. The human id is the representation of the piece of consciousness centralized within the oldest parts of the brain, namely the brainstem, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. These parts provided essential life processes and give rise to natural feelings, such and elevated moods when rewards are presented and agitation when danger is near. They allow humans to be surviving, resilient, and very capable of reproduction (success).
As humans evolved through time, they acquired language and developed it from something trivial to sophisticated. Language allowed humans to develop a sense of self, starting from the oral stage and progressing all the way until the genital stage. It's no accident that these stages of development come one after another: food first, shelter next, then reproduction, and finally, stable reproduction.
As language evolved, humans came to realize that information can not only be stored internally within the mind, it can be written down. Memory capacity expanded. Intelligence rose. Humans became obsessed with prediction. In order to survive with each other, Freud reasoned that the old survival techniques were no longer helpful in the human population, so they evolved the ego and superego to modulate their decisions. The egos created reasons for an individual to deviate from their instinctive, "natural" desires.
Humans are only "human" when the outer regions of their brains, those that give rise to morality and language, are considered. While the neocortex is only present in more cephalized creatures, the fact is that all animals are cephalized from the center up. Reproductive processes, such as polygamy arise from those primal regions, so to eliminate them from this discussion is pretty much reducing this problem to opinions.
That is definitely not doing the question any justice.
Bleh, you're probably right. I was thinking something different.