Sigmund Freud

This newer ideology was found in the nineteenth century, and may be regarded as one which emphasized man’s freedom to indulge his more animal-like aspects: to obtain freedom, for his body, from disease, death, hunger, discomfort, and drudgery. This movement eventually gave us modern surgery and medical science, modern technology, mass production of food and other consumers’ goods, central heating, indoor plumbing, domestic lighting, air conditioning, and the plethora of so-called labor-saving devices. The outlook behind these achievements may be symbolized by Charles Darwin, whose writings came to stand for proof of the animal nature of man, and of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were taken to show that sex was the dominant, if not the sole, human motivation and that inhibitions were the great bane of human life. This latter point of view came to be accepted on the most pervasive level of human experience in the attacks on inhibitions and discipline which we call “progressive” education as represented in the outpourings of such semipopular thinkers as Rousseau in the earliest stage of the movement (in Emile) or John Dewey in the latest stage. We who enter the twentieth century must not assume, as earlier ages so often did, that our immediate predecessors were wrong and that we should seek a point of view which appears true largely because it is opposed to them. This mistaken method of human progress has led men in the past to oscillate over the centuries from one extreme point of view to its opposite, and then, a few generations later, back again. Thus, the humanism of the sixteenth century had reacted against the scholasticism of the medieval period and was reacted against in turn by the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, the materialism of the nineteenth century, and the reaction against this latest outlook by the “flight from freedom” and blind mass discipline of reactionary totalitarianism in the Fascist and Nazi aberrations.

Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (p. 851). GSG & Associates Publishers. Kindle Edition.