What hope there is derives from Freud's assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. ... Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud's egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature. (Philip Rieff)

What hope there is derives from Freud's assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. ... Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud's egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature.

Philip Rieff

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assumption contending convincing democracy equal full hierarchy high-low hope human idea jostling life logic mad nature revision student traditional psychoanalysis egalitarian

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