ABSTRACT
In his determinism Freud is close to Schopenhauer. He was acutely conscious of that aspect of human bondage rooted in the individual’s psychology and of the way the individual himself contributes to his own bondage. Like Schopenhauer he thought of it as an instance of the causal determinism which holds sway in human life: ‘are you asking me, gentlemen, to believe that there is anything which happens without a cause?’ (Freud 1949a, p. 21). Like Schopenhauer and Hume he thought that to deny this is to turn human thinking and behaviour into something accidental, random and unpredictable: ‘there is within you a deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice … [But] this belief is quite unscientific and … must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental life’ (ibid., pp. 87–8).
