ABSTRACT
Like Hobbes, Sigmund Freud posited a fictitious State of Nature outside the domain of history and civilization in order to legitimize the existence of the Leviathan. In explaining why the strategy of repression is doomed, Freud again referred to words and energy as the two relevant resources of mental politics. To provide a person's ego with support by acting as its ally against the forces of the id is the fundamental task of Freud's therapy. In Freud's framework the lifting of repressions is depicted as having many advantages. It places at the disposal of the ego energies which hitherto were either inaccessible or wasted in its efforts to maintain internal barriers. The mental agency which is supposed to do the condemning is, of course, the ego. Freud pictured the mind as a social hierarchy whose classes are engaged in a civil war for the power to determine the actions of the individual as a whole.
