Abstract

It is not fully appreciated that one of the most interesting of Schopenhauer's clandestine followers is Sigmund Freud. In Freud's 1923 masterpiece, The Ego and the Id, he sets up what amounts to his final model of "consciousness." In that brief volume, Freud differentiates between the ego and the id and eventually distinguishes these from the superego or ego-ideal. In this paper, I shall point out the remarkable similarities between Freud's model and the one Schopenhauer put forth nearly eighty years previously, as well as the differences in their respective descriptions of the phenomena of conscience and guilt.