The purpose of this research is to examine selected works of Marx and Freud on various issues relating to their assessment of the human condition in the modern period, i.e., the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the implications flowing therefrom for the postmodern and current period. The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the context in which the thought of Marx and Freud achieved preeminence in western culture, and then to discuss the views of each with reference to certain fundamental questions that their analyses of culture raise.
The history of western culture in the twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the work of Marx and Freud. It is perhaps not too much to say that, taken together, Marx’s analysis of culture and society as fundamentally social processes that imply…