Reinhold Niebuhr’s Critique of Freud: No Room for Prophets

Reinhold Niehbur, the great American theologian who has been labelled a "prophet to politicians" and was identified by Barak Obama as his favorite philosopher, wrote an essay about "Creativity and Self Concern in Freud" that was published in a book of essays in honor of the centennary celebration of Freud's birth.  While recently reading this essay I was struck by how many of Niebuhr's criticisms are centered on a lack of space for prophets in Freud's philosophy.

Here's Niebuhr's critique of the Freudian super-ego:

If the id is too closely identified with the ego, the super-ego is on the other hand not sufficiently identified with the structure of selfhood. For the super-ego represents the demands of the community upon the self. This social interpretation of conscience makes the ability of the self to defy the community inexplicable, whether it does so in its own interests or in the name of a higher value than that which the community embodies. Since Freud’s system is a consistently naturalistic one, it cannot, despite the subtleties of its analyses of the intricacies of human selfhood, do full justice to the transcendent freedom of spirit of which the self is capable and it cannot survey the creative and destructive possibilities of that freedom. For the capacity of transcending every social situation and its own self bears within it all the possibilities of creativity. It enables the self to make a critical survey of its own actions and of its culture, and to project a different end and goal from the traditionally established one.

Here's some of Nieburh's critique of the Freudian understanding of civilization:

Organized comunities have one similarity with individuals.  They have an organ of will, insofar as they have an organ of government.  They are different from individuals because they have no sharply defined organ of self-transcendence.  No one in the nation is destined to view the total situation and to place the national interest in some coherent scheme of values.  This function is performed by all reflective individuals and groups of individuals who have the ability to survey a larger scene and a more inclusive system of values than those dictated by the survival impulse or the collective pride of the community.  But the very fact that these expressions of freedom are not as coherent or organized as the nation's will, makes it inevitable that the collective will should always prove more potent than the freedom, which expresses the conscience of the nation.