The Great Gatsby, Freud and Psychology in the 1920s

Starting in the 1920s, a rebellion against religion, the church and old sexual mores begun. This movement was called Modernism and this paper will address and explain one of the main factors of the movement: Psychology. The psychological ideas were new and embraced by especially the youth, and adults too, all sick of the strict norms and rules. Sigmund Freud was the symbol of psychology, and so he has been for decades now. Sigmund Freud and psychology in the 1920’s, like money and materialism, replaced religion and common beliefs. God was no longer important to people, and they found support in psychological ideas and money.

Sigmund Freud is called “The Father of Psychology”, not because he first discovered or invented it but because he was one of the first important psychologists. (Kasschau 109) He came up with different ideas and theories, which all are important and essential in psychology today. Freud concentrated basically on human drives, the unconscious mind and the personality. Even though Freud is believed to think humans were useless beings, Kim Griffin rejected this idea: “. . . he believed that all humans had a natural “bad” side. Every human has aggressive, animalistic and destructive impulses.” According to Enduring Issues in Psychology, Freud found three different aspects of our personality and psyche. He named them id, ego and super-ego. The id is our biological part, like instincts, which is given to us at birth. We cannot control the id, and it seeks for release based on unconscious motives. The super ego is simply our conscience, the part of out personality which is formed by norms and rules in society. The ego exists as a balance between the id and the super ego. The ego “strives after pleasure and seeks to avoid unpleasure”(Blake 65), which is the egos main task. In other words, the ego tries to please the id while not going as far as causing unpleasure, by doing something the super ego and our morals are against.
Furthermore, libido