Alain’s medical school essay help

admin @ December 21, 2007

Medical school essay help:  Alain’s concept of the interconnection between body and mind was primarily Cartesian, with its emphasis on the role of physical, corporeal determinants. He believed that Freud misinterpreted the symptoms and signs of human behavior, and attributed motives incorrectly to an autonomous and murky unconscious. Physiology plays a more important role in behavior than Freud allowed, and this led him to create an unruly unconscious to explain what are often, in fact, physical causes. As for dreams, they are not the messengers of a hidden spirit, but the weakened, distorted perceptions of a drowsy mind. Finally, Alain did not trust the complicated mechanisms of Freud’s concepts, preferring a simpler, more practical, natural explanation of mental phenomena. He saw in psychoanalysis an overly pessimistic view of humankind, which emphasized misery and depravity rather than encouraging nobility of action and the exercise of the will.
Medical school essay help:  With regard to another major influence on modern thought, Marx, the writings of Alain again reveal criticism and reservation. Although he can be considered a socialist, Alain espoused a dialectic which was more specific, emphasizing the individual and each person’s role within the class struggle. He was also much less of a dogmatic absolutist than Marx, and his views of politics and history do not reveal the same systematic approach or the inevitability of social revolution. As for war, whose horrors he witnessed firsthand between 1914 and 1917 and which occupied his later thought, he also disagreed with Marxist ideology. He criticized the Marxists for oversimplifying historical and social causes; they blamed capitalists and their greed for causing war when in fact the causes were far more complex, and involved in addition a kind of collective madness of a people intent on war.
Medical school essay help:  In Mars ( 1921) the importance of passion, both individual and collective, and its relationship to war, a "crime of passion," are explored at length. Alain, a determined pacifist, believed that a Marxist state would be just as militaristic as a capitalistic one, since all governing groups have a will to power which tends to be expressed in warfare. Each individual is tempted by the moral perversions of war and violence, which are so often justified by false claims of a transcendent or ultimate justice.
Medical school essay help:  Whatever the content of his writing, Alain often used concrete and innovative images to capture his reader’s attention or make a point. These images are often taken from everyday life: a crying baby, a loaf of bread, or a farmer resting in his field. Besides these arresting, poetic images, he formulated his thought in striking phrases, which comprise a stockpile of maxims. He saw ideas as instruments which allow us to grasp reality and to conduct our life with dignity and morality. the issues he discussed were often quite complex, but stated in a simple prose, without philosophical terms or jargon. Although his writing often opposed prevailing thought, the freshness of his style and the rigor of his thought earned him a great reputation. During the first half of the 20th century, a period marked by global atrocities, his propos indicated a path for humankind’s secular salvation through reflective thought and moral action.

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