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66 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
Constructions of the human mind as a conscious–unconscious dualism
drew upon the familiar culture–nature, human–beast, civilized–
primitive dichotomies underpinning nineteenth-century thought.
The unconscious part of the mind was regularly associated with the
bestial, instinctive life of the natural, material world as opposed to
the rational, cultured world of the conscious mind. In this sense, the
unconscious became strongly linked with a notion of a ‘beast within’.
Mary Midgley traces the lineage of this image in Western thought,
noting its absence in Homer’s epic poems, where the blame for shameful
human behaviour is shifted on to the gods (not animals). Plato, in
contrast, characterized the gods as ‘good’, and consistently located evil
in the animal world: ‘Black horses, wolves, lions, hawks, asses and
pigs recur every time he mentions the subject of evil.’ 2 Midgley argues
that the Christian tradition perpetuated the conceptualization of evil
in the form of a beast. Christianity has also been implicated in tying
imagery of the beast more closely to the wolf, since the identification
of the followers of Christ as ‘flocks’ and Christ himself as a lamb has
led to characterizations of Satan or ‘the beast’ as a wolf (the lamb’s
greatest enemy). 3
If philosophy and religion had developed the notion of ‘the beast
within’ alive during the long centuries since Plato, it was Sigmund
Freud’s work in the field of psychology which modernized the concept.
As Joseph Grixti has comprehensively argued, Freud ‘lodged
the beast in the unconscious’. 4 There are certainly many passages in
Freud’s work that characterize the unconscious as the condensation
of all that is primitive, bestial and irrational in the psyche; he wrote,
for example, of behaviour that arises from unconscious desires as
‘wolfish’. 5 Evolutionary theory provided the scientific basis for such
imagery; as Freud argued, ‘Man’s archaic heritage forms the nucleus
of the unconscious mind’, 6 suggesting that bestial impulses suppressed
through the progress of civilization have been relegated to the realm
of the unconscious. But Freud had also read Nietzsche, and, as Bryan
Turner has argued, he was deeply influenced by the philosopher’s
characterization of a humanity driven, through a primitive heritage,
by the instincts of a ‘wild beast’ or a ‘beast of prey’. 7 Thus, in giving