Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘human nature’ functions not as a settled anthropological datum but as a contested site where biology, culture, spirit, and psyche each advance competing claims to definitional authority. Freud fixes aggression and libido as irreducible instinctual endowments, establishing a tragic baseline against which civilization can only partially prevail. Fromm challenges both behaviorist plasticity and Freudian fixity, insisting that human nature harbors real dynamisms — needs for relatedness, freedom, and meaning — that no social order can simply reprogram. Maté presses the socio-biological argument further, reading modern capitalist culture as systematically falsifying human nature by naturalizing competitive selfishness when the species’ actual baseline is cooperative and attachment-oriented. Nussbaum, drawing on Aristotle, locates human nature in characteristic capabilities and the conditions of flourishing, making it the normative ground of ethical argument. Damasio grounds the discussion in homeostatic biology, showing that drives, affects, and cultural inventions all serve life-regulatory imperatives continuous with animal existence. Pascal occupies an older tension: human nature as simultaneously capable of grandeur and misery, instinct and reason forever in unresolved conflict. Across all positions, the corpus repeatedly returns to one underlying polarity: whether human nature is a fixed essence to be uncovered or a developmental possibility to be cultivated — a tension that defines the therapeutic ambition of depth psychology itself.
Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without devel
Fromm stakes out a middle position against both biological determinism and cultural relativism, arguing that human nature possesses real inherent dynamisms that set limits on social adaptation.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
Under a capitalist system notions and expressions of human nature will both mirror the individualized, competitive ideal and justify it as being the inevitable status quo.
Maté argues that dominant cultural narratives distort the concept of human nature by naturalizing competitive selfishness, masking the species’ genuine baseline of cooperativeness and attachment.
, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022thesis
men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
Freud establishes aggression as a constitutive and irreducible element of human nature, forming the tragic foundation upon which civilization must laboriously construct its restraints.
, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930thesis
There are certain factors in man’s nature which are fixed and unchangeable: the necessity to satisfy the physiologically conditioned drives and the necessity to avoid isolation and moral aloneness.
Fromm identifies two non-negotiable constants in human nature — biological drives and the need for relatedness — that any adequate social psychology must account for.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
For as long as people have been writing about humanity, there’s been a pervasive assumption that the human mind is created by some all-powerful force. For the Ancient Greeks, that force was nature, embodied as gods. Christianity wrenched human nature away from Mother Nature and placed it in the hands of a single, omnipotent God.
Barrett traces the historical succession of frameworks — nature, God, evolution — through which human nature has been explained, contextualizing all essentialist accounts as culturally situated constructions.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
The claim that the political is a part of our nature appears to be equivalent to the claim that a life without it is lacking in an important good, is seriously frustrated or incomplete.
Nussbaum reads Aristotle’s appeal to human nature as a normative ethical argument: nature names not a biological minimum but the conditions required for a fully flourishing human life.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
Instinct and reason, signs of two natures. (344) Thinking reed. It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought.
Pascal frames human nature as constitutively divided between instinct and reason, locating dignity not in corporeal existence but in the capacity for reflective thought.
, Pensées, 1670thesis
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
Pascal diagnoses restlessness and diversion-seeking as structural features of human nature, revealing an underlying existential emptiness that no external achievement can resolve.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
the worst part of the barbaric human nature would have already been tamed, and cultures would eventually achieve effective control over barbarism and conflict, if only we give them time
Damasio tentatively entertains the progressive-cultural thesis that barbaric impulses within human nature are being gradually subdued by educational and cultural development, while marking its precariousness.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Cooperative strategies have been a part of the homeostatically driven biological makeup of humans, which means that the germ of conflict resolution is present in hu
Damasio grounds cooperative and prosocial tendencies biologically, arguing that homeostatic drives make conflict resolution as much a feature of human nature as aggression.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
No conceivable condition exists under which a human being has less agency or fewer options than in infancy and early childhood. The imperative to survive overrides everything, and that survival depends on the maintenance of attachment, at whatever cost to authenticity.
Maté locates the deepest constraint within human nature in the infant’s absolute dependence on attachment, showing how this foundational vulnerability shapes character across the lifespan.
, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022supporting
These ancient neural systems, which constitute the foundations of our deeply felt personal values and standards of conduct, only give us options to consider in our social worlds.
Panksepp insists that evolved affective systems constitute a shared neurobiological substrate for human nature while emphasizing that cultural and historical forces determine how those systems are expressed.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
when the one note of individuation enters into the birth, human nature and life are divided in two. From this time on, if the utmost quietness is not achieved, human nature and life never see each other again.
The Taoist text presents human nature as a primordial unity fractured at birth through individuation, with spiritual practice as the means of recovering that original wholeness.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
The ability to invent solutions is an immense privilege but prone to failure and quite costly. We can call this the burden of freedom or, more precisely, the burden of consciousness.
Damasio frames consciousness and the capacity for cultural invention as simultaneously the distinctive privilege and the existential burden specific to human nature.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
the ‘arts’, broadly construed as the creature’s characteristic abilities and ways of functioning in the world, make living things the things they are.
Nussbaum, reading Protagoras, argues that human nature is constituted by characteristic capacities and ways of functioning rather than by a pre-given essence independent of those abilities.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Human morality organizes around questions of right, wrong and justice. According to de Waal and others, it originates with concern for others and in understanding and respecting social rules.
Levine, drawing on primatology, grounds human moral capacity in affective and social dispositions shared with other mammals, naturalizing ethics as an expression of human nature rather than a cultural imposition upon it.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
it is not their habit to set up images, temples and altars; rather they charge them who do so with folly, and this, I think, is because they do not hold like the Greeks that the gods are of human natures.
Harrison, via Herodotus, marks the anthropomorphic projection of human nature onto divinity as a culturally specific Greek phenomenon, raising the question of how conceptions of deity reflect conceptions of the human.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
the hero’s nature is human but raised to the limit of the supernatural—he is ‘semi-divine.’ … the hero’s supernaturalness includes human nature and thus represents a synthesis of the unconscious and human consciousness.
Jung locates the mythological hero figure at the threshold where human nature and the collective unconscious meet, making the hero an archetypal symbol of the individuation process.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
an emphasis on predatory and murderous instincts in both human beings and the rest of nature; … a tendency to draw a sharp and rigid boundary between man and nature in such a way as to see the latter as radically ‘other’
Tarnas identifies the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex as the astrological correlate of cultural tendencies to project destructive instincts onto nature and to sever human nature from its ecological ground.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006aside
By His privations in the flesh He re-established and renewed the human state, and by His own incarnation He bestowed on human nature the supranatural grace of deification.
The Philokalia articulates the Orthodox theological conviction that human nature, disordered by the Fall, is restored and elevated through the Incarnation toward deification.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside
Many of the patterns that organise and make sense of the dance of life in animals – and importantly in humans – come from somewhere, we have little or no idea where or how: instincts.
McGilchrist invokes instinct as a deep, opaque layer of human nature — pre-conscious, non-learned patterns of response — that challenges reductive accounts of behavior as purely cultural or rational.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside