Myth and Human Agency: Psychoanalysis, Alienation, and Responsibility in Camus, Sartre, and Russell

In the end, the psychoanalytic dialogue with existential philosophy reveals that alienation is not a terminal condition but the crucible in which agency is forged. Camus’s Sisyphus, Sartre’s Orestes, and Russell’s Prometheus each dramatize the ego’s confrontation with oppressive internalized structures, whether cosmic absurdity, cultural guilt, or mechanistic helplessness, and show that liberation arises only when these tyrants are dismantled. By refusing despair, rejecting manufactured remorse, and sublimating vulnerability into creative solidarity, the individual transforms alienation into autonomy. As Russell insists, man must ‘sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power’ (Russell, B. 2004). This is not a call to transcend the human condition, but to embrace it: to author meaning where none is given, to build ethical responsibility in an unfeeling wilderness, and to claim freedom as the conscious act of a resilient ego. In this synthesis, psychoanalysis and existentialism converge on a shared imperative, to dismantle the tyrants within and to live as agents of human values.

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