Psychoanalysis and the communist movement

Freud graduated as Doctor of Medicine from the Medical School of the University of Vienna in 1881.

Freud started medical school at seventeen, an unusually early age. It took him an unusually long time to finish medical school. Not until 1881 did he finally received his medical degree. Reports from friends who knew him during that time, as well as information from Freud's own letters, suggest that Freud was less diligent about his medical studies than he might have been. He focused instead on scientific research.

Freud began work at the Vienna General Hospital almost immediately. His plan was to gain the experience in treating actual patients that eight years of medical school had not given him, but that he would need in order to start a successful private practice. He started in an entry-level position, moving rapidly through the surgery and dermatology departments, and arriving finally in Theodor Meynert's department of psychiatry. While there, he continued to do research on neurophysiology.
http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/freud/section3.rht

hoodie.

I’d be interested to know what you mean when you use the term subconscious.

Freud's psychoanalysis was developed under positivism....
it's a nonsense calling it "scientific" or "non scientific" without talking about epistemology. Positivism is over, "science" and "scientism" are different things.

Nowadays Psychonalysis is a very different thing. Like marxism, it's not an unitary theory, but there are different branches. None of them is pure "freudian".
Human's mind is not isolated, but emerges from relationship.
Many psychoanalysts don't believe in the "sexual drives" theory etc...
There is a lot of empiric research on children and mothers, now we know a lot more about how psychopatology rise from relationships.

My english sucks, but i'm studying to be a psychoanalyst myself (and i'm a former patient).... so i felt the need to reply

if you want to know more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowlby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fonagy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Stern_(psychologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_A._Mitchell

It is perhaps splitting hairs but as I remember it, as it concerned Freud, to become qualified to practice medicine you had to get the degree which he got and then go on to a kind of Part II training which involved kind of going into a kind of apprenticeship in a hospital kind of thing.

Which he didn’t do, I think.

I don't have any details to hand but remember reading that Freud regularly attended a Paris coroner's session where he saw the results of unimaginable violence and cruelty particularly against children.

Anarchy will never succeed until we resolve the childhood dialectical conflicts of mass society's mass neurosis.

Dave B,
thanks for your critique, and thus the opportunity for further comment.

No no NO!!

Penis envy, castration, and Oedipal mother complex are purely symbolic terms, don't be a fundamental literalist.

Sorry, but these are the most common misrepresentations of Psychodynamics.

In fact far from failing to find evidence, every practicing clinical psychotherapist, as opposed to academic psychologists, finds elements of these symbolic complexes in all their clients.

First, shagging is adult genital sexuality and has nothing to do with the unresolved need for our mother's intimate physical nurturing during the Oedipal stage of child sexual development.

Nurturing, not fucking!!!

From the instant of birth, the culture of mass society conspires to undermine the all important mother-child connection, and thus, by the latter Oedipal stage, every child in mass society is already neurotically preoccupied with a devastatingly, unresolved need for mother's further physical nurturing.

Just as siblings thus become rivals for mother's nurturing, so Father also eventually becomes a rival.

But Father is bigger and stronger and can thwart our autonomy.

Castration is simply a symbol for a boy's fear of having his autonomy cut by his Father rival.

Unfortunately, because mass society is largely patriarchal, boys are forced to repress their rivalry, repress their autonomy, and thus are symbolically castrated by the patriarchal father.

This is why civilization is so latently homosexual.

Penis is simply a symbol of male autonomy, and penis envy is simply the female's admiration and envy of male autonomy in our patriarchal culture.

Tragic proof of Penis Envy is the case of Freud's nephew Edward Burneys who was approached by the tobacco industry in 1919 with the task of convincing women to smoke.

Until then women universally found smoking a smelly, dirty, disgusting male habit.

Burneys changed that perception by taking a handful of women and have them march in a large New York parade with the swaggering freedom of male bravado while most shocking of all,,, smoking cigarettes in public!!!

Overnight women across America began subconsciously associating cigarettes as portable male penises that symbolized the power of male autonomy that they could now purchase for a dime.

Overnight, the tobacco companies doubled their profits.

Darwin is absolutely clear:

Sexual reproduction is the root of all animal social behavior.

The uniqueness of human sexuality is not only the root of human cooperation,

but the social intricacies of cooperation according to Darwin is what led to the cognitive revolution that created modern homo-sapien-sapien.

The unique sexuality of the human female, whose continual sexual receptivity without the need to come into occasional periods of heat, is the key factor that develops the human male-female intimacy necessary for the growth of empathy and compassion.

The unique twelve year sexual development of human children to reach independent adult sexual maturity is a second key factor in the nurturing cooperation of human social behavior.

Human sexuality is the root of human social behavior.

Aggression on the other hand, perverts human sexuality; thus perverting human social behavior, and is the root of mass society.

Environmental manipulation and curiosity is required before one can develop into a sexually successful autonomous adult.

Autonomy is necessary for the development of a successful sexual identity.

Mass society has always been hierarchical, and as primatologists will tell you all primates in hierarchy are forced to repress their instincts and instead utilize deception as their main strategic tool for sexual reproduction and survival.

The scientist is repressing his shagging instinct, and is instead reaching his sexual goal by the deceptively indirect means of: sublimation.

Sublimation is where the scientist is first trying to become a successful scientist so that he can obtain a more successful sexual identity to better attract Nicole.

Besides sublimation, there is also projection and, like Pavlov's dog, association, but in your example sublimation is the norm.

Your scientist example, due to hierarchy, is pure sublimation on his part,

but, 'that concern, compassion and empathy for the suffering of others' is due to the uniqueness of human female sexuality and how that dramatically increases female-male intimacy and bonding

Sex and Death (including violence and aggression) are the two most powerful release mechanisms that animals use to release themselves from suffering.

Animals caught in a painful trap are known to chew their leg off to escape suffering even though they know it means certain eventual death.

The neurotic pathos (suffering) of mass society is the root not only of our neurotically methodical organization of violence, but also of how war is a sublimated death drive.

Obviously you didn't read the article that began this thread in the first place!

Stalin feared and hated Freudian psychoanalysis!
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Anarchy is born at the birth of the mother-child connection.

Hoodie a very enlightening post, providing very simple but effective arguments against many of the most common misconception about Freud, and things I certainly had not fully undersood

The Pleasure- and Reality-Principles: Freud's reality principle posits that there are frustrations and punishments quite as often as pleasant encounters, and this cognitive victory of reality over the instinctual drive toward pleasure is said to bring forth consciousness and in fact, agency. But isn't it a matured consciousness that constructs the notions, reality and pleasure as oppositions in the first place? Freud well-noted that civilisation undermines the pleasure principle, but posited that this is the invariant nature of "healthy" maturation within society. Are we then to view maturation as the increasing tendency toward sacrifice, making neurosis or neurotic desire as natural as progressive reform movements, mothers and apple pie? At any rate, it seems clear that a game was constructed which only considers the immediate or "objective" social environment, and it is this "social reality" (aka "superego") which claims itself winner in a conflict with pleasure. Neurosis is said to be the denial of defeat; denial itself is a common "defense mechanism".

That no other social species or social form exhibits such a pervasive degree of admitted neurosis than the civil relation, particularly in its capitalist form, we must say the entire debate concerning "reality" is ethnocentric and has little to do with the ubiquitous patterns (or archetypes) we ascribe to nature and label "laws" or "principles". This contradiction (or alienation) is maintained by denying consciousness or agency to any but the civilised, performing a marvelous narrative of circular logic called civics, the physics of civilisation. We become compartmentalised like commodities in a warehouse.

Children do not grow up. They are destroyed alongside the pleasure of free-play. Not all at once, mind you, but little by little. And how readily parents and educators comply with the traditional "gifts" of frustration and punishment, sacrificing the child's frivolity and wonder in exchange for dead-serious, harsh "nature". The process is insidious else the child, if s/he survives the ordeal at all, matures into a criminal or reactionary poet, unable to prevent the "return of the repressed".

The Pleasure- and Reality-Principles combining to produce consciousness can be viewed through the aesthetic lens with a slightly different resulting image. Without denying pleasure its fundamental status, we witness situations to approach or avoid. A mentalist teleology, "intention" or "drive", need not even be invoked. The Pleasure Principle is usually interpreted as "the young organism seeks only pleasure". A behaviourist view would read "the young organism reciprocates (or engages with) patterns (contingencies) of reinforcement". There is no pleasure without influence, and a pleasant situation not only draws our attention, we seek to replicate it as often as we might. As a matter of fact, the age qualifier is unnecessary: we witness all organisms respond "positively" to reinforcement, keeping in mind that the idea of reinforcement is something other than reward, ransom or bribery. If the organism itself is thought of as a situation such as a physiologist or functional anatomist might picture it, "self-reinforcement" considers the internal environment. The result is the same: approach is the conditioned response to environmental encouragement giving one directionality.

It is not a simple either/or dialectic. Approach-avoid "choices" or "responses" are also accompanied by the possibility of indifference, often the effect of habituation or stasis – the lack of movement – and even more often, uncertainty. Originality (or "subversion" or "transgression" or "creativity") is not the dialectic opposition to directionality. It could be seen as the result of multivariate influences which make every situation at least slightly unique, or it could be seen as the option not to move at all or postpone movement or try a novel route from the expected. Constraint cancels out the necessity of consciousness. Influence demands it, as Samuel Buttler implied. It is said a falling rock has no choice but to crash onto the ground. When behaviourism or depth psychology ignore the variable aesthetics of a situation and experimental engagement with it ("operant" or "artistic" behaviour), personal and even social agency outright disappears. Modern science has traveled from its original position of exploration and wonder, into the sterile description or invention or modification of machineworks necessarily responding to necessity. The predictable universe it desires contains no awe, no interest, no surprise. It is written and invariant. The goal of modern science is the elimination of all intervening variables. I call that constraint.

Asger Jorn suggested we should approach situations as trialectic rather than dialectic, in that this view does not foster aggression or competitiveness as all alliances or antagonisms become provisional or "situationally variable" and therefore, temporary. I think even that is too much of a simplification, particularly when all situations are viewed as systems of contradiction. The thinking of contradiction is contradiction itself – merely another language game. Engels' interpretation of Hegel suggests, on the contrary, that bipolar opposition is the source of motion itself. It is an assumption most take for granted. But there is always at least a third option, a way out. Early naturalists pointed out that nature, meaning here, "the world outside of civilisation", does not tolerate contradiction. This is another way of saying nothing can exist which does not exist and from that, nothing exists isolated from being, nothing exists in isolation. The contradictions we experience must either be artificial and therefore spurious (illegitimate, imagined) or expressions of power over nature and ultimately other/self-destructive. To ultimately seek out contradiction is to destroy the planet in a grand suicidal gesture or an accumulated series of little wounds inflicted over time. Planetary suicide is "nature's" way of destroying the contradiction: "the end of civilisation as we know it". Another way of saying all this is "self-defeating behaviour has no selective advantage", but then, that 'goes without saying' and we reply, "Duh!". The hypertrophic wrist-cutter bleeds to death; the hyperphagic predator exterminates its prey and wains away or bursts in the process of over-eating.

Of course, this is only more sophistry and not just a bit extremist. To think things through to possible ends is extremism. But it seems obvious from ethology and ethnology that we, the epitome of civilisation, are the only social form bent on alienation and destruction rather than association or connection and creation. Theologians called this "free will", proving our singular choice among all other animals (and "childish" heathens) by god – we are free to sin. The furthest our creation takes us is the imagination of dystopias. We are discouraged from discourse on pleasure for fear of the label, "romantic". Well-being itself is barely tolerated for fear we are accused of utopianism. We go on to embrace or approach dystopic contradictions rather than be warned against and then avoid them. Struggle becomes the perpetual condition, the perpetual state. Nihilism becomes the long embrace with nothing, the avoidance of being or indifference to it. By itself, indifference is the lack of consciousness which is also to say "arousal". Pleasure seekers are frowned upon as hedonistic antisocialites. We are reduced again to two extreme options: total destroy or acquiescence. "Reality" (Baudrillard's "hyperreality" or Debord's "spectacle") disposes of the pleasure principle to the degree that only what is presented and permitted, or nothing at all is the source of the pleasant. We survive on an interest-free loan, vicarity in which interest is a sacrificial payment, not a poignant perturbation toward movement, a deviation in orbit caused by gravity or other influence. We view perturbation as something that causes disruption, trouble, or disorder. Voodoo illness is more prevalent than placebo health. There needn't be a flu bug for an entire population to catch it – only the suggestion by well-placed advertisement. Antonin Artaud's word to describe our situation was "wrong-side-out".

I have no doubt that Freud was a genius and paver of new roads. But he did not take the third option which is "true" revolutionary consciousness. Viewing "that oceanic feeling" of connection within the universe as a pathological delusion of religious thinking, he could not transgress his own patriarchic contradictions, no matter how figuratively they were portrayed. Psychoanalysts who did think the psychoanalytic project was to encourage a break rather than adjustment (such as the anarchist, Otto Gross and socialist, Wilhelm Reich) were themselves diagnosed with madness. One did not diverge too far from Freud without witnessing a temper-tantrum. But then, such is the nature of politics.

I contribute to the topic reluctantly for the following reasons:

We fear and hate psychodynamics because it reveals uncomfortable truths about the neurotic character of our motivations.

Moreover, our egos have invested a lot of energy repressing the truth of our neurosis from our conscious minds.

Freud, like all children raised in mass society, inevitably fails to transcend the neurotic paradigm of mass society that he himself observed.

Thus Freud will always be dismissive of wholistic consciousness with dismissive phrases like,"that oceanic feeling" or "back to the womb", and instead, like most of us, Freud will cling to mass society's fear driven paradigm of dualistic consciousness.

Freud can guide us far along the path of "true" revolutionary consciousness, but in the end, we reach a fork in the anarchy road where we must say goodbye to Freud.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this thread would start to throw up psychobabble, but it's been surprising how little critique there has been of the pseudoscientific assumptions of psychology/psychotherapy in postings. Yearzero usefully suggests reading Richard Webster, but there are many others who offer critiques, like William Epstein, Tana Dineen, Alex Howard, Ernest Gellner, Dryden and Feltham, and David Smail.
Apologies for quoting the latter at length, but he writes much better than me:

"The somewhat claustrophobic concentration on the ‘inner lives’ of people who have both the self-concern and the resources to seek out individual psychotherapy tends to lead – as it did, for example, in the case of Freudian psychoanalysis – to an elaborate structure of theoretical concepts, many of them wonderful and some of them weird, which the clinician has to postulate in order to keep pace with the complexity of the phenomena which a thoughtful, well-educated and, literally, resourceful adult can present. Hence the appearance on the theoretical scene of ‘unconscious minds’, ‘ids’, ‘egos’, complexes’, ‘personas’, ‘animas’, and so on. Hence the emphasis in many psychotherapies on internal worlds, inner resources, responsibility and choice, the power in one guise or another of positive thinking. The trouble is that, though no doubt they point to features of human conduct and understanding of great importance, such theoretical constructs have a vagueness, and a tendency to proliferate, that obscure the more fundamental processes that operate beyond the microcosm; they may have a kind of magical seductiveness, an attractive pseudoauthority, but they do not have the generally applicable precision which can be used in any (nondogmatically) systematic way. This is one reason why no real science of psychology has emerged, but only a collection of competing, semi-patented, ‘brand name’ approaches."

"The ideological enterprise of psychology and psychotherapy has been to detach person from world so that social exploitation can be represented as personal breakdown."

"A person is the interaction of a body with a world (environment). The important thing to grasp here is that there are no ‘things’ involved in the construction of personhood other than bodies and worlds. A person is not a thing, but an interaction; anything material about a person is either body or world. There is no particular harm in calling nonmaterial aspects of the person ‘mind’, or even ‘spirit’; difficulties arise only when such concepts are subtly rematerialised and regarded as ‘inside’ the person in some semiphysical sense."

"Psychology’s most significant contribution to modern society is less ‘scientific’ or ‘therapeutic’ than managerial."

shug, thanks for the suggestions for other authors to read. I'm certainly going to keep a note.

I’ve just seen that an essay entitled The Cult of Lacan.
Freud, Lacan and the Mirror Stage written by Richard Webster is published on the net here.

The essay concludes with the following paragraph:

“In many respects Lacan’s links with psychoanalysis are tenuous. The theories he elaborated, from a magpie-mixture of different, and sometimes incompatible intellectual ideologies, traduce Freud’s own ideas at practically every point – and do so as comprehensively as the theories of any of the ‘heretics’ Freud expelled from his church. In other respects, however – not least in his disregard for empirical evidence, his confusion of science with cultic religion, and his messianic compulsion to accumulate followers, Lacan is indeed what he claims to be – the true successor of Freud. That Lacan and Lacanianism ever achieved the status which they did in British, American and European universities in the latter part of the twentieth century, is an intellectual tragedy which Freud himself helped to bring about.”

i would be interested to hear peoples thoughts on Norman O. Brown in particular 'Life against death'. I think that book offers an extremely useful starting point and impetus to developing a real analysis of the 'subjective' or 'spiritual/psychological' side of history. In particualr at what it is which drives humanity to make history and what if any is the 'goal' or meaning of history.

i think life against death is a starting point (at least) for devolping on Marx's point that "neither subjective or objective nature appears in a form adequate to the human being." Norman o Brown sees the neurotic aspect of this unsatifactoriness of human existence and therefore of history generally which Marx overlooked but both agree that history does have a fundamental aim, of achieving a particulaly human mode of existence which can express the full potential of humanity.

anyway, i would like to hear any thoughts.

I am not a physicist, but a simple explanation as to what dark energy is, is that they don’t know.

I went to a recent lecture on this at the Manchester astronomical society by an expert and he semi jesting quoted Rumsfeld as summing up astro physics on this issue of dark matter and dark energy.

On dark energy they have observed, so they think that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. So it is not an issue of galaxies etc flying off into the different directions of infinity like bullets at a constant speed having been shot big bang style from the barrel of gun at a constant speed. They are in fact accelerating like a self propelled energy fuelled rockets.

Something must be doing this and they have called it dark energy dark essentially meaning they don’t know what it is. It is not just a matter of tweaking the numbers or observational error etc the effect or error is massive.

It is related to dark matter. When the look a galaxies they tend to spin around in like massive spinning discs of stars and other visible type stuff.

Calculating the masses velocities of spin etc they should just be flying apart.

(apart from the fact each of the spinning disc galaxies, as separate entities, are themselves moving off in one direction or another as part of the expansion of the universe thing which is the other issue)

The fact that the galaxies don’t fly apart ‘must’ mean that there is more gravitational inducing mass or matter than can be seen, thus invisible and also ‘dark’ matter.

Again the effects are massive, numbers vary a bit but something like 95% of mass like matter of the universe is ‘missing’.

Black holes, very large planets and ‘small stars’ that haven’t ignited or lit up yet are candidates (Massive astrophysical compact halo object, or MACHO’s)
but very few people or any now thinks that that could make up all the difference.

Then there are other canditates of types of matter that to all intents and purposes don't interact with our world apart from having a mass and gravity as well as the possibility crashing into the nucleus of an atom here and there and rattling it about a bit.

The problem is there is lots of real stuff flying around crashing into the nucleus of an atoms here and there and rattling them about a bit.

Hence they are building detectors for them 2 miles down at the bottom of mine shafts were it is less noisy. There is one in the UK at the bottom of a salt mine in cleveland. NE England.

Cern hopes to try and discover what they might be.

They are called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, but the word massive is a bit misleading, probably generic and to distinguish them from neutrino type things and other dark matter candidates that are really ‘small’.

I think the "massive" is because they have mass not because they are especially large.

As far as I understand it...

There’s dark matter, dark energy and now, dark force. There seems to be dozens, if not hundreds of bewildering arguments and theories around these but their main result has been to strengthen the standard model of the universe in that none of them call it into question (Big Band, inflation, etc).
Einstein used the term “cosmological constant” (sometimes “cosmological term”) to describe a repulsive force balancing out the gravitational attraction of distant galaxies thus keeping them apart. He quickly retracted this calling it his “biggest blunder”. But it appears it may have a real significance.
In general relativity, energy, in any form, is the source of gravity and the curvature of space and one particular type of energy precisely produces the effect of Einstein’s cosmological constant – the energy of nothing at all.
Quantum mechanics, when allied with Einstein’s special relativity theory, implies that space is not empty anywhere but full of a bubbling, ephemeral brew of elementary particles that come and go just as quickly. Nevertheless, these “virtual” particles measurably affect almost every microscopic process in the universe (L.H. Krauss, 2001). The predicted changes in the properties of atoms, the effects in energy levels of electrons around them, agree with the measured changes more accurately than any other predictions in the whole of physics.

I don’t know where the billions of neutrinos (or whatever) passing through our thumbnails every second fit into all this.

Following Alf, I know that many scientists do not agree that a child goes through a “compressed” stage of evolution. My instincts are, from my children and grandchildren that they do. One example is the development of long term memory from around about two years old and to me there’s no reason why this shouldn’t go much further back than our fairly recent ancestry.

Freudian slip.

There was some question on the interpretation of the red shift several years ago, but we don't hear much about that, since the red shift is the primary evidence for expansion and as that is now taken for granted and so much has been invested in making this idea of the big bang "common knowledge", the question would present problems for many popular publishing houses and esoteric institutions.

However, what if Pascal's notion were maintained, that every point in the universe is its center (and this makes sense intuitively, at least in terms of perceptual relativity)? The big bang which rests on the notion of an absolute beginning in space itself explodes into logical error. The notion of infinity needs no beginning or end point. We've always had a psychological problem anticipating origins and prior nothingness. But it could be that organisation spontaneously coalesces here and there, now and then, in a vast condition of indeterminacy, deduced merely from the laws of probability, given an infinite array? This does not presuppose something from nothing. It's an idea older than Einstein that matter and energy are not destroyed but are oscillations of being, or state-dependent fluctuations ever organising and disorganising.

I like to ask "what if the void is only the imagination of the impossible and given a name?" It makes about as much sense as god. Given infinity, could it be that chance irregularity is the "norm" and order the exception? Our culture history has a lot invested in beginnings and endings and control forces, and this is the result of linear thinking without leaving the confines of the box.

Back in 1897, Wilhelm Wundt suggested human perception presents a problem for the natural sciences, who responded by detaching nature from the human observer. Likewise, the environment presents problems for the introspective psychologist so the human is extracted from outside influences. Today, the interaction between humans and the environment is considered purely mechanical, predictable and manipulable.

Psychoanalysis and especially, Gestalt theory attempted to bring the two back together. The former tends to be more explanatory and the latter descriptive. I'd say the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century witnessed a revolution in thinking we are only now starting to catch up to. (the big war of 1914 was quite a set-back to all revolutionary movement). There were some cats back then more post-modern than anyone we have to offer. Artists were more attuned to currents in science and philosophy than today's average phud. I think the problem we have today concerning revolution is not some internal psychological dynamic but an education system which, still following the logic of linear progress and tit-for-tat causation, teaches that old dead guys are irrelevant to today's modern world. What we learn best is amnesia and are expected to improve (accumulate) our knowledge.

Another example of the contradictions built into our civilisation? Or should I say absurdity?

In what way do you think the concept of linear time proved crucial to 'humanity understanding itself (and nature as a whole)'? Do you think this very conceptual framework may have in some way inhibited this understanding, or continues to inhibit this understanding? What role does 'the cosmic level' have in the foundering of the linear model? Is the cosmic level something to be 'returned to' once all the fruits of the linear process have been garnered, or does it exist as an infinite, invariant critique of the finitude of linear time?

Yes. If the "succession of modes of production" is life, then what is it that actually proceeds? Wouldn't that be "workers"? No, "modes of production" refers to the work itself! Henceforth, life is work. Work is hard. Life is hard. Life sucks, then ya die! And if workers abolished work (changed their behaviour and did something else), wouldn't punctuated linear time disappear as well?

There is a difference between sequence and time. The former can be empirically observed and validated. The latter is a metaphysical entity immanent in metaphysical space (as opposed to, say, observable topography).

Time is an invention of the church bell and factory whistle. Time is articulated by the duration taken from life between the alarm clock and the factory door, which is to say, the most efficient movement between one's bedroll and workshop where we "punch" the clock. Time can stop on weekends and holidays, but inevitably endures in the certainty of toil and death and the reproduction of new production units.

Likely, with the abolition of work (and therefore, class) we would retain the notion of time as "rest" punctuated between indeterminate episodes of fighting, feeding, fucking and fermenting.

So-called "primitive" notions of circular time did not refer to one big circle whose beginning and end represent an identity, but a multiplicity of repeating rhythms and predictable cycles. That the moon is in a certain conformation several times a year does not mean history forever repeats itself. It only seems so because of long periods of relatively un-interrupted equilibrium -- "stasis".

I wouldn't call the repetitive, often boring and highly disrespected daily grind something natural or "native" to evolving biological systems. Were it so, there would be no "room" for discussion of revolution in the sense usually implied here, except as the sharing of impossible fantasies.

The big question is "Can we change our own behaviour?" This is why psychological inquiry (analysis) is probably the more relevant field for our discussions before we go on to tackle the specific means to be undertaken. The psychology of adjustment tells us we shouldn't want to change. If we do, behaviour modification tries to change us back. Otherwise, there is prison. This contradicts the logic of much psychoanalysis which only rationalises why we can't change or justifies our immobility (helplessness?). Given the big picture of "geological time", the contradiction is an absurdity.

History is merely an inductive database full of meaningful errors we might learn not to borrow from, pattern and repeat. Obviously, it would do no good to forget it altogether. If science concerns the future, we are talking of the imagination of possibilities and the construction of a narrative to nurture them.