Psychoanalysis and the communist movement

Infinity & linear (cause-effect) reason:

In-determinant means 'not caused'. Indeterminate means 'not known'. Theology and Rationalism never questioned cause itself and proceeded to "logically" conclude their identity: reality is caused by a knowing being. Rationalism and religion always travel together by virtue of originary causation, the first principle. If there is a first, why not a last? The end of the universe? Thenceforth, infinity is found to be impossible to imagine. 2500 years ago, Epicurus said this must mean there is an edge, and went on to ask what becomes of his hand should he travel to the edge, bore a hole and stick his arm through. If it is just more hole, he still had to imagine infinite depth. Prior to this, another old dead Greek showed that what is truly unimaginable is the void, pure nothingness, absolute negation. If we can imagine empty, black space of nothing, we must imagine ourselves somehow immersed there to witness "it", and that is something rather than nothing. By comparison to the void, infinity is child's play.

Now, of course you know that many, if not most, of the conventional "Marxists" found on this board would call everything from lazily gathering seeds to madly working in a factory part of a "means of production". By this token, we would not endorse a statement that everything is work. We see ourselves as indeed the product of the indeed rather sucky capitalist means of production but we would view that understanding as useful as a way to reach a different and not sucky condition, not necessarily lazily gathering seeds but far better and lazier than the present regime.

OK, you know this. So what's behind the crude reductionism of your statement?

1. A statement that you think we're so stupid or so benighted by Capital that when we talk about producing things that must mean capitalist work in all it's glory regardless of our intentions. A statement we're so dumb that the style you can find in our expression is enough to determine everything else.

2. A statement that the world really is just illusion and so the tone and feeling that you get from a statement really is what determines its meaning. As characters in your dream world, if we seem rigid to you, then we certainly are rigid and no further investigation is merited. You associate production with ordinary work and so that's what it means. We know there's no such thing as objectivity in any degree.

3. A statement that the potential reader is similarly benighted and so whatever our statement about means of production, it will merely screams work to him.

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All of those scenarios point to the kind of interaction where you communicate that you don't particularly think dialogue is at all worthwhile, yet you continue to address us. It's like the classic discussion with a significant other who only repeats "you may say you're sorry but I can tell you don't really mean it" or with a cop who keeps saying "why do you keep lying to me?"

And yes, know your background is something of fusion of councilism and postmodernism but pomo's "I can twist your words to my convenience" approach hasn't particularly improved with age.

Well, Red, you should know that I am thinking of the superego, which I equate with Culture or the :collective (un)consciousness. This should preclude the idea that social critique addresses specific individuals or groups. You should also remember that a big part of my critique has always been the over-developed ego-structure which, following traditions, influenced by the 'superego', wanting to fit in, etc.,etc. represses or subverts intuitions and instincts, in short, the "id". Even reactionary groups are not immune to larger cultural influences. This is fairly in line with psychoanalysis, which this thread has purported to address.

I've never said objects do not exist. Commodity fetishism redirects our attention away from relationships, toward the objects themselves, such that everything becomes detached. This can lead us to endorse contradiction or pose a contradictory cosmos in need of our constant meddlement. At the very least, it is compartmentalising. (Notice how often I use the word, "you").

Finally, while I have a lot of respect for Bordiga and Vaneigam, I've never been fond of councilism. Rather, I've insisted on not throwing out babies with bathwater. As to the intelligence level of the membership here, I'm sure there is a very wide range. You will be happy to hear that I myself scored a whopping 89 on standardised IQ tests, so forgive me if I come across incoherent from time to time.

All seriousness aside, I just thought I'd add that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sophistry, taking something out of one context or familiar matrix and placing it in another just to see if the new collective arrangement survives (fitness). This is the basis of surreallism as well as heart transplants. The problem from the perspective of a libertarian-slash-anarchist "morality" or 'consistency" arises when this novel arrangement is presented not to ask or stimulate questions (like "does it fit?", is it inviting?", "does it smell bad?", "will it satisfy?") but to present absolutes and certainty, which is the standpoint of dogma. What is even worse is the insistence that no other alternatives are available or possible, which is finality. The question of fitness also applies to the erasure of elements from the context, such as the word "property". For example, I think "private" and "community" are more becoming as nouns or adverbs than adjectives of property. The dialectic itself seems to disappear: Where is the problem of a little respect for privacy in the context of a community toilet? The self-other dialectic begins itself to break down of lose importance when one can see a bit of one's self in the other and the other in one's self. This is communication.

As to the unbending finality and irresistibility of the "superego", much of what I describe of it are pieces ("old tapes", we used to call them) I myself have "owned" but then shed, like the necessity of non-violent, democratic interventions, the need for total consensus or the effectiveness of protests and demonstrations. It was a long time before I could even question these precepts, being that they saturated the context I grew up in. Age has its merits, at least if one is not afraid to move, and that is not a matter of intelligence. I received the wisdom of the philosophers in Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy with great enthusiasm: "Perhaps our minds are too highly trained!"

To stir things up a bit.

Whose to say wanting to fit in or the so called super-ego isn’t an ‘instinct’.

And that the ‘super-ego’ and morality is just some kind of semi conscious ‘rational’ system to regulate or ‘referee’ otherwise conflicting egotistical drives, which if allowed to express themselves would lead to anarchic mutual conflict where everybody would loose.

Wanting to fit in could be a social, cohesive and co-operative instinct of a gregarious pack or herd animal. Of course wanting to fit into ‘what’ is another question and he who controls and can manipulate concepts of acceptable social norms, which people may instinctively wish to abide by because they are social norms, can control society.

Wanting ‘to fit in’, looked at from the possible perspective of a social instinct would, viewed negatively, be a tyrannical and authoritarian instinct in the sense that you may feel compelled to obey.

Viewed positively it could be seen as an emotion that encouraged co-operative behaviour.

So if people behaved like shits in a free access socialist or anarchist society etc they wouldn’t be invited to parties, be ostracised and children wouldn’t be dissuaded from knocking on their doors and running away etc.

Unless not liking people because they are shits is an act of state-like coercion and that we should love our enemies.

Then we have the altruistic punisher syndrome where you get back at somebody for being a shit to somebody else, for being ‘anti social’, at a possible anti egotistical risk to oneself.

Popular culture is of course replete with appalling examples of the perversion of this possible non egotistical emotional reaction or instinct for the social good suggesting that it may have a deeper resonance.

Rambo, Batman and the various super heroes etc

What is wrong with wanting to go off and risk your life to stop Germans marching through Belgium with babies on their bayonets, the perception of reality or the response to it?

Why do all the egregious actions of the capitalist class have to be dressed up in noble motives for the greater good of humanity, requiring sacrifice from the suckers of course?

Where even the primary actors like Bliar appear to need for themselves to ‘rationalise’ or sublimate the real reasons away from something that lies just beneath the surface in more ways than one.

As I think, was it Greenspan, lamented that it was unfortunate that they couldn’t tell the truth and that it was all about the oil in Iraq.

Really well put, and I agree, particularly with the idea that the super-ego itself is "instinctive". Might it even represent the "social instinct"? The emergent mutual influence between the inside and outside? Submerged, unorganised memories? We all want to fit, especially if we at all have a gripe with alienation and separation. We don't want to experience the contradiction of fitting into catch-22 situations. We don't want to be forced into new (or old!) situations or go into them blindly or thoughtlessly. I've no beef with reason itself. Nor materialism. Your sense (I presume) of a positive view along with the negative critique opens up a lot of possibilities, meaning "choices" based on a deeper familiarity. From this perspective, could it be that the psychoanalytic process itself "comes with the equipment" and Freud only gave it a name and inserted some new content?

Categorization is probably essential. Setting categories in stone so we can forget, ignore, take them for granted or let them dictate our moves may as well be likely, but I think unnecessary. I think content should be as free to move between boxes as we would ourselves like to be. If ideas are not provisional, they are spooks. Even this is not "unnatural". Sometimes the box is attractive, but its contents are repulsive (and vice versa).

The world is a complicated mess. Were it not, there would be no movement, no wonder, no art. Science or philosophy would be unnecesary, if not impossible. The problems we experience are rarely a matter of the processes themselves, but our applications of them. Traditional Western "reason" as reflected in our history has attempted to capture and simplify (order and arrange) this "chaos" in attempt to straighten out the mess, to establish certainty. The result has been (for many of us) boring homogeneity and devastation of difference under the euphamistic label, "increased complexity" and a "higher order of existence". Yet even that was likely a reactionary stand against previous "lines" of thought felt too constraining.

The current positive view of chaos is beginning to blossom an idea that chaos is not an "evil" thing but an unorganized matrix (like the unconscious) from which emerges spontaneous order, patterning, organisation. The provisional 'nature' of order refers us back to movement as well as death death. There are no permanent systems. Of a sudden, we've returned to the questions Epicurus and his pals posed 2500 years ago. But we have some new ones as well!

Interesting thread here.

I found it pertinent to read an analysis on the leftcommunist.org board, that a lot of psychoanalysis is in fact, bourgeois. Yes, I know you're thinking it's probably pretty stupid an analysis but I recommend giving it a cursory read at the very least: http://www.leftcommunism.org/spip.php?article104&lang=fr

A lot of good points raised there if you ask me, especially tracing communists' legacies of using psychoanalysis.

Thoughts? Feelings?

Nope, don't think it's a stupid analysis. Good article.

Perhaps you should engage in such an "important" debate but choose a more appropriate forum eg Charlatans Are Us.

Bourgeois Psychoanalysts & Socially Dysfunctional Women

Eckstein came from a prominent socialist family and was active in the Viennese women's movement. When she was 27, she went to Freud seeking treatment for vague symptoms including stomach ailments and slight depression related to menstruation.

Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess, in those days considered dangerous to mental health. Freud suspected, in addition, a "nasal reflex neurosis", a condition popularized by his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist.

Fliess had been treating "nasal reflex neurosis" by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anesthesia with cocaine used as the anesthetic. Fliess found that the treatment yielded positive results, in that his patients became less depressed. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was temporarily useful, perhaps surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and even Freud himself.

Eckstein's surgery was a disaster. She suffered from terrible infections for some time, and profuse bleeding. Freud called in a specialist, his old school friend, Dr Ignaz Rosannes,[1] who removed a mass of surgical gauze that Fliess had not removed. Eckstein's nasal passages were so damaged that she was left permanently disfigured. Freud initially attributed this damage to the surgery, but later, as an attempt to reassure his friend that he shouldn't blame himself, Freud reiterated his belief that the initial nasal symptoms had been due to hysteria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Eckstein

Anna O. was the pseudonym of a patient of Josef Breuer, who published her case study in his book Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), an Austrian-Jewish feminist and the founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women).

According to current research, "examination of the neurological details suggests that Anna suffered from complex partial seizures exacerbated by drug dependence."[5] In other words, her illness was not, as Freud suggested, psychological, but neurological. Many believe that Freud misdiagnosed her, and she in fact suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, and many of her symptoms, including imagined smells, are common symptoms of types of epilepsy.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_O.

'The greatness of Freud consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing and undissolved such contradictions [the contradictions of the subject] and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.'
--Adorno

I've just tried to read the entire thread, so missed a lot, but wanted to raise a few points.

Red Hughs wrote:

The application of scientific experiments to a person assumes that people are in some way commensurable, to which one can only reply, not to the extent that they are a person. For psychoanalysis, each subject finds its own cure. Well, these days, bourgeois subjects are a bit old fashioned. It's hard to find them, you know, and that makes practicing psychoanalysis tricky. It's the collective scream of people who to all appearences want to be treated as commensurable, as commodified objects -- 'instrumentalise me!' -- that make 'modern levels of experimental rigor' possible.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and marxism is difficult, beyond Lacan's remark that Marx invented the symptom, which I think is finally just a clever thing to say. That argument runs that, just as surplus value is value produced for the other, the symptom is surplus enjoyment, the enjoyment of the other, often experienced as suffering.

In the English translation of Lacan's Other Side of Psychoanalysis there is an appendix, which reproduces an 'impromptu' Lacan staged at Vincennes in '69 or '70. He is bombarded by student protestors who look only for reenforcement of their practice. He responds that their practise is hysterical, that they look only for a new master -- and they will find one! Their placard waving and marching was for the benefit of the other only. But I disaggree with the person on this thread who wrote 'anarchism is a mental illness' insofar as it is hard to find anything that is not 'mental illness' in the sense intended -- while there can be no 'normal' for psychoanalysis, there similarly can be no right.

But that's for protestors, not for Marx(ism).

While Marx describes a historical mode of production, Freud describes a historical mode of the subject, but unlike with Marx, there is a question whether Freud's mode survives. The 'psychoanalysands' I see as people rebelling against their status as surplus workers. Certainly, today's idea of mental health sees the ability to work as its standard, without considering the social relations around working and worker.

The Anna O. article cited in the thread makes a distinction between psychological and neurological, which I feel is a false choice. Whether there is or not a 'normally' functioning brain, the recourse to one feels to me like a de-historicisation of the subject. As Lacan once quipped 'I've seen enough CAT scans to see that the brain contains not a single thought'. Thought and, even more, language are the modes of the subject, these are social, historical processes.

I'm at work, and can't make of this a proper argument, but thought I throw some wrenches in the thread's machinery. I recommend the first chapter of Zizek's Metastases of Enjoyment, which is on googlebooks, for a good summary of the Freudian revisionists who are brought up in this thread.

An impoverished piece of one-sided theory, disappointingly typical of those small groups which interpret themselves as the voice of history. But at least they have the good grace to include this rollicking example of lacanery:

“Our practice is a swindle, bluffing, making people blink, blinding them with boasting words, it is after all what we use to call much ado about nothing. [...] From an ethical point of view our profession is indefensible, and anyway that is why I am sick of it, because I have a higher conscience just like everybody.” “It is about knowing whether or not Freud was an historical event. I believe he missed his chance. Like me, shortly, no one will give a damn for psychoanalysis any more.”

This is presented in the text, ‘The Political Implications of Psychoanalysis’ as Lacan at the end of his life, as if it were a deathbed recantation, his admitting at last a thoroughly dishonest endeavour. In fact it is the sort of comment he made throughout his career against pyschoanalysis, its ideological practices, the rituals and pretences, its backslidings and dishonesties, its religious and cultish modalities, its pretensions towards radicalism and its dependence on the rich, its futile self-justifications and absurd controversies, its crimes of commission and its unexamined weaknesses.

And so what if he did make such remarks? I feel the same about the communist milieu, I hate everyone in it for more or less the same reasons. But if we consider the situation if he had not spoken thus... how his project would have amounted to little more than another cult in the same terms as all the other para-academical intellectual cults of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. At least he called it as it as it must have appeared within the general context. But anyway, these are precisely the type of remarks that are not permitted within marxism except to the extent that they are externalised onto rival groups. Where the author of ‘ The Political Implications of Psychoanalysis’ projects the allegation of bourgeois ideology, Lacan introjects it. And in general, where psychoanalysis is directed towards paths of divergence the theories of both marxism and real science are tied to the cult of occam’s razor (and generalised unified theories). Error is always to be cut away and denounced as error. It belongs to someone else, somewhere else, sometime else. But why the heat, and what pushes truth as a form hostile to error?

As to the question of whether psychoanalysis is a science. Frankly, who cares? The only people who approach bodies of knowledge in this manner (with their absurd disproofs of creation myths, as if such myths were scientific propositions) are the type of people who assume an identity between their knowledge and the physical world itself and thus are unable to locate the contingencies in their own propositions. The fundamental difference between psychoanalytic approaches to, for example, religion and that of real science is that psychoanalysis does not pass judgement on error but rather asks the question, ‘what are these people really talking about?’

If psychoanalysis is a science then it behaves in a strange manner. But what is its method and what is its object? The method is narrative or description rather than explanation based... in fact, its most opportune appearances occur always at that unpredictable juncture where descriptivity must take over from explanation.

And the object of psychoanalysis is love. And when I say love I mean statements of ambivalence. How is it possible to scientifically approach the significances and implications of ‘I love you’ when this variously could mean any and all of the following: I love you; I desire you; I need you; I utter, ‘I love you’ (a) because I don’t want to hurt your feelings, (b)because I am nostalgic about what we once had (c) because I am ambitious (d) because it is a meaningless term to me (e) because I must defend myself (f) because really I hate you.

It is not the task of psychoanalysis to discover the truth of ‘I love you’ because quite simly there is no true resolution of it. Love is always ambivalent, and as long as there is feeling, there is always more to say about it. Or it always has more to say. In the face of ambivalence, psychoanalysis has only further opportunities for description. Psychoanalysis reveals the paths which ambivalence takes. And its descriptions only falter when the heat goes out of it all. When the ambivalences have been exhausted.

The techniques of psychoanalysis are focused on the means of the many departures from deployed images: How does this person react when their feelings are relayed back to them in terms of Oedipus? How do they resist? What material is thrown up as they denounce the analyst? In what terms are they appalled, revolted, disgusted, amused, or simply indifferent to the re-framings of their personal history? How do they meet the challenge of ‘freudian slips?’ If they present themselves as the victim then recast them as the perpetrator. If they see something as obvious then get them to explain it as if it were obscure. If they see themselves as central then reveal to them that they are irrelevant. Like Lacan says, psychoanalysis is nothing but circus tricks.

The method of psychoanalysis is something of a black box but we can at least examine both the inputs and the outputs (and the output is never a ‘cure’ but only a reframing of the same problem: [i]man’s desire is always the desire of the Other.) For example, whilst the author of the above mentioned ‘left communist’ denunciation of psychoanalytic charlatanism freely externalises his feelings of contempt and dispatches Freud as if with a fly swat, walking away, brushing his hands together, contemplating the good job done, it is at that point which psychoanalysis gets to work on his ambivalences, on his heat, on what else his efforts say about him. There is a question of dignity at stake for the left communists when psychoanalysis proposes to them that all this talk of the bourgeoisie shows how much they miss their mummies’ titties.

In the same way, I am amazed that people can still be bothered with denouncing Freud. What’s in it for them? Where is their kick? Of course, it is not the end of the matter that through psychoanalysis we are able to trace in the left’s internecine squabbles over the inheritance of Lenin’s blessing the mythic forms of Totem and Taboo, it is not the end of that matter at all. Its not just all about Oedipus. But it is a beginning. Where the trail has gone dead and the relations have gone cold and there is nothing left to say, the black box of psychoanalysis, rattling full of fake relics, reframes what is going on within the scene in the most unrealistic and ridiculous terms imaginable, it begins by stating something else, the desire of the Other, and by god that stirs em up, that's the real stuff for givin em the willies.

Like Lacan says, psychoanalysis is shit and by the way, fuck you all.

And another thing...

The thing is that one can use the general perspective of psychoanalysis to analyse and critique Freud's (or anyone's) own specific applications of the theory. Could there be conflicts in his personal history with his own mother left unresolved and "forgotten" which nevertheless dig away, bits and pieces of personal history popping up now and then because they are as well part of the cultural and social-historic millieu which led up to colour his opinions of his patients, always focussing more on conflicting sexual matters within their family? Was it unfortunate that he reduced all a person's potential (energy) to the singularly important reproduction of the species to which the material necessities are only an adjunct?

Freud had no admiration for society/civilisation but thought it was an overwhelmingly done deal. The individual can only resolve their conflicts (with help from a disinterested/objective other) in adjustment to it or continue suffering from oppressive neurosis. Marx utilised a similar logic, but thought society could be undermined bit by bit to get passed its own contradictions. Might Marx have been influenced by the conflict between his own less-that-advantaged social millieu and that of those with which he wished to hobnob? There is no question his family suffered as a result of his beyond-his-means life-style, but very likely the man had more generally altruistic motivations as well and, true to the general ideas of then-current philosophy and science, assumed a primary cause could be deduced (the distribution of material necessities) which, if changed, would produce the complete transformation of the whole of society, like a rug pulled out from under it. All these sorts of question are well within the domain of Freud' theory of the id, the internal drives to satisfy necessity (and more) and the unconscious composing not only "repressed" personal history but social norms (superego) as well which collectively produce the conflicted and alienated individual ego. Marx' and Freud's discussions of fetish are not mutually exclusive.

The importance of depth psychology is the perspective it gives to focus our questions. Freud gave a vocabulary and syntax to talk about things we've been thinking about since probably forever. His ego defense mechanisms are extremely helpful to keep in mind, illustrating a process we often see around us. In a big way, they label and therefore bring to light personal misuses of logic, an area cognitive behaviourism took particular advantage of. It just so happens that they are useful to mass media and public relations (the moulding of public opinion) as well. The critique of theoretical rigour itself demonstrates a focus on grammar over vocabulary and syntax. Could it be that the superego has incorporated a social fetish for detail and detatchment to protect a damaged ego from exposure? All mere hypotheses, sure. The point is, we had a new framework for viewing the world. How we interpret or apply that view is our own personal or collective fuck up.

Another thing to consider is the focus within medical science at the time on providing illusion for the patient so that their faith in the "practice" kicked in their own healing potential. Up till the '20's and '30's, placebo drugs were prevalent just for this reason. Doctors came to mistake their own showmanship for reality, being trained specifically in standing on pedestals for the sake of the illusion. Placebo became unethical when the medical profession came to believe in their own efficacy and discount the patient's participation. This was in no way hindered by the burgeoning chemical companies attempting to commidify every waste product from the production of petroleum-based fuels and weapons. Today we eat plastic food. In a Darwinian sense, (everyone had to fit their theories to the evolution paradigm back in the day) one could say the modern spectacle was pre-adapted by "progress" in medical showmanship. Contemporary, Arthur Conan Doyle described his own medical training along these lines.

I have no disagreement with the critical (left communist) article posted above. But it is mostly an ad hominem attack. It asks us to dump the whole program and therefore, puts an end to all discussion if we should be persuaded. The whole presentation could be viewed as an ego defense. How often are we confronted by certain "truths" to redirect us toward unrelated agendas? We call this the behaviour of mass media when it isn't merely spewing lies. The idea of the superego removes the paranoid response which suggests there is intent and malice directed at us. It only suggests social influence operating to colour our opinions and assessments. We tend to mimic our surroundings unawares. Psychoanalysis merely tries to bring these hidden influences and conflicts to the foreground of our consciousness, not unlike class-struggle propaganda attempts to direct our attention to the oppression all around us. Not unlike dialectics when it attempts to illustrate the contradictions our society embraces, so we have some conscious choices which were not available before.

This has been an interesting thread and has got me to thinking. I first questioned the discussion of quantum physics as out of place, but soon came to realise that it is part of the "collective consciousness" operating on old and entrenched ideas of cause-effect linear thinking influencing or enframing nearly every topic of discussion. I've developed these ideas here, more as a means of organising my own thoughts than any attempt at persuasion. The ideas of emergent systems in Dynamic Systems Theory is a new way of looking at cause-effect relations in a rigourous manner. The importance of diverse theories to social criticism is not so much in their own rigour or generated assessments and predictions, but their suitability as a language or perspective to refining our own ideas. The idea is not to give them an authenticity to which we decide to conform, but to look at our own ideas in a different light. That view will be attractive or not, as the case may be. If the attraction to revolutionary theory is "for itself", it is only a practice to develop rigour and consistency, even if we do assume this is the road to successful persuasion.

History seems to illustrate that social movements have followed passion more than meticulous reason. Marx thought that once conscious of their own oppression, folks would get pissed enough to rise up. It may just be that there has never been a coherently integrated human being, and we should not expect to see one in the near future. It may also be that awareness of one's oppression was never the problem, that what was holding folks back was a feeling of helplessness and impotence. Our own theories have illustrated a thousand reasons for inaction. This is no reason to put off the revolution, as Freud and pal Schopenhauer seemed to have suggested. The question should be less a matter of "can we win?" than "can we live?" The affirmative answer might be just as valuable (despite its "truth-" or "un-truth" value) as a brightly coloured sugar pill with a fancy name was in the 19th century in curing lumbego. That "reality" (the "real" reality) and "truth-value" will finally show themselves unmediated so that we can all proceed in the "right" direction may be a bit too much to expect. Maybe those voodoo witch-doctors were on to something after all?

a brief point about your last post and the idea that Freud is reductionist, reduces everything to sex. threre is this tendency in his thought i think but Noings out another tendency which Freud seemed to dvelope towrds the end of his life. This was the tendency for his view of sexuality to become all embracing and basically turn into Eros or 'energy of life' (a bad term i've only used cause i don't like saying 'life force').

The question of why Freud stuck by his guns in calling this 'sexual energy' is intersting. i think it was because he wanted to keep the strong connection between adult expressions and forms of sexuality with the infants earlier general attitude to life and experiences and fantasys of this period. However i think this made things easily misunderstood and leads to a lot of problems but thats another conversation.

and

At the risk of steering this onto another conversation, would Freud's later views on sexual energy and 'life force' have been the germ of Wilhelm Reich's emphasis on 'orgastic potency' for social health and, ultimately, orgone energy (cue Hawkwind lyrics about orgone accumulators and Kate Bush's Cloudbusting)?

i think there probably is a connection i'm not sure exactly about the details though.

i think the problem with Wilhelm Reichs ideas of 'orgones' etc is that he fell into a a typically bourgeois mode of thinking which meant he had to find the actual energy as a physical substance and therefore invented orgones and a whole bunch of weird shit, rather than understanding it in terms of movement and in peoples relationship with their environment and with other people and objects.

Also Norman O Brown criticises Reich for viewing sexuality purely in terms of genital/adult sexuality whereas Norman O Brown (and he argues that Freud held a similar view as himself) claims that adult genital sexuality is in fact a sacrifice of the pleasure of the whole of the body in its entire relationship with the world in favour of what we think of as sex (i.e adult/genital sex). and this is why Reich can in Browns view reduce sex merely to orgasm, i.e he has a mechanistic view of sex and is obsessed with orgasms as the be all and end all of life.

i don't know if i've explained myself that well here but ...

jaycee wrote
'i don't know if i've explained myself that well here but ...'

Well enough... I didn't know that stuff before.

Exactly. Though I wouldn't say "bourgeois" so much as "enlightened" or "modern". Freud was not immune to this. Orgone energy is just a synonym for libinal energy, but not left at the "hypothetically obvious" where Uncle Sigmund let it rest. For Freud, the reality principle emerges when the child's desires for pleasure are frustrated. Thanatos (the new-found "reality" of death) opposes eros (the instinct for life) at every turn. We are walking contradictions by nature. It's all pretty Aristotelean, but the Greeks had their "bourgeois" sentiments as well.

On the other hand, Aristotle might have said, if he had hold of the modern lexicon, that orgone "energy" is merely an emergent quality of cellular metabolism: "the whole is more than the sum of the parts".

Ernie wrote:

communal_pie wrote:

Armed Sheep wrote:

See Freud's 'The Uncanny' for how the repetition of an idea reveals its opposite.

Not necessarily. I think what they mean is, it is rare for a discussion on Libcom to be allowed to run freely without, ahem, strong admin pressure to do otherwise. And whilst the cats are away, talking about psychoanalysis on Libcom is the sound of mice at play.

I've noticed a long aesthetic tradition in diverse discussion forums patterning sanctification and demonisation. The first is a matter of pre-established authority. The job is to accumulate familiarity, or to modernise the language should said saint be long dead. An agreeable all-encompassing theory (demonstrating complexity to the point of ceaseless entertainment) is sufficient to declare sainthood, but not for one from among mere mortals.

Unfortunately, sanctity always gives birth to heresy. Critique of dissenters takes on the form of demonising. The slightest grotesquery is pointed out, and, even if not authentically heretical toward established saints, colours the whole of the person exhibiting it. Should there be agreement concerning the unattractive detail, the whole joins ranks with the true heretics who are excluded or reminded that they will find no niche among the living.

Where sainthood itself is decried, all that is left is negation. This stand holds great promise for those of a more egalitarian bent. To prevent the likelihood of arrogant heroes rising from the rank and file, discussion tends to split along the lines of dogmatic iteration and shit talk.

On the other hand, this process may not be limited to interweb discussion. The pattern seems to appear wherever religious and political institutions begin to emerge.

For those who wish to maintain a scientific rather than mere theoretical integrity, I would here repeat one of my favourite quotes from anthropologist, Victor Turner. It should work well even for those nihilists who would dispose of science itself as "just another a bourgeois institution":

Oh yeah,

One article in the latest ASAN has some relation to this topic.

Liked the look of this, for what it's worth. All sorts of questions...

Richard Webster points out the significant similarities between the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and Freud’s idea of infant sexuality.

He also makes comparisons between Psychoanalysis and other ideologies:

“Throughout all the centuries of Christian history there has functioned what the French historian Léon Poliakov has called ‘that terrible mechanism of projection that consists in attributing to the loathed people of God one’s own blasphemous desires and unconscious corruption.’ The millennial movements of the Middle Ages, the Great European Witchhunt, modern anti-semitism and Stalin’s purges have all alike been marked by collective fantasies in which groups identifying themselves as the ‘pure’ have sought to annihilate entire classes of human beings imagined as ‘evil’ or ‘unclean’. Yet if we turn to psychoanalysis in order to gain insight into the fundamental process of demonological projection which has scarred the face of Christian history, what we find is nothing other than a less destructive version of the same process. Psychoanalysis does not only project men’s feelings of inadequacy onto women, and the anxieties and obscene impulses of the normal personality onto ‘neurotics’, it also, perhaps most significantly of all, projects adult impulses and desires onto children.”

Webster’s review of Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Lacan is also a good piss take. The review is called Lacan Goes to the Opera:

http://www.richardwebster.net/lacangoestotheopera.html

Please can you explain these ideas in plain English?

Nah, plain English and metaphysics make pretty uncomfortable bedfellows.

For Alf, the body of critique of Freud and psychotherapy seen over the past few decades, might be researched and referenced and fully argued - but they can just be dismissed as smears made by people who "consider themselves to be revolutionaries". I wonder if such people are Freud parasites?