Re: Psychoanalysis Re: "happiness is a transitory state"

[Mike Ballard <swillsqueal@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- Bill Lear <rael@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Monday, February 9, 2004 at 10:28:36 (-0500) Doug
> Henwood writes:
> >...
> >Or, if you want to take it further, there's Judith
> Butler's argument
> >- rooted in that silly doctrine called
> psychoanalysis - that subjects
> >are formed in subjection (through deference to
> authority figures,
> >like parents, and their successors, like language
> and law), and that
> >attitude of deference to authority persists through
> life, for fear of
> >the disintegration of the subject.
>
> So, our chains become part of us, and attempts to
> break the chains
> therefore hurt?
>
>
> Bill

"...the drive for freedom inherent in human nature,
while it can be corrupted and suppressed, tends to
assert itself again and again." Eric Fromm

I see humans (and most humans are workers at this
stage in history) as having an instinct for freedom.
According to my reading of Freud, this instinct is
repressed in order to maintain civilization i.e.
whatever class society exists at the moment.

Fromm says the majority, "need the myths and idols to
endure..."   They learn, through their upbringing, to
give over their own power to authorities outside
themselves.  Of course, when it is a mutually
beneficial relation as say between a student wanting
to learn Spanish and a teacher who want to teach
Spanish, the authority increases the person's freedom.
 This is *not* what I mean by authoritarianism.  The
relation all too often goes the other way
though--authority is imposed in order to cultivate a
subservient psychology in the individual.  Further, as
Marx pointed out in the fetishism of commodities
section of CAPITAL V.I, producers are imbued with a
kind of upside-down thinking pattern in societies
dominated by commodity production or reified thinking
as Lukacs would have it. Freud would say that they are
*born* to do this, it's biological and therefore, the
revolt against civilization is narcissistic/futile and
those who are infected with dicontent have neuroses :
they need to undergo psychoanalysis in order to get
them back on track, to conform with the mainstream
i.e. the dominant ideology.  Poor Siggy, living in the
soon to be annexed Austria.

But as Fromm pointed out, "The criticism of democratic
society should not be that people are too selfish;
this is true but it is only a consequence of something
else. What democracy has not succeeded in is to make
the individual love himself; that is, to have a deep
sense of affirmation for his individual self, with all
his intellectual, emotional, and sensual
potentialities. A puritan-protestant inheritance of
self-denial, the necessity of subordinating the
individual to the demands of production and profit,
have made for conditions from which Fascism could
spring. The readiness for submission, the perversion
of courage which is attracted by the image of war and
self-annihilation, is only possible on the basis of a
- largely unconscious - desperation, stifled by
martial songs and shouts for the Führer. The
individual who has ceased to love himself is ready to
die as well as to kill. The problem of our culture, if
it is not to become a fascist one, is not that there
is too much selfishness but that there is no
self-love. The aim must be to create those conditions
which make it possible for the individual to realise
his freedom, not only in a formal sense, but by
asserting his total personality in his intellectual,
emotional, sensual qualities. This freedom is not the
rule of one part of the personality over another part
- conscience over nature, Super-Ego over Id - but the
integration of the whole personality and the factual
expression of all the potentialities of this
integrated personality."

Regards,
Mike B)





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Each day a few more lies eat into the
seed with which we are born, little
institutional lies from the print of
newspapers, the shock waves of
television, and the sentimental
cheats of the movie screen.

Norman Mailer

http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

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