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

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
> > most psychology -- including Freudian psychoanalysis -- is extremely
> > individualistic, especially in practice. Or it focuses on 
> the behavior
> > and/or consciousness of the "average" person in society...

Ted W. writes: 
> Kleinian psychoanalysis isn't "individualistic" if you mean 
> by this has
> little room for finding the source of psychopathology in social
> relations.  Though it gives a significant role to "constitutional"
> factors (particularly in the case of schizophrenia, manic depression
> and autism), it emphasizes the role of social relations.  This also
> provides the basis for the notion of an average individual 
> type (e.g. a
> type dominated by "greed") since common relations will generate a
> common type (this is the central implication of the relational concept
> of essence spelled out in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach).

I said _most_ psychology. I really don't know anything about Melanie Klein's work. 

> Keynes's economics (a) gives a significant role to irrational
> psychology in the determination of economic behaviour and (b) most
> derives its understands this irrational psychology from 
> psychoanalysis.

I didn't know the second part. 

>   I think (a) is true of Marx's economics as well.  In Marx, 
> it derives
> from the sublation of German idealism, specifically of the role Hegel
> gives to the "passions" in his account of the the historical process
> through which mind develops to rationality.

my impression is that Marx's vision of psychology was mostly descriptive, though he did learn a 
lot from the Aristotelian tradition of the ideal happy and moral human life in society 
(the opposite of alienation).

Jim D.