Freud and Marxism.
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TM – so basically you have read a few novels and remember it yourself.
The point I’m making is that to use evidence such as that to create a whole system of child developmental framework and stage posting, to use it as a basis for alleged therapeutic intervention, to explain the behaviours of vast tracts of child and adult behaviour. Is, if you pardon my French, as weak as piss.
I know my feelings and memories. You do not. You are not me.
I do not invent memories after reading novels.
Instead, reading has introduced me to people who have shared similar experiences and expressed them.
My own experiences prove that romantic feelings and fantasies known by adults as sexual in origin do not just begin with puberty, regardless of what your academics say. I go by what life has shown me, not people with degrees and doctorates. So now who’s the bookish snob?
Plus you cannot help but finish any message to me with a diminishing jibe. I find you a very offensive person.
TM – He doesn’t just do that to you but to anyone who disagrees with him. The ‘diminishing jibe’ is his style and needs to be ignored if you can.
The point, TM, is not that you didn’t experience them, and not to diminish them, or the books you read, but that to generalise them wildly, assume that they are universal, that they can be fitted into and explained by the bizarre fever dream that Freud created and that then think that this “theoretical system” is worthy of lengthy discussion, is beyond belief.
As to my offensiveness, I wasn’t attempting to offend you I was giving you an earthy critique of this type of methodology, not you personally.
I could of course claim that my offensiveness is due to unresolved conflicts during my analysis stage, or that I was frightened by a horse’s undercarriage when I was in the pram. Alternatively I could argue that the fact that I made an offensive remark to you wasn’t my choice and that any free choice I had in the matter is actually just an illusion of free will.
Personally I’d prefer to just take ownership and responsibility for it, explain that I was frustrated by the fact that intelligent people like you continue to invest in the ideas of a fraud like Sigmund and that this frustration leads me at time to be offensive. To that end if I have offended, I do honestly apologise.
I would also suggest that you read up on Attachment Theory, at least a little. Having gained a little knowledge of your early life, as shared on this board, I would, with genuine respect, suggest attachment theory may actually give you interesting insights into how we make and maintain affectional relationships.
I am angered when I hear academics and “experts” sounding off about things and, yes, generalising, when I know my experience of life completely refutes them. They’ve probably buried their own childhood memories, as so many adults do.
I know I’m a human animal, and as a human animal, my feelings and emotional experience in life can’t be totally different from that of others. I used to think it was, but as I read, seeking kindred spirits in other people’s recorded experiences and thoughts, I realised my own were not so unique or bizarre, but that many shared my own or similar feelings and thoughts. No man, no being, is an island.
I think there are things we can take from Freud, and other things we can reject. The same with Reich.
This is the case with other writers and thinkers. It’s called discernment.The concepts shown in this article are closer to scientific materialism, socialism, and neuroanatomy, which consider that there is a connection between the brain and the function of the human body, affected by external reality, in opposition to the pro-capitalist and idealist conception of Freud and Jacques Lacan. The writer sees a connection between capitalism and the influence of this economic system in the minds and brains of humans, and that is totally correct; regarding sex, it is totally different from Freud’s sexual conception. Moreover, his wife said that he was a pervert. The concept of the death instinct is in opposition to human physiology and homeostasis and the negative feedback of the human body
I agree, except 1) what is a “pervert”? and 2) if someone were a “pervert” it wouldn’t mean all their ideas and writings are invalid.
De Sade was a proto-socialist. Most people today would also call him a “pervert.” Also, what is perverse in one era, place and society is not considered perverse in another.
Homosexuality was normal in ancient Europe, then for 1,500 years it was perverse; now it is normal again.
Edgar Allan Poe’s wife was 13. Should I stop enjoying his stories and poems? Should I burn them and shout “Pervert!”?
Today, instead of sexuality being a wide and embracing term, our need for compartmentalism has reduced it to the physical mechanics of sex acts and coitus. This has even become a virtue.
“He’s a family man” means he is a good man and trustworthy. “He’s a loner” means he fits the profile for everything bad; he should be avoided.
Similarly, deep loving relationships without physical sex are diminished: “That’s not a relationship. That’s JUST friendship” – emphasis on JUST,
i. e. nothing. The word “relationship” now only means having sex. “What would you know about love? You’ve never done it!”AI Overview
No, there is no historical record of Sigmund Freud’s wife, Martha Bernays, calling him a “pervert.”
However, this myth likely stems from a conflation of two well-documented historical facts regarding her view of his work:
• She called his work “pornography”: While Martha was a devoted wife who managed their household, she was a deeply conservative and Orthodox-raised woman. She was famously uncomfortable with his fixation on sexual motivations and explicitly referred to his psychological writings and theories as “pornography”.
• The public called him a pervert: Because Freud’s theories centered heavily on taboo topics like infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and repressed desires, the general public and the contemporary medical community frequently labeled Freud himself as a pervert or obsessed with filth.
While Martha disliked the explicit nature of his research and largely refused to engage with his psychoanalytic theories, she remained his supportive partner for over 53 years until his death.He was preoccupied with sex, presumably because of his own problems in that area. His own wife called psychoanalysis “a form of pornography.” He saw everything an infant did as a source of sexual pleasure, from sucking milk to excreting. He was obsessed with masturbation and believed it was the cause of most mental illness. He developed a succession of questionable concepts like virginal anxiety, penis envy, and the Oedipus complex. He decided each hysterical symptom was a depiction of a sexual fantasy; he told one virginal patient that her cough was caused by her unconscious desire to suck her father’s penis.
At one point, he was convinced that sexual molestation in childhood was the cause of adult psychoneuroses. He believed everything patients told him, and even made things up for them and interpreted their dreams as distorted evidence of actual events. He failed to distinguish their fantasies from his own, even believing they had telepathically transmitted their thoughts to him. He thought his neurotic patients had repressed their memories of abuse, which he tried to bring to light. At first he thought nursemaids and governesses were the abusers, then he came to believe fathers were the abusers. Eventually he realised some of the stories about fathers were too outlandish to be real, so he switched gears. He decided patients were merely fantasising about sex with fathers because of an Oedipal repressed yearning for paternal incest, or because they were trying to cover up the auto-erotic activities of early childhood sexuality. Some of the fantasies were bizarre, like an account of female circumcision where the little girl was forced to eat her own labia after it was excised. This prefigured the repressed memory witch-hunt of the 20th century, with its many false accusations of child molestations and Satanic ritual abuses. At one point he entertained the possibility that he had forced daydreams of molestation upon his patients, but then quickly rejected the idea.
When he thought he could get away with it, he would align details of a case history to support his current theory. He “awarded himself a license to invent, suppress, alter, and rearrange facts in the interest of enhanced self-portraiture and theoretical vindication.”
Sigmund Freud is widely rumoured to have had an extramarital affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, though historians remain divided on the matter.
The Minna Bernays Controversy
• Who she was: Minna Bernays was the younger sister of Freud’s wife, Martha Bernays. She moved into the Freud family household in Vienna in 1896 and lived with them for decades, eventually accompanying them to London.
• The Swiss Hotel Register (1898): In 2006, German sociologist Franz Maciejewski uncovered a hotel logbook entry from a trip to Switzerland on August 13, 1898, where Freud registered himself and Minna as Dr Sigm. Freud and his wife in a double room with a single bed.
• Carl Jung’s Claim: Psychoanalyst Carl Jung later claimed that Minna confessed to him in 1907 that she was in love with Freud and had an intimate relationship with him. Freud loyalists dismissed Jung’s claim as bitter retaliation after Freud broke ties with him.
• Pregnancy Rumours: British historian Peter Swales further alleged that Minna became pregnant by Freud in 1900 and had an abortion, though this claim lacks definitive proof.Historians’ Split
• The Sceptics: Early official biographers, such as Ernest Jones and later biographer Peter Gay (who initially denied it), maintained that Freud’s personal life was strictly conventional and that his relationship with Minna was purely intellectual.
• The Believers: Following the discovery of the 1898 Swiss hotel registry and further archival research, many scholars (including Peter Gay later on) acknowledged that the evidence makes a physical affair very possible.
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