Freud and Marxism.
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” DJP- I’m no expert on animal behaviour, as TM will tell you, but don’t many animals seek out a quiet place to die when life becomes unsupportable?”
That doesn’t sound neurotic to me. Native Americans did the same.
” but don’t many animals seek out a quiet place to die when life becomes unsupportable?”
Most animals seek out a hiding place when they are sick, this is because being sick makes you vulnerable. The fact that some of the ones that are sick actually die, it is not surprising that some of the sick animals don’t recover.
Interestingly I think this is an example of the Freudian habit of putting 2 and 2 together and making a mystically based sex related 43. It’s a bit like seeing that little girls sometimes get pissed off because they can’t widdle up the wall like their brother and developing penis envy, with the possible consequence of:
Resentment towards the mother who failed to provide the daughter with a penis
Depreciation of the mother who appears to be castrated
Giving up on phallic activity (clitoral masturbation) and adopting passivity style vaginal intercourse. (quite how the 3 year old works that out is a little bit worrying!!!)
A symbolic equivalence between penis and childOr maybe she just wishes she was able to piddle up the wall
Another more tragic situation was that Freud was for once right on the money in his badly named “seduction theory” which explained female “hysteria” as having a root in trauma and that sexual abuse was very much part of that. Of course stating that child sexual abuse was rife in upper class Paris and Vienna was not a popular thing to say and he abandoned that theory and came up with the far more acceptable Oedipus complex.
Better to get rich being wrong than staying poor being right, eh Siggy?
Anyway TM to save you any tedious research here’s my introduction to Freud’s Death Instinct. https://wezselecta.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-death-instinct.html#comment-form
Perhaps BD might be interested too?Maybe those among fellow animals who are defeated in the quest for mates do develop problems, but i would guess they just try their luck again. Similar to a healthy human who is repulsed will shrug and move on. Whereas an unhealthy and repressed human will be unable to move on and may become a stalker or a suicide – both signs of neurosis/psychosis.
As far as i know, other animals do not exploit their own species, or impose religion and repressive doctrines to suppress sex. They don’t have gender fixations or pornography, or need to sublimate and divert their natural drives. They don’t have physical hang-ups and body obsessions.
But neither do primitive humans, to the extent we do. Severe neuroses appear to be part and parcel of class society, and most severe under modern industrial capitalism.https://images.app.goo.gl/GvS5Lqxuj1tefsWq5
And Reich also pointed out that rabid promiscuity and an obsession with sex are also signs of neurosis.
And the issue of repression was probably more acute in the early part of the 20th century.
Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven focusses on this issue, very poignantly.
The difficulty with Freud’s theory is that it offers us entities (for example repressed unconscious conflicts), which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of behavior But there are no correspondence rules for these alleged causes—they cannot be identified except by reference to the behavior which they are said to cause (that is, the analyst does not demonstratively assert: “This is the unconscious cause, and that is its behavioral effect;” rather he asserts: “This is the behavior, therefore its unconscious cause must exist”), and this does raise serious doubts as to whether Freud’s theory offers us genuine causal explanations at all.
And Reich also pointed out that rabid promiscuity and an obsession with sex are also signs of neurosis.
Did he give any indication of numbers here? Or is moderately promiscuous okay? Asking for a friend.
He believed two partners in a lifetime was healthy. But that’s his opinion.
Certainly he considered lechery, dirty jokes, pornography and “counting conquests” to be as much signs of what he called the Emotional Plague as is angry celibacy and tyrannical marriage.Moral judgements trying to pass as “science” if you ask me. I’ll tell my friend they might be neurotic.
I used to love Wilhelm Reich in my teenage years. “Mass Psychology of Fascism” may have been one of the first places I read about socialism. And “Listen Little Man” is a great rant.
But as I grew older and learnt about more things, and especially as I got better at critical thinking and philosophy, I just realised more and more how most of this was just pseudo-science and assertions that don’t really stand up.
It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?
It’s probably the later edition available from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (?)
I don’t know if he is valid or not. I’m just saying what i know of his ideas, and know he described my own feelings so well with regard to the physical discomfort and woodenness/bloatedness that accompanies repression and which adds an extra burden to any work or socialisation.
When living in Switzerland (from where i contacted and met comrade Fleischmann), i discovered Reich.
I was sharing a flat with two German students whom i would describe as examples of what Reich calls healthily functioning individuals. The contrast with being a student in the U.K. could not be greater.
There was no bullying among these German students and their friends. No machismo. No dirty talk. No porn. No put-downs. No spite. No nationalism. They had girlfriends who visited and often stayed. They were opposed to war. They had no craze for sports. No adulation for any celebrities. No interest in what someone wore, no mocking of another’s musical tastes. None of the obsessions, viciousness and malicious pettiness and rivalry which is the norm here.
They were social in a true sense. They drank beer, but with meals, which we cooked and ate together. They kept everything clean.
I was so glad i was there and had their support during my Kriegsangst while the first Iraq war was happening. There would have been no one to support me here.
They did not go out at night to drink themselves into a stupor or fight in the streets.No masturbation, no sport, definitely no football, only 2 partners for your entire life, no rude jokes, no taking the piss, you can have a drink, but only with meals, no getting wazzed and off to bed by 9.30pm
Socialism’s going to be a right giggle
DJP wrote: ‘It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?’
It seems not, and the original (ie pre-orgone) Mass Psychology of Fascism has only recently become available again (freely, at that) in German: https://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/2940
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