Jacques Lacan
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The fact that the scientific ‘establishment’ and the economic ‘establishment’ discard the work of Freud and Marx respectively has always been, for me, one of their highest recommendations.
The difference between Marx and Freud is the level of research and support.
Marx’s work was meticulously researched, you only need to have a quick glance at Capital and you can see the high level of quantitative and qualitative research Marx used to support the theoretical conclusions he came to.
Compare that to the “little Hans” case study. Half a dozen letters resulting in the ridiculous conclusions Freud came to. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Wez, given that you hold being rejected by the scientific establishment as a badge of honour, can I assume that as the scientific establishment reflect the idea of transubstantiation, that you truly believe that the host is transformed into the body and blood of Christ during the mass?
BD – Any casual glance at the history of science reveals how the ‘establishment’ got wrong on innumerable occasions. Of course the scientific theories of today will always become the discarded theories of tomorrow – that’s the nature of science. I think it is a mistake to try and make ‘science’ the new religion because, like all other human activity, it is subject to political ideology and manipulation. You used the word ‘ridiculous’ twice in one sentence to ‘ridicule’ Freud which would interest any psychologist. There have been countless ‘scientific’ theories that are now considered ‘ridiculous’. Many just add the label scientific as an advertising slogan in an attempt to make it respectable. Despite a relentless campaign against his work, Freud, like Marx, won’t go away. You can pick apart his early work since he virtually invented psychotherapy but for me his mature ideas – the dialectic between Eros (the life force) and Thanatos (the death instinct) is far and away the best understanding of the terrible hatred and cruelty that still pervades humanity.
Marx was a scientist; Freud was a charlatan, like many Lacan followers. Several burnout groups and personalities in Latin America are supporting him
That Lacan did not read Freud isn’t my opinion; it’s the opinion of people who have read both. Besides, the argument is that you do not have to read Freud to understand Lacan or vice versa
He wrote a book titled Return to Freud, and many have argued that it is not a return to Freud.
When you read Marx, you know immediately that you are dealing with a scientist who has covered several scientific fields, including anthropology
Wez – “ You used the word ‘ridiculous’ twice in one sentence to ‘ridicule’ Freud which would interest any psychologist”
I can point you in the direction of many, many of the lots of psychologists I know that wouldn’t find anything interesting at all about me using the term ridiculous at all interesting, they would find it a commonplace.
Back in the real world most serious students of human psychology look in Freud as an interesting historical artefact in the development of more cohesive understanding of the human mind or human behaviour.
What is interesting, however, is your response, which implies that any questioning of Freud’s any part of his dogma is suspicious, any critical thought is to be treated as unworthy. All of the hallmarks of a cult.
What’s also even more interesting is the unsupported and demonstrably false and universal nature of your statement. That is to say, you stated that “any psychologist” would find my use of the term “ridiculous” interesting. Just like your hero, Freud, you have stated a matter of opinion, as a matter of fact.
Examining your words more closely, you stated that all psychologists would find my use of the term “ridiculous” interesting.
What evidence do you have to support this universal statement? Have you surveyed all psychologists? Have you even surveyed a representative group of psychologists to arrive at your conclusions? No, just like Siggy, you’ve used his methodology, if in doubt, just make shit up that suits your particular narrative and to hell with any supportive evidence.
The fact of the matter is that, similarly, Freud’s ideas don’t hold water when put against any form of forensic examination.
The idea that all (every single one of them!), young boys see their sisters naked and assume that they have had their genitalia chopped off by their fathers and as a result associate themselves with their father to avoid the same fate is beyond ridicule.
Even if we swallow that nonsense for those who have seen female genitalia, what about about children who don’t have female siblings, what about single parents?
And that’s just one of Freud’s ludicrous theories
As to the idea that somewhere humans have through the process of evolution (a process which is based on the idea of physical survival) have somehow developed a drive that leads us to kill ourselves is possibly even more risible.
Fair play if you enjoy that wizards and warlocks nonsense, set yourself away, but linking it to the ideas of scientific socialism is a step too far.
I took two classes on medical psychology and abnormal psychology, and they are much better and more interesting than Freud’s analysis; they are more real and more scientific, and most of the teachers and the students rejected Sigmund Freud. Some teachers applied the concept of ‘bizarre personality’ to Freud, and they called him a cocaine addict
The reason that I am doing research and reading Jacques Lacan is not that I support his point of view, but I want to have sufficient knowledge to be able to answer arguments on chat and Facebook sites, and discussion forums. I am an amateur in Lacanianism
BD – Back to your old habits of creating straw men which you shoot down – where is there any evidence for you to say: ‘What is interesting, however, is your response, which implies that any questioning of Freud’s any part of his dogma is suspicious, any critical thought is to be treated as unworthy. All of the hallmarks of a cult.’ What I did say is that Freud was creating a new perspective on mental health virtually from scratch so he is allowed a little room for error. You seem not to have read his later work which, when synthesized with the Marxian analysis, came up with some interesting theories courtesy of the Frankfurt School. I have read nothing that explains the hatred and cruelty of reactionary ideology and practice that surpasses their work. I still believe you protest a little too much. You appear to have no understanding of these ideas so perhaps a little reading is in order? I attempt to make Marcuse’s idea of the death instinct a little more accessible here: https://wezselecta.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-death-instinct.html#comment-form
Wez, I’ve read plenty of Freud and had the “pleasure” of working for three years alongside Freudian practitioners in therapeutic settings. I’ve had enough of their psychobabble to last a lifetime. As to their methodology, many thanks for providing an ample example and the opportunity to discuss the kind of illogical and pseudo mystical BS he and his follows like to ceaselessly regurgitate.
With your (and others’ indulgence) let’s start to dissect some of the statements from you blog post. This is useful because there are many statements you make that are illustrative of the ways in which Freud and his followers come up with massive generalisations, illogically link phenomenon and come up with quasi religious conclusions based on very little other than their own musings.
For example you state “The child’s relationship with its parents is paradoxical from the start. It needs the mother to satisfy the stimuli for feeding and safety. We know that it also has sensual (infantile sexual) needs as well. When this is expressed in inappropriate behaviour a conflict with the parent is created (because of the moral and educational values of the adult). The child then experiences contradictory needs and is unable to deal successfully with stimuli.” This whole train of thought is predicated on a false assumption, infantile sexuality.
You state that “We know that it also has sensual (infantile sexual) needs as well“. But do we know that? How can you say with certainty that a child has infantile sexual needs? The whole basis of this part of your argument is based on Freud’s assumption that infant behaviour is stylised by the child having sexual desires towards one or both of its parents. What evidence is there for this assumption? Have you asked the infant? I think you’ll find that the infant won’t give a particularly coherent response. If, the behaviour being observed is not based on infantile sexual drives in its nature, then the whole idea that the child is in conflict with its parent falls. Is it not more likely that the sexualised behaviour of children and young people towards their parents that Freud observed were a result of sexual abuse in the children’s childhoods? I have worked alongside many children who have been subject to early years sexual abuse and highly sexualised behaviours in those children is a well known and consistently reported phenomenon. The whole “infantile sexuality” appears with modern eyes as being based on a misunderstanding of child behaviour and a confusion between cause and effect.
Next let’s talk about spiders. You try to link the idea of sex and the “death instinct” into the behaviour of some insects where the female eats the male after mating. In the weird and wonderful world of the Freudian this demonstrates that the urge to reproduce coming into conflict with the urge to survive. However a closer examination shows that this is nonsense. Does the male spider put themselves in a known position of danger because the drive to get his leg over (or maybe all eight of them) overcomes the danger he faces? That assumes that the spider has the cognitive ability to recognise that mating is a dangerous thing. Given that mating is a once and only pleasure, how on earth would the spider be able to recognise the danger and recognise that his mate is going to eat him and then become conflicted by the possible outcomes?
Moving on, what about your statement “some have believed that human sexuality lies at the root of irrational human behaviour. How else are we to explain why his theory of history is so successful in all areas except the most important one – the prediction of a socialist revolution?“. Well, yes, a small number of people do think that human sexuality lies at the root of irrational human behaviour, but they are very, very small in number. If you look at the work of Ellis, Beck, and many other psychologists, the development of irrational thought is viewed by many as being far more complex than the simplistic Freudian notions you appear to be alluding to. Are irrational thoughts (let’s face it irrational behaviour is a consequence of irrational thoughts) genuinely rooted in human sexuality? Let’s look at the irrational thoughts that are triggered by post traumatic stress disorder. Are these irrational thoughts caused by human sexuality? What evidence at all do you have to support the statement that you have made?
As another example, superstitions of all kinds tend to be irrational in nature, are all superstitions rooted in human sexuality? My brother Patrick had a phobia of giraffes when he was little, it was brought on by the fact that he misheard my mother when she used to say, “shut the back door and keep the draft out”, thinking she had said Giraffe instead of draft. No doubt Freud and his follows would have concocted some tale where our Paddy had been somehow frightened at some point by viewing a giraffe’s undercarriage and become concerned that a bloody big spider was going to eat him after having had sex with him!
However your approach (a familiarly Freudian approach), is to put all of this clearly unsupported dogma into a huge generalisation “How else are we to explain why his theory of history is so successful in all areas except the most important one – the prediction of a socialist revolution?“.
How else indeed, well I can think off the top of my head about half a dozen explanations which don’t involve human sexuality being at the root of irrational behaviour. How about Marx being over optimistic? How about Marx not being able to predict that rather than the workforce coming together in greater and greater numbers, that new technology would actually start to separate workers from each other and reduce the nature of collective action? How about the fact that premature mistaken revolutions such as the Bolshevik revolution would provide the perfect propaganda tool for capitalism? How about the fact that the capitalist has developed far more sophisticated propaganda mechanisms than Marx foresaw? How about the fact that political and social reforms have provided some degree of short term relief for workers at times of crisis?
No, no, no!!!! Cast these kinds of practical, historic, factual based thoughts aside, “how else could we explain” the failure of Marx’s predication of a socialist revolution but by the irrational thoughts of the workers regarding capitalism, but by those thoughts being rooted in human sexuality. What a load of baloney.
And then the final, Freudian, crowning achievement, “the death instinct” is linked to sex and satiation of appetite. You state that after a meal, or following sex we achieve a status of satisfaction, of contentment and emotional calm and somehow cognitively every last one of us link those experiences to being dead! We say to ourselves after a good feed or an enjoyable shag, “this must be like being dead”. However, this is not an occasional thought that some of us bizarrely have, as you say it’s an instinct (Thantos) it is there for all of us, hanging over us just waiting to emerge (just quite how evolution which is based on survival and reproduction has achieved this instinct is never explained, or what use it is in the quest for survival or reproduction). I must be quite strange, when I contemplate death (we all do at some stage), I have never once thought to myself “I suppose dying will be a bit like having a nice meal or a satisfying roll in the hay”.
You go on to state “No organism can survive without simulating death.” That’s not true, though is it? You can watch a mussel as long as you like, you wont see it simulating death, I had a cat for nearly 20 years, he never simulated death even once. Yet another huge unsupported and factually incorrect statement, just like the whole edifice of Freudianism it is built on foundations of sand.
So to finally prove the fairytale nature of your musings, you tell us that somehow there is a “longing of the animate entity to return to its inanimate origins?”, yet practically the whole of religious mythology is built upon the idea that religious faith will somehow provide some form of eternal life. How is it then that religions have thrived for millennia whilst being based upon a belief that you think is contradictory to the internal longings of the animate to return to the inanimate.
If you want to believe all of this undiluted bin juice, it’s up to you, bonny lad, but don’t think that for one moment it provides any kind of insight into the human mind or human behaviour.
BD – Well thank you for an in-depth response to my essay on the death instinct free, for a nice change, from insults and anger until the very end – you just can’t help yourself, can you. You won’t be surprised to hear that I believe that you make several assumptions and many mistakes in what you write but here is not the place for my reply. Could you copy and paste your post into the Freud and Marx thread and I’ll answer you there.
‘Marxism and Psychology’ by Anton Pannekoek from Living Marxism. Vol. 4 No. 1. February, 1938.
Anton Pannekoek: Marxism and psychology
This is my main point: the left that calls itself Marxist is trying to combine Lacan and Marxism, which they are calling the Lacanian left. It’s the same situation as the Frankfurt School, which also tried to combine Freud and Marx
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