Thomas_More
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Thomas_MoreParticipant
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.- This reply was modified 6 hours, 55 minutes ago by Thomas_More.
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Thomas_MoreParticipantHe 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.Thomas_MoreParticipantAnd 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.
Thomas_MoreParticipantFrom Listen, Little Man!
https://images.app.goo.gl/muKUB5LceS5QshB9A
https://images.app.goo.gl/P7iSZHT7GgvSmhps5
https://images.app.goo.gl/ZiUgpziQBwv7yj2b7
https://images.app.goo.gl/r9f1qz5u3JH4z7kR9
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Thomas_MoreParticipantMaybe 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.
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Thomas_MoreParticipant” 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.
Thomas_MoreParticipantI don’t know about “death instinct”, which sounds ridiculous to me. But reichians say that neuroses are specific to humans and to other animals in captivity.
Humans being the only animals which have divorced themselves from the free and natural flow of the sex instinct.
Also, animals in captivity show neuroses and also masturbate.
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Thomas_MoreParticipantThese things did not bring about the Holocaust, as i am sure you know.
Scapegoating suited the populist Nazi Party for electoral and political success purposes, and the hatred of Jews especially was a Christian inheritance of centuries. Martin Luther’s diatribe against Jews gives Der Sturmer a real run for its money.The psychopathic hatred evinced by those in charge of the herding and killing was all part of the job and those chosen for it were the most psychopathic or banal types.
Even so, complaints against the job inundated Himmler, who had to repeatedly urge the “necessity” of it to the reluctant.Thomas_MoreParticipant” I’ll happily show my arse in the Party’s front window.”
That’ll prove the laws of physical attraction and repulsion!
We want to attract people, not repel them!😄
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Thomas_MoreParticipantYou can observe libido as a physical function, just as you can observe anger, frustration, grief, and other bio-chemical actions of the nervous system.
Thomas_MoreParticipantErnst’s experience showed him Reich was wrong in thinking cured patients would become socialists. In fact, the opposite often occurred. Feeling better, they lost interest in politics. Unless they were already socialists, of course. Those remained so.
Thomas_MoreParticipantI have no interest in these later ideas of his.
Surely libido is just a name for the sexual feelings (nervous stimulation) which are aroused by certain external phenomena and certain thoughts, leading to “take off” if fortunate, and repression if not.
Likewise, any “forces” would be material and able to be studied and scrutinised.
Btw, has anyone bothered to read Blewitt’s article on Freud in The Socialist Standard?
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Thomas_MoreParticipant“Freud had no political understanding whatsoever which is why his theories need the addition of a Marxian perspective. Marx’s theory of alienation has profound psychological implications which can be, and have been, explored by those using psychoanalytical techniques. We do not reject Darwin’s work because he was a Christian so let’s give Freud some slack for being a Viennese petty bourgeois. My contention, along with that of the Frankfurt school, is that Freud’s ‘death instinct’ has its roots in the alienation created by capitalism.”
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I agree absolutely, although i’ve never looked at his “death instinct” theory.Cde Fleischmann gave me Freud’s earliest essays to read, which don’t have any of that.
Thomas_MoreParticipantOla Raknes.
Thomas_MoreParticipantThen you’ll admit Reich’s heart was in the right place. I’m no scientist either, and my understanding of both the world and the individual, and of my own problems, is philosophical, not scientific.
Freud here is being absurd, of course. Reich said he’d gone off the rails, even if Reich did too, in a different direction. -
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