Wez
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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.
BD -I replied to the points you made in your first lengthy critique of my essay on the death instinct. You have not replied to this. Are you satisfied with my interpretation of the Marcuse/Freud hypothesis?
BD – In the second part of your Freudian critique you seem to suggest that I accepted all of his theories. This couldn’t be further from the truth as I regard him as, in many ways, very bourgeois in his ideology and it is only when combined with Marx’s work that it can be helpful in the political struggle. One of his greatest mistakes, and I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned it, is his disbelief of all of the many reports of sexual abuse by fathers as reported by his female patients. His middle class values could not countenance such a reality.
BD – Sorry about my tardiness in responding to your original post but I’ve been quite busy the last few days and haven’t had a chance to reply in any depth. Firstly let me say that your charge of ‘massive generalizations’ is rather rich coming from a fellow Marxian Socialist since generalizations is our stock in trade. We believe in the cause and effect of modes of production causes class struggle that leads to cultural and political historical change and we extrapolate this to all human cultural evolution. Likewise a physicist would insist that the ‘laws of nature’ are universal – and you can’t find a greater generalization than that! I have to ask did any of your former ‘Freudian colleagues’ manage to help anyone? Freud came to believe that sexuality was but one expression of ‘Eros’ (the life force) and so your objections to the existence of infantile sexuality are confusing sensuality and sexuality. You speak of other ‘majority’ psychologists opinions dismissing Freud – but don’t most of them equally dismiss Marx? Any psychologists opinion is profoundly weakened if he/she has no understanding of how capitalism is a psychological cancer. Many mammals fight for the right to mate so putting the two stimuli of survival and procreation in a contradictory dialectic. The inability to successfully respond to stimuli – desire, creativity in one’s work, catharsis of the arts etc. can and does cause severe mental distress that sometimes leads to suicide. Buddhist meditation is dedicated to destroying the turmoil caused by the frustration of living in such an alienated world – just one example of a religion/philosophy that does not fear death. I will read your sequel and respond to that.
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.
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
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.
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.
Roberto- Many socialists inherit socialism from their parents and/or a relatively rational home life. This is where psychoanalysis has its strength in analyzing childhood. Capitalism causes a default dysfunctional family environment so those of us lucky enough to have a reasonably rational home life are much more likely to be socialists. Of course at the other end of the spectrum we have authoritarian and/or religious irrational families which generate fascism, racism and xenophobia etc. This has been exhaustively analyzed by Marcuse, Adorno and Fromm and is no longer a mystery.
Why would Burnham, with his scrapping the triple lock, give Reform an open goal at the next election? Is he that stupid?
Roberto – Consciousness of our mortality, your ‘finitude’ as you call it, can also have the reverse effect in terms of religion and/or despair. I don’t see any evidence that this has been a positive motivation in political history. What are your thoughts concerning the reasons put forward by the ‘Frankfurt School’ for the lack of class consciousness among working people?
TM – You don’t have to possess a knowledge of the materialist conception of history to be class conscious.
Roberto – Of course capitalists do not always act in their own class interests but this is down to economic ignorance rather than a lack of class consciousness. If you agree that the awareness of our ‘finite time’ on this planet does not affect ruling class consciousness why should it affect working class consciousness?TM- Any chance that for once in your life you can answer a question? Would you agree with the simple proposition that the ruling elite are infinitely more class conscious than the working class?
TM – I wasn’t talking about ‘capitalists’ I was talking about the ruling elite in what I said above. Of course they are all capitalists but not all capitalists are members of the elite. Would you agree with the simple proposition that the ruling elite are infinitely more class conscious than the working class?
