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Freud Speaks Through Me.

  
 
000
17:38 / 19.09.03
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is founded on the duality of sex--life/survival instincts—and death (what waits for each of us at the end of our individual experience). Coupled with this unified bi-polarism there is another duality present: the individual vs. the society. Society seeks to control each individual member of its collective with the enforcement of codes, rule s, and regulations. And, in perhaps a Nietzschen sense, the individual seeks to press hir “will to power (a term of N’s and not of Freud’s)” as far as/he can in response to the pressure of a collective control.

Freud talks of a particular “defensive” mechanism he calls projection. This is a two-fold mechanism. On one fold it operates within the individual. A specific person will project hir hopes, fears, and such onto the society around hir. In general upon groupings of people, and in specific, upon particular individuals within society.

The other fold is that a society will project its collective fears & etc. onto either another group of people and/or onto specific individuals either within or outside of their particular group.

The problem with projection is that it happens—as things do with Freud—at a level in our unconscious that we cannot, without extensive sessions on a comfy couch or on the comfy chair, apparently, recognize that we are engaged in this behaviour.

While aspects of Freudian theory have been discredited over the years, we are best not to throw the baby out with the bath, aren’t we? This particular aspect of Freud’s theory seems simple and correct with regard to my observations of the actions of specific individuals and the actions of individuals acting in consort with their immediate peer group, or larger a larger grouping.

Without getting into how the larger the grouping is, the easier it is to succumb to mob mentality where individuals will act in ways that are not normal to their day-to-day behaviours, what do you think? Is this so plainly obvious or is it garbage?
 
 
Tom Coates
18:02 / 19.09.03
Could you cite some sources for this, because it's not a part of Freud that I recognise, and I have most of the available volumes on my shelves after studying him for four years. I've got some ideas as to where I could start looking, but it would be much more useful if you could cite chapter and verse.
 
 
eye landed
05:32 / 20.09.03
It seems more like a holistic interpretation than a critique, TC. But I would also like to see some supporting quotes, if possible.

Freud thought his theory would be validated one day by neuropsychology (he was actually rebelling against a very physical paradigm within the medical profession). I think we now have the capacity to explore Freud's ideas in the context of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic system is involved in preparing our body for stress (fight or flight), but can be hazardous to maintain. The parasympathetic system is intended for more relaxed situations, boosting digestion, the immune system, and other functions. It is also required for sex (ever been impotent due to nervousness? It's apparently common among male virgins). It is interesting that you mention the concepts of sex and death in that context.

I've recently been reading about toxemia (the theory that disease is caused by toxins). Toxins apparently build up when the sympathetic system is too active, since the parasympathetic system is responsible for purifying the body. Apparently the sympathetic system is everactive due to our loud, fast-paced, urban culture. In a way, we exist in a perpetual state of shock and stress. Our own shock is a projection of our culture's shock, which is a result of fast progress.

Medicine is really the study of symbols (symptoms), and sex and death are symbols for greater dualities. But that's mystical mumbo-jumbo, so I'll let you think whatever you like about it.
 
 
Nietzsch E. Coyote
04:57 / 21.09.03
Well that sounds a lot like Freud. But not as boring. Is that a paraphrase of ideas out of "Civilization and its Discontents"? I don't remember projection specifically as something covered in that one but that is the main one he talks about society in. IIRC
 
 
Tom Coates
09:44 / 21.09.03
I'm not sure it sounds terribly like Freud. I mean the eros/thanatos distinction is certain Freud in his later incarnations, but I'm not sure that the distinction between individual and society really holds that much water. That various kinds of society put pressure on an individual that they can't possibly live up to, he certainly does say - but it's more complex than that. The individual itself is not self-contained and individual - by trifurcated into id, ego and super-ego (literally "it", "I" and "over-I") - with the 'id' being the needs and desires of the individual in their most basic - almost hydraulic - sense. The super-ego on the other hand - which has its roots in our integration of parental figures in to an individual psyche - is both protector/defender of the ego and a pressure upon it. It's the part of the mental apparatus that deals with things like censorship, the defence mechanisms (projection and the like).

The split between society on the ouside and the tripartite mind is far from distinct and clear, in fact the super-ego could be seen to be the direct result of an individual created in a social world (Althusserian 'interpolation', maybe?) but just as easily the basis for our need for a social world. That individuals acting in aggregate display some of the same splits and divisions is interesting, but perhaps not particularly surprising. Depressingly, as so often with Freud, the conclusions he comes up with aren't easily mapped onto a simplistic morality of 'good' and 'bad' - but instead simply mostly functioning or disfunctioning. I think Freud would find it relatively easy to argue that the state of society that resulted in the least mental illness was necessarily the best one, because it demonstrated a healthy (rather than morally good) way of operating...
 
 
I The Golden Dawn-nie Darko U
04:47 / 22.09.03
I recieved this by PM with the request that I post it on mod's behalf. I do so only because I do not like to see anyone have their voice taken away. I removed a small bit of text at the end. It was "spam" for this "Ic-dU?" thing...

.....+ * + * +.....

“I'm not sure it sounds terribly like Freud.”

No, but it doesn’t sound as if Chrome could be channeling Freud as he has been informed by the developments in psychology and philosophy in the interim? I mean Freud-Chrome says:

“ While aspects of Freudian theory have been discredited over the years, we are best not to throw the baby out with the bath, aren’t we?”

So when Tom says:

“…but it's more complex than that,”

then we feel the need to point out that Freud-Chrome has perhaps presented something intentionally simple so that people do not need toknow Freud to talk about this aspect of his (obviously simplified) theory. Why drag in things not needed. For instance:

Tom talks about the three-fold nature of the individual psyche, claiming that the “super-ego,” is responsible for morality (which is likely the case, if we want to see it like Freud), but, is this construct really the one with defense mechanisms OR is it more that the defense mechanisms come out of (are emergent) from the tripartite structure?

It seems to us to make more sense to go for the latter (regardless of what Freud has said!): a defense mechanism isn’t a moral judgement anyway; rather it is an unconscious coping device that stems from the holistic interaction of the three components: ID fears at a base level, EGO fears for the self, and SUPER_EGO makes the judgments with respect to that fear. And BOOM, next thing you know, for example, people are getting shut-out of a society , singled out, marked, loaded on a train, and shipped off to a “concentration” camp (what are they intended to be concentrating on anyway?—how they are different and “inferiour” or something? Are they to accept and believe the dominant paradigm’s judgement of them & accept that indeed they are worthless and deserve the ovens, gas chambers, and experiments?—but we digress).

“The split between society on the outside and the tripartite mind is far from distinct and clear, in fact the super-ego could be seen to be the direct result of an individual created in a social world (Althusserian 'interpolation', maybe?) but just as easily the basis for our need for a social world.”

Yes, but that’s the point isn’t it: 1 into 0 into 1…Oops sorry, let us explain: Self (in Freud a triple layer structure) is built by the society it dwells in, but Self is in that society (until the trains are ready) and can work to alter that society (until singled out) based on hir internalized material from that society. But here we are moving away from Freud and into Peter Berger’s “Social Dialectic.”

The social dialectic is exactly this three-fold process of “world-building”:

1. Externalization: ongoing outpouring of “human being” into the world.
2. Objectivation: these outpourings become “the real”; i.e., fixed, and impose their consequences upon us.
3. Internalization: the moment where we take in the objective world and make it internal, ready for alteration or not, ready for acceptance or not, and etc. & prepare to lop back to the outpouring stage. We put the internalized social milieu back into the society, but it has been given a “spin” based on the particular Internalization.

In other words, a society becomes reified by this process, and now requires, what Berger calls, a “Plausibility Structure.” This is the stories, infrastructure, and etc. that are in place to convince the individuals within a societal structure that that structure IS REAL AND TRUE & that there is no reason to attempt to alter it, change it, or etc. because it is “fine the way it is”; i.e., it is plausible.

So, back to Freud, the whole of a personality (its Id, Ego, Super Ego) is what partakes in this social dialectic; thus, the “Plausibility structure” is not acting merely on the Super-ego, but on the whole person.
 
  
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