Herbart Marcuse
Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud
"If it feels good, just do it." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... the Freudian hypothesis ... does not lead back to the image of a paradise which man has forfeited by his sin against God ..."
"[... the Freudian hypothesis leads] to the domination of man by man." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"Frauds individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"A half truth ... is false since the missing half changes the content of the obvious fact." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... the hatred against patriarchal suppression—a 'barrier to incest,' ... the desire (for the sons) to return to the mother—culminates in the rebellion of the exiled sons, the collective killing and devouring of the father, and the establishment of the brother clan, which in turn deifies the assassinated father and introduces those taboos and restraints which, ..., generated social morality." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"The monogamic family, with its enforceable obligations for the father, restricts his monopoly of pleasure; the institution of inheritable private property, and the universalization of labor, give a son a justified expectancy of his own sanctioned pleasure in accordance with his socially useful performances." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"The overthrow of the king-father is a crime, but so is his restoration.... The crime against the reality principle is redeemed by the crime against the pleasure principle: redemption thus cancels itself." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... the aesthetic dimension and the corresponding feeling of pleasure ... is the center of the mind .... link[ing] the 'lower' faculties of sensuousness, (Sinnlichkeit) to morality ... – the two poles of human existence" (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"Man exists only part time, during the working days, as an instrument of alienated performance [capitalist performance]; the rest of the time he is free for himself." "The irreconcilable conflict is not between work and Eros, but between alienated labor [man not able to be himself at work, i.e. capitalist, top-down hierarchy] and Eros [man being himself]." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... the liberation of Eros could create new and durable work relations." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"Underneath the habits of work in every man lies the immortal instinct for play [the child of caprice within]." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)
"The human relations connected with work may 'provide for a very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive, and even erotic.'" (Marcuse quoting Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)
"... reproduction is merely a 'by-product." "The primary content of sexuality is the 'function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body'" (Marcuse quoting Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)
"Fore-pleasure is the preliminary play with all parts of the body, and represent a perpetuation of the pure polymorphous perverse play of infantile sexuality." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)
"... according to Freud, the drive toward ever larger unities belongs to the biological-organic nature of Eros itself." "... the modifications and deflections of instinctual energy necessitated by the perpetuation of the monogamic-patriarchal family, or by a hierarchical division of labor, or by public control of the individuals private existence are instances of surplus- repression ..." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"In the aesthetic imagination, sensuousness generates universally valid principles for an objective order. The two main categories defining this order are 'purposiveness without purpose' — i.e. beauty, 'lawfulness without law' — i.e. freedom. 'Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck; Gesetzmässigkeit ohne Gesetz'" "Whatever the object may be (thing or flower, animal or man), it is represented and judged not in terms of its usefulness, not according to any purpose it may possible serve, and also not in view of it 'internal' finality and completeness." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"The philosophical effort to mediate, in the aesthetic dimension, between sensuousness and reason thus appears as an attempt to reconcile the two spheres of the human existence which were torn asunder by a repressive reality principle." "... the aesthetic reconciliation implies strengthening sensuousness as against the tyranny of reason and, ultimately, even calls for the liberation of sensuousness from the repressive domination of reason." "... on the basis of Kant's theory, the aesthetic function becomes ... the philosophy of culture ... a non-repressive civilization, in which reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational ...[according to Schiller] the possibility of a new reality principle. [i.e. a New World Order]." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"'... The conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people,... whereas civilization is founded on relations between large groups of persons [the village].... In no other case does Eros so plainly betray the core of his being, his aim of making one out of many; but when he has achieved it in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he is not willing to go further.'" (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents in Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... 'unification' of the partial instincts into one libidinal object of the opposite sex, and in the establishment of genital supremacy [husband rule, wife submit] .... is repressive." "For example, the modifications and deflections of instinctual energy necessitated by the perpetuation of the monogamic-patriarchal family, or by a hierarchical division of labor, or by public control of the individuals private existence are instances of surplus-repression pertaining to the institutions of a particular reality principle." "Psychoanalytical theory sees in the practices that exclude or prevent procreation an opposition against continuing the chain of reproduction and thereby of paternal domination―an attempt to prevent the 'reappearance of the father.'" "... perversions thus express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order." " Therefore, if the historical process tended to make obsolete the institutions of the performance principle [obey God, parent, boss, etc.], it would also tend to make obsolete the organization of the instincts [conscience] ― that is to say, to release the instincts from the constraints and diversions required by the performance principle." [This is what Eve did in the Garden of Eden.] "For the libidinal energy [our carnal desires] left to itself and supported by a free intelligence [a facilitator like Satan] aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against its ever more extraneous limitations ... strive to engulf an ever larger field of existential relations, [outside support for help] thereby exploding the reality ego and its repressive performance." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"Freud ... stressed the role of religion in the historical deflection of energy from the real improvement of the human condition to an imaginary world of eternal salvation...." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
In his book, The Future of an Illusion, Freud "... praised science and scientific reason as the great liberating antagonist of religion." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Marcuse wrote "This dialectic constitutes the unexplored and tabooed core of Freud's metapsychology." "The gratification of non-procreative genitality are ... tabooed as perversions..." "... perversions ... the sex instincts ... which do not serve or prepare for the procreative function." "sexuality is by nature 'polymorphous-perverse.'" (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Brown wrote "Children are polymorphously perverse. . . . by the standards of normal adult sexuality." "Fore-pleasure is the preliminary play with all parts of the body, and represent a perpetuation of the pure polymorphous perverse play of infantile sexuality." "The 'magical' body of occidental mysticism, and the 'diamond' body of oriental mysticisms, and, in psychoanalysis, the polymorphously perverse body of childhood." "Infantile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained through the activity of any and all organs of the human body ['touching, seeing, muscular activity, pain, etc.']." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)
In explaining Freud, Marcuse wrote: "If Freud's hypothesis is not corroborated by any anthropological evidence, it would have to be discarded altogether ... except for the fact that it telescopes, in a sequence of catastrophic events, the historical dialectic of domination ... elicits aspects of civilization hitherto unexplained." "... the Freudian hypothesis ... does not lead back to the image of a paradise which man has forfeited by his sin against God ..." "[... the Freudian hypothesis leads] to the domination of man by man." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud) "In Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer ─ 'this mentality of man as the master can be traced back to the first chapters of Genesis.'" (Jay) Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization to legitimize Freud's dream of an un-repressed civilization, a civilization no longer under Godly restraint, no longer under "domination," a condition Marx labeled as repression, alienation, and reification, caused by an "opiate"—patriarchal religion—a way of thinking which Freud saw as the source of neurosis (those who concede to accept external domination as a way of life). ". . . Definition of religious experience as experience of absolute dependence is the definition of the masochistic experience in general." "Both the sadistic [*] and the masochistic [*] trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship to overcome this aloneness." [Fromm believed that man could] "not take the last logical step, to give up 'God' and to establish a concept of man as a being who is alone in the world, but who can feel at home in it if he achieves union with his fellow man and with nature." [In other words, the German people could give up God but they could not, out of the fear of loneliness, give up Hitler. They had not learned that their escape from loneness was to be found in union with mankind and nature.] (Erich Fromm Escape from Freedom, brackets added) [*] Our dictionaries carry the influence of this Freudian ideology: Masochism: "a sexual perversion characterized by pleasure in being subjected to pain or humiliation especially by a love object;" Sadism "a sexual perversion in which gratification is obtained by the infliction of physical or mental pain on ... a love object" Merriam-Webster Dictionary (emphasis added) In other words, by a dialectical definition, a masochist is anyone who willfully obeys their parents', Gods', etc. command, when the command interferes with their natural, carnal (sexual) desire (according to Freud all desires, including children's desires, are sexual), and a sadist is a parent, God, etc., who places a command upon another person, a command which block their satisfying of a natural, carnal (sexual) desire.
As Marx "demythologized" Hegel, Marcuse "demythologized" Freud, rescuing Freud from his despair since he could not grasp a pathway in which to realize his dream of an un-repressed civilization. With the release of Eros, all Freud could see was the "explosion" of civilization, a return to barbarism; "instinctual liberation (and consequently total liberation) would explode civilization itself, ... freed from constraints ... man ... without work and order ... would fall back into nature ... destroy[ing] culture." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud) Using Kant, the Marcuse attempted to deliver Freud from his mythological "error." His dialectical pathway around the "explosion" of civilization was to actualize in civilization a taxonomical awareness "from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to eroticisation of the entire personality" to bring Eros into Civilization, into the workplace. Marcuse wrote: "To meet this argument, we recalled certain archetypes of imagination" a word he freely interchanged with "phantasy," "uniting the whole person, the universal and particular under pleasure ... reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason ... the fulfillment of man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of inherent libidinal forces [laws of the flesh]." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... (O)n the basis of Kant's theory, the aesthetic function becomes ... the philosophy of culture ... a non-repressive civilization, in which reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational ... [according to Schiller this gives hope to] the possibility of a new reality principle ." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
According to Marcuse "... the origin of repression leads back to the origin of instinctual repression ... early childhood." "... the 'external restrictions' which first the parents and then other societal agencies have imposed upon the individual 'interjected' into the ego and become its 'conscience'; henceforth, the sense of guilt permeates the mental life." "The id carries the memory traces of the dominion ... forward into every present future: it projects the past into the future." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"The historical possibility of a gradual decontrolling of the instinctual development [the "decontrolling" of the conscience over the id; i.e. let's be positive (love the creation, love pleasure) and not negative (love the creator, love God)] must be taken seriously, perhaps even the historical necessity – if civilization is to progress to a higher stage of freedom." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"'Every renunciation ... becomes a ... conscience; every fresh abandonment of gratification increases its severity and intolerance ... every impulse of aggression which we omit to gratify is taken over by the super-ego and goes to heighten its aggressiveness (against the ego).' 'That which began in relation to the father ends in relation to the community.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents,
"Freud ... compares the attitude of civilization toward sexuality." "... lasting erotic relations among mature individuals ... a 'libidinal rationality'..." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud) Freud saw the conflict in civilization as one where sex (the sensuous: touch, taste, sight, smell, sound) plays the determinant agent "'... The conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people,..." "'... whereas civilization is founded on relations between large groups of persons. (... the effort) to combine organic substances into ever larger unities,' to 'establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus―in short, to bind together?'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents in Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Freud then reveals his true sexual bias: "'In no other case does Eros so plainly betray the core of his being, his aim of making one out of many; but when he has achieved it in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he is not willing to go further.'" ibid. (bold added) In other words a patriarch paradigm (procreation—husband, wife) predominates with mankind and not a matriarchal/heresiarchal paradigm (adulterous-homosexual culture) As Marcuse explains: "... according to Freud, the drive toward ever larger unities belongs to the biological-organic nature of Eros itself." "This dialectic constitutes the unexplored and tabooed core of Freud's metapsychology." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
According to Marcuse, "... the prehistory of the sense of guilt ... has 'its origin in the Oedipus complex and was acquired when the father was killed by the association of the brothers.' [the brotherhood, the fraternity]" (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... original domination becomes eternal, cosmic, and good, and in this form guards the process of civilization." "The 'historical rights' of the primal father are restored." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Supposedly, with the expansion of the guilty conscience, which followed the sons killing of their father, "[t]he despot-patriarch has succeeded in implanting his reality principle in the rebellious sons." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)
With the aid of psychoanalysis, Marcuse saw memory (the "ought"—Eros restrained but subconsciously the desire retained) as an apparatus to be used in assisting mankind out of the repressive standards of the present civilization. "The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present." "... the restoration of memory is accompanied by the restoration of the cognitive content of phantasy." "... psychoanalytic theory recaptures the strict truths of daydreaming and fiction." "Memory," the law of the flesh, therefore, is an organ of "truth," which remembers currently suppressed carnal urges of past erotic acts of childhood, natural acts which were suppressed by parent standards. Thus it serve as a tool for the therapist, as it did for Satan in the Garden in Eden. "If memory moves into the center of psychoanalysis as a decisive mode of cognition, this is far more than a therapeutic device; the therapeutic role of memory derives from the truth value of memory." "Its truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities [love and support by the parent and carnal hopes] which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilized individual, but which he had once been fulfilled in his dim past and which are never entirely forgotten." "... all thinking 'is merely a detour from the memory of gratification ... memory of gratification is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driven power behind the process of thought." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Brown writes about memory as a cause for repression, when it is used to retain patriarchal standards: "The core of the neurosis of individuals lay in the 'memory-traces of the experiences of former generations.'" (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History) All this has changed, as several generations have praxised the dialectical process in their homes. Irvin Yalom writes: "The current generation is the first in the history of the world which has nothing to learn from grandparents;" (Irvin Yalom Theory and Practice and Group Psychotherapy) Thomas Kuhn writes "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Kuhn quoting Max Planck's famous dictum. (Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolution)
Marcuse wrote that: "Phantasy [role-playing "ought"] plays a most decisive function in the total mental structure: it links the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of consciousness, the dream with the reality [the 'ought' with the 'is' negating the 'not,' a circumvention of restraining commands] ... the perpetual but repressed ideas of the collective and individual memory, the tabooed images of freedom." "Phantasy is cognitive in so far as it preserves the truth of the Great Refusal, ... in so far as it protects, ... the aspirations for the integral fulfillment of man and nature ... the 'lower depth' of instinctual gratification assumes a new dignity." Phantasy "... unit[s] the whole person, the universal and particular under pleasure." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
Perversions, according to Marcuse "show a deep affinity to phantasy" since phantasy is "free from reality-testing" and "subordinated to the pleasure principle alone" and can be aroused through "artistic imagination." (Imagination-"the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality" Merriam-Webster Dictionary) Phantasy "links perversions with the images of integral freedom and gratification." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"... perversions thus express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order."
"The vicissitudes of the 'proximity senses' (smell and taste) ... is 'much more a bodily, physical one, hence also more akin to sexual pleasure' .... give, as it were, unsublimated pleasure per se (and unrepressed disgust). They relate (and separate) individuals immediately. Such immediacy is incompatible with the effectiveness of organized domination, with a society which 'tends to isolate people, to put distance between them, and to prevent spontaneous relationships and the the natural animal-like expressions of such relations.'" (Freud in Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
"In terms of the pleasure principles ... reproduction is merely a 'by-product." (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)
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HERBART MARCUSE |
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| "… the dialectical concept, in comprehending the given facts, transcends the given facts. This is the very token of its truth. It defines the historical possibilities, even necessities; but their realization can only be in the practice which responds to the theory, and, at present, the practice gives no such response" (Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man , p. 253)
"According to Marx, the correct theory is the consciousness of a practice that aims at changing the world. Marx's concept of truth, however, is far from relativism. There is only one truth and one practice capable of realizing it. Theory accompanies the practice at every moment, analysing the changing situation and formulating its concepts accordingly. The concrete conditions for realizing the truth may vary, but the truth remains the same and the theory remains its ultimate guardian. Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth not vice versa" (Herbert Marcuse Reason and Revolution, pp. 321-322) |
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| "The revolt at home against home seems largely impulsive." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. xvi | |
| "In other words, the shaping of the environment, the transformation of nature, may be propelled by the liberated rather than the repressed Life Instincts, and aggression would be subjected to their demands." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. xix | |
| "... the affluent society, are on the side of that which is – not that which can and ought to be." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. xxii | |
| "... the erotic energy of the Life Instincts cannot be freed under the dehumanizing conditions of profitable affluence." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. xxiii | |
| "‘By nature,' the young are in the forefront of those who live and fight for Eros against Death and against a civilization which strives to shortening the ‘detour to death' while controlling the means for lengthening the detour." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. | |
| "Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. | |
| "Psychology could be elaborated and practiced as a special discipline as long as the psyche could sustain itself against the public power, . . . the terms of psychology become the terms of the societal forces which define the psyche." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. | |
| "The task is: to develop the political and sociological substance of the psychological notions." | |
| "Free gratification of man's instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress." | |
| "'Happiness,' said Freud, ‘is no cultural value.'" | |
| "Freud's theory is in its very substance ‘sociological.'" | |
| "The notion of a non-repressive civilization will be discussed in terms of ... Freud's theoretical conception on socio-historical content." | |
| "As psychoanalysis has become socially and scientifically respectable, . . . [it has] interpreted man in terms far more offensive to social taboos than Freud's earlier ‘pan-sexualism'-terms . . . ." | |
| "...this essay ... moves exclusively in the field of theory." | |
| "The subsequent discussion will try to apply the tabooed insights to psychoanalysis (tabooed even in psychoanalysis itself) to an interpretation of the basic trends of civilization." | |
| "‘Instinct' refers to primary ‘drives' of the human organism which are subject to historical modification . . . " | |
| "... transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle." from: immediate satisfaction—pleasure, joy (play), receptiveness, absence of repression to: delayed satisfaction, restraint of pleasure, toil (work), productiveness, security. |
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| "... gain through renunciation and restraint" | |
| "the reality principle ‘safeguards' rather than ‘dethrones,' ‘modifies' rather than denies, the pleasure principle." | |
| "The adjustment of pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibility with the established societal norms and relations, and, by that token, implies the transubstantiation of pleasure itself." | |
| "ego ... strives for ‘what is useful' and what can be obtained without damage to itself and to its vital environment." | |
| "reason ... learns to test the reality, to distinguish between good and bad, true and false, useful and harmful." "reason ... subordinate to the reality principle." |
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| "phantasy ... free from the rule of the reality principle." "phantasy ... ‘protected from cultural alterations' and stays committed to the pleasure principle." |
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| "The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the great traumatic event in the development of man ... it occurs during the period of early childhood, and submission to the reality principle is enforced by the parents and other educators." | |
| "The fact that the reality principle has to be re-established continually in the development of man indicates that its triumph over the pleasure principle is never complete and never secure." | |
| "The return of the repressed makes up the tabooed and subterranean history of civilization." | |
| "Frauds individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology." | |
| "The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and the reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization." | |
| "... repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus." | |
| "The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, ..." | |
| "Freud considers the ‘primordial struggle for existence' as ‘eternal' and therefore believes that the pleasure principle and reality principle are ‘eternally' antagonistic." | |
| "However, his theory contains elements that break through this rationalization; they shatter the predominant tradition of Western thought and even suggests its reversal." | |
| "Cultural freedom thus appears in the light of unfreedom, and cultural progress in the light of constraint." | |
| "Culture is not thereby refuted: unfreedom and constraint are the price that must be paid." | |
| "... compromised freedom, gained at the expense of the full satisfaction of needs." | |
| ".... freedom in civilization is essentially antagonistic to happiness: it involves the repressive modification (sublimation) of happiness." | |
| "And the past continues to claim the future: it generates the wish that the paradise be re-created on the basis of the achievements of civilization." | |
| "If memory moves into the center of psychoanalysis as a decisive mode of cognition, this is far more than a therapeutic device; the therapeutic role of memory derives from the truth value of memory." | |
| "Its truth value lies in the specific function of memory to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilize individual, but which he had once been fulfilled in his dim past and which are never entirely forgotten." | |
| "The reality principle restrains the cognitive function in memory." | |
| "As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies." | |
| "The rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the present." | |
| "... the restoration of memory is accompanied by the restoration of the cognitive content of phantasy." | |
| "... psychoanalytic theory recaptures the strict truths of daydreaming and fiction." | |
| "The liberation of the past does not end in its reconciliation with the present." | |
| " ... the orientation on the past tends toward an orientation on the future." | |
| "The recherche du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future liberation." | |
| Freud's analysis of the development of the repressed mental apparatus: | |
| "(a) Ontogenetic: the growth of the repressed individual from early infancy to his conscious societal existence." | |
| "(b) Phylogenetic: the growth of repressive civilization from the primal horde to the fully constituted civilized state." | |
| [Ontogenetic and Phylogenetic] "are continually interrelated." | |
| "The interrelation is epitomized in Freud's notion of the return of the repressed in history: ... the individual re-experiences and re-enacts the traumatic [genus development] ... instinctual dynamic [reflects upon] the individual and genus (between particular and universal) [conflict]." | |
| The Origin of the Repressed Individual (Ontogenesis: the development or course of development especially of an individual organism. Merriam-Webster's dictionary) |
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| "... human freedom and happiness is ... a struggle of the instincts ... of life [dynamic] and death [static] in which soma [body] and psyche [mind], nature [environment] and civilization [people] participate." [praxis] |
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| "The center of Freud's metapsychology ... dynamic biological [body and mind] and ... sociological [environment and people] ..." |
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| "... a dynamic union of opposites of the unconscious and the conscious structures; ... of soma-psyche and the external reality." | |
| "... two ultimate principles which govern the mental apparatus: pleasure principle and reality principle." | |
| Tripartite topology of id, ego, and superego id <= superego => ego | |
| "This dualistic construct [id and ego] and the intermediary and ‘overlapping' elements between the two poles [superego]." | |
| Tripartite topology of id, ego, and superego sex (libidinous) <= superego => ego (self preservation) | |
| "... antagonism between sex (libidinous) rooted in the mental apparatus life instinct (Eros) pleasure principle and ego (self-preservation) |
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| Tripartite topology of id, ego, and superego life instincts (Eros) <= conscience => death instincts | |
| "... conflict between the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct [also part of Eros]." Life Instincts (Eros) = "impulses to gratify basic needs" Merriam-Webster's Dictionary Death Instinct [also part of Eros] = "an innate and unconscious tendency toward self-destruction ... aggressive and destructive — Thanatos" Merriam-Webster's Dictionary |
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| death instincts ... ‘whose function it is to assure the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways to returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself,' ... part of Eros - [the life instinct]." Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1950, 23 | |
| "Eros and the death instinct are now the two basic instincts." | |
| "Freud is driven to emphasize time and again the common nature of the instincts prior to their differentiation." | |
| "... the fundamental regressive or ‘conservative' tendency in all instinctual life." "‘to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world.'" Quiescence: to become quiet, rest: marked by inactivity or repose : tranquilly at: causing no trouble or symptoms. Merriam-Webster's dictionary |
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| "The instincts are drawn into the orbit of death. ‘... life is governed by ... constant equilibrium, it consists of a continuous descent toward death.'" |
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| "‘Life is [Eros - an unremitting struggle against]... a continuous descent toward death.'" | |
| Capitulation to status quo, accepting absolutes, i.e. conscience, = pre-mature death | |
| "The life instincts (Eros) gain ascendency over the death instincts." | |
| "‘... the claims of Eros, of the sexual instincts, as expressed in instinctual needs.'" | |
| "They have to win, against death, the ‘potential immortality' of the living substance." | |
| "Plato's ‘fantastic hypothesis' that ‘living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavored to reunite through the sexual instincts.'" | |
| "Eros is defined as the great unifying force that preserves all life." | |
| "The instincts are defined no longer in terms of their origin and their organic function, but in terms of a determining force which gives the life processes a definite ‘direction' (Richtung), in terms of ‘life-principles.'" | |
| "This inability to discover in the primary instinctual structure anything that is not Eros, the monism of sexuality ... now seems to turn into its opposite: into a monism of death." | |
| "However, the discovery of the common "conservative nature" of the instincts militates against the dualistic conception and keep Freud's late metapsychology in that state of suspense and depth which makes it one of the great intellectual ventures in the science of men." | |
| "Never before has death been so consistently taken into the essence of life, but never before also has death come so close to Eros." | |
| "The death instinct is destructiveness not for its own sake, but for the relief of tension.... the unconscious flight from pain and want ... an expression of the eternal struggle against suffering and repression." | |
| "The death instinct seems to be affected by the historical changes which affect this struggle." | |
| id, ego, and superego | |
| "The oldest ... largest layer is the id ... domain of the unconscious, of the primary instincts. ... free from the forms and principles which constitute the conscious, social individual." | |
| Id "... is neither affected by time nor troubled by contradictions; it knows ‘no values, no good and evil, no morality.'" | |
| Id "... does not aim at self-preservation; all it strives for is satisfaction of its instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure principle." | |
| Ego "... the ‘mediator' between the id and the external world ... observing the testing the reality ... adjusting itself to the reality, and altering the latter in its own interests ‘representing the external world for the id, and so of saving ... it from annihilation.'" | |
| The ego " ... has the task of ‘representing the external world for the id, the so to save it; from the id, blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete disregard of the superior strength of outside forces, could not otherwise escape annihilation.'" | |
| " ... the chief function of the ego is that of coordinating, altering, organizing, and controlling the instinctual impulses of the id so as to minimize conflicts with reality:" |
|
| "... the chief function of the ego is that of to repress impulses that are incompatibility with reality, to ‘reconcile' others with the reality by changing the object, delaying or diverting their gratification, transforming their mode of gratification, amalgamating them with the impulses, and so on." |
|
| "The ego ‘dethrones the pleasure-principle, which exerts undisputed sway over the processes in the id, and substitutes for it the reality-principle, which promises greater security and greater success.'" | |
| "... the ego retains its birthmark as an ‘outgrowth' of the id." "... the processes of the ego remain secondary processes." |
|
| "... all thinking ‘is merely a detour from the memory of gratification ... to the identical cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached only more by the path of motor experiences.'" | |
| "... memory of gratification is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driven power behind the process of thought." | |
| the superego "... originates from the long dependency of the infant on his parents; the parental influence remains the core of the superego." | |
| the superego "... the ‘external restrictions' which first the parents and then other societal agencies have imposed upon the individual ‘interjected' into the ego and become its ‘conscience'; henceforth, the sense of guilt permeates the mental life." | |
| "the need for punishment generated by the transgressions or by the wish to transgress these restrictions (especially in the Oedipus situation)." |
|
| Franz Alexander - superego " the ‘transformation of conscious condemnation, which depends upon perception, into an unconscious process of repression.'" | |
| The superego "... conscious struggles with the demands of reality (the parents and their successors in the formation of the superego) are transformed into unconscious automatic reactions....'" | |
| "As a rule the ego carries out repressions in the service and at the behest of if its superego." | |
| "Repression soon becomes unconscious.... assumes a tendency toward a decrease of mobile psychic energy to a ‘tonic form' ― corporealiza-tion of the psyche." | |
| "The autonomous development of the instincts is frozen, and their pattern is fixed at the childhood level." "Adherence to a status quo ante [death instinct] is implanted in the instinctual structure." |
|
| "The individual becomes instinctually re-actionary...." | |
| "The individual punishes itself (and then is punished) for deeds which are undone or which are no longer incompatible with civilized reality, with civilized man." | |
| "The superego thus enforces not only the demands of reality but also those of a past reality. ... the mental development lags behind the real development, or retards the real development, denies its potentialities in the name of the past." | |
| "The id [unconscious] carries the memory traces of the dominion of the [primal pleasure principle] forward into every present future: it projects the past into the future." "... freedom from want was a necessity ..." [for the id to be restored.] |
|
| "The superegos, also unconscious, ,rejects this instinctual claim on the future, in the name of a past no longer one of integral satisfaction but one of bitter adjustment to a punitive present." | |
| "The superego thus enforces not only the demands of reality but also those of a past reality. ... the mental development lags behind the real development, or retards the real development, denies its potentialities in the name of the past." [repeated from above] | |
| "In the case of human organism, this is an historical world." "... a repressive organization of the instincts underlies all historical forms of the reality principle in civilization." "... civilization has progressed as organized domination." |
|
| "organized domination ... awareness guides [Freud's] entire Phylogenetic construction, which derives civilization from the replacement of the patriarchal despotism of the primal horde by the internalized despotism of the brother clan." | |
| "... all civilization has been organized domination, the historical development assumes the dignity and necessity of a universal biological development." | |
| "... biological and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts ..." vicissitude: the quality or state of being changeable : MUTABILITY Merriam-Webster's dictionary | |
| "... historical substance must be recaptured ... by unfolding their own content." | |
| "... our subsequent discussion is an ‘extrapolation,' ... calls for a duplication of concepts [doublespeak] ... corresponding terms denoting the specific socio-historical component." | |
| vicissitudes of the instincts | |
| "(a) Surplus-repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the modifications of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization." |
|
| "(b) Performance principle: the prevailing historical form of the reality principle." "Behind the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananka or scarcity (Lebensnot), ... struggle for existence ... for the satisfaction of human needs ... pleasure is ‘suspended' and pain prevails." |
|
| "Behind the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot), which means that the struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay." | |
| "In other words, whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the procurement of the means for satisfying needs." | |
| "For the duration of work, which occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is ‘suspended' and pain prevails." | |
| "... the basic instincts strive for the prevalence of pleasure and for the absence of pain, the pleasure principle is incompatible with reality, and the instincts have to undergo a repressive regimentation." | |
| Scarcity "... is the consequence of specific organization of scarcity, and of a specific existential attitude enforced by this organization.... organized in such a way that it has not been distributed collectively in accordance with individual needs, nor has the procurement of goods for the satisfaction of needs been organized with the objective of best satisfying the developing needs of the individuals." | |
| "Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals ― first by mere violence, subsequently by a more rational utilization of power." | |
| "However, no matter how useful this rationality was for the progress of the while, it remained the rationality of domination, and the gradual conquest of scarcity was inextricable bound up with and shaped by the interest of domination." | |
| "Domination differs from rational exercise of authority." | |
| Rational exercise of authority "... is inherent in any societal division of labor, is derived from knowledge and confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for the advancement of the whole." | |
| Domination "... is exercised by a particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a privileged position. ... the specific historical institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination introduce additional controls over and above .... civilized human association .... additional controls arising from the specific institutions of domination are what we denote as surplus repression." | |
| "For example, the modifications and deflections of instinctual energy necessitated by the perpetuation of the monogamic-patriarchal family, or by a hierarchical division of labor, or by public control of the individuals private existence are instances of surplus- repression pertaining to the institutions of a particular reality principle." | |
| "... (phylogenetic) restrictions of the instincts which mark the development of man from the human animal to the animal sapiens." | |
| "The power to restrain and guide instinctual drives, ... increases rather than reduces gratification: ... the breaking of compulsion, is the human form of pleasure principal ." | |
| "However, the mastery of instinctual drives may also be used against gratification; . ... basic repression and surplus-repression ... intertwined, and ... organized in such a way that all the partial impulses and their ‘zones' were all but desexualized in order to conform to ... a specific social organization of human existence." | |
| "The vicissitudes of the ‘proximity senses' (smell and taste) ... is ‘much more a bodily, physical one, hence also more akin to sexual pleasure .... give, as it were, unsublimated pleasure per se (and unrepressed disgust). They relate (and separate) individuals immediately." | |
| "Such immediacy is incompatible with the effectiveness of organized domination, with a society which ‘tends to isolate people, to put distance between them, and to prevent spontaneous relationships and the the natural animal-like expressions of such relations." | |
| "... instinctual restraints ... enforced by the hierarchical distribution of scarcity and labor." | |
| "The pleasure principle was dethroned ... because it militated against a civilization whose progress perpetuates domination and toil." | |
| "Freud ... compares the attitude of civilization toward sexuality." | |
| "... a tribe or a section of the population ‘which has gained the upper hand and is exploiting the rest to its own advantage. Fear of a revolt among the oppressed then becomes a motive for ever stricter regulations.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents | |
| "... the repressive organization of sexuality ... under the reality principle ... affects the life instinct as well as the death instinct." | |
| "The sex instincts bear the brunt of the reality principle. ... the subjection of the partial sex instincts to the primacy of genitality ... under the function of procreation." | |
| "... the diversion of libido from one's own body toward an alien object of the opposite ...." | |
| "The gratification of the partial instincts and of non-procreative genitality are ... tabooed as perversions, sublimated, or transformed into subsidiaries of procreative sexuality." | |
| "This organization results in a quantitative and qualitative restriction of sexuality ... alter the very nature of sexuality: from an autonomous ‘principle governing the entire organism it is turned into a specialized temporary function, into a means for an end." Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization p. 41 | |
| "In terms of the pleasure principles ... reproduction is merely a ‘by-product." | |
| "The primary content of sexuality is the ‘function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body'; ..." | |
| "Freud emphasized time and again that without its organization for such ‘service' sexuality would preclude [rule out] all non-sexual and therefore all civilized societal relations―even at the stage of nature heterosexual genitality;" | |
| "‘... The conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people,..." "... whereas civilization is founded on relations between large groups of persons.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents |
|
| "... the effort ‘to combine organic substances into ever larger unities,' to ‘establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus―in short, to bind together?'" | |
| "How can sexuality become the probable ‘substitute' for the ‘instinct towards perfection,' the power that ‘holds together everything in the world'?" | |
| "‘In no other case does Eros so plainly betray the core of his being, his aim of making one out of many; but when he has achieved it in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he is not willing to go further.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents | |
| "... according to Freud, the drive toward ever larger unities belongs to the biological-organic nature of Eros itself." | |
| "... the unifying and gratifying power of Eros, chained and worn out in a sick civilization ... conflict between sexuality and civilization ... between pleasure principle and reality principle." | |
| "He [Freud] finds the reason for culture's ‘antagonism to sexuality' in the aggressive instincts deeply fused with sexuality: they threaten ... to destroy civilization, and they force culture ‘to call up every possible reinforcement' against them." | |
| "Civilization plunges into a destructive dialectic: the perpetual restrictions on Eros ultimately weaken the life instincts and thus strengthen and release the very forces against which they were ‘called up' ―those of destruction." | |
| "This dialectic constitutes" "the unexplored" "and tabooed" "core of Freud's metapsychology." |
|
| "...focus the discussion on the institutions and relations that constitute the social ‘body' of the reality principle." |
|
| "... describe it in terms of the specific reality principle that has governed the origins and growth of this civilization." |
|
| "We designate it as performance principle in order to emphasize that under its rule "society is stratified" "according to the competitive economic performances of it members." |
|
| "The performance principle, which is that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, presupposes a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized." | |
| "Men ... work in alienation .... labor time is painful time, for alienated labor is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle." | |
| "Libido is diverted for socially useful performances in which the individual works for himself only in so far as he works for the apparatus ... activities that mostly do not coincide with his own faculties and desires." | |
| "The restrictions imposed upon the libido appear as the more rational, the more universal they become, the more they permeate the whole of society." | |
| "... social utilization (in labor) ... enriches the life of the individual ... the instinctual energy thus withdrawn does not accrue to the aggressive instincts." | |
| "... external objective laws ... absorbed into the ‘conscience' ... work as his own desire, morality, and fulfillment." [libido controlled by a higher authority] | |
| "... the individual lives his repression ‘freely' as his own life: ..." [self control, self denial] | |
| "His erotic performance is brought in line with his societal performance." [patriarch control] | |
| "... mind and body ... function as instruments [of alienated labor] only if they renounce the freedom of the libidinal subject-object [touch no, taste, not, see not, hear not, smell not] which the human organism primarily is and desires." | |
| "... time plays a fundamental role in this transformation." | |
| "Man exists only part time, during the working days, as an instrument of alienated performance; the rest of the time he is free for himself." | |
| "... the pleasure principle which governs the id which is timeless ... militates against ... dismemberment" | |
| The pleasure ego "must learn to forget the claim for timeless and useless gratification, for the ‘eternity of pleasure.'" | |
| "The human relations connected with work may ‘provide for a very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive, and even erotic.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents |
|
| "The irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labor (performance principle) and Eros (pleasure principle)." Freud Civilization and Its Discontents |
|
| Whoever controls entertainment, controls leisure time, controls the overflow of limitations set by repressive domination―pacification. If A (control of entertainment) equals B (control of leisure time), and B (control of leisure time) equals C (the overflow of limitations set by repressive domination), then A (control of entertainment) equals C (control of overflow of limitations set by repressive domination). |
|
| "... when the growth of productivity threatens to overflow the limits set by repressive domination." "the technique of mass manipulation developed an entertainment industry ... directly controls leisure time," "has the state directly taken over the enforcement of such controls." |
|
| "The individual is not to be left alone" with a facilitator. | |
| "For [the libidinal energy] left to itself and supported by a free intelligence [a facilitator] aware of the potentialities of liberation from the reality of repression, the libidinal energy generated by the id would thrust against its ever more extraneous limitations ... strive to engulf an ever larger field of existential relations, [outside support for help] thereby exploding the reality ego and its repressive performance." |
|
| "The organization of sexuality reflects the .... "organization of society." "... ‘unification' of the partial instincts into one libidinal object of the opposite sex," "and in the establishment of genital supremacy." "... is repressive." |
|
| "... the partial instincts do not develop freely into a ‘higher' state of gratification which preserves their objectives, but are cut off and reduced to subservient functions." | |
| Individual Eros reduction => Social Eros reduction Social Eros reduction => Individual Eros reduction |
|
| "... the socially necessary desexualization of the body:" "the libido becomes concentrated in one part of the body," "leaving most of the rest free for use as the instrument of labor." |
|
| "... temporal reduction of the libido ... supplemented by its spatial reduction." | |
| perversions = societal organizational taboos | |
| "... sex instinct has no ... temporal and spatial [time and space] limitations on its subject and object [self-environment or individual-other/social];" | |
| "sexuality is by nature ‘polymorphous-perverse.'" "... perversions ... societal organization[al] taboos ... all ... the sex instincts ... which do not serve or prepare for the procreative function." |
|
| what is called perversion is seen by Freud as compos mentis (sound mind) | |
| "... the taboo on the perversions is sustained with such extraordinary rigidity [because] "‘they exerted a seductive influence;'" "‘... a secret envy of those who enjoy them had to be strangled.'" A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis |
|
| "... perversions seem to give a promesse de bonheir greater than that of ‘normal' sexuality." "...‘exclusive'... deviations from normality ..." "... rejection of the procreative sex act." |
|
| perversions = rebellion against procreation | |
| "... perversions thus express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order." |
|
| Eros = Patricide | |
| "Psychoanalytical theory sees in the practices that exclude or prevent procreation an opposition against continuing the chain of reproduction and thereby of paternal domination― an attempt to prevent the ‘reappearance of the father.'" |
|
| perversions = reject feelings of guilt | |
| "... perversions" "seem to reject the entire enslavement of the pleasure ego by the reality ego." "... often characterized by a strong rejection of that feeling of guilt which accompanies sexual repression." |
|
| perversions => phantasy―artistic imagination | |
| "... perversions" "show a deep affinity to phantasy" "free from reality-testing" "subordinated to the pleasure principle alone." "... as artistic imagination, [phantasy]" "‘was kept free from reality-testing'" "'and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone.'" Freud Collected Papers [Phantasy] "links perversions with the images of integral freedom and gratification." |
|
| using sex to overthrow the patriarch paradigm | |
| "A society which employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions upheld sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the domain of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation." | |
| "They establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization which turned the organism into an instrument of work.... suppression ... efficient domination of men and nature." | |
| "... license in the practice of perversions ... the fusion of Eros and death instinct,... loosened beyond the danger point ... the loosing of this fusion makes manifest the erotic component in the death instinct and fatal component in the sex instinct." |
|
| perversions=> Eros => death instinct | |
| "Perversions suggest the ultimate identity of Eros and death instinct, or the submission of Eros to the death instinct." "There is no societal organization of the death instinct paralleling that of Eros ... it falls under the strict taboo on perversions." |
|
| "... diversion of [death instinct] from the ego [life instinct] to the external world ... feeds technological progress..." | |
| "... the use of the death instinct [Nirvana-to get peace, status quo] for the formation of the superego [right vs. wrong] achieves the punitive submission of the pleasure ego [socialism-life] to the reality principle [capitalism-death] and assumes civilized morality [repression]." | |
| death instinct=> superego => dying on others terms Peace with God, dying to self, means no peace with self, dying on own terms, (man) and peace with man means no peace with God | |
| "In this transformation the death instinct [peace at all cost] is brought into the service of Eros; the aggressive impulse provide energy for the continuous alteration, master, and exploitation of nature for the advantage of mankind." | |
| death instinct=> superego => destroy Eros objects on other object terms | |
| "In attacking, splitting, changing, pulverizing things and animals (and, periodically, also men), man extends his domination over the world and advances to ever richer stages of civilization." | |
| "‘... the intellect can provide no permanent defense against a vigorous barbarism [in reference to the death instinct ‘a principle of death'].'" Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War | |
| death instinct is actually carnal man saying "What can I get out of this relationship for myself." OR "If I can not get anything out of this relationship for myself than this relationship is not worth living." OR FINALLY "If I can not get anything out of life for myself then life is not worth living." Called "Dying with dignity." Called Foolishness! | |
| "... socially channeled destructiveness ... defies all usefulness." | |
| destructive instincts=> superego | |
| "‘In the construction of the personality the destruction instincts manifest itself most clearly in the formation of the super-ego.'" Franz Alexander, The Psychoanalysis of the total Personality | |
| death instinct=> superego => destroy Eros objects on other object terms | |
| "... the superego builds up and protects the unity of the ego ... works in the service of Eros ..." "by its defensive role against the ‘unrealistic' impulses of the id," [self-preservation] "by it function in the lasting conquest of the Oedipus complex [act of killing the father figure for the mothers relationship] ..." |
|
either:
or:
all of this is Gnostic. |
|
| superego=> turns ego (I will) against its id ("felt" needs)=> splits personality ("thy will" against "felt" needs, a destruction of self, premature death. The conscience is a premature death.), no longer a ‘whole' person | |
| "... the superego ... directing the ego against its id, turning part of the destruction instincts against a part of the personality—by destroying, ‘splitting' the unity of the personality as a whole; thus it works in the service of the antagonist of the life instinct [Eros]." | |
| superego=> moral core of mature person | |
| "This inner-directed destructiveness [superego] ... constitutes the moral core of the mature personality." | |
| Conscience=> filter life through death instinct Categorical imperative => social existence—patriarchal paradigm |
|
| "Conscience, emerges as permeated with the death instinct [restraint of self-Eros to preserve self]; the categorical imperative that the superego enforces remains an imperative of self-destruction while it constructs the social existence of the personality." | |
| live and die on someone else's terms checked aggressive tendencies => tyrannical ego-ideal => ego-ideal represses ego: suppressed aggression toward others (authority) turns against the ego therefore divert aggression tendencies into positive output or avoid situation (negate power of authority which causes aggression) ... in dialogue | |
| "... death instinct ... life instinct ... repressed." "‘The more a man checks his aggressive tendencies toward others the more tyrannical, that is aggressive, he becomes in his ego-ideal .. the more intense become the aggressive tendencies of his ego-ideal against his ego.'" Freud The Ego and the Id |
|
| repressed ego=> melancholia => death instinct culture aggressive instincts => super-ego => death of libido | |
| "Driven to the extreme, in melancholia, ‘a pure culture of death instinct' may hold sway in the super-ego; it may become a ‘kind of gathering place for the death instincts.'" "‘...liberation of the aggressive instincts in the super-ego ... exposes [the libido] to the danger of maltreatment and death." Freud The Ego and the Id | |
| fatal dialectic = civilization => destruction | |
| "... the fatal dialectic of civilization: the very progress of civilization leads to the release of increasingly destructive forces." | |
| (Phylogenesis) Phylogeny: The evolutionary history of a kind of organism. Merriam-Webster's dictionary "... the origin of repression leads back to the origin of instinctual repression ... early childhood." |
|
| "The superego is ... the repressive organization ... directed against its pregenital and perverse manifestations." | |
| "... the ‘trauma of birth' ... the first expressions of the death instinct, the impulse to return to ... the womb [Nirvana]." | |
| "... the mature individual's behavior is hardly more than a repetitive pattern of childhood experiences and reactions." | |
| "... the unreasonable severity of the superego of the neurotic personality, the unconscious sense of guilt and the unconscious need for punishment, seem to be out of proportion with the actual ‘sinful' impulses of the individual;." |
|
| "... the perpetuation and ... intensification of the sense of guilt throughout maturity, the excessively repressive organization of sexuality, cannot be adequately explained by ‘what the individual himself has experienced;." |
|
| "... the individual reactions to early experiences ... ‘would accord much better with their being reactions to genetic events,' ..." | |
| "... the mental structure is ... forced to regress behind early childhood, from the prehistory of the individual to that of the genus. ... ‘a biological sense of guilt'" Otto Rank "... the child's ... upbringing ‘reflect ... echoes of primitive man.'" |
|
| "... archaic heritage ... memory traces of the experiences of former generations.'" | |
| "Individual psychology is thus in itself group psychology ... the individual ... is an archaic identity with the species." | |
| "This archaic heritage bridges the ‘gap between individual and mass psychology.'" Freud Moses and Monotheism | |
| "... psychology tears the ideological veil ... to dissolve the individual." | |
| "Self-consciousness and reason ... the image of repression... agents of domination; ... enslavement ... retained the mark of their birth." | |
| "By ‘dissolving' the idea of the ego-personality into its primary components, psychology now bares the sub-individual and per-individual factors which ... make the individual; it reveals the power of the universal in and over the individuals." "... undermines the autonomous individual." |
|
| "... psychology must be unfreeze, them by tracing their hidden origins." | |
| "... childhood experiences are linked with the experiences of the species." | |
| "The past defines the present because mankind has not yet mastered its own history." | |
| "... fate is in the instinctual drives, subject to historical ‘modification.'" |
|
| "... the beginning of the experience of domination ... the primal father ... never entirely overcome: the mature ego ... preserves the archaic heritage of man.'" | |
| "... all modifications of the ego ... ‘acquired during the defensive conflicts of early childhood. '" | |
| "... ego endowed from the beginning with its own peculiar ‘dispositions and tendencies,'" | |
| "... the notion of the ego's essential dependency on pre-individual, generic constellations." [Freud] "... constellations in the development of the ego." |
|
| Freud " thinks that ‘even before the ego exists ... tendencies and reactions are already determined.'" | |
| "... this assimilation of ego and id ... in favor of the id rather than the ego, the generic rather than the individual processes." | |
| "No part of Freud's theory has been more strongly rejected than the idea of the survival of the archaic heritage-his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind from the primal horde through patricide to civilization." | |
| "... the Freudian hypothesis ... does not lead back to the image of a paradise which man has forfeited by his sin against God." | |
| "... the Freudian hypothesis [leads] to the domination of man by man." | |
| "... established by a very earthly father-dispot ... unsuccessful or uncompleted rebellion against him." | |
| "... the individual is still punished for the impulses long since mastered and deeds long since undone." | |
| "If Freud's hypothesis is not corroborated by any anthropological evidence, it would have to be discarded altogether ..." | |
| " ... except for the fact that it telescopes, in a sequence of catastrophic events, the historical dialectic of domination ... elicits aspects of civilization hitherto unexplained." | |
| "If the hypothesis defies common sense, it claims, in its defense, a truth which common sense has been trained to forget." | |
| Brainwashing is defying common sense by restoring "truth which common sense has been trained to forget." | |
| According to Freud truth is not found outside of man and his environment but is found within man and his environment. It is not spiritual but material. |
|
| "[Freud] ... the first human group was established and sustained by the enforced rule of one individual over all others. ... the genus man ... was organized by domination ... the father ..." | |
| "[Freud]... the father ... the man who possessed the desired woman ... supreme pleasure ... monopolized for himself ... and produced and kept alive the sons and daughters." | |
| "[Freud] The primal horde is a temporarily functioning group ... the patriarchal despotism which established this order was ‘rational' to the extent to which it created and preserved the group." | |
| "[Freud] The primal father prepared the ground for progress through enforced constraint on pleasure and enforced abstinence.... the first preconditions for the disciplined ‘labor force' of the future." | |
| "Moreover, this hierarchical division of pleasure was ‘justified' by protection, security, and even love: because the despot was the father, the hatred with which his subjects regarded him must from the beginning have been accompanied by a biological affection—ambivalent emotions which were expressed in the wish to replace and imitate the father, to identify oneself with him, with his pleasure as well as with his power." | |
| "The father establishes domination in his own interest ... he creates that ‘order' with out which the group would immediately dissolve.... the primal father foreshadows the subsequent domineering father-images under which civilization progressed.... he incorporates the inner logic and necessity of the reality principle itself ... ‘justified' by his age, his biological function, and (most of all) by his success ... He has ‘historical rights.'" | |
| "Primal patriarchal despotism thus became an ‘effective' order.... superimposed organization of the horde ... the hatred against patriarchal suppression very strong.... this hatred culminates in the rebellion of the exiled sons, the collective killing and devouring of the father, and the establishment of the brother clan, which in turn deifies the assassinated father and introduces those taboos and restraints which, ..., generated social morality." | |
| "Freud's hypothetical history of the primal horde treats the rebellion of the bothers as a rebellion against the father's taboo on the women of the horde; no ‘social' protest against the unequal division of pleasure is involved. ... civilization begins only in the brother clan, when the taboos, now self-imposed by the ruling brothers, implement repression in the common interest of preserving the group as a whole." | |
| "... the decisive psychological event which separates the brother clan from the primal horde is the development of guilt feeling. [i.e. rules to keep father position in place while controlling the primal horde]." | |
| "Progress beyond the primal horde – i.e. civilization – presupposes guilt feelings; it interjects into the individual [must be an organ for it?] and thus sustains, the principal prohibition, constraints, and delays in gratification on which civilization depends." | |
| "The rebellion against the father is rebellion against biologically justified authority; his assassination destroys the order which has preserved the life of the group." [Germany rejects God, turns to man (or group of men) over the horde and thereby escape from freedom, according to Erick Fromm] | |
| "The father survives as the god in whose adoration the sinners repent so that they can continue to sin, while the new fathers secure those suppressions of pleasure which are necessary for preserving their rule and their organization of the group." | |
| "The progress from domination by one to domination by several ... makes repression self-imposed in the ruling group itself: all its members have to obey the taboos if they want to maintain their rule." | |
| "Repression now permeates the life of the oppressors themselves, ... part of their instinctual energy becomes available for sublimation in ‘work.'" | |
| "... the taboo on the women ... leads to expansion and amalgamation with other hordes; ... formation of larger units ... the function of Eros in civilization." | |
| "‘... vacant [power] through the father's death passed to women; the time of the matriarchate followed.'" | |
| "... the matriarchal period is preceded by the primal patriarchal despotism: ... ;low degree of repressive domination, ... erotic freedom, ... associated with matriarchy ... consequences of the overthrow of patriarchal despotism ... rather than as primary ‘natural' conditions." | |
| "‘... freedom becomes possible only as liberation." "Liberty follows domination ... leads to domination." "Matriarchy is replaced by a patriarchal counter-revolution ... stabilized by the institutionalization of religion." |
|
| "During that time a great social revolution had taken place. Matriarchy was followed by a restitution of the patriarchal order." [65] "The new fathers ... never succeeded to the omnipotence of the primeval father. There were too many of them and they lived in larger communities than the original horde had been, they had to get on with one another and were restricted by social institutions." [66] Freud Moses and Monotheism | |
| "Male gods at first appear as sons by the side of the great mother-deities, but gradually the assume the features of the father; polytheism cedes to monotheism, and then returns the ‘one and only father deity whose power is unlimited.'" | |
| "Sublime and sublimated, original domination becomes eternal, cosmic, and good, and in this form guards the process of civilization." "The ‘historical rights' of the primal father are restored." |
|
| "The sense of guilt ... intrinsic to the brother clan ... consolidation into the first ‘society' ... guilt feeling about perpetration of ... patricide." | |
| "Threat to group ... removal of the authority which ... had preserved the group;" | |
| "promise a society without the father—that is without suppression and domination." | |
| "... they betray ... the promise of liberty." "... rebellious parricides act ... forestall ... the threat; they reestablish domination by substituting many father for one ... deifying and internalizing the one father." |
|
| "The despot-patriarch has succeeded in implanting his reality principle in the rebellious sons." | |
| "Their revolt has, for a short span of time, broken the chain of domination; then the new freedom is again suppressed—this time by their own authority and action." | |
| "Must not their sense of guilt include guilt about the betrayal and denial of their deed?" "Are they not guilty of restoring the repressive father, guilty of self-imposed perpetuation of domination?" "The question suggest itself if Freud's phylogenetic hypothesis is confronted with his notion of the instinctual dynamic." |
|
| "As the reality principle takes root ... the pleasure principle becomes something frightful and terrifying; the impulses of free gratification meet with anxiety, and this anxiety calls for protection against them." | |
| "... integral gratification ... represented by the woman who, as mother, has once, for the first and last time, provided such gratification." "These are the instinctual factors which reproduce the rhythm of liberation and domination." |
|
| "‘Through her sexual power, woman is dangerous to the community, the social structure of which rest on ... the father.'" Otto Rank The Trauma of Birth | |
| "‘The king-father is slain by the people, not in order that they may be free, but that they may take upon themselves a heavier yoke, one that will protect them more surely from the mother.'" Otto Rank The Trauma of Birth | |
| "The king-father is slain not only because he imposes intolerable restraints but also because the restraints, imposed by an individual person, are not effective enough a ‘barrier to incest,' not effective enough to cope with the desire to return to the mother." "Liberation is therefore followed by ever ‘better' domination;" |
|
| "‘The development of the paternal domination into an increasingly powerful state system administered by man is thus a continuance of the primal repression, which has as its purpose the ever wider exclusion of woman.'" Otto Rank The Trauma of Birth |
|
| "The overthrow of the king-father is a crime, but so is his restoration...." "The crime against the reality principle is redeemed by the crime against the pleasure principle: redemption thus cancels itself." |
|
| "The sense of guilt is sustained in spite of repeated and intensified redemption: anxiety persists because the crime against the pleasure principle is not redeemed." | |
| "There is guilt over a deed that has not been accomplished: liberation.... the sense of guilt was ‘the consequence of uncommitted aggression ... guilt is the expression of the conflict of ambivalence,... struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct';" | |
| "... a pre-existing sense of guilt, which seems to be ‘lurking' in the individual, ready and waiting to ‘assimilate' an accusation made against him. ... a ‘floating anxiety' which has subterranean roots even beneath the individual unconscious." | |
| "... the primal crime ... is re-enacted in the conflict of the old and new generation, in revolt and rebellion against established authority ... repentance: in the restoration and glorification of authority." | |
| "... Freud suggested the hypothesis of the return of the repressed, which he illustrated by the psychology of religion." | |
| "Freud though that he had found traces of the patricide and of its ‘return' and redemption in the history of Judaism, which begins with the killing of Moses." | |
| "[Freud] believed that anti-Semitism had deep roots in the unconscious: jealousy over the Jewish claim of being the ‘first-born, favorite child of God the Father'; ... ‘grudge against the new religion' (Christianity) which was forced on many modern peoples ‘ only in relatively recent times." | |
| "This grudge was ‘projected' onto the source from which Christianity came, namely, Judaism." | |
| "If we follow this train of thought beyond Freud, and connect it with the twofold origin of the sense of guilt, the life and death of Christ would appear as a struggle against the father—and as a triumph over the father." "See Erich Fromm, Die Entwicklung des Christusdogmas" |
|
| "The message of the Son was the message of liberation: the overthrow of the Law (which is domination) by Agape (which is Eros)." | |
| "This would fit in with the heretical image of Jesus as the Redeemer in the flesh, the Messiah who came to save man here on earth." | |
| "Then the subsequent transubstantiation of the Messiah, the deification of the Son beside the Father would be a betrayal of his message by his own disciples—the denial of the liberation in the flesh, the revenge on the redeemer." | |
| "Christianity would then have surrendered the gospel of Agape-Eros again to the Law; the father-rule would be restored and strengthened." | |
| "... the primal crime could have been expiated, according to the message of the Son, in an order of peace and love on earth ... it was rather superseded by another crime—that against the Son." | |
| "With his transubstantiation, his gospel to was transubstantiated; his deification removed his message from this world. Suffering and repression were perpetuated." | |
| "This interpretation would lend added significance to Freud's statement that the Christian peoples are ‘badly christened,' that ‘under the thin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were, barbarically polytheistic.'" | |
| "... ‘badly christened' in so far as the accept and obey the liberating gospel only in a highly sublimated form ..." | |
| "Equally open was the armed struggle of institutionalized Christianity against the heretics, who tried or allegedly tried to rescue the unsublimated content and the unsublimated objective." | |
| "There were good rational motives behind the bloody wars against the Christian revolutions which filled the Christian era." | |
| "The image of liberation, which has become increasingly realistic, is persecuted the world over. ... trials and tribulations of non-conformists release a hatred and fury which indicate the total mobilization against the return of the repressed." | |
| "... religion contains ... the image of domination and the image of liberation...." [domination over the flesh, to use it for God, and liberation from it at the same time, its power not in control over ones life.] | |
| "Freud ... stressed the role of religion in the historical deflection of energy from the real improvement of the human condition to an imaginary world of eternal salvation.... [In The Future of an Illusion Freud] ... praised science and scientific reason as the great liberating antagonist of religion." | |
| "The function of science and of religion has changed ..." "In ...culture, the functions of science and religion tend to ... deny the hopes which they once aroused and teach men to appreciate the ... world of alienation." "... religion is no longer an illusion ... the predominant positivistic trend." See Max Horkheimer "Der neueste Angriff auf de Metaphysik" in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung |
|
| "Where religion still preserves the uncompromised aspiration for peace and happiness [challenge authority, freed to do your own thing], its ‘illusions' [father figure, obedience] still have a higher truth value than science [under state control] which works for their elimination." | |
| "The repressed and transfigured content of religion cannot be liberated by surrendering it to the scientific attitude." | |
| "Freud applies the notion of the return of the repressed, which was elaborated in the analysis of the history of individual neuroses, to the general history of mankind." | |
| "... confronted with the concrete and tangible factors which refresh the memory of every generation." "... the instincts he cites the ‘processes during puberty.'" "Under the impact of the ripening genital sexuality, ..." |
|
| "‘... phantasies of all person ... infantile tendencies ... the sexual feeling of the child for the parents.... the attraction of the son for the mother, and of the daughter for the father.... with the overcoming and rejection of these ...incestuous phantasies, ... one of the most painful psychic accomplishment of puberty; ... the breaking away from the parental authority, ... opposition between the new and old generation ... important for cultural progress.'" Freud Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex | |
| "The decisive difference between the primal situation and its civilized historical return is, ... that in the latter the ruler-father is normally no longer killed and eaten, and that domination is normally no longer personal." | |
| "The ego, the superego, and the external reality have done their work — but ‘it is not really a decisive matter whether one has killed one's father or abstained from the deed,' if the function of the conflict and its consequences are the same." | |
| "In the Oedipus situation, the ... situation recurs under circumstanced ... assure the lasting triumph of the father [patriarchal paradigm]." | |
| "... [the primal situation] assure the life of the son and his future ability to take the father's place." | |
| "How did civilization achieve this compromise?. ... practically identical with the contents of Freud's psychology." | |
| "The function of the father is gradually transferred from his individual person to his social position, to his image in the son (conscience), to God, to the various agencies and agents which teach the son to become a mature and restrained member of his society." |
|
| "... the intensity of restraint and renunciation involved in this process ... are more rationally distributed between father and son and among society as a whole, ...." | |
| "The monogamic family, with its enforceable obligations for the father, restricts his [the sons] monopoly of pleasure; the institution of inheritable private property, and the universalization of labor, give a son a justified expectancy of his own sanctioned pleasure in accordance with his socially useful performances." |
|
| "... framework of objective laws and institutions, ... puberty lead to the liberation from the father ... a necessary and legitimate event." |
|
| "The transformation of the pleasure principle into the performance principle, which changes the despotic monopoly of the father into restrained educational and economic authority." |
|
| "In the primal horde, the image of the desired woman, the mistress-wife of the father, was Eros and Thanatos in immediate, natural union." "She was the aim of the sex instincts, and she was the mother in whom the son once had that integral peace which is the absence of all need and desire – the Nirvana before birth." |
|
| "Perhaps the taboo on incest was the first great protection against the death instinct: the taboo on Nirvana, on the regressive impulse for peace which stood in the way of progress, of Life itself." |
|
| "With regard to the mother, sensual love becomes aim-inhibited and transformed into affection (tenderness)." |
|
| "Sexuality and affection are divorced; only lather they are to meet again in the love to the wife which is sensual as well as tender, aim-inhibited as well as aim-attaining." |
|
| "Tenderness is created out of abstinence — abstinence first enforced by the primal father." "Once created, it becomes the psychical basis not only for the family but also for the establishment of ... group relations. |
|
| "‘... the primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying the directly sexual tendencies; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their tendencies that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology.'" Freud Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego |
|
| "... within the system of rewarded institutions, the father ... and his function now perpetuate themselves into every child ... [as] duly constituted authority." "Domination has outgrown ... personal relationships and created institutions ... which are the ... inner limits ... of civilization." |
|
| THE DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION | |
| "Freud attributes to the sense of guilt a decisive role in the development of civilization:" | |
| "Freud ... establishes a correlation between progress and increasing guilt feeling." "He states his intention ‘to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the evolution of culture, and to convey that the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.'" |
|
| "... Freud emphasizes that, as civilization progresses, guilt feeling is ‘further reinforced,' ‘intensified,' is ‘ever-increasing.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents "... Freud is twofold: first, ... analytically from the theory of instincts, secondly, ... theoretically analysis ... the great diseases and discontents of temporary civilization." |
|
| "... the prehistory of the sense of guilt; it has ‘its origin in the Oedipus complex and was acquired when the father was killed by the association of the brothers.'" | |
| THE DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION How can you kill the father and not have remorse! | |
| "... they ["‘the brothers'"] satisfied ... aggressive instinct; ... the love ... they had for the father caused remorse, created the superego by identification [with the father figure] ... created the ‘restrictions which would prevent a repetition of the deed.'" |
|
| THE DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION Abstaining from aggression against the father! | |
| "... man abstains from the deed [killing the father]; but ... the aggressive impulse revives against the father and his successors, aggression has to be inhibited anew." |
|
| Renunciation of aggressiveness toward father produces super-ego; increases intolerance/aggression against ego. | |
| "‘Every renunciation ... becomes a ... conscience; every fresh abandonment of gratification increases its severity and intolerance ... every impulse of aggression which we omit to gratify is taken over by the super-ego and goes to heighten its aggressiveness (against the ego).'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents, 1949 |
|
| Impulse energy is either sent to the act of removing the father (impulse satisfied—positive) or to the conscience (impulse sudo-satisfied, sublimated, submit to the fathers demand under threat—negative) and therefore impulse (ego) is suppressed by the superego. The father figure controls by the ego submitting to the superego. Anti-will to power. |
|
| The conscience prevents Nirvana—"natural" death. Freud's philosophy is a philosophy of death. | |
| "... the superego ... takes the wish for the deed [kill the father] punishes ... suppressed aggression [hate of the father]." |
|
| The conscience prevents Nirvana—"natural" death. Freud's philosophy is a philosophy of death. | |
| "Eternal struggle between Eros [desire for mother, dynamic, approach pleasure] and ... death instinct; [found in mother, Nirvana impulse, static, avoid pain] ... aggressive impulse against father (and his social successors) derivation of the death instinct, [avoid pain] [the father] ‘separating' the child from the mother, ... inhibits the death instinct, the Nirvana impulse." |
|
|
According to the Dialectic Paradigm the son is running to the mother (back to the womb)—to escape pain (which is untimely death—to die naturally is to return to Nirvana instinct) found in the mother—who is also the source of pleasure. (The mother is the synthesis of pleasure and death, Eros and Nirvana, internal instincts not external commands, attracted toward unity with nature through internal, natural, subjective forces, not detached from nature by external, unnatural, objective forces. The Father sees the sons pleasure with mother as perverse behavior (Jealousy). The Father thwarts the sons quest for Nirvana through the use of pain, or threat of its use. The son concedes to the fathers will (not pleasurable, antithesis to Eros and Nirvana) to avoid fathers infliction of pain (untimely-death, external, unnatural force) in his quest to avoid pain/approach pleasure (in his natural, carnal terms) found only in the mother. The father (objective authority, voice of authority) supersedes the mother—unity, life and death— produces conscience (super-sede-ego). The conscience tends to be associated with the father (patriarch) while the super-ego tends to be associated with the mother (matriarch), since the father sets conditions in a moment in time which are carried out for the rest of time, while the mothers conditions are intrinsically relationship biased (whenever needs change, response required to satisfy the needs also change). While the father will not change his position for the perceived needs, the mother will. The father is set (static) the mother is fluid (dynamic). The environment, the situation, will not change the fathers position (seen as a negative force), while any change in the environment, the situation, will affect the mothers position (seen as a positive force). The father seeks to control (to dominate) the environment, while the mother seeks to relate with (to unite with) the environment. The objective, therefore, is to remove (kill) the negative force of the patriarch while keeping his security aspects (the we decision, consensus, through discourse and agreement on Eros) so all can benefit from the positive, the mother, and all "die in dignity." Play Eros music, take drugs, and die "peacefully." We do not control the environment, it controls us, then "Mother nature"—entropy*—is in control. Just remember after the whore (pleasure) comes the beast (death), where death is the name of the game, and life can not be sustained without its use. * "a : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity" Merriam-Webster Dict. Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, and life. No man can come to the Father but by me." 1 Corintians 2:6 Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: Luke 9:56 For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. 1 John 3:8 He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Hebrews 2:14 Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; John 10:10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Matthew 10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill thMt 10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.e soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. |
|
| "[The father] thus does the work of Eros; love, too, operates in the formation of the superego." "The severe father, who as the forbidding representative of Eros subdues the death instinct in the Oedipus conflict, enforces the first ‘communal' (social) relations: [I guess if thieves do it in a group it makes it alright: you have to be willing to sell those under law to the lawless] his prohibitions create identification among the sons, aim-inhibited love (affection), exogamy, sublimation." |
|
| "On the basis of renunciation, Eros begins its cultural work of combining life into ever larger units." | |
| "‘Since culture obeys an inner erotic impulse which bids it bind mankind into a closely knit mass, it can achieve this aim only by means of its vigilance in fomenting an ever-increasing sense of guilt.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents | |
| "‘That which began in relation to the father ends in relation to the community.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents | |
| "‘If civilization is an inevitable course of development from the group of the family to the group of humanity as a whole, then an intensification of the sense of guilt— resulting from the innate conflict of ambivalence, from the eternal struggle between the love and the death trends— will be inextricably bound up with it, until perhaps the sense of guilt may swell to a magnitude that individuals can hardly support.'" Freud Civilization and Its Discontents |
|
| "Strengthened defense against aggression is necessary ... the defense against enlarged aggression would have to strengthen the sex instincts, for only a strong Eros can effectively ‘bind' the destructive instincts." |
|
| THE DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION Unpleasant work has to be enforced. | |
| "... developed civilization ... depends for its very existence on extended and intensified regimentation and control." "‘Our civilization is generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.'" Freud "The instinctual syndrome ‘unhappiness and work' recurs throughout Freud's writing ... is centered on the connection between curbing of sexual passion and civilized work." |
|
| "If there is no original ‘work instinct,' then the energy required for (unpleasurable) work must be ‘withdrawn' from the primary instincts—from the sexual and from the destructive instincts." "... civilization is mainly the work of Eros ... culture ‘obtains a great part of the mental energy it needs by subtracting it from sexuality.'" Freud |
|
| Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Hebrews 2: 14, 15 | |
| Romans 8: 1-8
1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. |
|
| " If sexuality is in its very essence antisocial and asocial, and if destructiveness is the manifestation of a primary instinct, then the idea of a non-repressive reality principle would be nothing but idle speculation." | |
| " The performance principle [a product of history] enforces an integrated repressive organization of sexuality and of the destruction instinct." | |
| " Therefore, if the historical process tended to make obsolete the institutions of the performance principle, it would also tend to make obsolete the organization of the instincts." [In other words, if we could remove the institutions on which the performance principle depends the order of the instincts would also change. Social environment shapes a persons nature.] |
|
| " Therefore, if the historical process tended to make obsolete the institutions of the performance principle, it would also tend to make obsolete the organization of the instincts ― that is to say, to release the instincts from the constraints and diversions required by the performance principle." | |
| " This would imply that ... destructiveness could be absorbed or neutralized by strengthened libido." | |
| libido: from Latin, desire, lust, from libēre to please 1 : instinctual psychic energy that in psychoanalytic theory is derived from primitive biological urges (as for sexual pleasure or self-preservation) and that is expressed in conscious activity 2 : sexual drive Marriam-Webster dictionary |
|
| Sigmund Freud popularized the term and pointed out that libido is the instinctual energy or force that can conflict with the conventions of civilized behavior. It is the need to conform to society and control the libido, contained in what Freud defined as the Id, that leads to tension and disturbance in both society and the individual. This disturbance Freud labeled neurosis. Thus, libido has to be transformed into socially useful energy, according to Freud, through the process of "sublimation". Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
|
| Carl Jung referred to libido as the free creative—or psychic—energy an individual has to put toward personal development. Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
|
| "non-repressive development of instincts" | |
| "the performance principle ... created ... the historical condition ... ossification [rigidity]" the objective is to "‘read off' from the historical vicissitudes [fluidity] ... the possibility of the instincts non-repressive development." |
|
| "conflict between the two principles is inevitable" | |
| "Freud maintains that an essential conflict between the two principles is inevitable ... caused and perpetuated by the prevalence of Ananke, Lebensnot, the struggle for existence." | |
| "implies the critique of the established reality principle in the name of the pleasure principle." | |
| "Freud ... religion as a specific historical form of ‘illusion.'" | |
| "‘Since men are so slightly amendable to reasonable arguments, so completely are they ruled by their instinctual wishes, why should one want to take away from them a means for satisfying their instincts and replace it by reasonable arguments.'" Freud |
|
| "‘Certainly men are like this, but have you asked yourselves whether they need to be so, whether their inmost nature necessitates it?'" Freud |
|
| "The historical possibility of a gradual decontrolling of the instinctual development must be taken seriously, perhaps even the historical necessity – if civilization is to progress to a higher stage of freedom." | |
| "... the death instinct ... seems to defy any hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization ... [it] seems to engender ‘automatically' the whole network of constraints and controls instituted by civilization ... beget perpetual repression." | |
| "‘... compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.' ... return to inorganic life, ‘dead' matter." | |
| "The organism was forced to abandon the earlier state of things ‘under the pressure of external disturbing forces.'" "... organic life must be ‘attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences'; decisive ‘external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life.'" | |
| "If the organism dies ‘for internal reasons,' then the detour to death must have been caused by external factors." "... factors ... sought in ‘the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun.'" |
|
| "unrealized tension ... life is less ‘satisfactory,' more painful, than the preceding stage generates the death instinct ... regression." "... Ananke, the conscious struggle for existence." 1) repressed sex instincts 2) death instinct turned to socially useful aggression and morality. "... ‘law and order' leads to the progressive weakening of Eros and thereby to the growth of aggressiveness and guilt feeling." |
|
| negation of negation | |
| "... the nature of the instincts is ‘historically acquired.'" "... this nature is subject to change if the fundamental conditions that caused the instincts to acquire this nature have changed." | |
| "death and sex instincts | |
| "... the change in the conditions of civilization would directly affect only ... the sex and aggression instincts ... the Nirvana principle seems to be unshakable." | |
| "... the derivatives of the death instinct operate only in fusion with the sex instincts ... a qualitative change in the development of sexuality must necessarily alter the manifestations of the death instinct." | |
| "non-repressive civilization" | |
| "... the hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization ... the possibility of a non-repressive development of the libido under the conditions of a mature civilization.... mental forces free from the reality principle and carry over this freedom into the world a mature consciousness." | |
| "phantasy-making" | |
| "‘With the ... reality principle ... thought-activity [theory-practice] was split off:."free from reality-testing ... the act of phantasy-making (das Phantasieren), [imagination] ... begins with the game of children, ... continued as daydreaming, abandons its dependence on real objects.'" [Lusts] | |
| "Phantasy plays a most decisive function in the total mental structure: it links the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of consciousness, the dream with the reality ... the perpetual but repressed ideas of the collective and individual memory, the tabooed images of freedom." | |
| "... the reality principle causes a division and mutilation of the mind ..." "The mental process and pleasure ego ... split." |
|
| The mental process is now take under control of the reality principle while the pleasure ego is left alone but is now made powerless. | |
| Set your mind on things above ... not my will but thine be done. | |
| pleasure ego becomes reality ego | |
| "Ego ... conforms to the reality principle ... guided only by that part ... formerly guided and driven by the whole ..." "[reality principle] is to set the objectives, norms, and values ... as reason it becomes the sole repository of judgment, truth, rationality, it decides what is useful and useless, good and evil." |
|
| "Phantasy ... [imagination ... pleasure rules] is left behind by the organization of the pleasure ego into the reality ego ... [imagination ... uniting the whole person, the universal and particular under pleasure] becomes useless, untrue – a mere play, daydreaming." "... reality ... no longer committed to the dream language." |
|
| "phantasy-making" | |
| "‘Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason. ... reality principle [pushes] this harmony into utopia ... phantasy insists that it must and can become real ... knowledge [gnosis] ... [lies] behind the illusion." |
|
| "‘True civilization... lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.'" Baudelaire, Mon Coeur Nis a Nu, XXXII, in Oeuvres Posthumes, ed. Conrad, Vol. II (Paris, 1952), p. 109 |
|
| "... the liberation of Eros could create new and durable work relations." "... the elimination of surplus-repression ... the emergence of a non-repressive reality principle ... would ... eliminate, not labor, but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." |
|
| "... the negation of the performance principle ... total automation would be the optimum ... alienation of labor ... potential of freedom." "... cancels rationality of domination and ... ‘re-realizes' the world – redefining it by the rationality of gratification." |
|
| "Phantasy is cognitive in so far as it preserves the truth of the Great Refusal, ... in so far as it protects, ... the aspirations for the integral fulfillment of man and nature ... the ‘lower depth' of instinctual gratification assumes a new dignity." "... look for the ‘cultural heroes' ... the trickster and rebel against the gods ... Prometheus -- the performance principle,... Pandora, the female principle..." |
|
| "Orpheus and Narcissus" | |
| "... Orpheus and Narcissus (like Dionysus to whom they are akin) ... stand for a very different reality. They have not become the culture-heros of the Western world." Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity, and progress through repression | |
| "... [Orpheus] the image of joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives [like a whore]... unites man with god, man with nature." | |
| "Narcissus ... tries to grasp his own beauty | |
| Isaiah 13: 12-15 12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. 15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. |
|
| Ezekiel 28: 11-19 11 ¶ Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 12 Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. 13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. 14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. 15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. 16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. 17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee. 18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. 19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more. |
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| ‘Paradise must always be re-created... everything strives toward its lost form ...'" | |
| "Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos." | |
| Eros: life instinct; impulses to gratify basic needs. Merriam-Webster Thanatos: death instinct; tendency toward self-destruction ... aggressive and destructive behavior not satisfactorily explained by the pleasure principle. Merriam-Webster |
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| "In contrast to the images of the Promethean culture-heroes, those of the Orphic and Narcissistic world are essentially unreal and unrealistic.... ‘impossible' ... miraculous, incredible, superhuman... their meanings [do not] explode it [i.e. language and desires can be used by Promethean culture], their images [mode of living-praxis] do explode it." | |
| "... moral messages are superimposed upon ... Orpheus and Narcissus ... [who] liberate potentialities | |
| "The Orphic and Narcissistic experience of the world negates that which sustains the world of the performance principle." |
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| "The opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome....the things of nature become free to be what they are." | |
| "But to be what they are thy depend on the erotic attitude ... The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man." | |
| "... Narcissus and Orpheus ... symbols of a non-repressive erotic attitude toward reality ... from the mythological-artistic tradition ... primary narcissism." " [Fn. 14 ] ... Narcissus and Dionysus are closely assimilated in the Orphic mythology.... identity of the one and the many... reunification ... of God and world, man and nature..." |
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| "... adding narcissus into psychoanalysis marked a turning point in the development of the instinct theory: ... independent ego instinct (self-preservation instincts) replaced by ... undifferentiated, unified libido prior to the division into ego and external objects. |
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| "... Narcissism ... engulfs the ‘environment,' integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world | |
| "Ego-feeling" "existential relation to reality "... ego separated from its narcissistic urge "embraced the universe ... an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." "...‘limitless extension and oneness with the universe' [Freud] (oceanic feeling) [orgasm]." "... oceanic feeling seeks to reinstate ‘limitless narcissism.'" |
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| "The Orphic-Narcissistic images are those of the Great Refusal: refusal to accept separation ... aims at liberation – at the reunion of what has become separated." | |
| "Narcissus' life is that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation." | |
| "Orpheus is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song." | |
| "Reality principle must be sought and validated by their aesthetic dimension." | |
| "‘Orpheus, the priest, the mouthpiece of the gods ... to tame the raging moods of tigers and of lions ... to distinguish plain between the public and private things, between the sacred things and things profane ... to build the towns, to carve the laws in wood.'" Horace, The Art of Poetry 1931 | |
| "‘He set the example for the people of Thrace of giving his love to tender boys, and enjoying the springtime and first flower of their growth.'" Ovid, Metamorphoses ... The Arts of Orphesu 1931 emphasis added | |
| "The classical tradition associates Orpheus with the introduction of homosexuality." | |
| "Orpheus rejects the normal Eros ... the repressive order of procreative sexuality ... for a fuller Eros ... the negation of all order." "The Great Refusal." |
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| "His language is song, His work is play." |
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| "The Aesthetic Dimension" | |
| "... the realm of aesthetics is essentially ‘unrealistic'" | |
| "... from Greek aisthētikos of sense perception, ... to perceive... approach to what is pleasing to the senses ... appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful." Merriam-Webster's Dictionary | |
| James 1: 13, 14 "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust [personal inclination], and enticed [Satan arousing hope or desire]." |
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| "Before the court of theoretical and practical reason [i.e. performance principle-repression] ... the aesthetic existence stands condemned." |
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| "aesthetic... the inner connection between pleasure, sensuousness, beauty, truth, and freedom." | |
| "aesthetic" 1) "preserves the truth of the senses ... 2) "reconciles the ‘lower' and the ‘higher' a) of sensuousness and intellect, b) pleasure and reason." |
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| "In Kant's philosophy, the basic antagonism between subject and object is reflected in the dichotomy (can not be correlated) between the mental faculties : 1) ness and intellect; 2) desire and cognition; 3) practical and theoretical reason." What I want and what God says. |
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| "Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself ‘What would my parents want me to do?' During the process of therapy the individual comes to ask himself ‘What does it mean to me?'" Carl Rogers |
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| God (object) must become subject to my feelings, my "felt" needs, or I will not accept him as caring and therefore will not follow him and will not approve of those who do follow him i.e. seen as fascist. |
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| practical reason "... freedom under self given moral laws for (moral) ends... knowledge;" "sense-datum" [an immediate unanalyzable private object of sensation- Merriam-Webster's Dictionary] can not govern the subject | |
| theoretical reason " ... nature under the laws of causality... desire." subject can not "break into the laws of causality." | |
| "... the autonomy of the subject is to have an ‘effect' in the objective reality, and the ends that the subject sets for itself must be real." | |
| "A third ‘faculty' must mediate between theoretical (desire/will) and practical reason (knowledge/understanding, a priori, cognition) ... a ‘transition'... from nature to freedom, links together the lower and higher ..." | |
| "practical reason" -- "theoretical reason" -- "judgment" "the feeling of pain and pleasure" | |
| "Combined with feeling of pleasure ... judgment is aesthetic ... its field of application is art [artcraft]." | |
| "... the aesthetic dimension and the corresponding feeling of pleasure ... is the center of the mind ... medium [whereby] nature [set laws, i.e. sensuousness] becomes susceptible to freedom [self-determined laws, i.e. morality], necessity to autonomy." | |
| It becomes thus a matter of steering the energy not stopping it. To stop pleasure is to create pain, hate, anger, rage toward the stopper. Yet pleasure seeks realization and finds it in obedience to the stopper of pleasure [seeking pleasure from an object outside the subjects aesthetic environment; neurosis]. Pain, anger, hate which seeks realization can not express it to the stopper so it is released toward those who disobey the stopper for the pleasure of approval of the stopper. A Lie: "Vengeance is mine saith the Lord." |
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| Stopped pleasure produces hate & war. Realized pleasure produces love & peace. |
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| "... freedom ... an idea to which no sense-perception can correspond ...‘analogiam'" | |
| "... the aesthetic function links the ‘lower' faculties of sensuousness, (Sinnlichkeit) to morality [upper faculties]." | |
| "We question [Freud's ‘universal validity'] in view of the historical possibility of the abolition of the repressive controls imposed by civilization ... to make the performance principle obsolete." | |
| Abolish the repressive controls and the performance principle becomes obsolete. |
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| "... the idea of a non-repressive civilization on the basis of the achievements of the performance principle encountered the argument that instinctual liberation (and consequently total liberation) would explode civilization itself, since the latter is sustained only through renunciation and work (labor) – in other words, through the repressive utilization of instinctual energy." | |
| "Freed from constraints ... man ... without work and order ... would fall back into nature ... destroy culture." | |
| "To meet this argument, we recalled certain archetypes of imagination [phantasy – "uniting the whole person, the universal and particular under pleasure" – pleasure rules –"reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason"] ... in contrast to culture-heroes of repressive productivity, symbolized creative receptivity." |
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| Used in the church as self-directed experience based salvation. (self-actualization) | |
| "These archetypes envisioned the fulfillment of man and nature, not through domination and exploitation, but through release of inherent libidinal forces [laws of the flesh]." | |
| "... ‘verifying' these symbols ... demonstrating their truth value as symbols of a reality principle beyond the performance principle." Evidently, because of your ‘importance,' by your bringing them up you verify their ‘importance.' | |
| "... the Orphic [flesh freely expressed in nature] and Narcissistic [flesh freely admired in nature] images ... the erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude ... order is beauty and work is play." | |
| "Universal Reconciliation" "relies on a reason that is before reason-mimesis or ‘impulse.'" The Theory of Communicative Action. 1981, p. 382 "Impulse, the primary fact, back of which, psychically we cannot go." John Dewey, "Social Psychology," Psychological Review, I (July, 1894), p. 404 "Universal Reconciliation - where reconciliation includes the interaction of human beings with nature, with animals, plants, and minerals." The Theory of Communicative Action. 1981 see F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie, pp. 57-58 |
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| "The good life is not any fixed state. The good life is a process. The direction which constitutes the good life is psychological freedom to move in any direction [where] the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality." "When the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming." "Existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience." Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person | |
| "... the next step ... eliminate the distortion of the aesthetic attitude ... looking for its philosophical legitimating ... in Kant ... the aesthetic dimension occupies the central position between sensuousness and morality – the two poles of human existence." |
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| "... the aesthetic dimension ... contain[s] principles valid for both realms." | |
| The objects (Patriarch's) own laws and agenda– "usefulness" and "purpose"–no longer determine worth, if it unites all in gratification it is legitimate, if it does not, it is not legitimate i.e. Patricide | |
| "purposiveness without purpose -- beauty" "lawfulness without law -- freedom." "Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck; Gesetzmässigkeit ohne Gesetz." |
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| "-ness" is a condition, a quality, state, degree | |
| "The object's ... theoretical and practical reason are ... suspended. ... the object is freely being itself." [enjoying the moment] |
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| "Whatever the object may be (thing or flower, animal or man [God?] , it is represented and judged not in terms of its usefulness, not according to and purpose it may possible serve, and also not in view of it ‘internal' finality and completeness." | |
| "The experience, which releases the object into its ‘free' being, is the work of the free play of imagination. Subject and object become free in a new sense ... results in a new quality of pleasure ... ‘pure form' ... This is the manifestation of beauty ... establishes ... laws of ... harmony ... free laws ... not enforcing the attainment of specific ends and purposes;... they are the pure form of existence itself." | |
| Imagination ‘frees' the object– experiencing pure existence (pure reality). | |
| "... the aesthetic dimension links Nature and Freedom, Pleasure and Morality. The aesthetic judgment is, ... ‘in respect of the feeling of pleasure or pain, a constitutive principle'" | |
| "... ‘spontaneity promotes the susceptibility of the mind to moral feeling.'" | |
| "... the aesthetic dimension is the medium in which the senses and the intellect meet." "... accomplished by imagination ... the ‘third' mental faculty." |
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| "... the aesthetic dimension is the medium in which nature and freedom meet." | |
| "The philosophical effort to mediate, in the aesthetic dimension, between sensuousness and reason thus appears as an attempt to reconcile the two spheres of the human existence which were torn asunder by a repressive reality principle." | |
| "... the aesthetic reconciliation implies strengthening sensuousness as against the tyranny of reason and, ultimately, even calls for the liberation of sensuousness from the repressive domination of reason." | |
| The use of Neurolinguistics to re-activate and strengthen sensuousness. | |
| "... on the basis of Kant's theory, the aesthetic function becomes ... the philosophy of culture ... a non-repressive civilization, in which reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational ... [according to Schiller] the possibility of a new reality principle." | |
| "The Transformation of Sexuality into Eros" | |
| "... a non-repressive civilization is predicated not upon the arrest, but upon the liberation, of progress – so that man would order his life in accordance with his fully developed knowledge, so that he would ask again what is good and what is evil." | |
| "If the guilt accumulated in the civilized domination of man by man can ever be redeemed by freedom, then the ‘original sin' must be committed again: ‘We must again eat from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence." | |
| "Non-repressive order is possible on if the sex instincts can generate lasting erotic relations among mature individuals ... a ‘libidinal rationality' which ... promotes progress toward higher forms of civilized freedom." | |
© Institution for Authority Research, Dean Gotcher 2012-2015