Freud and Marxism.
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Yes you did. But then again, a fraud can be correct in some matters.
Again, it is sifting content that matters.
Reich disapproved of homosexuality, but that doesn’t erase his accuracy in describing the feeling of sexual repression resembling the bloating of a bladder, nor his apt statement that
“The living has no purpose.
The living merely functions.”Wez – Do I think that the unconscious mind has an impact on our development of personality? I think that the sub conscious mind is also influencial (even though Freud did not use the term subconscious frequently and then only in German).
Is Freud’s model of the mind particularly useful in understanding it, absolutely no. Do I agree with the following concepts, the oedipus complex, the electra complex, the idea of penis envy, absolutely know.
I know that childhood events, including separation, trauma and loss are massively important in understanding the development of personality, cognition, language skills, sociability, physical growth, the immune system, etc.
Did some of Freud’s initial thoughts move the study forward to some extent, yes, but the development of Attachment Theory and the work of people like Bowlby, Rutter, Van Izendorn, Sagi, is far more important than the semi mystic ramblings of people like Freud, Jung, etc.
BD – Do you use a psychological analysis to understand the majority’s rejection of socialism and the embrace of tribalism (nationalism, fascism etc.)? Do the thinkers you refer to attempt to understand the psychology of political ideologies? If they do please give me some links.
If the practice of psychological investigation involves the observation of one’s own mental happenings, aren’t those happenings altered by the very act of observation? And isn’t this something that observation has to avoid to count as scientific?
Not really.
When in thrall to the misery of unrequited love, for instance, one is conscious of it, but remains in thrall until it dies out of itself.
Similarly, one is conscious of an anxiety disorder, social discomfort, obsessions, etc., but remains victim to them.
Whilst agreeing with the SPGB that your problems are largely due to capitalism, you might still want to seek some relief by seeing a therapist.The social production of ‘loneliness’ (and by implication other so-called ‘individual psychological’ states)?
Yes. Capitalism’s cut-throat nature permeates the whole of society. Reich said that by the age of ten in this society most children have at least one type of neurosis.
The competitive ferocity of the system trickles down into the working class and its children in the form of bullying. There is no proletarian solidarity in bullying.
Bullying spans all age-groups. Workers bully workers. Workers regiment workers on behalf of the capitalists. Workers intimidate each other every day. Rape each other. Abuse each other. The poorer the circle of one’s associates is, the worse the abuse.
Most days, most of us are going to receive a metaphorical punch in the face or else give one.
In practically all associations, including ones for leisure, there is spite and put-downs of a kind.
Loneliness can often appear or actually be preferable: certainly to the “contactless sociality” (a Reichian term) of present social existence.Thomas More wrote: “Loneliness can often… actually be preferable…”
I think that The Guardian article is arguing against precisely that conclusion.
I should have said “being alone” is preferable to being with undesired, unpleasant others.
Christina of Sweden:
“Better a lifetime alone than ten minutes with you.”
Chelmsford “If the practice of psychological investigation involves the observation of one’s own mental happenings, aren’t those happenings altered by the very act of observation? And isn’t this something that observation has to avoid to count as scientific?”
That is one of the major criticisms of reflective models of the mind, any reflection or analysis of what happened in our mind is by its very nature reconstructive. When I child does something “naughty” we say to the child “why did you do that” and the child responds “I don’t know” and then we say to the child “well, you must know”. But actually half of the time we don’t know why we do the things we do and when we reconstruct we tidy up the thoughts, add bits in, etc.
Part of the problem is that we tend to think in a mixture of different parts of the thought process, visual process, language, auditory thinking including noise, feelings, olfactory thinking and processing. However we nearly always explain our action through one modality language. Language is by its nature a representation of the thing not the thing itself. When we use language to say that we are bored/happy/angry, we are using a description of the feeling not the feeling itself. By its very nature the description must always be at least slightly inaccurate, therefore any recollection of events will be coloured by this inaccuracy.
Skinner and the classical behaviourists dismissed any form of attempt to gain insight to mental functions from recollection or commentary on description of mental events. They put forward the view that scientifically we can only describe behaviour from the point of view of the observer and any attempt to understand the internal mental activities would by definition be unscientific.
The classic refutation of how we need to take mental functions when we observe behaviour is by using a thought experiment.
In the thought experiment you imagine a group of Skinnerist psychologists carrying out an observation of motorist behaviour using traffic lights. By purely observing the behaviour and not trying to understand the internal motivation of the motorists, the Skinnerists would come to the conclusion that red light means stop, green light means go and amber light means speed up!
“Reich said that by the age of ten in this society most children have at least one type of neurosis.”
I wasn’t going to take part in this thread (as we’ve been here before) but this is too much. Why do you keep quoting Reich as if he was any sort of authority on the subject. We know he ended up a raving lunatic seeing sexual energy as the basis of the universe but even before that he was engaged in dubious speculations.
It may well be true “by the age of ten in this society most children have at least one type of neurosis” (depending on what you mean by “neurosis” — and BD will be able to advise whether this is still a concept psychiatrists use) but it won’t be for the reason Reich gave — misdirection of some mysterious “sexual energy” that has never been found any more than the “qi” of traditional Chinese medicine has.
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