Freud and Marxism.
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Really the term, outside of the rump of Freudians, neurosis is very rarely used. It isn’t used in the DSM or the ICD. Basically it means that a person has experienced stress and anxiety which has an impact on their development and personality. It is differentiated from organic issues in the brain. The key difference between neurosis and psychosis is that the person with neurosis maintains reality; where as the person with psychosis can lose reality (hallucination of various kinds, delusions, etc.) Psychosis is still used as part of diagnosis. Borderline Personality Disorder refers to a person having signs of psychosis and signs of neurosis.
It is fine for Reich to state that most children have a neurosis by the age of ten; it’s another thing for him to evidence this. Did he carry out a study? Did he have an appropriate sample? Did he match the sample to ensure no researcher bias?. No, it was just his view. Given that he was working as a psychiatrist it might be expected that he would see “neurosis” everywhere. Also, as the then use of the term “neurosis” was so loosely defined, what did he mean by the term anyway?
This is an example of how the Freudians end up having such a lot of loopy ideas. Basically the “great man” (Freud, Jung, Reich, or whoever), makes a statement (such as the one quoted about Reich) and then whatever horse shit the great man has spouted becomes the truth.
I disagree. His conclusions came from his work with patients. Also he urged self-analysis and used a lot of physical exercises to help loosen inhibitions and rigidity.
If anything, it is psychiatry which is often bogus, rather than psychoanalysis, which is about helping people based on their individual histories, not putting them in compartments and drugging them, with the object of making them fit into the current society.This is the same kind of proof by assertion, “physical exercises help loosen inhibitions and rigidity”. How? What evidence is there for that conclusion? Or is it as I said previously “The Great Man” making a statement.
It is about as much use as me saying “playing with a yo yo helps loosed inhibitions and rigidity”, typical Freudian mumbo jumbo.
You state that psychoanalysts take historical information into account. Practically all of the psychotherapeutic approaches use individual histories to assist people, not just psychoanalysis, Gestalt Approaches to psychotherapy, Transactional Analysis psychotherapy, Person Centred Approaches to psychotherapy, Dialectical Behavioural approaches, etc. etc. all progress from individual histories, that approach is not unique to psychoanalysis.
As to psychiatrists, like any other profession, there are some good ones and some bad ones
Just tell me what you disagree with in this article, please.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/2021/03/08/sex-in-a-free-society/
BD – I notice that you haven’t answered my question – what have all of your establishment experts got to say about the relationship between political ideology and psychological development/character? At least the synthesis of the work of Freud and Marx has given us a working hypothesis as used by the Frankfurt school. Or do you think, like ALB, that the atavistic hatred and cruelty witnessed by recent history was merely a matter of ‘false consciousness’?
Wez,
Apologies for not getting back to this, I haven’t forgotten it and I’m not shirking the question, just it is a complex question and I want to set some time properly to answer with my thoughts. I will try to set a bit of time tomorrow. CheersTM – “I’m not following what any “Great Man” says. I’m going by my experience.
Your posts here, on the other hand, are full of academic terminology and names, as read in a book”I must admit I am “guilty” of reading books, how dreadful.
However my replies are also based on “my experience” of over 40 years of professional life of working therapeutically with some of the most challenging children and difficiult children in the North of England.
This work does not mean spending one hour a week with them in an ivory tower like Reich et al, but working directly with them day in day out 24 -7. My thoughts are based on that direct work as appled by the books and training I have undertaken.
I am, I admit, more regularly working in a more academic role, but I still get involved in direct work and in support work on a regular basis.
And I’m sure he did good work. Similarly if Reichian approaches help you, that’s great. Different approaches help different people, we wouldn’t think that there is only one approach to help physical health, why should there be a universal panacea for mental health.
The question here is, however, is does Freud’s and or Reich’s model of the mind stand up to critical examination, and the fact of the matter is that neither of them hold much water in my opinion.
I will though, have a read through the article from the World Socialist, I remember reading it when it was published.
I will add my thoughts to it when I get the time to do so.
By coincidence yesterday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a discussion about an exchange of correspondence in 1932 between Einstein and Freud on why war and what to do to stop it. This gives this thread some contemporary interest rather than being a subject of abstract curiosity of a forum member.
The programme can be listened to here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tr2s
Einstein was writing as a pacifist. One of the passages from Freud that was read on the programme was that humans are born with “the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts”. By “we” he meant “psychoanalysts” and which rules out as completely utopian a free society without a repressive state. That was why Reich rejected the existence of such “instincts”, though on philosophical rather than scientific grounds.
Then you’ll admit Reich’s heart was in the right place. I’m no scientist either, and my understanding of both the world and the individual, and of my own problems, is philosophical, not scientific.
Freud here is being absurd, of course. Reich said he’d gone off the rails, even if Reich did too, in a different direction.Ola Raknes.
ALB quotes Feud saying: ‘One of the passages from Freud that was read on the programme was that humans are born with “the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts”. By “we” he meant “psychoanalysts” and which rules out as completely utopian a free society without a repressive state.’
Freud had no political understanding whatsoever which is why his theories need the addition of a Marxian perspective. Marx’s theory of alienation has profound psychological implications which can be, and have been, explored by those using psychoanalytical techniques. We do not reject Darwin’s work because he was a Christian so let’s give Freud some slack for being a Viennese petty bourgeois. My contention, along with that of the Frankfurt school, is that Freud’s ‘death instinct’ has its roots in the alienation created by capitalism.
“Freud had no political understanding whatsoever which is why his theories need the addition of a Marxian perspective. Marx’s theory of alienation has profound psychological implications which can be, and have been, explored by those using psychoanalytical techniques. We do not reject Darwin’s work because he was a Christian so let’s give Freud some slack for being a Viennese petty bourgeois. My contention, along with that of the Frankfurt school, is that Freud’s ‘death instinct’ has its roots in the alienation created by capitalism.”
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I agree absolutely, although i’ve never looked at his “death instinct” theory.Cde Fleischmann gave me Freud’s earliest essays to read, which don’t have any of that.
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