Freud and Marxism.
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” DJP- I’m no expert on animal behaviour, as TM will tell you, but don’t many animals seek out a quiet place to die when life becomes unsupportable?”
That doesn’t sound neurotic to me. Native Americans did the same.
” but don’t many animals seek out a quiet place to die when life becomes unsupportable?”
Most animals seek out a hiding place when they are sick, this is because being sick makes you vulnerable. The fact that some of the ones that are sick actually die, it is not surprising that some of the sick animals don’t recover.
Interestingly I think this is an example of the Freudian habit of putting 2 and 2 together and making a mystically based sex related 43. It’s a bit like seeing that little girls sometimes get pissed off because they can’t widdle up the wall like their brother and developing penis envy, with the possible consequence of:
Resentment towards the mother who failed to provide the daughter with a penis
Depreciation of the mother who appears to be castrated
Giving up on phallic activity (clitoral masturbation) and adopting passivity style vaginal intercourse. (quite how the 3 year old works that out is a little bit worrying!!!)
A symbolic equivalence between penis and childOr maybe she just wishes she was able to piddle up the wall
Another more tragic situation was that Freud was for once right on the money in his badly named “seduction theory” which explained female “hysteria” as having a root in trauma and that sexual abuse was very much part of that. Of course stating that child sexual abuse was rife in upper class Paris and Vienna was not a popular thing to say and he abandoned that theory and came up with the far more acceptable Oedipus complex.
Better to get rich being wrong than staying poor being right, eh Siggy?
Anyway TM to save you any tedious research here’s my introduction to Freud’s Death Instinct. https://wezselecta.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-death-instinct.html#comment-form
Perhaps BD might be interested too?Maybe those among fellow animals who are defeated in the quest for mates do develop problems, but i would guess they just try their luck again. Similar to a healthy human who is repulsed will shrug and move on. Whereas an unhealthy and repressed human will be unable to move on and may become a stalker or a suicide – both signs of neurosis/psychosis.
As far as i know, other animals do not exploit their own species, or impose religion and repressive doctrines to suppress sex. They don’t have gender fixations or pornography, or need to sublimate and divert their natural drives. They don’t have physical hang-ups and body obsessions.
But neither do primitive humans, to the extent we do. Severe neuroses appear to be part and parcel of class society, and most severe under modern industrial capitalism.https://images.app.goo.gl/GvS5Lqxuj1tefsWq5
And Reich also pointed out that rabid promiscuity and an obsession with sex are also signs of neurosis.
And the issue of repression was probably more acute in the early part of the 20th century.
Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven focusses on this issue, very poignantly.
The difficulty with Freud’s theory is that it offers us entities (for example repressed unconscious conflicts), which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of behavior But there are no correspondence rules for these alleged causes—they cannot be identified except by reference to the behavior which they are said to cause (that is, the analyst does not demonstratively assert: “This is the unconscious cause, and that is its behavioral effect;” rather he asserts: “This is the behavior, therefore its unconscious cause must exist”), and this does raise serious doubts as to whether Freud’s theory offers us genuine causal explanations at all.
And Reich also pointed out that rabid promiscuity and an obsession with sex are also signs of neurosis.
Did he give any indication of numbers here? Or is moderately promiscuous okay? Asking for a friend.
He believed two partners in a lifetime was healthy. But that’s his opinion.
Certainly he considered lechery, dirty jokes, pornography and “counting conquests” to be as much signs of what he called the Emotional Plague as is angry celibacy and tyrannical marriage.Moral judgements trying to pass as “science” if you ask me. I’ll tell my friend they might be neurotic.
I used to love Wilhelm Reich in my teenage years. “Mass Psychology of Fascism” may have been one of the first places I read about socialism. And “Listen Little Man” is a great rant.
But as I grew older and learnt about more things, and especially as I got better at critical thinking and philosophy, I just realised more and more how most of this was just pseudo-science and assertions that don’t really stand up.
It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?
It’s probably the later edition available from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (?)
I don’t know if he is valid or not. I’m just saying what i know of his ideas, and know he described my own feelings so well with regard to the physical discomfort and woodenness/bloatedness that accompanies repression and which adds an extra burden to any work or socialisation.
When living in Switzerland (from where i contacted and met comrade Fleischmann), i discovered Reich.
I was sharing a flat with two German students whom i would describe as examples of what Reich calls healthily functioning individuals. The contrast with being a student in the U.K. could not be greater.
There was no bullying among these German students and their friends. No machismo. No dirty talk. No porn. No put-downs. No spite. No nationalism. They had girlfriends who visited and often stayed. They were opposed to war. They had no craze for sports. No adulation for any celebrities. No interest in what someone wore, no mocking of another’s musical tastes. None of the obsessions, viciousness and malicious pettiness and rivalry which is the norm here.
They were social in a true sense. They drank beer, but with meals, which we cooked and ate together. They kept everything clean.
I was so glad i was there and had their support during my Kriegsangst while the first Iraq war was happening. There would have been no one to support me here.
They did not go out at night to drink themselves into a stupor or fight in the streets.No masturbation, no sport, definitely no football, only 2 partners for your entire life, no rude jokes, no taking the piss, you can have a drink, but only with meals, no getting wazzed and off to bed by 9.30pm
Socialism’s going to be a right giggle
DJP wrote: ‘It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?’
It seems not, and the original (ie pre-orgone) Mass Psychology of Fascism has only recently become available again (freely, at that) in German: https://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/2940
I do apologise for the very late reply to questions about the article by Cde Fleischman in the World Socialism Journal by TM.
It has been a while, and I had started my writing my responses to the article, however life has been very busy for me. I have had a chance to compelete my thoughts on the article, so here goes:
Although there are many parts of it I don’t disagree with, to me it is far too deterministic and filled with universal statements about people’s lives. This then leads to, what appears to me to be rather over the top and simplistic descriptions of parts of society but which leave out many other aspects of the lives we live, including many of the positive aspects of human relationships which also characterise our interactions with each other. For example statements such as “There is an enormous amount of shame, self-loathing and guilt.” “Distance and aloneness are typical of life today.” and “It’s man against woman and man against man and each of them resentful of everyone else.”, although this is the case for some people at some points, it is clearly not the case for all people.
There is a tendency to look at the current situation, the way that capitalism operates and how the working class will react which to me is far too mechanistic and far too universalistic.
Yes capitalism invades into our lives, but despite the difficulties this produces, despite the ideology that capitalism promotes, we are still a social creature and for lots of us we gain a great deal from the genuine social interactions that makes. The joy of helping one another, the feelings of connectedness we have when we share laughter with friends, the feelings of closeness at times of difficulty, etc.
Another example is the section which states “A repressive milieu affects you from the moment you are born. The child is subjected to many forms of denial and repression. In fact, childhood is the prototype of all later oppression and coercion. The child’s spirit is deformed by constant restrictions.” I can only report my own childhood in great detail, but I have worked with families for many years and for some of us that is not the experience they had.I lived in the same economic system as the one described by the article, but the way it is described is not what it was for me, from what what I can remember. My childhood was a really happy one, I lived in what would nowadays be described as a typical working class neighbourhood, and I was surrounded by acceptance, care and warmth. Not just the females, but a lot of the males as well. There was my next door neighbour who was like a grandfather figure to me who ran a little shoe repair shop, I spent hours in his wooden hut watching him work as he retold stories of his childhood in rural Northumberland, George who lived at the top of the street who had racing pigeons and showed us how to care for the pigeons and helped us make little wooden go carts, as well as many other examples. My family were supportive and nurturing, and not just my Mam but my Da as well.
As we grew up we formed a football team all from kids from the same street and we watched as we married, sometimes to sisters and brothers from the same street. Their kids came along and for a lot of their children; they have made friendships and bonds with each other. We had a street get together recently, which we do once or twice a year, and there were nearly 30 of us, all lads and lasses that lived together and played together and cared and protected each other. I always say I never worried when I went out as a kid ‘cos I had 15 big brothers and 10 big sisters!
I’m not saying that this means that what happened to me is typical, but I have lots of examples (my partner and her friends included) who can describe these types of experiences. So the description given in the article is certainly not universal and I would question if it is even typical.
Capitalism is brutal, vicious and cut throat, however, from my observations, humanity, cooperation, nurture, caring for each other, or at least tolerating each other, always comes to the fore.
For example thinking about the sacrifices that took place during the miners’ strike, as one example, still make me reflect on all of the good that humans can do. The collection centre for food parcels was overwhelmed at times, and despite all that could be thrown at people by the system, when people were starved back to work, they went back with their heads held high and with the support of their community. Over the road from where I live there is now a food bank collection centre held on Mondays and there are people dropping food off all day.
Another example, I have worked for many years with foster carers, hundreds of families who have sacrificed so much of their lives to have the opportunity to care and nurture children who came to them as complete strangers. Not doing this for money (the fostering allowances given are generally pitiful) but to give some stranger’s child a chance to live a better life.
The examples I am giving are not to detract from other people’s experiences, but to make the point that lots of people appear to have a generally happy life, have reasonably friendships, with some close ties with family and often experience warmth and love in several aspects of their lives, despite the depredations of capitalism.
This fits in with one of the several issues I have with the approach that Freud and Reich take, to me it relies very much on the assumptions that everyone has the same experiences and that we all react to these experiences in the same way. We don’t have the same experiences, we all have different experiences and as a result of those differences we create slightly different understandings of the world around us.
For example the early Freudian idea of the Oedipus complex would be laughable if it hadn’t been taken so seriously. That male children fall in love with their mothers and want to eliminate their fathers is so prescriptive and fantastic. What happens if you are brought up by your father on your own because your mother died in childbirth.
Take the idea of penis envy, what about little girls who only have sisters and don’t encounter a brother’s “little friend” to be envious about? We all make different conclusions depending up on our experiences and also to an extent because of our genetics, but also happenstance plays a part. My older brother genuinely had a phobia of giraffes when he was a toddler, the reason for this only became apparent when he was about 3 years old, my mother asked him to close the back door in the kitchen and he said back to her, “yes and keep the giraffes out”, my mother had a stock phrase, shut the door and keep the drafts out, he had misheard what she had said. Although this is funny, it was also the cause of a small amount of trauma for him at the time, and it demonstrates that individual perception is exactly that, individual.
People often say that two children are brought up in the same way and end up with different personalities, but this is not the case. No two people have exactly the same upbringing. Take the example of me and my brother. He is five years older than me and although we had the same genetic parents, we had different experiences of the same people. Just for starters my brother’s parents were five years younger than the parents I had. I shared their love with two siblings from the start of my life, whereas he started life as an only child until the birth of my sister.
Even mono zygotic twins (identical) have a different experience even from the moment the egg splits into two. The two eggs will implant in different parts of the womb, the levels of nutrients will be different, the way they attach through the umbilical cord will be slightly different, the level of hormones shared by their mother’s blood will be different. That’s even before they are born.
That is why the whole idea that we will all react in exactly the same to the same social stimuli is a fallacy. We can also say that generally there is a tendency in most people to respond in certain ways to certain situations, but there will always be some that react differently.
Again I’ll give an example of how genetic difference can make a difference to how we comprehend the world. Back in the 80’s I was involved in the care of a young man who had severe autism, learning difficulties and who was abandoned into the hospital system at the age of 6 months old. Understandably growing up in this strange and uncaring world he developed very challenging ways to protect himself. As he had no language and because he was scared, he responded by biting people if he was scared or if he was threatened. In the early 70’s one of the “therapists” came up with what was described as a “behaviour modification programme”. The programme was that if this lad bit someone the nursing staff would put Tabasco sauce into his mouth. Apart from the fact that this was cruel, abusive and despicable, the “programme” also had another difficulty. People who have autism often have hyposensitivity to taste, to him all tastes were quite bland. So, to him having a splash of Tabasco sauce was an absolute treat. Instead of discouraging him from biting people, they were actually rewarding him!
Returning to the article in question the author quotes Reich as saying “The father represents and teaches authority . . .The family in capitalist society . . . protects the woman and the children, but its cardinal function is … to produce a bourgeois outlook and a conservative personality”, again I can only speak of the men in my family, this was certainly not their role.
They taught me to challenge the system, cooperate with each other for the good of others, to love and be loved. This, I suppose, is the real problem, reducing the experiences as billions of millions of individual people to form of psychological determinism.
Eric Berne, who developed the concept of personal script, told the story of two brothers, the two brothers had been told by their mother for many years that they would both end up in a lunatic asylum. When he met them it was in an asylum, they had both followed the message given by their mother, however one was a patient and the other was a psychiatrist.
I suppose what I am saying is that the world is full of difference and different people, with different experiences may also lead them to similar conclusions. For example, no doubt, the oppressive nature of society and of some family and family relationships may lead some people to seek out a freer and more humane way of living, this may also lead them to understand the constraints which capitalism places on them and may make the idea of a Socialist transformation of society an urgent necessity (and good on them for it).
Others may see the cooperative and caring family they were brought up in and the nurturing and supportive community they experienced as a model which demonstrates practically the way in which a sane society could operate, if only the constraints of the capitalist system were over thrown.
There may also be other individuals who see things from a very logical and methodical way who see the irrationality of the current system, the waste, the futility of reform, etc. and as a result develop a Socialist consciousness.
The one dimensional approach to the human mind of people like Freud, Reich, Jung, and others is based not on scientific study but is based purely on personal conjecture and the unsupported claims of these theorists. Have some of them developed useful insights, undoubtedly. However if their supporters wish to celebrate these insights, they must also accept the damage and destruction their work has gone on to cause. With Freud’s theories (with all of their difficulties and useful contributions) there is also Freud’s approach, the great psychiatrist who cannot be questioned, whose word is law. To gain an insight into the trauma the great man/woman approach to psychiatry, psychology and therapy, have caused you only need to read about the life and times of Bruno Bettleheim.
This is not to say that Freudian approaches haven’t been part of the development of current understandings of the human mind, you couls say probably in the same way that Hippocrates laid the foundation of modern medicine. However I wouldn’t expect my GP to base their treatment of me by following the ideas of Hippocrates, and neither would I expect to any serious student of the human psyche to base their outdated and unscientific ideas of Freud.
As I have said several times on this forum, far more interesting and scientifically tested approaches exist. For example attachment theory, which began from an early attempt to empirically examine object relations theory, and has played a pivotal role in linking psychoanalytic theory with its social and neurobiological correlates. It re-focused attention onto the primacy of actual relational trauma and the importance of the interpersonal dimension of human relatedness as opposed to fantasy and the intrapsychic environment. I would recommend reading up about it.
This leads me on to Wez’s question “what have all of your establishment experts got to say about the relationship between political ideology and psychological development/character?”.
Interestingly to the Socialist point of view, Attachment Theory is based upon the idea that early infant experiences of care and nurture, or the lack of it and also puts forward the idea that the more cooperative, connected and available the care giver is to the child, the more likely the child will develop a secure attachment and also be able to develop cooperative interdependent behaviours and personalities themselves. As most studies state that between 55-65% of children develop a secure relationship. It would seem that the nature or our attachments would predict a higher number of the population held postive viewpoints about the imporance of cooperation and interdependent activity. This has been indicated by several studies in America that generally those with secure attachments were far more likely to have “liberal” rather than Conservative views. People with insecure avoidant attachments (usually rated as between 25-20% of the population) held a mix of liberal and conservative views and that insecure ambivalent attachments (usually rated as between 20-15% of the population) were more likely to have conservative views.
Although that is not in any way an exact science, it is certainly a solid answer to the age old “human nature” argument, i.e. attachment makes the point that human nature is actually hard wired in to us to be cooperative and interdependent, and that anti social behaviour is the exception, rather than the rule, usually occuring where there has been early years trauma and neglect (that is not to say that all people who experiecned trauma and neglect will become anti social).
BD – Thanks for that considered addition to the debate. I will read it again but, to me, the most obvious mistake you make is to emphasize ‘individualism’ and ‘difference’ in human personalities. What has always struck me, in terms of political debate, is how similar and conditioned people are. The ‘human nature’ argument against socialism seems almost universal in my experience, usually made by those who consider themselves as supreme examples of ‘individuality’. Surely a Marxian class analysis demands that we should emphasize the ‘sameness’ of ideological and behavioral social phenomena? Your distinction between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ views is surely irrelevant to socialists as both lead, and have led, inevitably to hell on earth. As I said I will read it again but these points above surprised me coming from a socialist and/or sympathizer.
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