Thomas_More
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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.
I don’t know about “death instinct”, which sounds ridiculous to me. But reichians say that neuroses are specific to humans and to other animals in captivity.
Humans being the only animals which have divorced themselves from the free and natural flow of the sex instinct.
Also, animals in captivity show neuroses and also masturbate.
These things did not bring about the Holocaust, as i am sure you know.
Scapegoating suited the populist Nazi Party for electoral and political success purposes, and the hatred of Jews especially was a Christian inheritance of centuries. Martin Luther’s diatribe against Jews gives Der Sturmer a real run for its money.The psychopathic hatred evinced by those in charge of the herding and killing was all part of the job and those chosen for it were the most psychopathic or banal types.
Even so, complaints against the job inundated Himmler, who had to repeatedly urge the “necessity” of it to the reluctant.You can observe libido as a physical function, just as you can observe anger, frustration, grief, and other bio-chemical actions of the nervous system.
Ernst’s experience showed him Reich was wrong in thinking cured patients would become socialists. In fact, the opposite often occurred. Feeling better, they lost interest in politics. Unless they were already socialists, of course. Those remained so.
I have no interest in these later ideas of his.
Surely libido is just a name for the sexual feelings (nervous stimulation) which are aroused by certain external phenomena and certain thoughts, leading to “take off” if fortunate, and repression if not.
Likewise, any “forces” would be material and able to be studied and scrutinised.
Btw, has anyone bothered to read Blewitt’s article on Freud in The Socialist Standard?
“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.
Ola Raknes.
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.Just tell me what you disagree with in this article, please.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/2021/03/08/sex-in-a-free-society/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68656853
The Moscow attack.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.
