Thomas_More
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On the continent, many, including Cde. Fleischmann, can still accept Reich’s early work, whilst they disapprove of his later meanderings. Similarly with Freud.
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.”
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.Dust Be My Destiny.
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.I know. I just wonder why he is putting Russia on a war footing if the war is going to be limited to Ukraine.
If a war with NATO direct is in the offing, he must be expecting a “conventional” war, if there is any logic for him in non-nuclear militarization.
Are both sides (NATO vs Russia) intending to agree a “conventional” war involving all of Europe?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.”Both Freud and Reich went off on tangents later in their thought. That should not make us reject their ideas out of hand.
If freudians posit the “structure of the mind” as the reason for social reality, that is wrong and is idealism on their part.
But if they understand things as materialists, they will see that the “structure of the mind” is both socially and individually produced, and that different personalities result from different responses to both external and internal happenings. The different responses that people have determining personality will stem from a long chain of individual experience and response, mostly subconscious and forgotten, stretching back into their life history from infancy.Phobias, as opposed to rational fears, will have such subconscious origins, although the phobia itself is known. The same goes for coping with sexual feelings or not, and the attraction for certain modes of thought as opposed to others.
Yes. The party has this in common with the 18th c. mechanical materialists (whom it criticises for their limitations where they are in fact correct in other matters), and places too much faith in the progress of reason.
In fact, we are witnessing deterioration in understanding re: the mass of workers. There was a dignity and resolve in the men and women of Peterloo which, far from having progressed since, has vanished.I’m not saying they are not. I’m saying how do you explain massive personality differences within the same class under the same capitalist system, unless biological (emotional and “personal-historical”, inner and nervous responses to experience) are in play, and not only socio-economic conditions?
I’m sure there are doctrinaire freudians, but it’s the doctrinaire bolsheviks who dismiss psychotherapy out of hand.
Let us not be like them.We also know that everyone’s formation is different, and their reactions to things too, and that most of these have origins which are buried in one’s past. The formation of a personality is an ongoing chain of feelings and responses both socially and individually conditioned.
Two men are working class and have the same job and the same pay. One is a socialist and one is a nationalist. They went to the same school. One is a “ladies’ man” and the other a shy celibate. One is not fazed by news of an atrocity. The other is deeply depressed by it and cannot sleep. The “ladies’ man” is a sexist. The celibate is respectful of women. The one is frenziedly excited about an upcoming football match. The other is bored sick by it. The one reads books, the other ridicules him for it.
They both exist under capitalism and have been formed under it, but both are very different personalities.
