Sigmund_freud

Sigmund Freud A great primer that doesn’t throw the baby out with the repressed infantile sexual instincts.

There was a lot packed into this short book, or long essay. Nearing the end of his life, and the end of the period of peace between WW1 and WW2 Freud was still Freuding. This book is ostensibly about the restrictions that civilization imposes on individuals, but probably more importantly in the psychoanalytic field it further sketches out a new primal drive in human nature, namely aggression. For most of his life Freud had looked at human nature through the lens of the “Pleasure principle” which is that all actions humans take can be explained in avoidance to unpleasure. This principle ran into problems, one example is how the mind seems to relive traumatic experiences over and over again. Enter the “death drive”, the main assertion of this book was that our two main drives (pleasure and aggression) are antagonistic to civilization. In that sense, civilization can be conceived of as a mechanism of repression and redirection of those drives towards behaviors that are beneficial to the group. He has called this process “Eros” and the later drive has come to be known as “Thanatos”. Eros is a work of unification at the cost of individual desire, i.e. civilization. The question (or warning) of this book is that Eros doesn’t seem to care about the individual at all, it will sacrifice the individual completely to achieve its goal of unification which will perhaps make living life in wonderful unity not worth it in the end. There is so much more inside this short book, it is widely considered one of Freud’s most important works. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter their views on Freud’s other ideas. This book has also tied in with thoughts I was already having in regard to the exclusivity inherent in inclusivity, the need for Orwell’s two-minute hate, etc etc. ...

Someone let Freud loose in the field of Anthropology! Spurred on by works from his rival Jung, Freud investigates the connections of totems, exogamy, taboos, religious and neurotic thoughts. A collection of four essays Freud initially investigates (or attempts to) the origins of “Incest Dread”, that is to say why incest became a taboo to begin with. From there he considers the correlation between Taboo and emotional conflict. He demonstrates this with some fascinating deconstructions of certain ceremonies to honor a king which required severe austerities that (in the school of psychoanalysis) demonstrates the peoples wish to honor but also torture the king. To prevent harm from coming to the king, but also prevent the king from harming. The subtitle of the book is Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. This is looked at in depth in the third essay investigating the similar power that animist and neurotics both attribute to thought. In many cases elaborate rituals are created to propitiate themselves of actions that were only committed in the psychic and perhaps subconscious realm. The fourth and final essays is a sort of climax where he attempts to tie everything together and put a Freudian bow on it. In this brilliant essay he argues that our entire society is built off of a real or imaginary event that has given us generational guilt (i.e., original sin). This guilt is the origin of all religion. Drawing from one of Darwin’s speculations about human society possibly being constructed similarly to gorilla’s social structure, that is one alpha male with a harem. The original act then was the brothers (whom the alpha male kicked out) united to murder their father. The father that they loved, feared, and respected. At the end of the day, you gotta go back to Oedipus. ...