15. Freud on Sexuality and Civilization - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

Subtitles section Play video

Prof: Good morning.
I have to get started because there is, of course,
a lot to be said about Sigmund Freud.
Actually it's a shame I have only fifty minutes for it and
not two or three lectures.
Just before I get into Freud, I just want to tell you that I
did send the questions already; emailed it to you.
So if you check your email, you have the questions for next
Thursday.
And I strongly encourage you to attend the lectures and the
discussion sections.
Those questions are not necessarily very easy.
So you may want to get more exposure beyond the readings to
have a good handle on it.
And let me just very, very briefly come back to
Nietzsche, before we go on to Freud.
Though I have enough on Freud, more than enough for today.
But I would like to still kind of wrap it up and to say what
the bottom line is.
And the big question is, to start with,
what is genealogical method?
What is new in Nietzsche's approach?
And it should be clear from the writings and from the lecture,
and I think from the discussion sections--
right?--that what he's suggesting, that in the
genealogical method you will take an ideal and a moral
principle, what you think is the right
idea, and then he will show that one can think about this idea
differently; and historically they did think
differently.
And his major example is good.
You think an idea of what good is;
it's uncontestable, easy to agree?
Well I will show you that in history the notion of good--and
it's opposite, what is not good--has been
constructed differently.
So the point of departure, first of all:
well, there is the Judeo-Christian morality of good
and evil.
I will show--I will go back to time, I'll go back to the
antiquity--and I will show that the notion of good was
completely different.
Right?
That is the genealogical method.
But to do it consistently, he really should be claiming
that going back to the antiquity--
I'm not suggesting that the good in antiquity was the real
good.
Right?
It's just a comparative study, which relativizes the idea of
good in your mind today, to make you aware that good has
been thought about differently in different times.
And, in particular, of course, his main focus is on
the notion of morality in modern society.
And he said well there is something unique about this
modern society; namely that morality somehow is
internalized into us, and we kind of accept our own
subjugation and our oppression because these values are so
deeply invested into us.
So that is, in a way--right?--the genealogical
method; not to have,
as I said in the lecture, a critical vantage point.
Try to get a way that I will give you the real universal
definition of good, and I will criticize any
question of morality from a universal concept of morality.
That's not what he does. Right?
His major aim is to show that all moralities,
all conceptions of moralities--all conceptions what
is justice, what is fair,
what is humane--has been manufactured--
right?--in the workshop of ideals.
And this workshops of ideals is a dark place where actually
coercion, torture, is being used to manufacture
these seemingly great ideas.
It's all about control over humans.
That's in a nutshell--right?--what Nietzsche
is trying to do.
So let me just make a step back to Marx and foreshadow a step
forward to Freud.
So this Nietzsche has really little disagreement with Marx's
theory of alienation.
He said, "Well, as long as Marx is saying that
in the modern world we are alienated because we are not
masters of our own fate, I agree with him." Right?
We are alien in this world and we do not have power over our
life.
External conditions act like as if it were nature,
a thunderstorm, and determines our life.
He agrees with this diagnosis--right?--of modernity.
His problem with Marx is that Marx comes to a solution.
Right?
Marx says, "Well, I know what human emancipation
will be.
I know what good society will be, and I know who will get us
there." Right?
"The proletariat."
And he said, "This is churlish;
that's no good." Right?
"I won't do that.
I won't fall into this trap." Right?
"I will not manufacture another ideal,
because my workshop, where ideals would be
manufactured, would be also a workshop which
smells"-- right?--"and which is full
with coercion, and I would subject others to
torture-- mental or physical torture?
In the good old days it was physical torture.
Today it's worse: it is mental torture."
Right?
That's in a nutshell--right?--what he's
trying to achieve.
And, of course, there is no Freud,
there is no Weber, and there is no Michel
Foucault; there is really no modern and
post-modern social theory without Nietzsche's insight.
This is a radicalization of critical theory.
Right?
Critical theory--we talked about this, from Hegel to
Marx--was a critique of consciousness;
that what is in our mind is a distortion of the reality.
Right?
And therefore they were trying to subject human consciousness
to critical scrutiny.
Nietzsche does it the most radical way.
He said, "I am capable to show"--
right?--"the shortcomings of our consciousness,
without showing you what is the right consciousness."
Right?
That's the project.
Now Sigmund Freud has a lot of similarities with this.
Right?
He's also a critical theorist, and he says,
"Well, what is in our mind comes very deep down from the
repressed.
And I will show you"--right?--"how,
if this causes you neurotic responses, I can actually cure
you, by the way; just I let you understand what
has been repressed in your life experience, and then you can do
something about yourself."
So that's in a nutshell Sigmund Freud's contribution.
So it basically follows closely to Nietzsche's ideas.
And in the piece particularly what I asked you to read today--
one of the pieces, right?--Civilization and its
Discontents, he's struggling very much with
the problem Nietzsche is struggling with.
He shows modern civilization as repression.
Right?
At the same time he does not want to reject civilization.
Right?
And he's tormented--right?--how to evaluate civilization.
Right?
And well he probably is not going as far as Nietzsche,
Nietzsche does.
We will see that when it comes.
Okay, this is Sigmund Freud.
And it's good advertising: don't smoke.
You have his cigar.
He has actually oral cancer.
He was suffering from it during the last twenty years of his
life, and eventually committed suicide;
and the cancer obviously had something to do with his cigars.
So don't smoke. Right?
Well Freud was one of the giants of nineteenth and early
twentieth century thought.
Many people who would name the intellectual giants of this
time, nineteenth century,
would name three names: Charles Darwin,
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
Right?
These are the three thinkers which made us rethink ourself--
who we are, where we come from, and what is the nature of the
society we live in?-- the most radical ways.
Okay, let me talk very briefly about Freud's life.
He was born in 1856, in what is now the Czech
Republic, Moravia, southern part of the Czech
Republic, in a small city called Freiberg.
His father was a Jewish wool merchant;
he was already married to his third wife--was about twenty
years his junior.
He was a pretty dominating figure.
The mother was, on the other hand,
a very sensitive human being.
In some ways Freud's troubled relationship with the aging
authoritarian father, and with the soft-spoken,
kind, forthcoming, and warm mother,
does explain a lot about his thinking about human life.
Very soon after he was born, they moved away from Freiberg.
First briefly they were in Leipzig and then they moved to
Vienna, and this is where Sigmund Freud received his
education.
In 1873 he enrolled at the University of Vienna.
He was studying law for awhile.
He got very bored with it.
So he shifted into medical school, and received his medical
degree in '81, and worked in the major
university hospital in Vienna, which is called General
Hospital.
In '85, very briefly he went to study to Paris.
And this was very crucial for his change because he became
interested here in neurology, and especially became
interested in a therapy what French psychiatrists was use,
and that was hypnosis, to treat hysteria.
And sort of he came back to Vienna and he decided that he
will now become a neurologist, interested particularly in
hysteria, and will use hypnosis as a
therapy.
He also married in '86--it was a lifelong and,
you know, very peaceful marriage--Martha Bernays,
who was a granddaughter of the chief rabbi of Hamburg.
So he's coming from a deeply Jewish family,
but he himself had very little faith in his life.
He began to practice psychotherapy,
and he set up an office in Bergstrasse 19;
19 Bergstrasse in central Vienna.
Here it is the house today where Sigmund Freud started to
practice, and practiced there until 1938.
And this is where psychoanalysis was born--so an
important house.
So after '86--right?--he began to collaborate with another
psychologist, Joseph Breuer.
And Breuer was not using the hypnotic method.
What he did, he did something what he called
"the talking cure."
This is something what you occasionally do,
or your friends do with you.
Right?
If something is on your chest, then you call your friend and
you say, "I need somebody to talk to."
Right?
There is some real big trouble in you;
you want somebody to listen.
Right?
Now this is exactly what Breuer did.
He did ask his patients to talk to him.
Right?
And it turned out that this talking cure was very effective,
as you've probably all experienced.
Right?
When something is on your chest and you have a good friend who's
willing to listen and does not rush to give you advice--
right?--this is whom you want.
Right?
Just to listen and nod, to be sympathetic,
and try to understand you and let you talk,
and ask the good questions, but not to give advice.
Right?
That's what Breuer discovered.
Well in 1895 they co-authored the book Studies in
Hysteria.
And now they actually in the book suggest that there must be
a new therapy.
Don't put people asleep but make them talk and let them
freely associate, and through this free
association you throw words in.
And then they're beginning to freely associate to this world,
you actually can uncover--they're beginning to
use the term--unconscious.
There is an unconscious level in each individual,
and with this free association you can dip into the
unconscious.
And, in fact, it was Freud who,
in doing this, practicing this with patients,
also began to understand that a lot of stuff in the subconscious
has something to do with sexuality;
that it is, you know, unsatisfied,
unachieved sexual desires, which are kind of repressed
into the subconscious.
And when, through these free associations,
he was digging into the unconscious, he began to
discover a lot of sexual stuff.
And then one year later it is--right?--a very important day
in the history of modern social thought.
In 1896 he finally has a name for what he does,
and he calls it psychoanalysis.
And here it is.
If you have not seen this picture yet, you should.
This was the famous couch.
That's where the patient had to lay down,
and Freud was sitting in an armchair and listening to what
they got to say, and asking just a couple of
probing questions.
But the essence of psychoanalysis is--right?--that
you do not solve the problem for the patient.
The patient has to find its own solution.
The psychoanalysis will know what the problem is eventually,
will lead you there, bring it from the subconscious
into the conscious, and then it is,
as it becomes conscious, you suddenly realize you can
deal with it.
Now about the later work, just very briefly;
it's voluminous.
In 1899 he published a book which is called
Interpretation of Dreams.
And it's to a large extent his analysis of his own dreams,
but also the dreams of some of his patients.
His father just passed away, and with the death of the
father he had a great deal of guilt, why he had this hate
feeling of his father.
It was a hate/love relationship,
but strongly motivated by hate.
And he began to analyze himself and trying to figure out what
his problem with his father was, and what his relationship with
the mother and father was.
And Interpretation of Dreams is a very important
step in this direction.
And the fundamental idea in this path-breaking book,
that in fact dreams are not accidental.
Dreams are the time of this little window of opportunity
when some of the stuff from the unconscious tries to come up
into the conscious.
So therefore what he did, he made people to remember
their dreams, and then he tried to help them,
from the material which was surfacing from dreams,
to understand their subconscious.
In 1905 there is another major breakthrough.
He's publishing The Pathology of Everyday Life
in which--you all know this term--the Freudian slippage;
when somebody, just by accident,
got something wrong, slips his tongue and says
something differently than it should.
Freud does show that very often it's actually also the
subconscious putting his head up;
and it's an indication what is in your subconscious,
what is repressed in you.
It was just not an error what you did.
Right?
Beyond these errors he can see the subconscious coming up.
And then, of course, the same year another major
breakthrough-- probably next to the discovery
of psychoanalysis, the most important
breakthrough--the "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality".
And now he is moving towards what some will say--call a
pan-sexualist understanding of the mind.
Well it's probably pushing it too far;
most who are do not believe in Freud.
But there are still many, many people who do believe in
Freud.
Right?
There are people who practice psychoanalysis.
You know, just ten, twenty years ago,
everybody has his analyst.
Right?
Interestingly, I think somehow this is a
little going out of fashion.
But I think there are still people--
you must know people--right?--who have their
analyst-- right?--and they go every other
week to the analyst, lay down on the couch and they
speak their mind, and then they're kind of
relieved.
Well I would say if you have problems of depression,
why don't you try it?
Actually I think it certainly does you less damage than taking
these bloody pills, what can--no,
not that psychoanalysis cannot cause you trouble.
Because these psychoanalysts, of course,
all know because of Freud's theory of sexuality,
that all these problems in us is depressed sexual desires,
and everything has to do something with our early
childhood experiences; for boys, with the love of your
mother, and jealousy of your father and--right?--and with
girls, the other way around.
Well so if you go to an analyst, in no time you will
start figuring out why you really, really hate your father,
or you hate your mother.
And well I'm not so sure that's the best thing what can happen
to you.
But anyway, that's what he was doing.
And he--in fact, he discovers I think an
intriguing idea-- and I think psychologists to
this day are struggling with it, how much truth there is to it--
the so-called Oedipus complex.
And you know what the Oedipus complex is.
King Oedipus, by accident,
marries his own wife--own mother--and it turns out own
mother--and that's of course a big tragedy.
Right?
You are not supposed to--this is incest, which is--virtually
all civilizations prohibit incest.
Well, and this is Oedipus complex, that we are always in
love with our parents of the opposite sex,
and jealous of the other parent.
Right?
And the Oedipus complex also means that we have a desire to
kill our father in order to have the love--
in fact, sexual love--of our mother,
if we are boys, and vice-versa for girls.
Well I think everybody would agree this probably pushed the
idea a bit too far, but there is clearly an
interesting-- a very important insight in the
argument.
Then, in the later work, he is moving more towards
metapsychology.
Now he tries to explain the functioning of society,
rather than just individual psyche.
The first major step in this direction is 1913,
when he published the book Totem and Taboo.
And this is about the origins of a fairly primitive
society--the transformation from a kinship network to a tribal,
larger tribal society.
And he explains in this book the origins of first complex
society as the brothers come together and they kill their
father.
And the father exercised in the kinship relationship absolute
power.
And in fact he also believed that in these early
kinship-based societies, there was even no incest taboo.
So the father actually could have sex with his daughters as
well.
Now the brothers come together, they kill the father,
and they create the first civilization.
They're beginning to repress desires and share power among
themselves.
That's Totem and Taboo.
Then he writes two important conceptual pieces,
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle",
1920, and "Ego and Id".
And I asked you to read some of it, 1923, which are kind of
important conceptual elements.
And I think this all cumulated in his Civilization and its
Discontents, 1930, which arguably,
if you are not interested in individual psychology but the
theory of society, this is his most important book.
It was a very big success and has not been out of print ever
since.
'38, he has to leave Vienna.
He had a similar hate/love relationship to the city of
Vienna as towards his father, as many people did.
But by '38, the Nazis took it over.
Gestapo actually interviewed his daughter,
beloved daughter, Anna, and sort of he saw the
writing on the wall.
It's time to leave; if you are Jewish,
you don't want to live in the Third Reich.
And he moves to London, and just a year later he
actually commits suicide.
It is an assisted suicide.
His doctor helped him to get rid of the pain he was
struggling with for a very long time.
Well, a bit about the psychoanalytic movement.
Freud's ideas were, of course, outrageous ideas,
very controversial.
Nevertheless very early on, already in 1902,
there were a group of very young and able people,
which included people like Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung
and Ernest Jones, who wrote a wonderful biography
of-- the definite biography--of
Freud.
If you want, of course, a very pro-Freudian
perspective, but read it, it's a great book indeed.
And they start together, in Bergstrasse 19,
in Vienna, every Wednesday.
This was called the Wednesday Psychological Circle.
Then in 1908 this becomes the Vienna Psychological Society--a
bit of a misnomer because in no time it's beginning to spread
around the world.
And there are psychoanalytic societies all over the world,
until this very day.
And if you want to become an analyst, it's not enough to have
a medical degree; you have to go through years of
very rigorous training, what these psychoanalytic
societies will monitor.
Freud was also a very difficult person to get along.
He basically had fallouts with everybody.
First, probably the most important of his early
associates, Adler; already in 1911 they break up.
Then with Jung.
Adler, Jung; next to Adler are the dominant
figures of psychology in the first two or three decades of
the twentieth century.
Then even later on he breaks with Ferenczi,
who was a pretty loyal guy, was not easy to get a fallout
with him, but Freud managed this one.
He could make enemies everywhere.
Okay, then really the person who was running the show became
his daughter, Anna Freud, who lived a long
life and held up the torch and carried the cause of
psychoanalysis.
So let me have a look at the book on The
Ego--not Ergo, I'm sorry, it's The
Ego and the Id.
Right?
This is a Freudian slippage, right?
>
I have to correct this one.
Well there are, he said--here is beginning to
move.
The initial idea is there is subconscious or unconscious and
conscious elements what constitute the human sexuality.
And now he wants to have a clearer conceptual apparatus to
deal with this.
And he has, well our perception system has three components.
One is the ego, the other one is id,
and the third one is superego.
And we will deal with all of this.
Right?
And therefore what is interesting, what is the
interaction between ego, id and superego.
And Discontents and Civilization deals with this
a great deal.
He's also talking about the two classes of instincts,
what guides life, and that's also important for
Civilization and its Discontents.
Well he said initially we made a distinction between the
conscious and the unconscious.
And the idea of unconscious came from the theory of
repression, that we have unconscious because some of the
experiences we do not recall; for instance,
our sexual desire towards our mother, which was prohibited,
it's pushed into our subconscious;
and other unpleasant experiences in our life we want
to forget and we put into subconscious.
That's repression.
We repress undesired experience.
Here unconscious--right?--coincided
with what is latent and what wants to become conscious,
wants to enter the conscious.
It's only suppressed, and it is psychoanalysis which
helps you to bring this into consciousness.
But he said, "well all that is
repressed is unconscious."
That's quite true.
You know?
If you had bad memories, you tend to forget it and put
it into the unconscious.
But--the big discovery was--but not all that is unconscious is
necessarily repressed.
There are stuff in the unconscious which was there
before it was in consciousness.
He said the later, which is unconscious only
descriptively, not dynamically--dynamically
meant it was depressed.
But there is an element of subconscious which is there only
descriptively.
Right?
This is what he called preconsciousness;
before--it was never in the conscious.
Right?
It is just deep down in you.
And well and he said, "We restrict the term
unconscious to the dynamically unconscious
repressed."
And now the two, this repressed unconscious and
the preconscious, together will constitute,
I suppose, the id.
Now we can now turn, have different concepts now,
Freud said, conscious, preconscious and unconscious,
and the question is what is the relationship between those?
So what is ego?
He said, "Each individual, there is a coherent
organization of the mental process, and this is what we
call ego."
Right?
Well it is to this ego that consciousness is attached.
What is consciousness in us is what is ego.
He said, "It is also a mental agency"--
right?--"which supervises and constitutes the process of
thinking"; he said, "which goes to
sleep, but, at the same time, exercises control even over
your dreams."
That's your ego.
And the ego is the agents of repression.
The ego will repress stuff which is in the way of the ego
to act, that will push it into the unconscious.
Well he said, "Therefore our therapy was
to try to bring into the ego what was unconscious"--
right?--"and what was repressed."
But there is something else which is not repressed,
which also has a very important drive, and this is id.
Right?
Id is what is deeply down in your--those desires,
the drives which come out of you.
And they are not-- some of it is not, has never been
repressed.
It is just by nature in you, for instance sexual drives.
Right?
"So I propose to call the entity,
which starts out from the system preconscious and begins
by the preconscious, the ego, and call the other
part of the mind, into which this entity extends
and which behaves through it as if it were unconscious,
the id."
It's unconscious but not repressed;
or a combination of repressed and preconscious.
Well he said, "The ego is very sharply
separated from the id.
It's really the id is below the ego."
And that's a very--this is probably the best to grasp,
what he said: "The ego's relationship to
the id is like a man on a horseback"--
right?--"after the rider is obliged to guide the horse
where the horse wants to go." Right?
This is the id. Right?
So the ego will be on the horse--the horse is the id--
but occasionally if you don't want to follow the horse,
you let the horse go where the horse wants to go.
Right?
You try to control the horse, but there is so much you can
do, about the horse.
It's a very important idea in mature Freud.
And then there comes the superego.
Right?
He said, "The ego is not merely a part of the id."
Right?
"There also exists a grade in the ego which may be called
the ego-ideal, or the superego."
Right?
And the part of this ego is firmly connected to the
consciousness.
And well the superego--right?--is the,
he said, "is part residue of earlier object choices of the
id, but it represents an energetic
reaction formation against those choices."
It is what tells you what you should be, not what you are.
The ego tells you who you are.
Right?
The ego tests the world of reality and tests what you can
achieve under the conditions of reality.
Right?
The superego is that part of your consciousness which
actually will tell you that what you should be.
Right?
Adam Smith, you remember Adam Smith, the theory of moral
sentiment.
There is somebody inside of you who is watching you and makes a
judgment on you whether this is right or wrong.
The idea of superego is very similar--right?--to this Adam
Smithian idea.
Well psychoanalysis, he said, was criticized for
ignoring the higher values in human life and talking only
about sex and so on and so forth.
He said, "This is all wrong;
we are very aware of the existence of the superego.
And there is a complex interaction between ego,
id and superego."
Well the ego is essentially repressive.
It essentially represents the external reality,
the external world as such.
The superego, on the other hand,
represents the internal world, your own view what you would
want to be, though you cannot be,
partially because your drives are dirty--
right?--and your ego does not let you to achieve that.
Right?
So actually what belonged to the lowest part of the mental
life-- right?--this suppressed stuff,
is turned into what is the highest in the human mind--
right?--the superego.
Well there are also two classes of instincts.
One instinct, what he discovered early in the
work, is what he calls
libido--right?--the sexual desire and the desire to live
and survive and self-preservation.
But there is another instinct in us;
he discovers it somewhat later in life, and this is the death
instinct, Thanatos.
So there are Eros and Thanatos.
One is what makes us live.
The other is destructive, wants to bring us to death.
And the human life and the human history can be understood
as a struggle between the Eros and Thanatos,
as such.
Sadism is a good example of Thanatos, he said.
Okay, let me move to Civilization and
Discontents.
And there are the major highlights: about ego
development, religion and purposes of life.
Civilization as restriction of sexual life.
About ego development.
There is not that much I have to add or interpret here.
Well he said the ego eventually evolves in us;
it's not just given in us.
Right?
It's sharply differentiated.
I can say, "This person has a strong ego."
You present your ego very strongly, and your id is being
hidden from, if I can put it with Erving
Goffman,--right?--the id is in the back stage.
You don't show it--right?--the id, but what you want to present
is your ego.
But this evolves gradually--right?--in the
process of human development.
You can see as ego gradually develops in a child and takes
the form as it is.
And one important process in this, as you move away from the
pleasure principles to the reality principle.
Right?
"Is there a purpose of human life?",
he asks.
"Well only religion can answer, talk to you about the
purpose of life.
I, as a psychologist or a social analyst or social
scientist, I cannot tell you what the purpose of life
is."
What is the purpose of life now?
He comes very close to the utilitarian idea.
Right?
We almost hear John Stuart Mill speaking to him.
Happiness; we are all striving to be happy.
Right?
But unfortunately the problem is it is much easier to be
unhappy than to be happy.
Right?
And, because we are confronted with the problems,
that in fact unhappiness is much likely to be our fate than
achieve what we want to be, happiness.
This pleasure principle is transformed into a reality
principle.
We say, "Well, that is the reality what we
have to accept."
And we have to escape this.
We need to have this reality principle to bring our
unhappiness under control.
To be able to survive the sufferings, we have to have a
sense of reality.
And this is the taming of the ego.
This now becomes very close to Nietzsche, as close as Freud
ever will be.
Right?
And the sublimation of instincts--that's all what
civilization is all about.
Right?
The feeling of happiness is derived from the satisfaction of
wild intellectual impulses, untamed by the ego.
The blond beast--right?--that's where the real pleasure comes
from.
But it has to be tamed. Right?
Here it comes. Right?
Very much the Nietzschean idea.
And this is happening through the--if you want to escape it,
then you do it, you become maniac,
or intoxicated.
If you cannot face the reality, then you drink.
Right?
It was too much, so I go to the pub and I order
a double scotch--right?--and then I relax.
Right?
Intoxication is the way how to avoid reality;
I get drunk.
Many people get drunk.
A very bad idea because actually it will make it worse.
Your unhappiness, as soon as the first few
minutes of happiness is past, will be just worse.
Well, and another way to do it is sublimation--
right?--of the instinct--to suppress and ennoble in some
ways these instincts that were-- actually you move into the
sphere of fantasies; you fantasize rather than live
out your depressed desires.
And this is the mechanism of fantasy, which creates art and
science; and the most noble human
activities are actually sublimated unsatisfied
desires--right?--which came from the ego--came from the id;
the ego confronted with reality and then suppressed it,
and then was sublimated into these higher elements.
Well he has a very nice quotation from Goethe on an
unpublished poem, and not surprisingly
unpublished.
This says: "The people who have science and art also do
have religion.
Those who do not have either science or art have to have
religion."
Well it's a very interesting idea.
In fact, I don't think it is totally obvious how you have to
interpret it, especially the first part.
I think there's a way one can interpret the first sentence:
Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst Besitzt hat auch Religion.
It basically means well, you know, science and art is a
sort of a religion, and if you are actually a
scientist or an artist, you have your religion;
you even don't have to be religious.
But if you have no science or no art, in order to make sense
of the life you need religion.
Right?
And that's--I think it's not surprising that he never
published the poem.
Well Freud pushes far.
He's also anti-religious, and he said well indeed
religion is just mass delusion, because it does create the
impression-- right?--that you can actually
mold reality; that there is purpose of
life--probably not on this earth but beyond that--and you will be
able to achieve that.
That's why he calls it 'mass delusion'.
You don't confront reality.
Right?
You do not develop your reality principle sufficiently.
And, of course, he also calls this infantile;
infantile because you create the figure of the god,
the father god.
And he said this is exactly the young infant's reaction how to
respond to danger, and the reality,
to hope that you will get protections from your father.
And he said this is exactly what religions are calling upon.
My--you know, when you address God as
"My Father."
Okay, there are different sources of unhappiness.
First of all the nature is a source of our unhappiness--is
superior.
And one part of nature is particularly a source of
unhappiness: our own body.
And, you know, if you are getting sick and
old, like Freud did, you will appreciate more and
more how much unhappiness comes from your body;
what you don't necessarily feel right now, but wait fifty more
years and you will.
Okay, and there is--the biggest unhappiness actually comes from
human relations.
It's again something which resembles very much the young
Marx--alienation, as alienated from your fellow
human beings.
And, of course, very much to
Nietzsche--right?--that the problem is in human relations.
Well now the question is how on earth we can solve this problem
of human relations?
And because we have this big problem--right?--in human
relations, people start blaming civilization,
like Nietzsche did.
And well but he said it is, in fact, conceivable that man
in earlier ages, rather than in modernity,
actually were happier than they are today.
Well yes, noble savages--right?--the happiness
in the state of nature, Rousseau.
He said, "Well that's not an unreasonable argument."
But how does civilization develop?
Well he said--suggests, he's proceeding towards more
and more control over the external world,
but also towards extension of the number of people included in
the community; therefore more and more control
over other people.
Right?
This is sort of civilization is a technology,
how to be able to control more people;
control nature and more people.
Yes, we already talked about Totem and Taboo.
You will see these on the internet.
Anyway, all culture, all civilizations,
are coming from repression.
And this is a very important insight;
very similar to Nietzsche's critique--right?--of morality.
And in particular civilization restricts sexual life.
Well the important aim of civilization,
to bring many people together into a society.
And the limit of uninhabited sexual love.
Right?
It restricts sexual life.
He said this was--the high mark was reached in Western European
civilization.
It's again almost--you read almost Nietzsche--right?--here.
A choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex,
and most extra-genital satisfactions are forbidden as
perversion.
But even heterosexual genital love is restricted.
Only sexual relationship, on the basis of solitary,
indissoluble bond between one man and one woman is what is
accepted in Western civilization,
not in other civilization.
And that is the most repressive system of sexuality.
Right?
Well--right?
And there is actually more to it, rather than repression of
sexuality.
You know?
It has to restrict all other kind of drives which is coming
from the id.
It teaches you--right?--to love your neighbor and even your
enemy, which is in his view--right?--impossible.
But well we have to control somehow aggressivity.
Homo homini lupus; man is the wolf of man.
Right?
This is kind of Hobbesian theory of human nature--deeply
down we are actually.
There is also a critique of Marx.
Marx thinks there is an easy solution.
You eliminate private ownership and homo homini lupus
will be solved.
He said this is naīve, this does not happen.
Well I don't have time to work on this, though it's a very
interesting idea: Nazism, and why you dislike
particularly which is close to you.
Well I think I'll probably just have to leave this here,
and just finish with the note suggesting that he is actually
very troubled.
He shows the repressive nature of civilization,
but he does not want to buy into the Nazi anti-civilization.
Right?
And he said, "Well I am not suggesting
the superego is not necessary-- superego is necessary--but I'm
concerned about the superego to be tyrannical."
Right?
"And let's try to find a middle
way"--right?--"in which let's not be naīve.
The id gives bad impulses and they have to be controlled by
the superego, but the superego can go too far
and too much."
So kind of tries to walk a narrow way between Marx and
Nietzsche.
All right? Thank you.