Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

1
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• Vienna.
• Physician specialized in neurology and psychiatry
• Faith in the scientific method ? Verifiable
  experience
• Elaborated his psychoanalytic theory from his
  practice and professional experience with
  patients
• Neuroses are distorted ways of dealing with
  reality regulated by the Unconscious
• Discovery of the Unconscious mental processes
  are essentially unconscious
• The unconscious emerges through dreams, slips,
  jokes.
• Works General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
  Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and
  Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, Why War?
  (together with Albert Einstein)

2
Themes

• Dominance of unconscious process (reason is
  important, but reveals to be more complex than
  what had been thought before)
• Instincts/natural impulses/Ambivalence
• Phylogenesis ontogenesis individuals reproduce
  the phases of development of the species
  (neurotics/children/primitive people)evolutionary
  theory
• Traumatic events (individual and collective) tend
  to be denied and forgotten (to avoid pain)
• Totem and Taboo society originates in the murder
  of the father (primitive herd)Law emerges in the
  empty space left by the murdered despotic father.
• Society is based upon law and the prohibition of
  incest.

3
Civilization and its Discontents

• What are the influences to which the evolution
  of culture owes its origin, how did it arise and
  what determined its course? (725)
• Biological evolution (permanent sexual instincts)
  led to the establishment of families (gendered
  of labor)
• Herd (despotic father)
• Murder of the father?LAW culture

4
Love

• -Romantic/sexual love (prototype of all
  happiness but also causes pain intense
  anti-social The wise men of all ages have
  consequently warned us emphatically against this
  way of life)-- Women
• Altruistic love (avoids the pain of possession
  by attaching their love not to individual
  objects but to all men equally favors social
  bonds of friendship and altruism) (Religion)--Men

5
Libido

• Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental
  energy at his disposal, he must accomplish his
  tasks by distributing his libido to the best
  advantage. (727)
• Woman finds herself thus forced into the
  background by the claims of culture and she
  adopts an inimical attitude towards it. (727)

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Culture ( civilization) against Love(Sex)?
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Repressive Western Culture

• Heterosexual, monogamous standards are impossible
  to achieve (transgressions), but fulfill the
  function of deviating energy towards society and
  social impulses
• The sexual life of civilized man is seriously
  disabled, whatever we may say it sometimes makes
  an impression of becoming atrophied, just as
  organs like our teeth and our hair seem to be.
  (728)
• Civilization requires sacrifices and deprives us
  from happiness, but gives us security

8
Libidinal economy

• Love (Eros)
• Agression (death instinct)
• Are always present (we cannot eliminate either,
  but only channel them better, which is what
  culture attempts to do)
• Economy of good and evil (God the devil, the
  Germans the Jews, etcetera)

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Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself

• Why should we do this? (728)
• Civilization attempts to counterbalance our
  natural tendencies to aggression

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Communism

• The Communists believe that they have found a
  way of delivering us from this evil.()
  psychologically it is founded on an untenable
  illusion.() Suppose that personal rights to
  material goods are done away with, there still
  remain prerogatives in sexual relationships,
  which must arouse the strongest rancour and most
  violent enmity among men and women who are
  otherwise equal.
• But Nature makes us unequal
• Hatred for someone (the neighbor, the bourgeois,
  the Jew)