Littleton: it's Adorno's fault

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Oct 2 10:04:56 PDT 1999


kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:


> Is it ok if I join this dance?
>
> On Sat, 2 Oct 1999 10:36:38 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi
> <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>
> > You
> > actually don't think that "Freud's version of the mind and its drives" is
> > correct, do you? Have you read _Inventing the Psychological: Toward a
> > Cultural History of Emotional Life in America_, eds. Joel Pfister & Nancy
> > Schnog (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), for instance? You might find the book
> > interesting.
>
> There is a real problem here. The charge that Freud's
> account is ahistorical is, in many respects, correct. But
> this doesn't say much - that's Freud's point. The
> psychical life of the mind *isn't* historical.

This is overtly and crudely religious. The *brain* is ahistorical (at least in the relative short run of the last 100,000 years) The mind doesn't "have" a history, it *is* its history. It is complex of social relations grounded in the physical structure of the brain.

Carrol



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