There will never be total "transparency" due to the simple fact that much of what our _bodies_ do -- including what our _brains_ do -- never rises to the level of consciousness. You normally do not pay attention to your toes unless you stub them, have someone lick them, and so on. You are unaware of your bowel movements until you feel the "call of nature" (or else you get constipated or suffer from diarrhea). Ignorance is bliss, in so far as much of our ignorance originates from our bodily well-being. Pain creates awareness, and pleasure is a diminutive form of pain. What Trotsky should have said: let's live largely pain-free lives so that we can enjoy pleasurable pains in moderate doses under controlled circumstances. But he was, alas, trapped in the psychoanalytic language of "instincts versus consciousness"....
While I believe it is neither possible, necessary, nor desirable to master all our feelings, it is advisable that some of us try a little harder to try & control some of our feelings, which should make, for instance, e-lists freer from flames & conversations more enjoyable.
BTW, Trotsky was far more sympathetic to psychoanalysis than I am. For instance, he wrote:
***** When the "genius" of Rozanov is spoken of, it is chiefly his revelations in the field of sex that are emphasized. But if some one of his admirers would try to bring together and to systematize what Rozanov said in his peculiar language, adapted to omissions and ambiguities, about the influence of sex on poetry, on religion, on government, he would get something very meager and very little that is new. The Austrian psycho-analytic school (Freud, Jung, Albert Adler and others) made an immeasurably greater contribution to the question of the role of the sex-element in the forming of individual character and of social consciousness. In fact, there can be no comparsion here. Even the most paradoxical exaggerations of Freud are much more significant and fertile than the broad surmises of Rozanov who constantly falls into intentional half-wittedness, or simple babble, repeats himself, and lies for two. (Leon Trotsky, _Literature and Revolution_ at <http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/trotsky/works/1924/lit_revo/ch01.htm>) *****
I've never read Rozanov, so I don't know if Trotsky's dim view of him is justified, but it is clear that Trotsky thought highly of psychoanalysis -- especially Freud -- if not all those who professed to practice psychoanalysis:
***** The influence of Freud upon the new biographical school is undeniable, but superficial. In essence these parlor psychologists are inclining to a belletristic irresponsibility. They employ not so much the method as the terminology of Freud, and not so much for analysis as for literary adornment.
In his recent work Emil Ludwig, the most popular representative of this genre, has taken a new step along the chosen path: he has replaced the study of the hero's life and activity with dialogue. Behind the answers of the statesman to questions put to him, behind his intonations and grimaces, the writer discovers his real motives. Conversation becomes almost a confession. In its technique Ludwig's new approach to the hero suggests Freud's approach to his patient: it is a matter of bringing the personality to the surface with its own cooperation. But with all this external similarity, how different it is in essence! The fruitfulness of Freud's work is attained at the price of a heroic break with all kinds of conventions. The great psychoanalyst is ruthless. At work he is like a surgeon, almost like a butcher with rolled-up sleeves. Anything you want, but there is not one hundredth of one percent of diplomacy in his technique. Freud bothers least of all about the prestige of his patient, or about considerations of goad form, or any other kind of false note or frill. And it is for this reason that he can carry on his dialogue only face-to-face, without secretary or stenographer, behind padded doors.
Not so Ludwig. He enters into a conversation with Mussolini, or with Stalin, in order to present the world with an authentic portrait of their souls. Yet the whole conversation follows a program previously agreed upon. Every word is taken down by a stenographer. The eminent patient knows quite well what can be useful to him in this process and what harmful. The writer is sufficiently experienced to distinguish rhetorical tricks, and sufficiently polite not to notice them. The dialogue developing under these circumstances, if it does indeed resemble a confession, resembles one put on for the talking pictures.
Emil Ludwig has every reason to declare: "I understand nothing of politics." This is supposed to mean: "I stand above politics." In reality it is a mere formula of personal neutrality -- or to borrow from Freud, it is that "mental censor" which makes easier for the psychologist his political function. In the same way diplomatists do not interfere with the inner life of the country to whose government they are accredited, but this does not prevent them on occasion from supporting plots and financing acts of terrorism. (Leon Trotsky, "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" at <http://www.trotsky.net/works/1926-len.htm> *****
Lastly, Trotsky co-authored a manifesto on art & revolution with no less a devotee to psychoanalysis than André Breton, who was in turn influenced by Trotsky:
***** In order to assist the revolution of the mind, Breton aligned Surrealism with the Communist Party. Inspired by Leon Trotsky's biography of Lenin, Breton reviewed the book in La Révolution Surréaliste in 1925, and concluded that:
Communism, existing as an organized system, alone permits the accomplishment of the greatest social upheaval....Good or mediocre, in itself defensible or not from the moral point of view, how can we forget...that it has revealed itself as the most marvellous agent ever for the substitution of one world for another? [60]...
...Breton argued that the trials were really an extension of the Stalinist vendetta against the exiled Leon Trotsky. Breton had always been sympathetic to Trotsky, and the Surrealists break with the Communist Party left the group free to take the Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary war hero as their champion. Breton admired Trotskys consistent revolutionary position and his interest in the arts....Breton was able to visit Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, and he admitted that "my heart beat fast" at the prospect of meeting one whose life was "incomparably more dramatic than any other." The very appearance and presence of Trotsky moved Breton:
The deep blue eyes, the remarkable face, the abundant silver locks....[H]e radiates from his whole person something electrifying....a depth of unaltered fresh youthfulness....[T]here is no greater intensity of spirit than his. [117]
In the course of their visit, Breton and Trotsky jointly produced Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant (Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art), which emphatically demanded freedom for art in the face of repressive fascist and communist regimes. Their argument was not for the freedom of "pure" art for arts sake, for they believed that true art could be nothing but revolutionary. However, the artist would never be able to adequately serve the struggle unless he was entirely free to express his own inner interpretation of the struggle. Their manifesto ended with the exhortation: "The independence of art -- for the revolution. The revolution -- for the complete freedom of art!" [118]...
[60] Breton, "Leon Trotsky; Lenin" La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 5, 15 October 1925: 29.
[117] Breton, "Visite à Leon Trotsky," (talk given at the meeting of the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste to commemorate the October Revolution, on 11 November 1938), in La Clé des Champs (Pars: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1967), 56-57.
[118] André Breton and Leon Trotsky, "Pour un Art revolutionnaire independant," (25 July 1938) in Tracts Surréalistes et Déclarations Collectives, 337-39. This tract was originally signed by Diego Rivera in the place of Leon Trotsky, who was forbidden by the Mexican government to participate in any political activities.
(Christopher Terrence Ryan, "Two Intellectual Responses to the Dilemma of Political "Engagement" in Interwar France: André Breton & Pierre Drieu La Rochelle," _Essays in History_ 33 [1990-1991] at <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH33/ryan33.html>) *****
Here's a photo of Trotsky with Breton and Diego Rivera in Mexico in 1938: <http://www.creative.net/~alang/lit/surreal/trotsky.htm>.
Yoshie