Well, you sweepingly diagnosed 144 million people in a country in which, presumably, you have never been, as borderline psychotics with sadistic tendencies, based on a book written four generations ago by a writer with an elitist agenda (if you're palling around with Lenin and Trotsky, you're an elitist in my book, no matter how egalitarian your rhetoric). You then went on to blame these people, who have spent the better part of the past decade getting kicked repeatedly in the face, for their own misfortune.
This is what I find offensive. Imagine if I had come on here and described how in reading about Richard Wright's childhood in "Black Boy," I was able to make broad conclusions about how the structure of the black urban family was to blame for African-American ghetto poverty.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
Ted Winslow wrote:
The passage contains the following ideas. Adult personality traits are rooted in the family relations characteristic of infancy and childhood. Paranoia, hostility, sadistic aggressiveness etc. are the product of a particular kind of family relations. (These two ideas are elaborated in Melanie Klein's "object relations" theory of the roots of adult personality in experiences in infancy and childhood.) Gorky's My Childhood describes family relations like those Klein claims are associated with the dominance in adult personality of relatively primitive forms of defence against persecutory and depressive anxiety such as paranoia, sadistic aggressiveness, etc. To the extent they were typical of Russian peasant households the relations described by Gorky would lead to those traits as typical of personalities emerging from those households - they might show up, for instance, as extreme anti-Semitism. This would have social implications.
It's the opposite of racist. It doesn't trace personality traits to unalterable innate "genetic" features of individuals. It explains racism as the product of primitive defences against anxiety, defences themselves taken as most likely dominant in personality because of relations in infancy and childhood. It does, however, acknowledge the existence of irrationality in the form of racism, other kinds of paranoia, sadism etc. It doesn't assume that individuals are everywhere and always rational.
It's been used (by Roger Money-Kyrle in Psychoanalysis and Politics) to explain the roots in family and economic relations of the kind of personality strongly attracted to fascism and Hitler in Germany. As I pointed out some time ago, the general ontological idea I was using it to illustrate, "internal social relations," is implicitly used by Marx to tie the coming into political dominance in mid-19th century France of the mentality represented by Louis Bonaparte to the irrational mentality of a large section of the French peasantry.
I assume when you say "offensive," you mean, among other things, obviously mistaken. In what way are these ideas obviously mistaken.
Ted
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