war sacrifice/psychoanalysis

[RE]

Psychoanalysis has no validity when it seeks to trump other disciplines.
But it has plenty when it can supplement them, and I think the Free
Association folks often lose track of the difference, or aren't careful
about warding off misunderstandings.  From another angle, no one goes to
work simply out of observance of a Law of the Father, but it's hard to
imagine anyone whose experience of work and its social organization is not
shaped by at least the tug of dutiful observance, however nicely sublimated
it is into some sort of Arbeitlust.

But psychoanalysis as mythology?  Only the most tendentious reading would
support that.  In "Sociology and Psychology" Adorno wrote of psychoanalysis
going into the depths of the subject and finding society.  Loosely, just add
unconscious psychological processes (lately getting good support from the
neurosciences and cognitive psychology, which used to think of the
unconscious as myth and psychoanalysis as a dead duck),  and you've got
psychoanalysis.
Randy
----- Original Message -----
From: <dredmond at efn.org>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 7:01 PM
Subject: Re: war sacrifice/psychoanalysis


> Quoting joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com>:
>
> > Psychoanalysis has also been extended to other realms: literary studies,
> > sociology, etc. I am very doubtful that it has any validity in those
> > domains.
>
> Psychoanalysis did have a genuinely radical moment, though - Freud was,
strange
> as it sounds, one of the first great theorists of the consumer culture.
The
> whole point of the Freudian revolution in psychology was (1) to replace
the
> notion of fixed, immutable identities with the notion of free-floating,
> malleable subjects, replete with personal microhistories, and (2) to
insist
> that all analysis has a moment of self-analysis. The later versions of
> psychoanalysis all but obliterated this radical insight underneath
reactionary
> mythologies of various kinds.
>
> -- Dennis
>
>
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