<HTML> andie: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Who we, Yoshie? You and the other mechanical Marxists? No oneelse has chimed on on that, so better stick to the first person singular. Yes, I think some phenomena, including psychosexual ones, have psychosexual explanations. The P/S aspects are not the complete explanation, but they are important explanatory factors, things without which you cannot understand or expalin what is going or why the phenomenon occurs. Frankly, there's justs o much that calls out for P/S explanation, that is, P/S explanans, that I mystified taht you should regard P/S factors as epiphenomenal. You cannot understand racism without it -- the mystique of the big black buck, the fear that They will marry your sister and rape your women (see here the great study White Over Black by some Berkleley historioan whose name escapes me); you cannoy understand war ands militarism without it, the ideal of manliness ans strength as killing; you cannot understand (no such) women's oppression without, with people's identies being wrapped up in gender-specific roles (this is part of Luker's point). But the notion that the P/S is never independently explantory, that it is always to be expalined by something else, is so ludicrously stupid -- sorry, there is no other word for it -- that the ball's in your court to make it rermotely plausible. Frankly, I don't have the energy to deal with this right now. You can do better than thuis. Yoshie, and you usually do. Keep organizing against the war. jks ^^^^^^^^^ CB: Perhaps Yoshie and Carrol ( the "we" ? ) are getting at that the explanations for racism, militarism and women's oppression as general phenomena are social rather than "psycho" , in the sense that "psycho" means individual and further individual-biological. This would not be a "mechanical" Marxist explanation reducing everything to economics. </BLOCKQUOTE> It is the issue of emergent levels or levels of organization of reality. Human society is an emergent level of reality, not reducible to the individual humans, and in many ways it determines individual psychological behavior. Society is not <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">a "collection of individuals" such that a social phenomenon such as racy myths about Black sexuality are explained by reference to the genes of individuals causing some to be racists and ,what, sexual fantasizers about superior Black sexuality.  However, social facts do explain  or determine individuals' patterns of behavior. Such that racist and sexually repressive socialization causes individuals to do that thing Justin is talking about, subscribe to the myth of the Black rapist. Of course the socialization must be of each individual's psyche, but it is socialization , not something rooted in these individuals independent of their social lives. I think the main criticism "we" are making of psychoanalysis it that Freud ulitmately accepts a model of a non-social individual ( See the Marxist Christopher Caudwell's critiques of Freud, tying it to his critique of the bourgeois concept of freedom; " A Study in Bourgeois Psychology: Freud"). However, there is an advance in Freud, I think, in that his legendary focus on sex and the shaping role of the family is in part attention to _social_ causes. And this even suggests a materialist theory of reproduction to be integrated with the Marxist theory of production. ( See my ... geez...it's been a while and I forgot what I titled that paper. "For Women's Liberation" or something like that). As to introspection, I don't think it contradicts the above analysis to say that a given individual might find relief from unhappiness by examining the social ideas and experiences that have been stuffed in the head. Also Freudianism analysis involves an "intimate" exchange, which is to say a social cure. Finally, the social ideas are embodied in organic brain matter, so that they can be altered by chemicals, medicine,etc. It's just that the social ideas ( a redundancy) do not arise in origin out of the individuals. </BLOCKQUOTE> </HTML>