>John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> "to imagine that class conflict inspires greater artistic passion than
> personal conflict seems
>to me to miss what makes an artist make art. '
>
> (and)
>
> "In a classless society we would then call upon a host of other scenarios
>nearly unimaginable to our mind today."
>
> Precisely, John. I can't imagine what the "other scenarios" or motives
> of conflict would be in a harmonious classless society. Would envy,
> loneliness, vengefulness, insecurity, will to power, still exist? If so,
> that would bring in question the hope of a classless society, that a
> better human being would result from it. The issue here seems to be
> whether human drives and conflicts, as indicated in Freud, for example,
> are more fundamental than class relations in forming character.
but as feminist and leftist Freudians have pointed out, the source of those conflicts aren't unconnected from class society. Quite a few feminists have pointed out, for instance, that men's supposed tendency toward a sense of self based on separation from others and women's tendency toward a sense of self built in terms of their relations with others, is rooted in a system of child rearing dominated by women. One solution would be to make child rearing shared between men and women.
The dynamics of ego development would still be there, but the gendered inequality wouldn't be bound up with it. Thus, people might still grow up to experience separation anxiety and find that they don't cope well with it, thus causing them trouble with the wider society at times -- and thus causing pain, anguish, grief, etc. One interesting take on this as the source of art and craft, as well as much more mundane things like work, is Larry Hirschhorn's _The Workplace Within_. He is interesting for the leftist in so far as, while he's a small l liberal theoretically, he connects it all to a larger social theory of economic development -- at the meso (organization) level and the macro (social) level. He was astoundingly wrong in his predications about the new economy, when writing back in the late 80s, but what he's saying is connected to Marx's analysis of alienation and the division of labor.
This is a long and discombobulated rendering of Hirschhorn's work http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/01/its-a-shame/
I always thought Doug, with his interest in psychoanalysis and depression/depressives, would appreciate Hirschhorn's understanding of the "depressive position" as a process, not a static state. Moreover, when Carrol has described depression, it fits right in with what Hirschhorn describes as well. Here, though, Hirschhorn manages to do what Doug often fails to do with Carrol. Because H is more wordy about it than the parsimonious Doug, H explains how it's not just an interiority of the individual that's involved, but its a very social process that you get an individual interiority at all -- and not just social in terms of an individual family or group, but in terms of that family or group as part of a wider social structure with attendant patterns of organization and interaction -- which is then all tied to particular economic structures, etc.
ANd none of it is necessarily incompatible with a recognition that depression is largely a chemical process. I read a study in Sci Am a few years back which talked about how situational depression, when exacerbated by an individual's social condition (such as lack of treatment of sit. depression) can exacerbate the chemical processes, creating permanent processes in the brain in reaction to events. As another Sci Am article pointed out, Freudian theories and the latest development in the supposedly non-freudian world of neuropsychology, etc. may actually be quite compatible after all. :)
hee. sorry again for overpost doug. but now I must get to the packing and, as a consequence, will be too busy to continue this posting spree. that's what i'm telling myself anyway.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)