[lbo-talk] Post Marxist Era

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Sun Sep 23 21:59:11 PDT 2007


Doug Henwood wrote:


>Is that your understanding of Freud's unconscious? Like some
>puppetmaster working offstage? And not the precipitate of one's life
>history?
>
That precipitate includes two things: 1. cultural and historical conditioning -- forces so large and deep and all-encompassing and obvious that they become invisible and 2. the unacknowledged/unprocessed experience of our personal life. For the sake of discursive writing these are separable. Within one's experience they are interwoven.

The process of analysis ideally would make both strands of unprocessed (unconscious) experience, conscious. No freedom is possible (no matter what govt is in place) without an awareness of the forces that have shaped us, of our total experience.

Granted that so far psychoanalysis has focused mainly on the strand of personal unprocessed experience, but this is not to say that it has to limit itself in this way.

Joanna



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