[lbo-talk] Power (Waiting for Foucault)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Jul 3 16:28:42 PDT 2008


shag wrote:
>
> as i said before, i completely agree with this. that's why i like freudian
> theory: eros and thanatos are inextricably intertwined.
>
> in order to change and grow as a human being, i have to destroy those
> things about me i no longer want to be. i have to destroy my ignorance in
> order to learn -- and do so over and over again. in order to become, say, a
> more generous person, i have to be willing to destroy my tendency to be
> selfish. the examples are endless. i always like the one that occured to
> me: an infant, in the primary state of narcissism, can't diffferntiate
> itself from the world, right? when it first latches on to a breast or
> bottle in order to it, it doesn't really undertand that the breast is not
> itself. infants can be pretty frantic and aggressive about latching on when
> they're hungry -- or something has stimulated the fight/flight response.
> and, in order to eat, they have to have the impulse to latch on and suck at
> something, eating and destroying, really, itself (if you buy the primary
> state of narcissism thingaroo).

I think this paragraph is an excellent illustration of the fact that Freudian psychology is merely a form of literary criticism -- it plays with words as though they were words in a poem, n0t as though they referred to any feature of human thought or feeling or personality.

This explains why Freudianism exerts such attraction on scholars in the humanities and so little on psychiatrists, psychologists, or neuroscientists.

Carrol



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