[lbo-talk] cleansing

Philip Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Sat Apr 11 19:59:32 PDT 2009



> Yo, dude, you said:
>
> And hilarious that it sort of explains why more people would care more
>> about
>> their toilet during times in which they have to "hold back" on spending...
>>
>
> But I'm saying that this obsession long predates the imposed "holding back"
> on spending.

Well, to go into that we have to ask which comes first? The egg or the chicken...

I won't even try and answer that. But I will say that there is a "dialectical" link between poo-poo time and spending... that's recognised empirically.


>
> You know, Freudian theory is something I know pretty well. I've got quite a
> few pages in Wall Street that do a psychoanalysis of credit money vs.
> gold-based money - a regime of oral entitlement connected with the breakdown
> of patriarchal authority vs. a system driven by the guilty sadomasochism of
> the anus driven by the law of the father. So your ahistorical version of
> events doesn't really hold, um, water either.
>
>

Hang on... I was under the impression that you can't simply apply psychoanalytic theory to anything and everything. You have to have a good idea of the people involved otherwise it means nothing. Certainly some connections can be made, but these are spurious.

This notion that you can arbitrarily call every stockbroker an obsessional (i.e. anal figure) is total nonsense. Many stock-brocker's are hysterics... men who avoid commitment through building their own egos (i.e. with symptoms other than anality)...

The only thing I'd say to social scientists (and everyone else) is: be very careful with psychological judgements...



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