Setting: the modernist era. A time when individual interests were both emphasized and degraded, art became virtually unrecognizable, and survival of the fittest permeated society. Thinkers began to explore the idea of humans as irrational beings, abandoning the conventions of the Enlightenment to explore the darker side of the psyche. This new intellectual sensibility was manifested in Nietzsche's nihilism, a singular doctrine which lacked the optimism of religion and the (rather ridiculous) approach of perspectivism. However, Nietzsche's philosophy is not untouched by the reaches of imperialism and Romantic exoticism. His theories about repeated lives and divine death echoed Hindu and Buddhist doctrine; thus, western philosophy began to take on a distinctly eastern feel.
Although Nietzsche influenced many high profile people, only one literally internalized his teachings--Sigmund Freud. Freud, a pop culture icon in his own right, is commonly associated with sex, death, and therapists. These associations are not altogether incorrect, but Freud's thoughts are (naturally) more complex, and he probably had quite a few unconscious philosophies which he failed to share with us. Unconsciousness aside, Freud attempted to use his theories to define "the human." Freud's human is base, unthinking, aggressive, repressed, governed by intricate levels of consciousness and egotism. On a superficial level, Freud doesn't seem to have missed the mark. We all have socially unacceptable thoughts and feel the influence of social conditioning. However, between all the uncontrollable forces that govern the human psyche, Freud somehow loses sight of the physical, real individual. A human is much more than a series of synapses and warring instincts. Freud was so caught up in the complex terrain of the psyche that he lost sight of the overall delicacy of the body. He does not explain the physical actions that seem automatic, like blinking and breathing, perhaps attributing them to the activity of an infinite subconscious. He trivializes conscious thinking and self-consciousness--the very qualities that define the human condition. After all, are we not afraid of dying because we consciously acknowledge the inevitability of our death? Don't we define humanity as impermanent because we recognize death? If Thanatos governed our non-erotic selves, as Freud suggests, we would not understand mortality, and our death instincts would simply lead us to "simplicity." Yet, this is not the case. We are painfully aware of our time, and we think we understand what it means to die. Instincts do not allow such lucidity. Freud seems to have forgotten, momentarily, that we are not wolves, and that the anxiety of the human condition comes from knowing what we are.
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Freud would respond that our philosophical fear of death's inevitability is an intellectualization (i.e. a defense mechanism) of the death instinct. Instincts don't allow lucidity, correct, but Freud never argues that the human psyche ends with instinct. The whole existence of the ego in Freud's scheme is to explain the rational aspect of humanity, that which sets us apart from other animals. However, arguing that rationality and consciousness expose the cracks in Freud doesn't work because Freud already accounts for how rationality and consciousness play into his scheme.
ReplyDeleteMy critique of Freud stems from the fact that there is no biological basis for what he is talking about. His 'death instinct', which he apparently observed in veterans suffering from PTSD, is a complete falsehood from a medical standpoint. People don't relive their traumas because of some desire for destruction, they do it because of physiological changes to the brain.
Freud may be useful as an illustrative tool for certain behaviors we observe in people. But that doesn't mean he's correct. It is the same reason why we still learn Newtonian kinematics even though they break down at relativistic speeds.
"Freud was so caught up in the complex terrain of the psyche that he lost sight of the overall delicacy of the body. He does not explain the physical actions that seem automatic, like blinking and breathing, perhaps attributing them to the activity of an infinite subconscious. He trivializes conscious thinking and self-consciousness--the very qualities that define the human condition. After all, are we not afraid of dying because we consciously acknowledge the inevitability of our death? Don't we define humanity as impermanent because we recognize death? I"
ReplyDeleteTWO POINTS:
First off-I love the idea of the "delicacy of the human body." Just remember, the the body is the seat of the Id or Unconscious. That is where the instinctual needs are. Emotions are conscious expressions of the intersection between the body and consciousness--(emotions are conscious to us, and are originary in the body--the nexus of the interaction between affect (emotion) and idea (consciousness).
The way these connections are made is through a couple of concepts that Freud talks about at some length (and we didn't). The instinctual needs of the human animal fill the id with instinctual cathexes or energy charges; yet it has no organization or will, only an impulse to obtain satisfaction. “Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge- that, in our view, is all there is in the id.” Freud, Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture 26, p359. This energy, if it flows from the sexual instincts, Freud called libido. And this energy of the Id had to attach itself to an object (or idea). Affect (or emotion) would form as a consequence of attachment--so it was important to attach to the right idea with the right affect. And if that object was too dangerous, then it had to be repressed, or sublimated--and here, affect can help as well. What does that all mean?
Part of the difficulty in looking at the nature of affect and idea, is that Freud’s own thinking on this topic changed over the course of his intellectual life. Freud felt that emotions lay in the realm of consciousness. Therefore, they are attached to the ego. Initially, Freud believed that an affective charge came about as a consequence of repression. The energy of the repressed idea was discharged by the emotion, say anxiety. Thus, an affective charge is something that becomes detached from the idea in the process of repression. “It represents that part of the instinct which has become detached from the idea, and finds proportionate expression, according to its quantity, in processes which become observable to perception as affects.” Freud, S., General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, p110 However, by 1926 he concluded that it had to be the other way around. Repression no longer caused the affect as a by-product, as a means of discharging cathexes of the unconscious idea. Freud now saw the affect as a signal to bring about repression. The ego-based affect, usually anxiety, was unpleasurable, and acted to alert the ego to the presence of a danger-situation. The pleasure principle kicks in and the id “turns on itself”, helping the ego to bring about repression. One runs from a dangerous situation; to psychically run away is to repress. In both formulations the idea temporally gives up the energy attached to it. The outcome can take a number of routes.
“Either the anxiety attack is fully generated and the ego withdraws entirely from the objectionable excitation; or, in place of the experimental cathexis it opposes the excitation with an anti cathexis, and this combines with the energy of the repressed impulse to form a symptom; or the anti cathexis is taken up into the ego as a reaction formation, as an intensification of certain of the ego’s dispositions, as a permanent alteration of it.”
Freud, S., New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, p90.
The libido attached to the idea can either be diverted when the impulse is destroyed, or remained unchanged a constant source of irritation and pressure to the ego. The diversion is in the form of a symptom- the energy of the idea is bound up, somehow, in the somatic structure of the individual. It is a substitute formation; the plasticity of the instincts allows the instinct to find expression through alternate routes. The ego’s role is to capture, organize. It is natural for the ego to want to bring in a symptom in from its isolation, to identify with it and it treats the symptom as a kind of frontier station- between the conscious and the unconscious. Danger exists however. The ego’s need to defend itself against the id’s demands can, through the possibility of continuously signaling of affects like anxiety, lead to a draining of the ego’s energies, leading to exhaustion. Further, the repressed impulses may return disguised as neurotic symptoms- illness, obsessional behavior, nightmares.
SECOND POINT:
I don't know if I would agree with you that Freud trivializes consciousness or self-consciousness. After all, would you say that Darwin trivializes our humanity when he points out we are part of evolution's big picture? Or that Copernicus trivializes humanity in the scheme of things when he tells us that we orbit the sun? Or is this the right way to think about this?