In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Ian Livingston]

Dang. Meant to reply to all on that last. Oh, well. Much going on today.

Dr. Hilarious is a character in The Crying of Lot 49 who claims
discipleship from Freud but who was a Nazi collaborator, specializing
in menacing faces.

Do you really accept Freud's explanations for homosexuality and his
generalization of repressed homosexuality to just about every male who
manifests sexual dysfunction? He was tolerant for a man of his era,
but, in comparison to someone of, say, the 15th Century, he was pretty
uptight, trying to blame homosexuality as a pathology, etc. And didn't
Oedipus precede Freud by a couple millennia? Wasn't the whole Hellenic
exposure thing a part of the Greek story of combativeness? Look how
many heroic tales hinge on childhood trauma. Athena alone among the
gods seems to have escaped childhood trauma, but only because she was
never a child. Freud did not introduce that story line. What Freud did
was establish psychoanalysis. There is much to be said for that. We
need not lionize him for it.

I have yet to see any compelling evidence for Jung having been
complicit with the Nazis. It seems the argument hinges mostly on his
having survived.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Jude Bloom <jude at bloomradio.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 14, 2012, at 5:42 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>
> Of course, as Dr. Hilarious notes, Freud had the good grace to die
> before the Third Reich could burn him for his semitic heritage, and
> Jung, of course, was Swiss and so survived the war and all its
> awfulness. Some folks might still blame him for that.
>
>
>
> Yes I think some folks blame Jung for more than that, namely Nazi
> collaboration or sympathies. I know Jung stridently denied this, but much
> later on after it was all over. Like Richard Strauss, he seems to have tried
> to stay out of it all but has some taint on him, fairly or unfairly.
>
> I was thinking that Freud was also ahead of his time on the gay thing. He
> was surprisingly progressive on it. Another way society's now just catching
> up with where he was.
>
> Also, I was thinking the dominant story that people tell of themselves these
> days seems to be a Freudian one — specifically the Childhood Damage meme.
> Almost everyone I know or see on TV etc (myself included) tells the story of
> themselves as having to overcome certain bad things in childhood which have
> defined their life. Family molestation etc — which Freud, with a kind of
> cowardice, bailed out on — seems to be a dominant idea for so many people,
> especially women.
>
> Who's Dr. Hilarious?
>
>
> jb



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant