Slow Learner again. I find THIS very interesting. Young P on Freudianism

[Steven Koteff]

You know, I was really compelled by my recent (first) reading of Joseph
Campbell's *Hero. *And kind of taken with the idea that recent centuries
have seen, for tons of reasons, a disappearing of most people's inroads to
the subconscious--which was accomplished for a very long time by the
symbols of mythology and religion, by various communal rites and rituals we
have discarded along the way, as well as by the assistance of particularly
gifted medicine men, shamans, mystics, etc. Campbell says that, absent all
that stuff, psychoanalysis allows the psychiatrist to become the modern day
medicine man, helping us to make sense of our unconscious lives, to
transcend the roadblocks that exist within us, etc.

Actually, I'm just starting that NOB's *Life Against Death *(on Mark's
recommendation). This is from Christopher Lasch's intro, talking about (and
quoting) Brown: "Brown has no interest in the diagnosis of psychological
symptoms; he wants to use psychoanalysis to reclaim the moral insights of
religion and mythology, not to explain them away. 'Our generation,' he
writes, '... has happily thrown away the accumulated wisdom of the race.'
Psychoanalysis, he thinks, provides a way to recapture this wisdom."

Brown does seem take care to distinguish between psychoanalysis as an
academic/medical discipline and as the particular field via which Freud
delivered new insights into the human phenomenon. Likewise Lasch, in his
intro, distinguishes between Brown's Freudianism and the particular segment
of Freud's work (the earlier, Eros-centric work) that is championed by
neo-Freudian critics (who, Lasch and Brown say, seem to willfully ignore
Freud's later, Thanatos-centric work).

I'm not far into the Brown, but I'm really enjoying it at this point. The
intro itself is worth reading. My concern is that the book seems
inclined--as a sort of overzealous response to the shallow and
eros-centered understanding of psychoanalysis he's responding to--to not
only argue for Thanatos's equal consideration but to crown it the
more potent/authoritative/eminent of the two in helping us come to an
understanding of human events.



On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 10:40 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> For sure. The critical discourses of deconstruction and postmodernism
> would be crippled without the good old psychoanalytic do-si-do:
>
>  "the less one can see of characteristic X, and/or the more a person or
> work disowns characteristic X, the mor certain I-the-interpreter become
> that characteristic X is repressed, deeply embedded, and crucially
> important."
>
> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 11:17 AM, Steven Koteff <steviekoteff at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Monte, your last paragraph resonates. Creative writing as an academic
>> discipline and maybe a contemporary phenomenon is carrying Freud's torch in
>> the survival of the kind of narrative you mention. Actually it seems to be
>> virtually hard wired into the narrative-constructing tendencies of at least
>> a few generations of Americans.
>>
>> On Feb 20, 2016, at 8:12 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  MK> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp
>> intellectual class for postwar America
>> and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that
>>
>> ​It's my guess that the fading context of Freud and of Pavlov -> Watson
>> behaviorism is already, and will be more in the future, one of the most
>> dated aspects of GR. That is, it will be something that ambitious readers
>> will have to "study up" as they do much of Bloom's 1904-vintage
>> pop-intellectual mental furniture in Ulysses, or as we do all of Dante's
>> late-medieval theo-psychology .
>>
>> I thought again of this recently while bingeing on Hitchcock, especially
>> re-watching 'Spellbound' and 'Psycho.' In the penultimate scene of the
>> latter -- otherwise a superbly taut, economical narrative --, a
>> psychiatrist who has just interviewed Norman Bates in his cell comes into
>> the sheriff's office and delivers a painfully long, pedantic, flat-footed
>> explanation of Bates' mental state and history (almost all of which we
>> could infer for ourselves). For decades I'd wondered how Hitchcock could
>> have made that mistake. This time I watched a 1997 "making of Psycho"
>> extra, incorporating an interview with screenwriter Joe Stefano. He had
>> been in psychoanalysis himself at the time of writing the script, and said
>> that Hitchcock had initially opposed that scene as a "hat-grabber" -- i.e.,
>> the audience would start getting ready to leave. Thd Master should have
>> stuck to his guns on that.
>>
>> At least Pynchon didn't succumb with Tyrone to the trope that annoys me
>> most in a lot of the strongly Freud-influenced storytelling of the
>> 1930s-1960s: that explicitly remembering and "talking out" an early trauma
>> (Mommy did X, Daddy didn't do Y, I witnessed and repressed Z) produces an
>> irreversible, even rapid "let the sunshine in" breakthrough to psychic
>> health. Some of that cropped up in the Satanic-child-abuse mania c. 1990,
>> and you can still see traces of it in various "recovery" psychologies
>> today.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 7:49 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Flange is not as concerned with the greedy cost of his analysis with
>>> Diaz
>>> "than with the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have
>>> been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and,
>>> Freud having been mother's milk for
>>> that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new."
>>>
>>> Freud was the mother's milk of a certain social and esp intellectual
>>> class for postwar America
>>> and, of course, TRP would know and have absorbed that. And learned its
>>> attitude to
>>> self-understanding and its psychic discoveries.
>>>  And soon would want to go much beyond that 'nothing newness' by
>>> reading and being influenced deeply by Life Against Death, Brown's
>>> Beyond Freudianism
>>> to the max as seen in GR.
>>>
>>> GR p. 411: follows seance words:
>>> ...[They] pick up the reflexes of Intent to Gawk; self-criticism is an
>>> amazing technique, it shouldn't work but it does"..
>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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