The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...
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This is from Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Freud throws off in a footnote a rather wild speculation about the origins of the human use of fire. I'll just paraphrase most of it, but I'll directly quote a bit at the end. In primordial days, lightning would strike the branches of trees and set them ablaze in this primordial forest, and primitive people would see the branches, still burning, fall to the ground. Then usually, one or more men would step toward the branch and put out the fire with their urine stream. Freud presumes that this was very pleasant for the men who did this: a form of sexual excitation, even. Why? Well … it was apparently an Oedipal thing. The father gods in the sky had sent the fire, the men of the tribe were conquering the father gods by pissing on the fire. Aaaaaah, feels good, eh? The real Prometheus? The real hero who tamed fire for the human species? That was a man who deprived himself of this pleasure by … N...
Somebody in Yahoo!Answers recently asked the following very broad question: " How does Freud, Jung or other psychoanalyst explain the development/ manifestation of the Oedipus/ Electra complex within a gay?" It isn't only very broad, it is ungrammatical. The verb should be either "do" or "did." If we think of the proper names as shorthand for their ideas/texts, then present-tense "do" is better. Anyway, it is a fascinating question, though perhaps of diminishing significance as the authority of those names/texts recedes. I'm not scholar enough to take it all on, but I did answer a bit of it as best I could, thus: M y understanding is that in Freudian theory, sexual identity is determined in adolescence, as the 'latency phase' comes to an end. A growing boy 'should' resolve his oedipal conflict by identification with his father, so his father is no longer a rival, and by the development of a sentimental affection ...