"Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche." I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge. The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.) But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a p...
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Philosophers continue to wrestle with Freudian psychoanalysis. Case in point, Rudolf Bernet, a French thinker. In 2013, Bernet wrote a book on the subject which was widely praised, but which has only just now been translated into English under the title Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and published by the Northwestern University Press, focusing on Freud on the one hand and Lacan on the other. I'm looking today at a review of the book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , which tells me that one of Bernet's purposes is to create a philosophical etymology of the idea of "drive," or as Freud would have written it "trieb," from Aristotle to the point at which Freud and later Lacan picked up on it. [And since Freud's image is all to familiar, I have provided one of Lacan above.] If I can trust the reviewer -- Daniel J. Smith of the University of Memphis -- Bernet has a Heideggerian background. This means he "...
My recent reading includes the book AMARNA SUNSET (2018), by Egyptologist Aidan Dodson. It is about the demise of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty, the dynasty famous for the heresies of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gets credit (or blame) for the creation of monotheism. Akhenaten was featured in Sigmund Freud's last book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939). Freud posits that the historical Moses was a devotee of Akhenaten, and that he and the other loyalists were exiled from Egypt after his hero's death, and followers of the older polytheism restored their own power and their gods. That was the origin of Judaism, on this view. There is much more to Freud's theory, and of course he brought psychoanalysis into the picture. He believed that the reason Moses didn't reach the promised land was that he was murdered, as an oppressive father figure, and that after he was murdered the memory of that dark deed was buried in the unconscious of the perpetrated, taking the form of exagg...
Adolf Grünbaum died on November 15. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh perhaps best known as an outspoken critic of Freudianism and psychoanalysis more broadly. Grünbaum wrote THE FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE (1984). This book was in its own way as much a criticism of Popper as of Freud. Psychoanalysis was the paradigmatic case of a pseudo-science for Popper. It was unfalsifiable and thus not a science, but rather a structure of ideas falsely marketing itself as a science. Popper, though, did not maintain that it was meaningless, or valueless. Had Freud considered himself an author of creative, imaginative, prose he would have been on the right side of the demarcation Popper sought to enforce. As Grünbaum tells the story, that was misguided. As the Popperian critique itself became conventional, some of Freud's admirers complied with it, on the master's behalf. And so was born the "hermeneutic" scho...
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...
A thought today from Bertrand Russell's book, Human Knowledge. Russell is here discussing the relationship of cause and effect. He considers the possibility that the relationship might be entirely subjective, just a name for the fact that A regularly precedes B in my experience . Whenever I see a dry match struck against a rock, I then see a flame, etc. He refers to this hypothesis as that of a "world consisting only of data," because it involves seeing causation (and other relations) as connections between one datum and another, not as facts about some external world whence come the data into my subjective consciousness. And of that idea, he says this: "As regards the irregularity of a world consisting only of data, this is an argument to which it is difficult to give precision. Roughly speaking, many sensations occur without any fixed antecedents in our own experience, and in a manner which suggests irresistibly that, if they have causes, these causes lie ...
Two new books about narcissism are getting some play in the press of late. Jeffrey Kluger's THE NARCISSIST NEXT DOOR comes to us from Riverhead Books. The other, THE AMERICANIZATION OF NARCISSISM by Elizabeth Lunbeck, hails from Harvard Un. Press. Kluger, a science writer with TIME, wants to warn and forearm readers about the potential "monsters" in their own lives -- families, workplaces, neighborhoods. He also invokes such pop-cult examples as Donald Trump, who he says has the "insatiable hunger to be the largest, loudest, most honkingly conspicuous presence in any room." Lunbeck. a professor of history at Vanderbilt, seems to want to take Christopher Lasch down a peg. It was Lasch who wrote THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM (1979), and Lunbeck says that Lasch's treatment of the term has made narcissism a cliché, "a highfalutin name for the old-fashioned complaint that modernity means a loosening of restraint." I'm looking at this moment at a...
May 6th was the 158th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. In commemoration thereof, here is a lengthy and fascinating quotation from Freud's Moses , a book written by a professor of Jewish History, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and published in 1993. The bit I'm about to quote is simply Yerushalmi's summary of Freud's views on Moses, without at this point any editorial comment by Yerushalmi (or by me). It is, I think, a remarkable example of a commentator who did a better job of describing Freud's views on this point than Freud himself ever managed. Monotheism is not of Jewish origin but an Egyptian discovery. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV established it as his state religion in the form of an exclusive worship of the sun-power, or Aton, thereafter calling himself Ikhnaton. The Aton religion ... was characterized by the exclusive belief in one God, the rejection of anthropomorphism, magic, and sorcery, and the absolute denial of an afterlife. Upon Ikhnato...