More Eros and Civilization

books/psicologia/eros-civilization.md

@@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ At first it sounds like The Force from Star Wars...
     long "detour to death"? 15 But the evidence is strong enough, and the detour is
     long enough to warrant the opposite assumption. Eros is defined as the great
     unifying force that preserves all life. 16 The ultimate relation between Eros
-    and Thanatos remains obscure. 
+    and Thanatos remains obscure.
 
     If Eros and Thanatos thus emerge as the two basic instincts whose ubiquitous
     presence and continuous fusion (and de-fusion) characterize the life process,
@@ -199,7 +199,7 @@ Superego:
 
     (a) Surplus-repression:  the restrictions necessitated by social domination.
     This is distinguished from (basic) repression:  the "modifications " of the
-    instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization. 
+    instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization.
 
     (b) Performance principle:  the prevailing historical form of the reality principle.
 
@@ -210,7 +210,7 @@ Superego:
     necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the
     procurement of the means for satisfying needs. For the duration of work, which
     occupies practically the entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is
-    "suspended" and pain prevails. 
+    "suspended" and pain prevails.
 
     However, this argument, which looms large in Freud' s metapsychology, is
     fallacious in so far as it applies to the brute fact  of scarcity what actually
@@ -378,7 +378,7 @@ Superego:
     nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil.
     The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due
     chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources but to the manner in
-    which they are distributed and utilized. 
+    which they are distributed and utilized.
 
     This difference may be irrelevant to politics and to politicians but it is of
     decisive importance to a theory of civilization which derives the need for
@@ -392,7 +392,7 @@ Superego:
     The available resources make for a qualitative  change in the human needs.
     Rationalization and mechanization of labor tend to reduce the quantum of
     instinctual energy channeled into toil (alienated labor), thus freeing energy
-    for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties. 
+    for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties.
 
     Technology operates against the repressive utilization of energy in so far as
     it minimizes the time necessary for the production of the necessities of life,
@@ -471,7 +471,7 @@ Superego:
     phylogenetic-biological level, the development of the animal man in the
     struggle with nature; and (b) the sociological level, the development of
     civilized individuals and groups in the struggle among themselves and with
-    their environment . 
+    their environment .
 
     The two levels are in constant and inseparable interaction, but factors
     generated at the second level are exogenous to the first and have therefore a
@@ -726,7 +726,7 @@ Superego:
     itself would almost certainly mean a considerable decrease in the standard of
     living prevalent today in the most advanced industrial countries. But the
     regression to a lower standard of living, which the collapse of the performance
-    principle would bring about, does not militate against progress in freedom. 
+    principle would bring about, does not militate against progress in freedom.
 
     The argument that makes liberation conditional upon an ever higher standard of
     living all too easily serves to justify the perpetuation of repression. The
@@ -832,7 +832,7 @@ Superego:
 
     (2) The self-sublimation of sensuousness (of the sensuous impulse) and the
     de-sublimation of reason (of the form-impulse) in order to reconcile the two
-    basic antagonistic impulses. 
+    basic antagonistic impulses.
 
     (3) The conquest of time in so far as time is destructive of lasting
     gratification.
@@ -862,7 +862,7 @@ Superego:
     rather than the content, of a free society. The realm of necessity, of labor,
     is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by
     objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free
-    play of human faculties and desires. 
+    play of human faculties and desires.
     The optimum in this realm is therefore to be defined by standards of
     rationality rather than freedom -- namely, to organize production and
     distribution in such a manner that the least time is spent for making all
@@ -875,6 +875,357 @@ Superego:
     transformation of labor but its complete subordination to the freely evolving
     potentialities of man and nature.
 
+## Regression into progress
+
+    The processes that create the ego and superego also shape and perpetuate
+    specific societal institutions and relations. Such psychoanalytical concepts as
+    sublimation, identification, and introjection have not only a psychical but
+    also a social content: they terminate in a system of institutions, laws,
+    agencies, things, and customs that confront the individual as objective
+    entities. Within this antagonistic system, the mental conflict between ego and
+    superego, between ego and id, is at one and the same time a conflict between
+    the individual and his society.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Therefore, the emergence of a non-repressive reality principle involving
+    instinctual liberation would regress  behind the attained level of civilized
+    rationality. This regression would be psychical as well as social: it would
+    reactivate early stages of the libido which were surpassed in the development
+    of the reality ego, and it would dissolve the institutions of society in which
+    the reality ego exists. In terms of these institutions, instinctual liberation
+    is relapse into barbarism. However, occurring at the height of civilization, as
+    a consequence not of defeat but of victory in the struggle for existence, and
+    supported by a free society, such liberation might have very different results.
+    It would still be a reversal of the process of civilization, a subversion of
+    culture -- but after  culture had done its work and created the mankind and the
+    world that could be free.
+
+### Work, toil and play
+
+    Freud's suggestions in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego do more
+    than reformulate his thesis of Eros as the builder of culture; culture here
+    rather appears as the builder of Eros -- that is to say, as the "natural"
+    fulfillment of the innermost trend of Eros. Freud's psychology of civilization
+    was based on the inexorable conflict between Ananke and free instinctual
+    development. But if Ananke itself becomes the primary field of libidinal
+    development, the contradiction evaporates. Not only would the struggle for
+    existence not necessarily cancel the possibility of instinctual freedom (as we
+    suggested in Chapter 6); but it would even constitute a "prop" for instinctual
+    gratificaiton. The work relations which form the base of civilization, and thus
+    civilization itself, would be "propped" by non-desexualized instinctual energy.
+    The whole concept of sublimation is at stake .
+
+    The problem of work, of socially useful activity, without (repressive)
+    sublimation can now be restated. It emerged as the problem of a change in the
+    character of work by virtue of which the latter would be assimilated to play --
+    the free play of human faculties. What are the instinctual preconditions for
+    such a transformation? The most far -reaching attempt to answer this question
+    is made by Barbara Lantos in her article "Work and the Instincts." 26 She
+    defines work and play in terms of the instinctual stages involved in these
+    activities. Play is entirely subject to the pleasure principle: pleasure is in
+    the movement itself in so far as it activates erotogenic zones. "The
+    fundamental feature of play is, that it is gratifying in itself, without
+    serving any other purpose than that of instinctual gratification."
+
+    [...]
+
+    The genital organization of the sexual instincts has a parallel in the
+    work-organization of the ego-instincts. 27
+
+    Thus it is the purpose and not the content which marks an activity as play or
+    work. 28 A transformation in the instinctual structure (such as that from the
+    pregenital to the genital stage) would entail a change in the instinctual value
+    of the human activity regardless of its content. For example, if work were
+    accompanied by a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism, it would
+    tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work  content. Now it is
+    precisely such a reactivation of polymorphous eroticism which appeared as the
+    consequence of the conquest of scarcity and alienation. The altered societal
+    conditions would therefore create an instinctual basis for the transformation
+    of work into play. In Freud's terms , the less the efforts to obtain
+    satisfaction are impeded and directed by the interest in domination, the more
+    freely the libido could prop itself upon the satisfaction of the great vital
+    needs.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But while the psychoanalytical and anthropological concepts of such an order
+    have been oriented on the prehistorical and precivilized past, our discussion
+    of the concept is oriented on the future, on the conditions of fully mature
+    civilization. The transformation of sexuality into Eros, and its extension to
+    lasting libidinal work relations, here presuppose the rational reorganization
+    of a huge industrial apparatus, a highly specialized societal division of
+    labor, the use of fantastically destructive energies, and the co-operation of
+    vast masses.
+
+    The idea of libidinal work relations in a developed industrial society finds
+    little support in the tradition of thought, and where such support is
+    forthcoming it seems of a dangerous nature. The transformation of labor into
+    pleasure is the central idea in Fourier's giant socialist utopia.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Fourier insists that this transformation requires a complete change in the
+    social institutions: distribution of the social product according to need,
+    assignment of functions according to individual faculties and inclinations,
+    constant mutation of functions, short work periods, and so on. But the
+    possibility of "attractive labor" ( travail attrayant) derives above all from
+    the release of libidinal forces . Fourier assumes the existence of an
+    attraction indnstrielle  which makes for pleasurable co-operation. It is based
+    on the attraction passionnée  in the nature of man , which persists despite the
+    opposition of reason, duty, prejudice.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Fourier comes closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the
+    dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation. However, in his detailed
+    blueprint for the realization of this idea, he hands it over to a giant
+    organization and administration and thus retains the repressive elements . The
+    working communities of the phalanstère  anticipate "strength through joy"
+    rather than freedom, the beautification of mass culture rather than its
+    abolition. Work as free play cannot be subject to administration; only
+    alienated labor can be organized and administered by rational routine. It is
+    beyond this sphere, but on its basis, that non-repressive sublimation creates
+    its own cultural order.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The necessity to work is a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt
+    to make oneself feel valuable even though there is no particular need for one'
+    s working. 37
+
+### Superid
+
+    It has been pointed out that the superego, as the mental representative of
+    morality, is not unambiguously the representative of the reality principle,
+    especially of the forbidding and punishing father. In many cases, the superego
+    seems to be in secret alliance with the id, defending the claims of the id
+    against the ego and the external world. Charles Odier therefore proposed that a
+    part of the superego is "in the last analysis the representative of a primitive
+    phase, during which morality had not yet freed itself from the pleasure
+    principle." [superid]
+
+    [...]
+
+    The psychical phenomenon which, in the individual, suggests such a pregenital
+    morality is an identification with the mother, expressing itself in a
+    castration-wish rather than castration-threat. It might be the survival of a
+    regressive tendency: remembrance of the primal Mother-Right, and at the same
+    time a "symbolic means against losing the then prevailing privileges of the
+    woman." According to Odier, the pregenital and prehistorical morality of the
+    superid is incompatible with the reality principle and therefore a neurotic
+    factor .
+
+### Time, memory and death
+
+    The flux of time is society' s most natural ally in maintaining law and order,
+    conformity, and the institutions that relegate freedom to a perpetual utopia;
+    the flux of time helps men to forget what was and what can be: it makes them
+    oblivious to the better past and the better future.
+
+    This ability to forget -- itself the result of a long and terrible education by
+    experience -- is an indispensable requirement of mental and physical hygiene
+    without which civilized life would be unbearable; but it is also the mental
+    faculty which sustains submissiveness and renunciation. To forget is also to
+    forgive what should not be forgiven if justice and freedom are to prevail. Such
+    forgiveness reproduces the conditions which reproduce injustice and
+    enslavement: to forget past suffering is to forgive the forces that caused it
+    --without defeating these forces . The wounds that heal in time are also the
+    wounds that contain the poison. Against this surrender to time, the restoration
+    of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is one of the noblest
+    tasks of thought.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nietzsche saw in the training of memory the beginning of civilized morality --
+    especially the memory of obligations, contracts, dues. 10 This context reveals
+    the one-sidedness of memory-training in civilization: the faculty was chiefly
+    directed toward remembering duties rather than pleasures; memory was linked
+    with bad conscience, guilt, and sin. Unhappiness and the threat of punishment ,
+    not happiness and the promise of freedom, linger in memory.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Still, this defeat of time is artistic and spurious; remembrance is no real
+    weapon unless it is translated into historical action. Then, the struggle
+    against time becomes a decisive moment in the struggle against domination: The
+    conscious wish to break the continuum of history belongs to the revolutionary
+    classes in the moment of action. This consciousness asserted itself during the
+    July Revolution. In the evening of the first day of the struggle,
+    simultaneously but independently at several places, shots were fired at the
+    time pieces on the towers of Paris. 11
+
+    It is the alliance between time and the order of repression that motivates the
+    efforts to halt the flux of time, and it is this alliance that makes time the
+    deadly enemy of Eros.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Every sound reason is on the side of law and order in their insistence that the
+    eternity of joy be reserved for the hereafter, and in their endeavor to
+    subordinate the struggle against death and disease to the never-ceasing
+    requirements of national and international security.
+
+    The striving for the preservation of time in time, for the arrest of time, for
+    conquest of death, seems unreasonable by any standard, and outright impossible
+    under the hypothesis of the death instinct that we have accepted. Or does this
+    very hypothesis make it more reasonable? The death instinct operates under the
+    Nirvana principle: it tends toward that state of "constant gratification" where
+    no tension is felt -- a state without want. This trend of the instinct implies
+    that its destructive  manifestations would be minimized as it approached such a
+    state. If the instinct's basic objective is not the termination of life but
+    of pain -- the absence of tension -- then paradoxically, in terms of the
+    instinct, the conflict between life and death is the more reduced, the closer
+    life approximates the state of gratification. Pleasure principle and Nirvana
+    principle then converge.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Death would cease to be an instinctual goal. It remains a fact, perhaps even an
+    ultimate necessity -- but a necessity against which the unrepressed energy of
+    mankind will protest, against which it will wage its greatest struggle.  In
+    this struggle, reason and instinct could unite. Under conditions of a truly
+    human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of
+    ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a "natural" death after a fulfilled
+    life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy.
+    Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those
+    who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization.
+
+    They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the
+    painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes
+    all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad
+    conscience of this guilt. Once again, the deep connection between the death
+    instinct and the sense of guilt becomes apparent. The silent "professional
+    agreement" with the fact of death and disease is perhaps one of the most
+    widespread expressions of the death instinct -- or, rather, of its social
+    usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of
+    repression. Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme
+    sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces
+    an element of surrender into life from the beginning -- surrender and
+    submission.
+
+### Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory
+
+    Fromm has devoted an admirable paper to "The Social Conditions of
+    Psychoanalytic Therapy," in which he shows that the psychoanalytic situation
+    (between analyst and patient) is a specific expression of liberalist toleration
+    and as such dependent on the existence of such toleration in the society. But
+    behind the tolerant attitude of the "neutral" analyst is concealed "respect for
+    the social taboos of the bourgeoisie."
+    7 Fromm traces the effectiveness of these taboos at the very core of Freudian
+    theory, in Freud' s position toward sexual morality. With this attitude, Fromm
+    contrasts another conception of therapy, first perhaps formulated by Ferenczi,
+    according to which the analyst rejects patricentric-authoritarian taboos and
+    enters into a positive rather than neutral relation with the patient. The new
+    conception is characterized chiefly by an "unconditional affirmation of the
+    patient' s claim for happiness" and the "liberation of morality from its
+    tabooistic features ." 8
+
+    [...]
+
+    in a repressive society, individual happiness and productive development are in
+    contradiction to society; if they are defined as values to be realized within
+    this society, they become themselves repressive.
+
+    [...]
+
+    while psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is
+    ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization,
+    psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to
+    function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering to it altogether.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Theoretically, the difference between mental health and neurosis lies only in
+    the degree and effectiveness of resignation: mental health is successful,
+    efficient resignation -- normally so efficient that it shows forth as
+    moderately happy satisfaction. Normality is a precarious condition. "Neurosis
+    and psychosis are both of them an expression of the rebellion of the id against
+    the outer world, of its ` pain,' unwillingness to adapt itself to necessity --
+    to ananke, or, if one prefers, of its incapacity to do so." 9
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the long run, the question is only how much resignation the individual can
+    bear without breaking up. In this sense, therapy is a course in resignation: a
+    great deal will be gained if we succeed in "transforming your hysterical misery
+    into everyday unhappiness," which is the usual lot of mankind. 11
+
+    [...]
+
+    The autonomous personality, in the sense of creative "uniqueness" and fullness
+    of its existence, has always been the privilege of a very few. At the present
+    stage, the personality tends toward a standardized reaction pattern established
+    by the hierarchy of power and functions and by its technical, intellectual, and
+    cultural apparatus. 
+
+    The analyst and his patient share this alienation, and since it does not
+    usually manifest itself in any neurotic symptom but rather as the hallmark of
+    "mental health," it does not appear in the revisionist consciousness.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Fromm writes: Genuine love is rooted in productiveness and may properly be
+    called, therefore, "productive love." Its essence is the same whether it is the
+    mother's love for the child, our love for man , or the erotic love between two
+    individuals. . certain basic elements may be said to be characteristic of all
+    forms of productive love. These are care, responsibility, respect, and
+    knowledge. 35
+
+    Compare with this ideological formulation Freud' s analysis of the instinctual
+    ground and underground of love, of the long and painful process in which
+    sexuality with all its polymorphous perversity is tamed and inhibited until it
+    ultimately becomes susceptible to fusion with tenderness and affection -- a
+    fusion which remains precarious and never quite overcomes its destructive
+    elements .
+
+    [...]
+
+    According to Freud, love, in our culture, can and must be practiced as
+    "aim-inhibited sexuality," with all the taboos and constraints placed upon it
+    by a monogamic-patriarchal society. Beyond its legitimate manifestations, love
+    is destruetive and by no means conducive to productiveness and constructive
+    work. Love, taken seriously, is outlawed: "There is no longer any place in
+    present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings,"
+    37 But to the revisionists, productiveness, love, happiness, and health merge
+    in grand hannony; civilization has not caused any conflicts between them which
+    the mature person could not solve without serious damage .
+
+    [...]
+
+    Freud had established a substantive link between human freedom and happiness on
+    the one hand and sexuality on the other: the latter provided the primary source
+    for the former and at the same time the ground for their necessary restriction
+    in civilization. The revisionist solution of the conflict through the
+    spiritualization of freedom and happiness demanded the weakening of this link .
+
+    [...]
+
+    Fromm 's ideological interpretation of the Oedipus complex implies acceptance
+    of the unhappiness of freedom, of its separation from satisfaction; Freud' s
+    theory implies that the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile protest  against
+    this separation -- protest not against freedom but against painful , repressive
+    freedom. Conversely, the Oedipus wish is the eternal infantile desire for the
+    archetype of freedom: freedom from want. And since the (unrepressed) sex
+    instinct is the biological carrier of this archetype of freedom, the Oedipus
+    wish is essentially "sexual craving." Its natural object is, not simply the
+    mother qua  mother, but the mother qua  woman -- female principle of
+    gratification. Here the Eros of receptivity, rest, painless and integral
+    satisfaction is nearest to the death instinct (return to the womb), the
+    pleasure principle nearest to the Nirvana principle. Eros here fights its first
+    battle against everything the reality principle stands for: against the father,
+    against domination, sublimation, resignation. Gradually then, freedom and
+    fulfillment are being associated with these paternal principles; freedom from
+    want is sacrificed to moral and spiritual independence. It is first the "sexual
+    craving" for the mother-woman that threatens the psychical basis of
+    civilization; it is the "sexual craving" that makes the Oedipus conflict the
+    prototype of the instinctual conflicts between the individual and his society.
+    If the Oedipus wish were in essence nothing more than the wish for protection
+    and security ("escape from freedom"), if the child desired only impermissible
+    security and not impermissible pleasure, then the Oedipus complex would indeed
+    present an essentially educational problem. As such, it can be treated without
+    exposing the instinctual danger zones of society.
+
 ### Misc
 
     But, again, Freud shows that this repressive system does not really solve the
@@ -1049,3 +1400,10 @@ Superego:
     Freud's own theory follows the general trend: in his work, the rationality of
     the predominant reality principle supersedes the metaphysical speculations on
     Eros.
+
+    [...]
+
+    As an isolated individual phenomenon , the reactivation of narcissistic libido
+    is not culture-building but neurotic: The difference between a neurosis and a
+    sublimation is evidently the social aspect of the phenomenon . A neurosis
+    isolates; a sublimation unites.