Sigmund Freud 1856 1939 Vienna Physician specialized in

Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939) • Vienna. • Physician specialized in neurology and psychiatry • Faith in the scientific method Verifiable experience • Elaborated his psychoanalytic theory from his practice and professional experience with patients • Neuroses are distorted ways of dealing with reality regulated by the Unconscious • Discovery of the Unconscious: “mental processes are essentially unconscious” • The unconscious emerges through dreams, slips, jokes. • Works: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, Why War? (together with Albert Einstein)

Themes • Dominance of unconscious process (reason is important, but reveals to be more complex than what had been thought before) • Instincts/natural impulses/Ambivalence • Phylogenesis & ontogenesis: individuals reproduce the phases of development of the species (neurotics/children/primitive people)—evolutionary theory • Traumatic events (individual and collective) tend to be denied and forgotten (to “avoid” pain) • Totem and Taboo: society originates in the murder of the father (primitive herd)—Law emerges in the empty space left by the murdered despotic father. – Society is based upon law and the prohibition of incest.

Civilization and its Discontents • “What are the influences to which the evolution of culture owes its origin, how did it arise and what determined its course? (725) • Biological evolution (permanent sexual instincts) led to the establishment of families (gendered % of labor) – Herd (despotic father) – Murder of the father LAW & culture

Love -Romantic/sexual love (“prototype of all happiness” but also causes pain; intense; antisocial; “The wise men of all ages have consequently warned us emphatically against this way of life…”)-- Women – Altruistic love (avoids the pain of possession; “by attaching their love not to individual objects but to all men equally…” favors social bonds of friendship and altruism) (Religion)-Men

Libido • “Since man has not an unlimited amount of mental energy at his disposal, he must accomplish his tasks by distributing his libido to the best advantage. ” (727) • “Woman finds herself thus forced into the background by the claims of culture and she adopts an inimical attitude towards it. ” (727)

Culture (& civilization) against Love(Sex)?

Repressive Western Culture • Heterosexual, monogamous standards are impossible to achieve (transgressions), but fulfill the function of deviating energy towards society and social impulses • “The sexual life of civilized man is seriously disabled, whatever we may say; it sometimes makes an impression of becoming atrophied, just as organs like our teeth and our hair seem to be. ” (728) • Civilization requires sacrifices and deprives us from happiness, but gives us security

Libidinal economy • Love (Eros) • Agression (death instinct) • Are always present (we cannot eliminate either, but only channel them better, which is what culture attempts to do) • Economy of good and evil (God & the devil, the Germans & the Jews, etcetera)

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” • “Why should we do this? ” (728) • Civilization attempts to counterbalance our natural tendencies to aggression

Communism • “The Communists believe that they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. (…)… psychologically it is founded on an untenable illusion. (…) Suppose that personal rights to material goods are done away with, there still remain prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancour and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. ” • But Nature makes us unequal – Hatred for someone (the neighbor, the bourgeois, the Jew)