This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt II
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The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)
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从本节课中
Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt
With a focus on Civilization and its Discontents, we examine how Freud’s theories tried to expose profound instincts as they appeared in daily life.
与讲师见面
Michael S. Roth
So Freud starts listening to these stories of thwarted or twisted frustrated desire.
And he starts to theorize that what his patients are suffering from is the past.
They're suffering from history, we might say.
Freud says, in studies on hysteria, that hysterical, hysterical patients, the
hysterics he's treating, suffer mainly from reminiscences.
Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.
It's the past that makes us ill. That's Freud's fundamental claim, it's
history that creates mythology. And by understanding history, even if it
means stirring up the depths, by understanding history we have a better
chance To live a life that's, has less suffering, and more possibilities for
happiness and love and work, as Freud sometiems said.
Now Freud was a pretty pessimistic guy, he wasn't looking for a, a, a mode of therapy
or understanding that was going to make everybody happy, and, And everybody's
going to be you know, running through the fields of flowers and singing Kumbaya, or
something, nah. Freud says what my goal is to reduce
hysterical misery to common unhappiness. That's he's a, no, he's a, he's a
pessimistic a thinker and a sober physician most of the time, most of the
time. And in his great work, I mean his big book
of, that really sets psychoanalysis going in a dramatic way, his big book is called
the Interpretation of Dreams. As I said before, published in 1900.
And dream interpretation is important for Freud, because it's dream interpretation
that he says is, the royal road to the unconscious.
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
And that's because in dreams, Freud thinks.
We actually are expressing parts of ourselves, parts of our sexuality, or
desire, if you will, that during era we censor.
So dreams, they get by the censorship of our waking life, and they get by that
censorship. Through disguise.
Our wishes are disguised in dreams. And so in Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
says, every dream, is a disguise, has a disguised wish at its core.
Every dream has a disguised wish. At its core and the job of interpretation
is to show what you really desire and in a way that's really what Freud is about.
Freud is, all of, the Freudian questions is always what do you really want?
What do you really hope to get out of this?
Now that can be an offensive question if you're sititng there and you aer
struggling, like you can hear it say, I have a cold, right, you can hear perhaps
in my voice I have a little congestion. The psycho-analytic question is, yes, you
have a cold, what are you getting out of this cold?
And my, why would I, it's not my fault I have a cold, it's not my fault I'm sick.
But the psychoanalyst question is yes, but what are you getting out of the cold?
You know, how does the cold, it's your, it's your symptom.
How does your symptom give you satisfaction?
That's the Freudian question and sometimes it's very offensive.
But you go to the doctor and you say, I'm suffering, I have this, I have this
neurotic tic I keep hitting myself in the head.
And the psychoanalyst says well, what are you getting out of that?
And then you say, well, I'm going to go to another doctor to give me a pill so I stop
hitting myself. That's fine.
The psychoanalyst says, I don't give you a pill to make you stop.
I just want you to understand what are you getting out of hitting yourself?
What satisfaction are you getting out of that?
What are you hiding from? Or what are you punishing yourself for?
What is the dream disguising? That question, what is the dream
disguising is this question about everything we do.
What is it you're disguising, by what you're doing right now?
What do you really want? [laugh] That's the Freudian question.
And there's no answer to that question. No one answer.
In other words you can't discover the truth of what you really want.
You can discover many of the things you seem to really want from today's
perspective. There is on objective certainty about who
you really are and what you really desire. All there is, is this inquiry into how the
past has lead you to have the desires that you have, and lead you to make the
compromises with those desires that you are currently making.
So that's all by way of background on Freud.
Now if you want to go back to that Library of Congress site, you can,you can look at
the section, I will put the link up here again.
Look at the section on dream interpretation.
And, and dream interpretation, again it's, the dream is a disguise, but there is a
certain amount of repression in that disguise.
That, that's why the dreams don't just say directly what you want.
You could look at the section on repression as well.
You'll see there are fabulous, Fabulous clip from The Simpson's where Homer
explains to Lisa why Marge continued to repress her feelings so she'll never
bother us again. You'll see that clip if you go over to the
Library of Congress site. Repression is key for Freud because that
is them mechanism that explains why you need interpretation.
Why you can't actually just, why we don't usually dir- directly express what we
desire. We don't en-, directly express our
sexuality because there's this force that keeps us from ourselves, right?
The self is divided In Freud. Unlike Rosseau, who thought you have to
fight to use the true self hidden under all the disguises.
And Freud, the true self is not just one thing, it's a contradictory, set of forces
and our desires are not uniform, even when we get underneath.
The repressions underneith the disguises are.
Desires are not uniform, they're a hereogenious mix of conflicting impulses.
A heterogenious mix of conflicting impulses.
And, and in a way that can, that almost brings us to civilization as[INAUDIBLE]
discontents. But I, I want to give you a little bit
more on the Freudian notion of sexuality and desire, which will help perhaps in
understanding why you can't just find the original thing you really want, the really
real, if I can put it that way. Of desire, because for Freud there isn't a
really "real" of desire. And that's because Freud theorizes that as
infants, really, as very small children, we begin to look for things to satisfy our
elemental craving Things. But we look for things, that are
associated with those elemental cravings and, and never actually, look for the
thing that, that, the nourishment that we, crave directly.
That is what, when we when we, crave something There's always an element of
fantasy on top of instinct. There's always an element of fantasy on
top of biology. So that you continue to search for your
fantasies to satisfy your biology[LAUGH]. And when you find something that really
does satisfy. It's because it's something you were
searching for before. Not the, not the thing itself but
something that, some fantastic, some imaginary construct of what you originally
biologically instinctively crave. And, and, and for Freud he has this
expression every, every finding of an object is a re-finding of an object.
Every finding of an object is a re-finding of an object.
And what he means is when we, when we discover something we really love, we say,
gosh I finally found what I really love. It's actually some repetition of Something
we fantasized about before. Something, that we perhaps, thought we
lost before. And, continue to search for things, that
are, that are, rooted in our histories. I guess that's the, the point I really
wanted to, to emphasize, is that it's, it's the rootedness in our histories that
are imaginar-, imaginary constructs on our biology that is behind Freud's notion of
sex and desire. It's our, understanding our history
doesn't do away with these desires. But understanding our history, is the way
we make meaning out of our desire, and have some better chance of, being, as
Freud would say, less miserable. Suffering less.
Understanding our desires understanding why we search for the things we search
for. Gives us something closer to, to freedom,
really. To the ability to love and to work.
Getting a little far afield from Civilization and its Discontents, so
perhaps I should jump back to that now. You remember that the book starts off
with, Freud's discussion of the oceanic feeling, the oceanic feeling.
And he, he's, he, he starts off that way in a, in a sense to give you a signal, and
I hope you pick it up because of our earlier part of the course, it's the
signal that he, Freud is an enlightenment thinker.
The oceanic feeling is supposed to be a way of talking about religion that is less
objectionable. He starts off with a critique of religion.
And the oceanic here, what's the oceanic feeling?
Again, what's the oceanic feeling, where I talked at the beginning, yeah.
>> Like eternity, like[INAUDIBLE]. >> Yeah.
You want to add to this? >> It's the theory that we belong to the
world. >> We, we feel like we belong to the whole
world. >> We feel like we're all just part of
the, we're part of the, what would you say?
Part of the? >> Force.
>> The force? >> The great scheme of things.
>> The great scheme of things. That works, yeah.
And what does Freud, what is Freud's response to this?
Because his friend is[UNKNOWN], a famous writer, says come on Freud, you're so
anti-religious. So you criticize all the magic and the
incense and all of that stuff, but come on, religion isn't about that.
Religion is about this deep feeling of belonging to the world to connect to
everything, you're one with the universe, and Freud says, no, I see.
What is his response? >> He has a feeling.
>> Well, he has a feeling but he goes a little farther than that.
I have never had such a feeling. It's very Voltarian.
He says, yeah, it's what infants feel in the crib.
Oh yeah. I remember, the very beginning of the
book. Oh yeah, I know about this feeling, that's
what babies have. And some people outgrow it.
Remember, Voltaire's response to Rousseau. This is on just the second page, of the
book. I cannot discover this oceanic feeling in
myself It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings.
One can attempt to describe the psychiological signs.
He says, this is a feeling that is[UNKNOWN] bond with the world as a whole
is something that you find in babies, and so, for Freud this is give it up.
It's an infantile, response to the world. So what Freud is doing here in the
beginning of Civilization and its Discontents, is he's taking a classic
enlightenment position that religion is, is bunk.
And religion is infantile and, and we have to face the world, as he saw it, with our
sober senses. And that's Freud saying, I am part of the
enlightenment, I am part of this Voltarian tradition, and, and Civilization's
Discontents is, is squarely in that, tradition.
The, the, the, the intellectual historian and biographer of Freud who's really
insisted on this, Freud's enlightenment credentials, if I can put it that way, is
Peter Gay who's, A big biography of Freud has become a standard source of narrative
biography about Freud's life, in, in general.
