Charitini Douvaldzi on Freud- Part 2—Entitled Opinions 05/29/2007

05/29/2007

Charitini Douvaldzi on Freud- Part 2

Charitini Douvaldzi holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Munich and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her main field of research is German culture and literature between the 18th and 20th centuries. She works specifically on autobiography, the Bildungsroman, psychoanalytic and cultural theory, narrative, vision, and the arts of […]

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00:00:00.000	[ Music ]
00:00:14.000	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:16.340	Welcome to entitled opinions.
00:00:20.300	My name is Robert Harrison.
00:00:21.980	And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
00:00:26.980	[ Music ]
00:00:46.980	The development of the individual seems to us to be a product of the interaction between two urges.
00:00:53.880	The urge towards happiness, which we usually call egoistic, and the urge toward union with others in the community, which we call altruistic.
00:01:03.140	In the process of individual development, the main accent falls mostly on the egoistic urge, or the urge toward happiness.
00:01:11.080	While the other urge, which may be called cultural, is usually content with imposing restrictions.
00:01:18.680	But in the process of civilization, things are different. Here by far the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of individual human beings.
00:01:27.180	The aim of happiness is pushed into the background.
00:01:30.580	It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual.
00:01:40.880	[ Music ]
00:01:48.180	[ Music ]
00:02:10.180	That was a passage from civilization and is discontent by Freud.
00:02:14.180	We're back with you for part two of our conversation with Cadduccini Duvazie, who teaches in the Department of German Studies here at Stanford.
00:02:22.180	We are talking about Sigmund Freud and what is alive and what is dead in psychoanalysis.
00:02:28.780	And as we promised in the first segment, we are going to turn our attention somewhat to the cultural writings of Freud and his theories of culture.
00:02:37.180	And maybe we start with this book of his, which is probably his most widely read work I would imagine.
00:02:44.180	Civilization and his discontent. I know it gets on a lot of freshman culture or civilization courses, syllabus.
00:02:52.180	And a very rich work indeed, perhaps somewhat misunderstood. I don't know what my guest Cadduccini thinks about that.
00:03:01.180	How about we turn to her and welcome Cadduccini back to the show.
00:03:07.180	Thank you very much for having me again, Robert.
00:03:10.180	Indeed, a very popular work and well, I think these are the discontent of being popular, certainly misunderstood.
00:03:20.180	I think it is often the one work that people use to interesting it to domesticate Freud and to make him a coordinate with Christian doctrine, which seems pretty, which doctrine in particular,
00:03:36.180	I mean, I have encountered I am not going to, I'm not going to call these people by names, but introductory books to Freudian theory that argue that, for instance, when Freud talks about guilt, he is, he is psychologizing the idea that we don't only feel guilty for our actions, but also for our thoughts.
00:04:05.180	So, you know, thought is as much as sin as action.
00:04:10.180	Well, as a raise as a Catholic and ex-alterboy, I know what that's all about.
00:04:15.180	Right.
00:04:16.180	But what do you think about it?
00:04:17.180	Right.
00:04:18.180	Let's take a step back if you don't mind it and reconstruct what are some of the basic premises of this book, civilization and this discontent.
00:04:26.180	When was it written, how does it fit into Freud's, you know, larger itinerary?
00:04:33.180	Yeah.
00:04:34.180	Yeah.
00:04:35.180	Well, it is written in a very important moment, of course, in 1929, 1930.
00:04:42.180	So, and the way I read it is to put it in a series of texts that follow a turn that happens in 1913 with totem and taboo, Freud's turn to social theory and anthropology.
00:05:02.180	This theory, he rewrites to some extent in '21, '22, with group psychology, and then we have this more general theory of civilization, another rewriting of the same theory in 1930 with civilization's content.
00:05:23.180	Is that, where does the beyond the pleasure principle is, and I think another fundamental work that is before.
00:05:29.180	Right.
00:05:29.180	Beyond the pleasure principle is 1920.
00:05:32.180	I don't remember who said that basically this is a time when Freud writes, always writes his books in some kind of dyadic structure, a very difficult book followed by a very simple book.
00:05:47.180	The beyond the pleasure principle would be the very difficult book, they are in group psychology, the supposedly easy one.
00:05:54.180	Do you think World War I had a fundamental impact on his thinking and maybe reconsideration and his discovery of what he called the death dry?
00:06:04.180	Absolutely.
00:06:05.180	Which is part of the civilization is just condensed.
00:06:07.180	Absolutely.
00:06:08.180	This is the moment when he is confronted with traumatic disorders.
00:06:18.180	Again, so it is a return to actually the trauma theory that he has repudiated, that he has abandoned when he abandoned the seduction theory.
00:06:29.180	So he's already thinking about trauma in 1918.
00:06:36.180	The biographical facts contributed to the death of his daughter, who was actually the mother of the little boy,
00:06:47.180	who plays the thought-dog game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
00:06:52.180	So these are the death is on his mind.
00:06:58.180	It's on his mind.
00:06:59.180	I think to understand civilization is just condensed.
00:07:01.180	One really has to understand what his theory of the death drive is.
00:07:06.180	I hope you don't mind if I summarize a very simplistic way.
00:07:10.180	What I remember beyond the pleasure principle, but up until this point he thought that the pleasure principle was the first one.
00:07:16.180	The most important thing about the death drive was that the pleasure principle was the dominant motivation or the main sort of agency in human behavior, desire, etc.
00:07:27.180	Maybe thanks to World War I and through further observation, he seemed to detect another fundamental drive as fundamental as the life drive or the erotic drive.
00:07:41.180	He was a death instinct, which he then tried to explain in very organic biological terms as where he seems to stipulate that any organic life form became organic out of inanimate matter.
00:07:58.180	It was a violent shock and trauma, this transition from the inanimate to the animate matter, and that all animate matter and all living things retain within themselves some drive to go back to an antecedent state of death or inanimate.
00:08:20.180	And that perhaps this is even more deep and fundamental a drive in human beings than the pleasure principle.
00:08:30.180	I think this is a broadening of a theory that he already believed in a theory that describes pleasure as a diminution of psychological energy, a theory that he has from the psychodynamic theory of theodofesna.
00:08:54.180	This is, it comes back, he goes back to the very beginnings of the analysis when unpleasant or pain, psychological, unpleasant was produced by the insertion into this psychological system of excess energy, excitation that produces energy.
00:09:17.180	So pleasure is, he could only explain pleasure through fashion as principle of constancy, the elimination of that excess energy and the stabilization of the system.
00:09:29.180	It's a really crazy idea of pleasure is that the moment the momentary suspension of pain or something along the line.
00:09:40.180	And that's where, of course, there are formulations of that principle of constancy, the Nirvana principle.
00:09:51.180	One thing that I would like to insert in this discussion is that a paradox in the theory that a theory that has become popularized as a theory that finds sex everywhere.
00:10:07.180	Sex is, in fact, the one thing that Freud's metaphysology cannot account for.
00:10:14.180	The sexual pleasure that except for besides the discharge at the end consists in an increase in excitation, which would...
00:10:26.180	Although doesn't he say in civilization, it's just intense, I believe that even the orgasmic is the greatest relief or relief from painfulness.
00:10:37.180	Right, by sex, a by sex, and Freud knows that very well, because he is the one who has written the three essays on the theory of sexuality.
00:10:45.180	And he has extended sex, sexual pleasure to be everything from some sucking to simple caresses.
00:10:56.180	He is very aware that one cannot reduce sex to the final release of tension in orgasm.
00:11:05.180	So what he considers the most crucial aspect of sex or sexual pleasure, which is pleasure in an increase of excitation, he cannot account for.
00:11:16.180	And I think it's worth mentioning because it's not something that people usually think about that Freud was not able to explain sex.
00:11:24.180	I personally believe that the death drive is a very important concept, whether it's important for Freud, whether one can verify it or not, but that's the one finding of his...
00:11:40.180	I won't say that it explains a lot because I don't think it has served an explanatory function, but if you take the death drive out of the equation, human history makes no sense to me.
00:11:55.180	I don't know how you feel about that. The role that the death drive plays in human behavior, but isn't it also the case that it's the drive which the conscious mind is the most important thing.
00:12:09.180	He's probably least equipped to come to terms with, to confront, and to in any way master.
00:12:19.180	I think that's very well put. In fact, Freud would say that it is the one drive that we can never encounter in a isolated form.
00:12:36.180	So it is always somehow connected with either sex, so it's giving me.
00:12:46.180	We see the sadism, for instance, or we see it extroverted, turned outward and we see it as aggression.
00:12:57.180	But this is an aspect of a theory that a deeply disagree with, the idea that aggression towards others is just an extroverted form of the death drive.
00:13:09.180	I'm glad to hear you say that because I've never bought the idea that aggression towards other externalized form of the death drive.
00:13:18.180	The death drive is much more insidious where it is an inner covert will in the human, in the human animal, to sow the seeds of its own self annihilation.
00:13:37.180	And I think by consequence it can have very destructive effects in the world because maybe it's through the consequences in the world that self destruction or self annihilation takes place.
00:13:51.180	But aggression towards others, I would agree with you, I once should not necessarily confuse that with the death drive.
00:13:58.180	Yes, yes. This comes within a series of transformations that Freud's theory of the instincts are subjected to or undergo.
00:14:14.180	And he starts, I think this is part of what you read at the beginning.
00:14:20.180	He starts with the theory where ego instincts are, and in things of self-preservation are opposed to libidinal instincts.
00:14:33.180	So he brings it, he retraces it back to folk wisdom when they say that love and hunger are the two things that govern the world and the psyche.
00:14:46.180	But then it is the beginning of the theory, it is the discovery of narcissism which makes him revise this theory, this dichotomy of ego and object instincts.
00:15:02.180	By saying that basically we have one big reservoir of big or not so big reservoir of libido.
00:15:10.180	And that there is something in the internal economy of libido that regulates our love for ourselves and our love for others.
00:15:20.180	Which is already a monstrous part of the theory I think, as if indeed you could quantify the amount of love or libido that we have and that at any point in order to love ourselves we have to withdraw the libido from the objects or in order to love others, we need to withdraw that narcissistic, you know, cateches.
00:15:45.180	So I don't buy that. I don't buy that. And I think that he in fact gets into deep waters himself when toward the end of this very text of civilizations discontent.
00:16:00.180	He says that the struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction, probably an irreconcilable one between the primal instincts of heroes and death.
00:16:15.180	It is a dispute within the economics of libido comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and object.
00:16:23.180	So if he's going to go back to this idea of the economy of libido between the distribution between ego and self-love and love of others, then why at all bring in this, this, revive this initial opposition into the struggle between heroes, heroes and Thanatos.
00:16:45.180	It's also part of his shining death.
00:16:49.180	Thanatos' meaning death. I think it's also part of his coming very close to a radical and a destabilizing insight and trying away from it the fact that he does not go one step further in equate, you know, the sexual drive with the death instinct.
00:17:13.180	The whole text, I think, symptomatically starts with the mentioning and almost a petropake repudiation of a model of religion that his friend Romaro Long suggested to him in a letter, the idea that religion comes, the basis of religion is the oceanic feeling, which is the feeling or the
00:17:29.180	tendency to dissolve within a greater universe.
00:17:50.180	So the dissolution of the ego.
00:18:00.180	And this is not true. Religion comes from the deep rooted desire for a father.
00:18:29.180	So it is, it is in fact a decision and ideological decision for patriarchy that he makes with a gesture.
00:18:40.180	I have to confess, however, that I'm persuaded, maybe not in the terminology that he uses about distribution and quotients of self-love versus communal love, but I'm very persuaded when he says that you cannot, that communal bonds have to be
00:18:59.160	to have an erotic foundation. But erotic in the larger sense, not sexual, but that one has to be eroticly bonded and that one cannot envision a tightly bound community where you have complete free love and where little gratifications have no obstacle to them.
00:19:25.160	So when he says that perhaps the taboos on sex or to say that the certain kind of active suppression of sexual freedom is the community's way of assuring that there is going to be enough,
00:19:40.160	to the original energy in all the members of the group to extend into the group that I think there's something fundamentally true about or at least my view.
00:19:55.160	It's true, it's horrible. If it's true, it's really horrible. This idea, this idea that, I mean, it is actually, you know, for all its sounding revolutionary, it's actually going back to the idea that you have introduced differently in totem and taboo that we can either have sex with somebody or we can love them.
00:20:21.160	And it's the idea that, you know, the minute the sexual drive is satisfied, there is no libido left to turn to become the sexualized or to become affection.
00:20:38.160	I think this is a horrible theory that in fact can only, in its logical conclusion, in its logical following, I think it lead only to fascism.
00:20:51.160	And that's what he does with group psychology. It is a very interesting, very peculiar moment in group psychology when he explains,
00:21:07.160	how by prohibiting the satisfaction of the sexual drive, the leader, whether this is, you know, the chief of the army, the head of the army or the head of the church, or the dictator.
00:21:28.160	By prohibiting the satisfaction of the sexual drive, he forces the members of the group into libidino ties with himself and with each other.
00:21:47.160	What is interesting there is that the libido does not only change quality, does not only become de-sexualized or sublimated and binds the members of the group to the leader and to themselves, to each other.
00:22:05.160	But what happens is that it also changes direction.
00:22:10.160	It is a moment that is incomprehensible in group psychology. Why it is that if the leader or if the parent, if the father prohibits the male son of having sexual relations with the sisters or with the mother.
00:22:32.160	Why is that he does not force the child into an affectionate relation with the mother, which was who was the original object of that libido, but to himself.
00:22:45.160	So I think that the monstrous implication of that theory is that we follow or become libidinoly attached to the person who utters the prohibition of our instinctual satisfied.
00:23:01.160	So I think that there is a question that is certainly a psychology of mass group psychology, which in the mass phenomenon is a modern one.
00:23:11.160	And one could perhaps even counter what you are saying about the dangers, which I appreciate. That is very real, dangerous.
00:23:18.160	And I could say that mass society is precisely the non-communal group because the numbers have grown so large that you can no longer expect to have a libidinoly connected group because it just the scale is too much.
00:23:32.160	And therefore charismatic leaders can channel the libidinoly of a huge mass of people, which doesn't lead to community. It leads to fascism.
00:23:42.160	I don't think that necessarily makes the phenomenon itself dangerous that a community needs a certain degree of libidinal investment on the part of all these members in order to establish itself and in order to perpetuate itself.
00:24:01.160	And that perhaps one of the risks of those sorts of societies, perhaps even the one that we live in, where community has dissolved, the bonds of community have dissolved at such an extent, that there is nothing out there to libidinoly project into.
00:24:17.160	And therefore narcissism becomes almost the necessary option where self-love is the only form of love that the society is leaving room for.
00:24:29.160	You see what I'm saying? And consumerism, I think, is that kind of ultimate narcissism, which doesn't have the possibility of a communal, the bininal investment.
00:24:42.160	Now, I agree with you here. I think it's a deep problem of Freud's social theory that there is actually in the structure in the psychological structure that he sets up to explain group formations. There is nothing that can explain the difference between a well-functioning, you know,
00:25:11.160	group from that has maintained, you know, some kind of individualism and the fascist group.
00:25:25.160	And you see that also, I mean, I think some of this is governed by his misargenies.
00:25:33.160	It is really interesting, the different roles he attributes to women in the formation of the group.
00:25:43.160	On the one hand, he will talk about women as an obstacle to civilization because libidos absolutely satisfied in the structure of the couple, even a third person does not belong to that couple.
00:26:00.160	But the heroes that, as you said, is supposed to form greater and greater unity, greater and greater units cannot stop at the couple.
00:26:13.160	In order to have society, he says we need to overcome the satisfaction, the sexual satisfaction that we would find in the couple formation.
00:26:25.160	So it's always just content in a marriage is a necessary precondition for them to be in the community.
00:26:32.160	Well, yes, on the one hand and on the other, if you read group psychology, women would be given, in fact, the civilizing role because if women had been strong, if the structure of the couple had been strong enough, we would have never come according to Freud
00:26:54.160	to fascism.
00:26:57.160	Happy sexually happy beings would not have the kind of desecualization of libido that leads to these powerful attachments to a leader and to the person who utters these prohibitions to them.
00:27:12.160	And don't you believe that has a degree of credibility to it as a thesis?
00:27:19.160	Well, this is the moment when I'm ambivalent because it is pretty coherent as a theory it actually makes sense to some extent.
00:27:35.160	And on the other, I don't want it to make sense.
00:27:40.160	And I still think we need to find a different way of describing different kinds of groups.
00:27:50.160	I'm reminded there's an epic Renaissance epic called the Orlando Foudioso by Adioso, and it's all about the wars between the Christianism, the serrisons, and the knights and going around the pursuing elusive erotic objects.
00:28:03.160	And Angelica is this great figure that everyone is after a serris in princess.
00:28:08.160	And she happens to fall in love with this guy named Midor, or not a very formidable knight, a very lyric kind of guy.
00:28:16.160	And they fall in love, they're happy, they consummate their relationship, and they disappear from the poem.
00:28:23.160	They become completely irrelevant to the action because their satisfaction, their gratification, is completely a historical.
00:28:34.160	It doesn't add anything to the story. You cannot make history out of this kind of happiness.
00:28:40.160	And this is what maybe discontent means in the title of this book.
00:28:47.160	Well, I think it's beautiful because I think what you're doing is bringing in a theory of narrativity, or what is important to narrative.
00:28:58.160	You're bringing that as a criterion that has actually formed or helped form Freud's thinking.
00:29:05.160	And I think this is an absolutely right and very insightful assumption.
00:29:13.160	And to go back to the death instinct, I'm not by no means the first person to talk about that, Peter Brooks, for instance, has done a lot with it, the idea that this tendency to return to an initial stability is of course a theory of narrative.
00:29:32.160	And that's what I agree with that. So to some extent Freud's thinking may distance itself from its, you know, referentiality and become or is determined by, you know, a theory that explains what is important in a narrative as opposed to...
00:29:58.160	And is this why he's so important in literary studies, still today, that because of this way in which his theory is in many ways a theory of narrative, or the way in which narrative organizes our psychic lives.
00:30:12.160	Yeah. Absolutely. And again, you know, as I was trying to explain in, you know, in a previous hour,
00:30:26.160	Freud's core theory is based on a dream of narrative coherence. So what, what, what, what Hayden White calls, you know, the value of narrative activity.
00:30:41.160	And in that core theory, the, the most certain criterion for mental health is a flawless narrative, if a narrative that doesn't have gaps.
00:30:57.160	However, or blockages, no? Or blockages. Yeah. I mean, in the beginning of Torah, he talks about the first narrative account of the patient being an unavigable river that has all these rocks that block, the block that's not.
00:31:10.160	The block, the block, the flow. And where, so gaps and blockages. However, in the very beginning and in the very end of Freud's career and thinking, both in the serious adoption of the beginning and the, you know, the return to trauma in Moses and monotheism, for instance.
00:31:36.160	We find a theory that is also suspicious of narrative, that defines illness as over-narrativization, as an order that has been established by the ego, by the tendency to cohere.
00:32:03.160	And that becomes pathogenic in itself, because it repudiates, because it forgets some originary crisis.
00:32:14.160	And I have to say that just on the experiential level, that seems very clear and persuasive to me that people, and I'm sure I'm no exception, people tell them stories to themselves about their reality, about their personality, about their family and social relations.
00:32:32.160	And they hold very doggedly and stubbornly to those stories, even though they may know that those stories are highly selected, constructed, and there's a lot left out of them.
00:32:46.160	And there's other things that are brought into them that might not necessarily could.
00:32:52.160	So, and yet we cannot live without some sort of narrative understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
00:33:01.160	So, and this may be get back to civilization and it's just contents where one of the, one of the theses there is that this heavy price that the ego has to pay, or in order to be part of a larger group community.
00:33:16.160	It's one where the super ego, which is the organizing authoritative principle of the group, gets accustomed to more and more concessions being made on the part of the individuals who formed the group, that it starts spinning out of control the demands of sacrifice and relinquishment of satisfactions.
00:33:45.160	Such that you have a super ego, which is starting to get so over-regulated, that human civilization is at great danger of perishing out of over-regulation.
00:34:00.160	And I believe that we are in a moment like that, and that it's getting so over-determined, our social behavior, what we can do, what we can do, what we can do.
00:34:13.160	That there is a distinct danger of something spinning completely out of control, not the control of libidinal license, but on the contrary, the over-regulation.
00:34:28.160	And also this increased aggression that the super ego picks up and then with which it attacks the ego.
00:34:40.160	It is interesting, because to go back to the difference between the main argument or the main insight of civilization and its discontent, the difference between that and the Christian idea of a conscience that makes itself a very important thing.
00:34:57.160	It makes itself hurt or starts protesting even at the sin of thought.
00:35:03.160	The difference is that Freud would be hard to credit him with that idea, because even though he thinks this is his heavily plagiarizing mutual here from the genealogy of morality.
00:35:19.160	Which idea is this? The idea that, in fact, if the super ego demands from the ego a an instinctual renunciation, that in fact every time instinctual satisfaction is renounced in accordance with the demands of the super ego.
00:35:44.160	Instead of the super ego becoming more lenient and happy with the ego, it becomes harsher with every single time that we renounce instinctual gratification.
00:35:56.160	So that for Freud we would come to theory that explains very well why saints and hermits are the people who suffer from the harshest super ego.
00:36:07.160	The most guilty. The most guilt. Yes. The most guilt whereas criminals may not.
00:36:14.160	So, and this is where really Christian teaching and in fact one of this is part ways.
00:36:24.160	This is based on the idea that the instinctual satisfaction, the main instinctual satisfaction that is being renounced in order for us to live in a community or instabilization is not sexual satisfaction, but is satisfaction of the aggressive drive.
00:36:43.160	So that every time this aggressive drive cannot be externalized and fine satisfaction, that amount of aggression is picked up by the super ego and is turned backward or inside against the ego.
00:37:04.160	And that is truly the ultimate ground, the ultimate reason for our unhappiness. It is not just the fact that we need to renounce various satisfaction in order to live with each other, but that in fact the more we obey this social demands, the more guilty we become.
00:37:30.160	It is a very pessimistic theory. I do think he is getting that from Nietzsche's genealogy of moral, especially the second essay.
00:37:38.160	I think the second essay, the second essay, the next essay, is the idea that it is only when we start renouncing, when we start or when we stop finding instinctual gratification that our psyche gains in the past.
00:37:59.160	'The Kings in Deppes' and that's that 'Deppes' is much more the super ego than it is, the id or the unconscious.
00:38:08.000	Would you say that Nietzsche and Chopin Hower, the two of them are huge presence in the background
00:38:15.920	of the two principles of Freudian, of later Freud's theory, of the pleasure principle
00:38:21.720	or to say the life forces, the Eros Nietzsche, and with Chopin Hower notorious pessimist,
00:38:32.360	that that would somehow be in the background of the death drive or the Nirvana principle, as you will call it.
00:38:40.200	I find Chopin Hower more in Freud's distinction between affect and representation.
00:38:51.280	I think that there is a revision of will and representation.
00:38:58.920	It is very difficult to see whether that, whether Chopin Hower's will is more a sexual drive or a death instinct.
00:39:09.240	That's true.
00:39:10.680	So that genealogy there, I think it would be both.
00:39:14.280	There is something in the death instinct that reminds me of Chopin Hower as well, the idea that the will, once it's objectification to take the course, it's own course.
00:39:27.720	And there is a strange moment in beyond the pleasure principle when Freud says,
00:39:35.000	we cannot cut short life because that the drive that leads us backward needs to have its forward course to lead backward.
00:39:49.640	But you can't change that course.
00:39:53.560	So I think that there is a genealogical thing.
00:39:57.440	I agree with that.
00:39:59.360	It also reaffirms something else that I believe, which is that the death drive and the life drive, the erotic drive, are not two separate things,
00:40:08.760	but that one lurks at the heart of the other and is distinguishable but not separate from.
00:40:17.760	And the person whom I think understood that really in original terms is Jacques Lacau.
00:40:25.360	Much maligned of lign, much maligned, but nevertheless his sense that the libidinal principle, where if it were really to follow its own bliss as to use a term that comes from the 60s,
00:40:44.880	And if it were ever to achieve its Jewish sauce and it always seems that it's on the path towards this ultimate, if we saw a certain enjoyment,
00:40:56.080	that Jewish sauce would be death. It would be self annihilation.
00:40:59.640	It would be this primordial connection or reconnection with what Freud called "Das-Ding" or the thing with a capital T,
00:41:10.520	which Lacau says we should be careful not to identify with the mother, but it's very, very close to what the mother represents in the imagination.
00:41:22.040	And so perhaps the ultimate goal of the erotic drive would be a kind of oceanic feeling, which is really true.
00:41:30.920	That's what I was thinking too.
00:41:32.280	And it is true, it is very difficult even reading with a careful reading of beyond the pleasure principle.
00:41:42.480	It is very difficult to see where in fact the death drive would be distinct from Eros, or from the pleasure principle.
00:41:54.680	Because the pleasure principle also only needs to supersede it by the reality principle because it would lead to destruction.
00:42:07.280	What do you agree with me that, in Freud, finally what we don't have is any concept of human normalcy or a state of human happiness
00:42:21.560	as a sustainable static state of which unhappiness is a deviation or that therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, or any other form of therapy can restore a patient to a state of happiness
00:42:39.880	precisely because by definition the human condition is an unhappy one.
00:42:46.920	And that may be the goal of therapy is not to make people happy, but to make them realize that their desires are fundamentally, ultimately impossible ones
00:42:58.400	and to accept and surrender and resign oneself to that.
00:43:02.480	I'm afraid we're not going to close on a happy note. We're not closing, we still have time.
00:43:08.880	Well, yeah, in the quotes that I would like to fight here is Freud saying that the ultimate goal or the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment
00:43:23.120	is to transform neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.
00:43:30.400	So this would be a very pessimistic vision. I believe that there is a way, however, in which there is freedom in ordinary unhappiness
00:43:44.080	that is not there in neurotic misery. So I don't know if that makes it any more optimistic.
00:43:55.560	But, well, again, optimistic optimism is an imperative of the culture we live in, Western European, especially American culture,
00:44:07.800	where you say ordinary unhappiness as if it's somehow tragic. But, you know, maybe ordinary unhappiness is not such a bad condition after all.
00:44:16.560	Especially if I mean, I think that a lot of psychotherapy, as it is practiced in this country, finds its ultimate goal in taking ordinary unhappiness
00:44:28.960	and making it into neurotic ecstasy or neurotic happiness.
00:44:35.840	So I think we find various dangers at the various extremes of therapeutic situations.
00:44:44.960	Psychoanalytic is confined as a disciplinary measure. It may function as a way to discipline subjects into
00:44:58.320	conformity with social demands which, you know, can happen if it is stripped of all its radical sides.
00:45:06.240	Especially if that the formation of a conformity narrative is the aim.
00:45:13.920	Psychoanalytic moves between these two extremes of conformity and, you know, the formulation of a coherent narrative
00:45:25.120	that would allow the person to live and analysis, which is precisely as La Planche says in the service of the death drive.
00:45:33.840	So dissolving and disintegrating those narratives that may keep us prisoners.
00:45:39.200	I personally, here's where I come down on it. I appreciate a great deal that the wisdom underlying
00:45:49.920	psychoanalysis as a theory of human nature and especially this idea of ordinary happiness as a
00:45:57.760	condition which is good enough. I think as a practice, it's clinical. I think more often than not,
00:46:07.280	these patients who go into this kind of endless psychoanalytic therapy are probably duped
00:46:17.680	more often than not. That's my personal feeling. But I think it beats a certain kind of contemporary
00:46:24.560	medicalization of psychic, let's say disorder, or let's just call it psychoanalytic order, the
00:46:34.960	basic unhappiness. And that sometimes the pressure to be happy, the imperative thou shalt be happy,
00:46:43.360	is much more destructive of psychic health than is the acceptance of ordinary unhappiness.
00:46:52.080	And this dispensing with the whole phenomenon of the psychic and treating every symptom of
00:47:01.600	melancholy unhappiness with medication. I think is one that's doing tremendous untold
00:47:12.800	damage and cultural destruction. I mean, I think that with the kind of medication of children
00:47:21.120	now with the slightest hint of depression or attention deficit disorder, what I realize is that
00:47:29.760	there are probably going to be very few poets in our future because melancholy is no longer allowed.
00:47:36.960	The kind of temperament of a certain kind of sorrowful disposition is not allowed, it's not tolerated.
00:47:44.240	It has to be drugged down. And all these things which are the matrix of creativity,
00:47:51.040	especially in adolescence, are just medically categorizes pathological.
00:48:03.520	Yeah, well, you know, you were playing being Floyd before, we don't need no education.
00:48:09.440	And I think that mitigating children, especially, especially because of a diagnosis of attention
00:48:21.440	deficit disorder, is to, I don't know, which percentage, but to a great part is the result of lazy
00:48:33.200	teachers. I think that the signs of attention deficit disorder are interchangeable with signs of boredom,
00:48:43.920	so that if we cannot offer children, students, listeners, and something interesting, it is very
00:48:55.840	easy to displace that accusation and to make them, you know, the locus of the pathological because
00:49:05.760	they cannot pay attention to something that lacks interest. So I think there are some
00:49:12.720	criminal aspects of mitigating children. And that's attention deficit disorder. I would also
00:49:24.560	point to depression, and I am very grateful that my depression or my melancholy or whatever you want
00:49:35.200	to call it was not taken away from me when I was in my adolescence because it was the fecundity of
00:49:42.480	those moods, the streamoon, are things that I'm still indebted to, you know, many, many, many years
00:49:50.560	later and had that been taken away from me, I think, perhaps the most precious elements of the
00:49:58.720	psyche are taken away and that that is on. But those can't be taken away. I mean, there is something
00:50:04.800	psychoanalysis cannot take those away. No, psychoanalysis cannot, but medical, you know,
00:50:10.400	this is prozac can. Well, I mean, I'm reminded of a wonderful cartoon, you know, in the 19th
00:50:17.040	century with prozac where you had Edgar Allan Poe as a kid, you know, standing in front of the
00:50:24.480	raven and saying, "Hey birdie, what would take place? What would take the place of a poem?"
00:50:32.320	And there was one with Nietzsche and one with Marx too. What about Bud Lehr?
00:50:41.120	Well, I think with Bud Lehr, the evidence of how she issues that is too strong for us to make jokes
00:50:50.560	like that about prozac. But how she did not dispel and it banished and exiled his own re on the contrary.
00:50:59.920	It gave space for his own re to to to to to to to to become creative. I don't think the same
00:51:06.400	happens with these modern medications. I think it is important. I think it is important to also
00:51:11.600	however dispel the fear that because, you know, our listeners might misunderstand this as
00:51:17.280	the fear that which I had for years and years and years that psychoanalysis will turn one into
00:51:24.320	a boring person. And it's it's I think it's a widespread widespread fear
00:51:35.280	which for me gets gets also reactivated every time I read, for instance, the wolfman or some
00:51:44.640	case stories like what aspects of the psyche are deadened, you know, are leveled by that kind of
00:51:53.200	discourse. And I think that is wrong. I think that in fact psychoanalysis can liberate
00:52:03.680	some of these aspects of the psyche, especially by giving giving way to primary processes which are
00:52:12.240	very much part of the creative process. Well said, karitini. We've been speaking with karitini
00:52:20.160	Duvalzi about Freud and our two part segment. This has been the second segment. We're wrapping it up
00:52:25.840	now. And you know, I wasn't going to end with this song. But after you mentioned the Pink Floyd
00:52:31.360	and the way this conversation is coming to his conclusion, I think it will be appropriate. So
00:52:36.160	thanks for joining us. Can you see me? Thank you so much, Robert. It's been a great day.
00:52:39.200	I'll have to back. Bye bye. Thank you.
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