Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 16:45:38 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-PSY: Re: Request for help (Better late than never... )


A lot of the suggestions on how to spend an hour on Freud and Marx are very
interesting. Yet another view might help bring out the deepest similarities
and most important differences even more clearly.

If I had an hour to introduce Freud and Marx, I'd probably try to limit
myself to 40 minutes to allow for questions at the end.

I'd then write up a slogan for the whole thing in both German and English:

	Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.

	They are not aware of this, nevertheless they do it.

For illustrative material I'd just use bits from Young Einstein (sort of
lowest common denominator for young Oz world view?) to illustrate the
sparks that fly when the scientific approach runs into the wall of everyday
prejudice. It also provides the perfect transition from Freud to Marx in
the scene where Marie Curie tells Bert she's fed up with just "sinking" and
"wants 'im to *do* somesing" (in the shower room of a lunatic asylum as it
happens). Also you get the chance to finish your piece with two minutes of
Rock n Roll Music blowing the minds of the folks back home in Tasmania.

I'd start with something on the lines of Zeynep's quote about the
dethroning of human arrogance, but I'd put it in the context of the
scientific revolution in the service of bourgeois production (Galileo's
muttered Eppur si muove as the Inquisition gags him). Getting at what
'*really* makes things tick instead of false explanations that foster fear
and superstition (if you're feeling ambitious quote a few lines of
Lucretius on the evils of religion!).

Then Darwin and the real history of the origins of humanity.

Then Freud and the real history of the origins of interpersonal behaviour
-- the unconscious patterns of emotional reward and punishment imprinted on
us in childhood, the revelation of only partially censored (transformed)
emotional concerns in dreams and dream work,  and the ability to guide
patients in therapy to a manageable realization that the emotional
pressures of their neuroses (wonky feelings that have taken over -- assumed
a fetishistic life of their own) were generated by genuine fears in the
past that are no longer real in the present and thus should no longer be a
cause of anxiety.

Perhaps I'd add two more words to my slogan board -- SEX and POLITICS.

I'd then go on about the resistance to Freud because of the central role of
sexuality and sexual relations in his theory of human sanity. This leads
naturally to the Frankfurt school and especially Reich (Mass Psychology of
Fascism) and Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man) and the question of Alienation.

Since alienation is easy to treat as a subjective and reflective
phenomenon, it's time to turn the subject inside out, point to the social
framework containing the individuals who've been in focus so far, state
that a sick society generates sick people faster than individual approaches
will be able to cure them (however well understood the individual pressures
behind the problems of the individual are), and play the Sick of Sinking
bit from Young Einstein.

Now is the time to point to the slogan Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun
es, and explain that it occurs a few pages into the chapter on Commodity
Fetishism in Capital I. From here on its straightforward Marxism -- the
equivalent of the sex drive in capitalist society is the drive for profit.
The social equivalent of the mechanisms masking the reality of parental
oppression and abuse is the fetishization of social effects (wages,
interest, rent, the "eternal" opposition of labour and capital, the
apparently living initiative of dead property in the shape of capital
controlling our lives, etc) into causes. Perhaps a comparison of the need
for a basically sick family to keep up appearances and pretend everything's
fine with the need for a basically sick society to pretend it's the best of
all possible worlds and the only problems are the people pointing out the
faults.

I'd round off by the need for directed political action to bring about the
emancipation of the working class and with it humanity, and compare this to
the need for directed emotional intervention to emancipate a patient from a
neurosis. This emphasizes the need for knowledge, practical skills, action
and organization AND the ability to defend yourself against powerful
enemies because what you're doing is attacking the very source of their
privilege and power.

Liberation is a powerful aphrodisiac and well worth celebrating, I would
say, and fill the auditorium with Rock n Roll Music.

I can't wait to hear how it goes in real life!!

Good luck Rob!

Cheers,

Hugh





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