Date: 02 Jul 96 18:58:21 EDT
From: "Chris, London" <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: Transference and emotional revolutions



Chris comments on Hugh's post:

Falling in love feels like an emotional revolution, and I like the
way Hugh risks some daring connections to make a profounder
point about the nature of the socialist society we long for.

He uses the term transference in a non-specialist way. It may
be any projection on the blank screen of the therapist, of past
important emotional associations, not just love. 

Falling in love has some similarities but is also more complex.
It certainly includes a projection of idealised emotions on the 
other. The intensity of physical union can make that feel real,
but the dialectics and contradictions of true concrete 
sensuous unions are more challenging.

I want to make an important caveat that Hugh appears to refer to
only one form of love, falling in love with a intimate partner.
I strongly suspect there are many other forms of love inevitable
and essential in the creation of societies, including for example
the love between older and younger people, and between 
leaders and led. And the love between members of the same
community. Phenomena of the early socialist states
that are now denounced as dictatorship or cult of the individual,
were among other things, phenomena of love, unrecognisable 
by bourgeois civil society that characteristically elevates
exclusively the love between two sexually active individuals.

Hugh wrote:

>>

I think it'll be the same with social revolution. Once the rigid,
irrational barriers of class society are down, the emotionally real
interpersonal and intergroup conflicts will surface (as opposed to
emotionally false but highly tangible economic conflicts such as those
leading to wars under capitalism and previous economic formations). Life
will be much more fluid, turbulent and unpredictable than now, but on a
foundation of social and economic security.

<<<<

I do not think that 
class phenomena are "irrational": the struggle over the 
distribution of actual resources must occur in every society.
Perhaps just what is irrational is that such complex social 
phenomena as modern production should be privately owned
and controlled.

But I am very much in sympathy with Hugh's warning that
socialist society will include much complexity, and
might even be more turbulent than class society, when you think of the
speed with which different attitudes can now sweep across the 
world among billions of atomised consumers/workers.





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