Group items tagged

the super ego

human disposition toward social connectivity called Eros, and that "the process of civilization is a modification which the vital processes experience under the influence of a task set by Eros.

I want to seize upon this "oceanic feeling" that Freud rejects as a cause of religious sentiment and investigate its significance further. In fact, it seems to me that the inspiration for all poetry might very well have its source in this feeling

Wallace Stevens blurs the distinction between emotions, the inner world, and the environment, the outer world

That was not ours although we understood,

1. Freud departs from the consideration of the beautiful within a distinctly modern position, associating aesthetics with the field that studies the "feeling" of the beautiful. This is quite different from say the Greek conception of the beautiful. 2. This modern handling of the beautiful is also seen in Freud's separation of the beautiful from knowledge or truth, again by his emphasis on its lack of usefulness and status as a feeling. 3. Freud places the beautiful within a long list of defenses, sublimations, and repressions that redirect our true libidinal impulses. He counts beauty as a derivation of sexual gratification, as a milder form of substitute intoxication that helps make the pain of life and its refusal to grant maximum pleasure, acceptable.

Thus there is in Freud an interesting, if inverted, parallel to the Greek (especially Platonic) conception of Beauty here on the one hand, and a clear manifestation of its modern development through the rise of the science of aesthetics and positivism. Freud seems uncertain about what else psychoanalytic theory can say about beauty. However, if he were to borrow from this Greek tradition, rather than from its modern development, he might be tempted to suggest that beauty is not so much a distraction from the truth of psychoanalytic theory, but the light that shines in the very confrontation of the conscious with the unconscious, and the intoxicating emergence of a truth (not a substitute feeling) that we find there

"Civilization does not once and for all terminate a 'state of nature.' What civilization masters and represses--the claim of the pleasure principle--continues to exist in civilization itself. The unconscious retains the objectives of the defeated pleasure principle." (Eros & Civ, 15-16)

And so rather than becoming ineffectual like Adorno's individual, the pleasure principle, in its diversion through alternate outlets, ends up being the driving force for all human accomplishment