freudamentalism

Music: Rosanne Cash: Interiors Presumably because Freud's 150th birthday is this weekend, yesterday the New York Times published a fantastic editorial titled Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge" that makes another call for recovering the fallen father of psychoanalysis. This essay is perhaps the most lucid explication of the "secondary topography" I've yet to read, and I think the author's argument, that we should reexamine Freud's "late" works like Group Psychology, is especially compelling. With two years of the current presidency to go, we have yet another article that attempts to explain why U.S. citizens continue to support an impotent fascist.

As the author explains, once Freud started writing his "cultural texts," he became increasingly interested in "group" behavior, which he noted functions homologously to individual psychology. Whereas the ego functions as the "dictator" for the individual, that function is usurped by the leader of a group--the ego ideal. The leader/ego-ideal functions to resolve the conflicted self (for example, "split subjectivity" or the tension between the "I" and the "imago") and even allows for certain kinds of enjoyment (frequently violence). I think the author of this essay provides a compelling explanation of the appeal of fundamentalism as a stilling of the restless mind (not to mention a walling-off of the unconscious).

What we need to bear in mind, however, is that the appeal of fascistic leaders also taps into the same libidinal economy of social change: as I suggested to my class last week, revolutionary politics is characteristically adolescent. Taking a page from the work of Larry Rickels, the argument there is that mobilization and solidarity for social change is akin to "acting out." Righteousness requires substituting one's ego ideal for the cause or a resolute leader, and is always underwritten by a (sanctioned) violence. So while Freud's all-too-brief theories of group psychology help to explain the appeal of George W. Bush, his understanding of the "escape from freedom" (well, that's Fromm, but fundamentally the idea is Freudian) also helps explain why hundreds of thousands of people are mobilizing and marching today in support of immigrant rights. The ecstasy of solidarity is not always in the name of fascism or war . . . although it sure seems like we've been smacked by the dark version of this for many, many years.