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Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

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I am reading through vol 15 of collected works I am nearing its end! This volume was written in the midst of war and like most people involved in the barrage of war, senseless death and destruction changed everyone's view of the war! It not only changed their ideas regarding war, but also how this destructiveness felt itself in sibling rivalries, separations and sabotage, not only in war, but it gave them a new perceptive on things. This writer is not unique in this, he just thought what most other intellectuals and philosophers were thinking aloud during the war, and the situation today is even worse. On p 237 he talks of his views psychoanalytic as compared to anagogic..which are the higher instincts of the mind? The higher functions of the mind were probably the largest growths of the brain after primitive times, the contemplative, philosophical religious...which rather than relying on impulses thought of humans as capable of being driven by more comntemplative criteria..if a person has food, sex, he is driven to more and more until everyone realizes his aims to conquer..and their is a reaction? That's Freud's view of most people..however there are those who ae not so oriented in this aggrandizing fashion..are interested in contemplative, religious, transpersonal, community oriented criteria as being part of a community a larger structure and contributing to a whole..this is more like Adler and Jung... occupy a place somewhere in between. He mentions it at books end..given the war it may not have seemed like a bad idea, and he will increasingly write on society, groups, religion after the war, the religious writings are not his best work, and its where his colleagues part company with him on being insistent on these views.

This book recapitulates much of his previous work, and is almost a summary and seems passe? On p 17 he notes on how the cinema the mass media phenomenon is taking over as forming people's minds, and this was in its infancy. On p 20 given the changes in psychology/psychiatry he wonders should it be a science? A question many people as today and he refers to it as "the study of the contents of consciousness"(p 21). We live in worlds constantly "created anew"(p 23)..this means with changed values of the people who are creating it, and how will this effect us? Later "loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables"(p 45)..is this not something material, but some lost intimacy in this changed world. Later "unjustifiably adopting an extreme mechanistic view"(p 46). Our science is mechanistic, deterministic, it relies on the ability to make laws given that the natural world follows fixed laws like newton's..but unfortunately it doesnt always..things can be indeterminate..is the world mechanistic..this will effect whether psychology/psychiatry can be scientific, or to what extent? On p 84/85 he pokes some fun at psychiatry and he is a psychiatrist..but has gone into independent study..so you should not expect his views as being subsumed under the label psychiatry..and he often talks on how he differs..and youll find practitioners draw some of these same inferences today? On p 92/93 as elsewhere he talks of a typical church sunday morning, the mystical frame of mind, contemplative, "devotions"..peoplebeing devoted to a higher cause..this is non scientific..does that make it bad or good as morals are non scientific..science and the ability to reason scientifically is not related to morals..which are a non scientific form of thinking. Remember he is a determinist who does not believe in free will but writes"is only exhibiting my trust in providence..deeply rooted faith in undetermined psychical events ..quite unscientific..determinism whoose rule extends over mental life"(p 106). On p 155 he sees no difference in the sexuality of men and women seen in dreams as "flying"(p 155).

He develops later his view on children. Before Freud children were thought to be innocent and friendly and in nature kind and decent, playful it was only later they became differentiated in some way. Here he writes of them as being "polymorphously perverse"(p 209)..largely lackin gin morals which later they may develop. Children left to themselves and near seduction, develop"perverse sexual activity"(p 209). This is important in the study of narcissism and the regression to more infantile states of narcissism, sexual development, fixations, lack of maturity and lack of..infantile states, including violence and even troubles with certain sectors of the adult world,
are considered infantile states..and this is thinking he largely developed. So that is vol 15 the important aspects are science and the field of psychology/psychiatry and he is a good writer at times since even though he is a determinist who believes in fixed laws..he tells you in glowing terms the positive views of others, the genuinely religios (genuine is important)..mysticism..the forming of values and morals and their non relation to intellect and scientific intellectual thinking..this disturbs him but its none the less true?

In the postwar US, Freudianism was an art of those concerned with the temporary suspension of unpleasant "realities": artists and intellectuals, persons intent on the maintenance of certain standards in the face of certain social leitmotifs. But "ego psychology" and the Lacanianism which challenged it in the name of scientific ethics were not the only Freud booms to occur, and the most poorly-remembered influence of Freud is perhaps that of James Strachey's Standard Translation on 20th-century Britain. Strachey's choices for translation of Freud's German are almost downright misleading from the standpoint of Freud's own concerns as a steward of Austro-Hungarian culture, but it is to be remembered that Freud's early work was read intensively by European intellectuals; and the group of British intellectuals centered around the Independent Labour Party was no exception, as the tendency of Freud's thought corresponded nicely to the ILP's already-existing concern with the "delinking" of moralism from the politics of everyday life. In other words, it would perhaps be a good idea to consider Strachey's Freud not as anticipating further developments in the line of positivistic decomposition of social mores but as a response to Shavian refusals of certain arrangements (such as enfranchised Britons were offered in lieu of the rapidly expanding social services of their Continental contemporaries): perhaps Bloomsbury can be taken to have codified the rules of this form of *epater*, rather than reinvented it with any "singlemindedness", and perhaps this work deserves to be taken as exemplary of this succor rather than scientifically "exceptionable" in its conjecture -- no matter how much we scruple to rigorize, no "research program" can be attributed to those whose assays produce no viable counterexamples.

Here you can witness Freud not as the straw man stereotype that so many despise but as a warm, humorous man with a great deal of vision. The man you encounter in this book is so different from what you would expect that I warmly recommend this to anyone with an inquiring mind.

He was a genius.