Herzog (2016) traces the lineage of German psychoanalytsts during the Cold War and their attempts to re-introduce psychoanalysis into cultural and scientific debates in their home country. Herzog pays particular attention to the work of Lorenz and Mitscherlich and their writings post-WWII.
What a wild ride through psychoanalyses of Nazism...Lorenz. What a guy. Aggression as a universal human trait: sure, absolutely, it has an evolutionary purpose which is activated when the Group is threatened in some way, in order to protect the In-group from some Other or Out-group. A base survival drive which is dependent on increases in stress hormones and a genetic legacy of brute, physical domination in non-linguistic species like our ape cousins. An excuse for attempts at genocide?
"and this is my contention – Anti-Oedipus needs to be understood also as a psychoanalytic text, not just an attack on psychoanalysis" (156)"The book was very much concerned with the emotional damages caused by a particular formation of capitalism – in everyone. It consistently searched for a language to articulate how economic conditions and processes shaped individual selves.
In this chapter (Chapter Five) of Cold War Freud, Herzog (2016) historicizes the environment and aftermath of Anti-Oedipus, in and outside of psychoanalytic communities. The author highlights how this prominent book was “lifted” into philosophical theory and cut off from important psychoanalytic thinking. Ultimately, Herzog argues that the text should be considered a psychoanalytic text.
“A great deal of the academic scholarship, however, has lifted Anti- Oedipus out of space and time entirely, treating it as principally a contribution to philosophy (whether wacky- elusive, spurious problematic, or canonical- impressive”-important to consider how it’s framed historically so one can then consider what constraints such framing presents to theory“Doing so reveals as well that the book needs to be understood as initiating a conceptual paradigm shift, particularly in its fresh take on the problem of ideology –and the puzzle of what attracts human beings to particular politi
Another week of "where to start." Very random - lots of thoughts, too little time to make any of them make sense.Herzog - and oh boy, Reich. Interesting guy. Grateful to him for the term "ideological befogging" and this gem, paraphrased by Herzog, "his conviction that it was above all parental prevention of child masturbation that prepared people for being obedient citizens and workers..." I mean, he's not wrong, but also, can we stop making everything about child masturbation?
"English commentators seemed to have taken special offense, with Terry Eagleton retrospectively summarizing the content of Anti-Oedipus as "the most banal anarchist rhetoric," a book in whose "apodicticism of desire...
“PTSD was an “invention- discovery” born of multiple, overlapping conflicts”“the catalyst for changing the science of trauma, including the very particular symptoms that we now in the twenty- first century continue to understand as key signs of PTSD (including delayed- reaction onset, numbness of affect, intrusive memories, or hyper- arousal), was a grotesque debacle fought out through the 1950s and 1960s over financial compensation for mental health damages among Jewish survivors of life in flight, hiding, or in the ghettos and concentration and death camps.”-mental health has always been
Although rejecters found imaginative ways to get around this as well – for example, by minimizing the assessed percentage of reduction in earning capacity – the law change simplified the claims process considerably.(109)One great problem with the ascent of PTSD, however, and inevitably, was that it relativized and blurred the differences between victims and perpetrators – not just between survivors of concentration and death camps, on the one hand, and US soldiers returning from Vietnam, on the other, but also between a soldier who had been tortured as a prisoner of war and a soldier who ha
"the creation of DSM-III in 1980, an important innovation was the introduction of the category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
