A deeper look at dreams

[Dresta]

Well, an important part of Freud's work on dreams was that the mind obfuscates the truth because it would be too painful or powerful to directly view in a dream, which would wake the mind up from its dream state. The reason that people or places in dreams might look very familiar is because they are a combination of the different traits from important people or place that you've experience or thought of in the last day.

I think Freud gets too much credit for this stuff: it looks like he borrowed extensively from Nietzsche, made the terminology more acceptable, effectively popularising his concept of sublimation (he even used the word several times). He talked a about Freudian repression, but called it 'inhibition' - the same with the super ego and guilt (calling it ressentiment, false morality, bad conscience). Even his "overman" was his term for an individual that was successful in transcending the fundamental conflict between established morality and instinctive urges, discovering a sense of inner freedom, and setting one's own standards of valuation (i.e. one of the primary aims of psychoanalytic treatment).

Freud formalised these ideas. What he really added, was refocusing everything around sexuality, adding concepts such as ***** envy, the Oedipus complex, and other highly speculative propositions. What i don't like is that he denied such influence when it is so clear, leading to many contradictory comments such as declaring “the degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche has never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again” at a time when he'd declared himself to have never even read Nietzsche!

He made a pretence of not having any philosophical antecedents (when he had many); i don't know why, but it seems likely to be for reasons of prestige, so he could carve a new science in his name (while disdaining the philosophy he devoured and then pretended had no influence on his ideas). His correspondence shows he had a clear familiarity with Nietzsche's early work, in the 1870s, even. Unsurprisingly, many of his followers ended up looking rather more like a cult than a science.

This is the shortest quote i could find that discusses it in any detail (talking about Ernest Gellner, and his concept of the Nietzschean minimum, all of which can be found in Freud in one form or another):

[QUOTE]The first point of this Nietzschean Minimum is what Gellner calls ‘the self-devouringness of morality’, by which he means that morality in the pejorative sense is a contorted and tortured outcome of the same wild sources that feed our basic desires. For this reason its ascetic conclusions are dishonest. ‘Self-devouring’ is a phrase meant to capture the necessary inconsistencies of the position: because Nietzsche condemns some morality but not all morality Gellner argues that ‘is not the condemnation of dishonesty itself a survival of that self-tormenting conscience which is being damned? In the name of what value or ideal can we damn cunning and the moralistic self-torturers if they prevail? Was it not they themselves who invented the ideal of the abstract truth? So do we not damn them in the name of a pseudo-standard which they themselves deceitfully invented, and in disregard of the more terrestial norm of success which we ought to reinstate?’ Brian Leiter in his later book on Nietzsche’s ethics explains this apparent contradiction in terms of a distinction between morals in the pejorative sense, morals ‘for the herd’ as Nietzsche charmingly puts it, and morality that allows the higher types to thrive.

The second aspect of the Nietzschean Minimum is the idea that excellence is parasitic on aggression, which therefore condemns humanitarian, ascetic morality as a perversion. The third aspect is a social Darwinianism, where conflict rather than harmony is the norm and characterizations to the contrary are against our true natures. Enlightenment values are merely on this view ‘… the old priestly venom, the resentment and self-hatred of the weak, the attempt to set up their weakness as the norm and to stigmatise vigour as evil…’

Schwitgebel’s book is a depth probe into the very deepest swamps of our self-image. Since Nietzsche concluded that most of us are incapable of self-knowledge, and Freud developed Nietzsche’s incredibly brilliant insight into the subterfuge of unconsciousness, there is now powerful empirical evidence beginning to produce data supporting the idea that our minds are mysterious not only to others but to ourselves also. Up until recently methodological suspicions of Freudian techniques hampered alternative approaches to investigating these mysteries. Ernest Gellner wrote his devastating critique of the Freudian movement in his The Psychoanalytic Movement, characterized it as an ideology structured in ways similar to those of a religion. Given that modern currents of thought have generally shunned religion, the Freudian content tended to be considered too spooky to be genuine.

The main problem Gellner identified was that Freud took the hard-nosed Nietzschean Minimum, which included the violent and power obsessed beasts of irrational and unknown motivations lying in everyone’s breast, and domesticated them for mass consumption. By adding an extra helping of sexuality, the salon-titillating aspect of this business gave the whole movement a genteelly scandalous reputation for all those unhappy wealthy unemployed and bored wimmin and that extra whiff of sex gave it the extra something the rather scary Nietzschean stuff didn’t have. As Gellner puts it about Nietzsche, ‘The Transvaluation of Values, which he commended, is questionably coherent, highly nebulous, sounds as if it might be arduous and perilous, and, let’s not beat about the bush, is a bit above the heads of ordinary people. A highbrow classicist-philosopher is shrieking against long-term historical trends which are hardly involved in the daily concerns of most people.’

So Freud is basically Nietzsche Lite, to borrow a soft drink metaphor. The middle classes loved it, and coupled with the provenance given to the whole movement because Freud was a medical man, Freud has become the religion of the stolid, affluent bourgeoisie. Lacanian Freudians like Zizek should brood on this as they try and roar Marxisms from these bourgeois s

[GimmeThat]

Wheres the .gif of a little black kid who saw something on the screen and fell off of his chair.?