Doug: >And most economists, political scientists, and writers in the New York >Review of Books would tell you the same about Marxism. Actually, Marx is taken much more seriously than Freud nowadays. Freud as "scientist" has absolutely no authority. All of the main tenets he stressed (repressed memories in particular) have been demolished by real scientists. What persists is Freud as visionary, Freud as prophet, etc. This is why he is so important to people like Zizek. He allows such fake radicals to formulate a critique of bourgeois society that leaves the main institutions intact, while focusing our attention on our individual pysches or sexual behavior. >There's a big difference between using psychoanalysis as a way of >understanding why people think, feel, and act the way they do and using it >as a therapy. Most kinds of psychotherapy have terrible success records. >Psychotropic drugs can help a bit, but they rarely cure. If that was only the case. Psychoanalysis has very limited value in explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular. There is nothing at all abnormal about German society in the 1920s. If anything, it was more open-minded and healthy than any other country in Europe. What happened is that it was subjected to enormous strains due to the collapse of world capitalism and a section of the population went nuts. Perhaps Doug is referrring to the value of psychology rather than psychoanalysis. I think psychology is very useful. Some of my favorite psychologists are Shakespeare, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Melville and Proust. Finally, on the question of whether psychotherapy can help people. For everyday garden variety neurosis, there simply is no evidence that it can. The reason for this should be obvious. Capitalism is the main source of unhappiness, although people are not conscious of its effects on their lives. Alienation is generated by the system itself. One of the reasons I have spent so much time reading and writing about primitive communism is that the evidence points in the direction of this type of unhappiness as being historically determined, and not a function of the human psyche as such. This is what anthropological literature reveals by and large: free and happy peoples with limited material means. Capitalism provides the opportunity for unlimited material means and a conjoined unhappiness. The real problem with psychotherapy in the past is that it was promoted as a cure for all sorts of problems that were clearly organic in nature, from obsessive-compulsive disorders to schizophrenia. The notion that the oedipal complex could have anything to do with hearing voices in your head is not only absurd, it is patently unscientific. As citizens of late capitalist society, we are doomed to suffer everyday garden variety unhappiness. Our marriages, our jobs, our relationships are unsatisfactory. People who have insurance plans or personal wealth to allow them to vent their displeasure to a "professional" will not get "better." In times past, they would go to a priest or a village elder. Now that capitalism has made commodity exchange universal, we simply pay for the service. But the social function is identical, to permit people to get up each morning and trudge off outside their home into a cold and hostile world. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
