#freud

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions. Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird. The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#freud #freudians #internet #marx #marxism

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this! ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#did #freud #functions #know #knowledge

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#freud #go #man #since #thought

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man. ↗

— Chaim Potok

#almost #another #because #countenance #elements

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life. ↗

— Herbert Read

#adult life #burying #clearly #difficult #disguised

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It introduced the notion that there existed certain predictable and identifiable processes by which dreams were formed. ↗

— Henry Reed

#dreams #existed #formed #freud #identifiable

In general, certain conclusions are possible from these data. They fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients. ↗

— Hans Eysenck

#conclusions #data #facilitates #fail #freudian

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#acute #deal #egotism #everything #explanation

Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. ↗

— R. D. Laing

#descended #freud #head #hero #him

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed. ↗

— Slavoj Zizek

#am #being #being alone #books #changed