Reading Freud and Lacan, it seems as if the exists a magnetic force that compels conformity, within late industrial culture, which takes the form of a the longing for a power from which one has become dissociated. This power may be conceptualized as a sense of wholeness and consequent self-enjoyment. The name given to this dissociation from power is "castration". The name given to the subjective feeling for this elusive quality of power is "the phallus".
This is at least how it looks from a perspective already enmeshed in late industrial (or some would say "post-industrial" culture). How we got there is another matter. That has to do with a long history of repression of one's drives (not just sexual drives) and the way that Judeo-Christian ideology has been instrumental in assisting this development. Lest one think I am impugning any particular group in naming the nature of the problem, Judeo-Christian, Nietzsche makes a point of indicating that the historical development of repression that occurred in the West also occurred in India. The name he gives to this global, historical development and its logic is "the ascetic ideal".
In the West, the ideology of "original sin" has a predominant place in the culture, so that the wish to get rid of aspects of oneself that smack of too much spontaneity or "instinct" permeates most of society. The deadening effect of the "ascetic ideal" is explicitly what Nietzsche opposes, as indeed he opposes anything with a "theological instinct" in it.
The direction in which Freud takes the ascetic ideal is complex. In some ways, his work represents a loosening of asceticism: we may now talk about sex more openly, after Freud. On the other hand, he and Lacan both keep a heavy remainder of the old, theological heritage, in that they keep up various rites of purification, where in general the natural state of childhood is considered to be fraught with "psychosis" so that there is a corresponding need for purification. My view is that the Freudian. and above all Lacanian. attribution of "psychosis" to early childhood states is a scientific reworking of the idea of "original sin" along Judeo-Christian lines. This statement does not discount that alienating the instincts might have been necessary for civilisation as we know it to have come into being. Indeed, all the evidence points to this Alienated instincts served a religious purpose.
This brings me to a rather different point: what one can estimate from this is that in terms of the cultural conditions Freud and Lacan are describing, there is a conventional and normative cultural dissociation from power, which takes place in everybody's lives, under the force of the culturally conditioned norms.
"Dissociation" may be the most apt term to use here, as it conforms with the idea that one is psychologically detached from that which one originally had. Thus one is inducted into "civilisation" as one dissociates from the immediate access to the pleasures of one's youth, into a cultural system of delayed gratification. One dissociates, as it were, from connections to the immediate environment and relationships of mutual pleasure that one used to have as a child. This dissociation is known castration, which is a symbolic (although also deeply psychological -- hence, real) gateway to induction into 'normal' adult life. It denotes conformity and self-abnegation.
However, it also implies an adult ego -- an ego centred approach to life, and not a decentred childish one, which expects the very environment (echoing the same form as the mother's breast) to sustain one, nurturing one with ecstatic visions and nourishing insights.
Not to be "castrated" pertains to the so-called "primitive" man who the colonial ethno-psychiatrists often disparagingly analysed and speculated upon. Contra Lacan, though, the uncastrated man (or woman) does not have a problem with speaking language. (They are not the ones who have been weaned within a Modernist pressure cooker of harsh moral lines by being impressed upon about the last necessity of Order.) The "primitive" seems from an overtly civilized and rationally constrained viewpoint to be all too connected with his natural environment and does not long for anything different. Carothers, one of the ethno-psychiatrists of the 40s thought that "Africans' strong religious sense came from living close to nature." [p 54--McCulloch).
According to Jock McCulloch [in Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind], Carothers also felt that the "African personality [displayed] some notable parallels with that of the schizophrenic. By European standards Africans lived in a world of fantasy. Rather than observing their environment in a detached or scientific way, they projected their own qualities and emotions onto the world about them. For Africans, all matter, both animate and inanimate, had a spirit." [ p 52]
The above sounds quite damning, until you realise that this is the natural state of man (and woman), to be connected with his natural environment, and not to long for a form of power that is non-existent. To project one's own power into the environment is to receive psychic nourishment from that very environment, as a form of cyclical replenishment. One is not castrated by this experience. Yet to deny the sense of one's own power to receive nourishment from the environment is to accept castration. Henceforth that which is natural -- or as it is then felt to be, "merely" natural -- can no longer serve to sustain one in one's mind and soul. Historical movement from primitive (uncastrated) man to cultural (castrated) man is one that denies the subject his replenishment from the very roots -- or base -- of being. Instead, he has come to understand that self replenishment can only come from as it were "above" -- from those who represent power itself, within organised society.
In current late industrial society, one must dissociate to a large degree from one's instincts to fit in. Nonetheless, this leads to all sorts of complications in the mind as well as in the body-politic of society. Accustomed dissociation is directly connected to that which Lukacs terms "reification" -- a state of alienation from power that reverses cause and effect, giving libidinous energy to abstract concepts such as "God" and "societal norms", so that they seem to have a right to command us.
This is at least how it looks from a perspective already enmeshed in late industrial (or some would say "post-industrial" culture). How we got there is another matter. That has to do with a long history of repression of one's drives (not just sexual drives) and the way that Judeo-Christian ideology has been instrumental in assisting this development. Lest one think I am impugning any particular group in naming the nature of the problem, Judeo-Christian, Nietzsche makes a point of indicating that the historical development of repression that occurred in the West also occurred in India. The name he gives to this global, historical development and its logic is "the ascetic ideal".
In the West, the ideology of "original sin" has a predominant place in the culture, so that the wish to get rid of aspects of oneself that smack of too much spontaneity or "instinct" permeates most of society. The deadening effect of the "ascetic ideal" is explicitly what Nietzsche opposes, as indeed he opposes anything with a "theological instinct" in it.
The direction in which Freud takes the ascetic ideal is complex. In some ways, his work represents a loosening of asceticism: we may now talk about sex more openly, after Freud. On the other hand, he and Lacan both keep a heavy remainder of the old, theological heritage, in that they keep up various rites of purification, where in general the natural state of childhood is considered to be fraught with "psychosis" so that there is a corresponding need for purification. My view is that the Freudian. and above all Lacanian. attribution of "psychosis" to early childhood states is a scientific reworking of the idea of "original sin" along Judeo-Christian lines. This statement does not discount that alienating the instincts might have been necessary for civilisation as we know it to have come into being. Indeed, all the evidence points to this Alienated instincts served a religious purpose.
This brings me to a rather different point: what one can estimate from this is that in terms of the cultural conditions Freud and Lacan are describing, there is a conventional and normative cultural dissociation from power, which takes place in everybody's lives, under the force of the culturally conditioned norms.
"Dissociation" may be the most apt term to use here, as it conforms with the idea that one is psychologically detached from that which one originally had. Thus one is inducted into "civilisation" as one dissociates from the immediate access to the pleasures of one's youth, into a cultural system of delayed gratification. One dissociates, as it were, from connections to the immediate environment and relationships of mutual pleasure that one used to have as a child. This dissociation is known castration, which is a symbolic (although also deeply psychological -- hence, real) gateway to induction into 'normal' adult life. It denotes conformity and self-abnegation.
However, it also implies an adult ego -- an ego centred approach to life, and not a decentred childish one, which expects the very environment (echoing the same form as the mother's breast) to sustain one, nurturing one with ecstatic visions and nourishing insights.
Not to be "castrated" pertains to the so-called "primitive" man who the colonial ethno-psychiatrists often disparagingly analysed and speculated upon. Contra Lacan, though, the uncastrated man (or woman) does not have a problem with speaking language. (They are not the ones who have been weaned within a Modernist pressure cooker of harsh moral lines by being impressed upon about the last necessity of Order.) The "primitive" seems from an overtly civilized and rationally constrained viewpoint to be all too connected with his natural environment and does not long for anything different. Carothers, one of the ethno-psychiatrists of the 40s thought that "Africans' strong religious sense came from living close to nature." [p 54--McCulloch).
According to Jock McCulloch [in Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind], Carothers also felt that the "African personality [displayed] some notable parallels with that of the schizophrenic. By European standards Africans lived in a world of fantasy. Rather than observing their environment in a detached or scientific way, they projected their own qualities and emotions onto the world about them. For Africans, all matter, both animate and inanimate, had a spirit." [ p 52]
The above sounds quite damning, until you realise that this is the natural state of man (and woman), to be connected with his natural environment, and not to long for a form of power that is non-existent. To project one's own power into the environment is to receive psychic nourishment from that very environment, as a form of cyclical replenishment. One is not castrated by this experience. Yet to deny the sense of one's own power to receive nourishment from the environment is to accept castration. Henceforth that which is natural -- or as it is then felt to be, "merely" natural -- can no longer serve to sustain one in one's mind and soul. Historical movement from primitive (uncastrated) man to cultural (castrated) man is one that denies the subject his replenishment from the very roots -- or base -- of being. Instead, he has come to understand that self replenishment can only come from as it were "above" -- from those who represent power itself, within organised society.
In current late industrial society, one must dissociate to a large degree from one's instincts to fit in. Nonetheless, this leads to all sorts of complications in the mind as well as in the body-politic of society. Accustomed dissociation is directly connected to that which Lukacs terms "reification" -- a state of alienation from power that reverses cause and effect, giving libidinous energy to abstract concepts such as "God" and "societal norms", so that they seem to have a right to command us.
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