Monday 2 November 2015

Nature and what is natural

Vlog CCCXLVI Part 2 of 2 - YouTube



I think it is also important to consider that the psychoanalysis, with its rigid insistence that one has to be rejected by the parent of the opposite sex in order to escape incest, actually itself insists on the necessity for narcissistic injury as the cornerstone of civilisation. According to it, everybody is broken and narcissistically injured -- that is a human universal. The author of the article quoted in the above video states that the narcissist never broke away from his mother, and therefore cannot understand that the rest of the world (and other people) are separate from him. But in African cultures, too, one does not break away from the mother or from nature, and there is a continuity, therefore between a sense of nature (and what feels "natural") and civilization. Significantly, there is no plague of narcissism in African societies (at least the ones I've seen). This kind of psychological stucture does not allow for it. But in Western societies, where narcissistic injury is the prescribed norm, it is very common. So, to contradict something the author of the article said -- I don't think the problem narcissists have is that they do not separate from the mother, but rather that their sense of the relationship with their mother becomes too rigid. A fluid connection would not be harmful. That is the African way. But a rigid sense of things and trying to relive the dynamics of the past is not going to do anyone any good.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity