Discussion: Thoreau and Freud

Our Thoreau discussion was led by Kirsten.  I read this short essay and while I felt agreement with some of what Thoreau had to say, about standing up for what you believe in, about not supporting entities (even if this means your government) that are carrying out actions you believe are wrong but I was left floundering somewhat by Thoreau's omission of any attempt to define conscience, to describe how this would work in reality.  I realize he was living in a very different time, less than a century after the American states, including Massachussetts, had been involved in a revolution to force independence from Britain.  Revolt against your government in this context would likely have been seen in a more acceptable and necessary light.  But Thoreau was a smart and thoughtful man and I would have thought he would have contemplated more stable situations and what future roles of democracy, conscience and individual rights and responsibilities might entail.  Kristen was helpful in giving us some background about Thoreau including his adherence to transcendentalism with its belief in the innate goodness of the human being.  I'm not sure that I'm as sanguine as Thoreau was.  I believe that there is innate goodness in human beings but I also believe (as did Freud) that there is innate aggressiveness and my worry in allowing individuals complete freedom is that those who contain more aggressiveness, allowed to run riot, can very easily and quickly with - mankind's technological and strategic abilities - come to dominate the more innately 'good' humans and certainly to oppress the weaker members of any community.

Kristen sent out a good set of questions but we only had a chance to discuss the 1st one - and even then it was a topic that we could have discussed for an entire day:

1. How do we determine what is right?  What are the rights of the individual vs the rights of society?

We live in a society which currently does not nurture a conscience in its citizens, instead it encourages obedience.  People may take actions based, they claim, on their conscience but at what point does their right to obey their conscience end?  My mind immediately went to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr quote that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."  But a determination of 'harm to others' is not always as clearcut as in Wendell Holmes' quote.  We had a brief discussion about how to define conscience.  Examples brought up were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war draft - where conscience was defined on the basis of adherence to religious tenets or teachings.  Society seemed willing to concede the overriding dictates of conscience if it was backed up by the practice of an accepted religion but in the absence of a religious foundation for conscience or in a current western world where religion holds less sway on society, where is conscience defined?  We discussed certain actions that may be sanctioned or even prescribed by religion and/or cultural norms: honour killings, genital mutilation, Christians objecting to abortion clinics (with varying levels of force reaching all the way up to sniper killings of doctors).  Thoreau doesn't explicitly state this but he was focused on the rights and obligations of the individual and for Thoreau, as for Wendell Holmes, the right of an individual to follow his conscience ends where harm to another might begin.

Thoreau was a fan of less government.  How do we make government more responsive to the needs to the people it governs?  Decentralization of government is one way of having a more flexible government with potentially less oppression of individuals (or potentially oppression of fewer individuals).  Switzerland would be one example of a country with a more decentralized government, with its various cantons.

It was an interesting discussion but we ran out of time to really dissect into what is conscience and how do we determine what someone's conscience is?  It was time to move onto Civilization and its Discontents, as postulated by Freud.

Dr. Jerry Zaslove led the discussion on Freud's text Civilization and its Discontents.  Dr. Zaslove has been studying Freud and the field of psychoanalysis for decades.  He spoke a bit about Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, where Freud lived for most of his life.  He had sent us a few texts including one containing Freud's views on capital punishment, and provided a handout on Ritual Psycho-Analytic Studies by Theodor Reik.  Zaslove made the point that the word civilization in the context of this book is probably not the best word.  Culture would have been more apt.  Freud (and Thoreau) are trying to understand the institutions that mankind had developed and how they have come to create such problems for individuals.

Freud is a modern step along a long pathway we've been following from the time of Copernicus through the the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Darwin, Nietszche, Kant, Thoreau etc) to a more modern era, one in which we may not need a state but we do require  a Social Contract.  Freud's method involved psychoanalysis, and the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is repression and the unconscious.  Freud saw psychoanalysis as a dynamic way of assessing the human mind rather than a static set of descriptors of symptoms.  Yet language is the main tool of psychoanalysis.  For someone new to the field, the jargon is a big barrier - not only to understanding but also because many of the words are sound cliched.  Interestingly, Professor Zaslove has been working on an analysis of psychoanalysis and aesthetics: aesthetics as a way to alleviate the suffering that civilization or culture causes to individuals.  Chapter II offers ways of coping with the unhappiness of life.  3 ways.  Deflection, intoxication or .....
Freud was influenced by Darwin and the concept of development and some of Freud's totemic concepts.

Dr. Zaslove briefly defined some of the language associated with psychoanalysis:

• Neuroses - where the ego is divided against itself
• Psyche - from the german means soul or spirit - the inner location of the body
• repression - in the german means repulsion, pushing away
• sexual - phases of the development of the human animal i.e.: adolescence, having a love object, Eros
• cathexis - one part of the mind is occupied by another part of the mind - almost militarily
• civilization - group or mass psychology - the energy of a group
• Id - place of non-conscious drives
• Ego - the self or "i"
• Super-ego - the over 'I' or meta-'I' - stands above the "I"; free association
• transference 
• obsession or compulsion - qualities of the human psyche

Zaslove described some of the influences at the time:

A time of revolutions and counter-revolutions
Archaeological investigation into ancient civilizations
Class system, industrialization - Freud was pessimistic whether these would change - persisent ruling class
City states such as Vienna are undergoing changes and stresses
Growing middle-classes - increased neuroses

One technique used in psychoanalysis is to try and understand emotions through memory and Zaslove briefly mentioned Mimesis in people.  Neurosis is a key issue in individuals as well as in society.  To Freud neurosis is not an illness, it's a consequence in the development of the mental life as a child, where it finds itself divided against itself.  The child has all these undifferentiated drives.  Each child will attach itself to an object (mother, father, grandparent or other caregiver).  The neurosis is the coming into existence of consciousness.  The human animal doesn't do this automatically, it does it via love and touch and by creating a picture .  The healthy self, in an effort to keep itself together, creates an imago, of that which has been lost or that which can be attained in the future.  The resistance or conflict arises when the child realizes that it won't achieve this image.

Civilization and Its Discontents is an anti-platonic book.  It's a book about where we are now (100 years ago) - about modernity.  It's a developmental psychology, it assumes the individual is capable of development.