Christianity QA

Question:

On Sun, 9 Feb 2003 17:07:51 -0500, "DUTCH" <DU…@A0L.C0M> wrote: >Freud

Also believed that all our motives were decided by pain and pleasure. I imagine he loved the pleasure of cocaine then? Have any of Freud’s critics – I imagine there must be some from another school of psychology – considered some of his writings to have been questionable and even engaged in a critique of him due to cocaine use? [serious question] Martin Borders…Language…Culture…QUICK! No wonder we have a problem with democrats and immigration as the top 50% of wage earners pay 96.09% of income taxes! Islam is not a religion of peace Islam’s history is one of brutal conquest Islam is involved in 20 of 22 wars today Islam must undergo a reformation, as did Christianity, as it is not compatable with the western nation state, or be asked to leave

Response:

Freud Language, as we know it, is a product of the conscious mind and governed by rational rules. The unconscious is pre-rational and, therefore, pre-linguistic. It consists of images, which are related by association, rather than logic. One idea or image calls up another idea and/or object that has been associated with it in an earlier experience. When I say "apple," you may think of a red or green fruit, but, at the same time, you may think of lunch because you’re hungry. You may think of the apple your grandmother gave you every time you went to her house. And/or you may think of the time you bit into an apple and found half a worm. These are private experiences. But you may also think of the apple that Eve gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden, an image coming from your store of cultural experiences. The shape of the apple, along with its cultural association with women and seduction, also makes it available as a disguised image of sexual desire in our dreams. Conscious mind Semiconscious state; while falling asleep, images drift through our minds. Unconscious mind, filled with repressed thoughts, wishes, fears. The concept of unconscious desires is hard to accept because these desires are unconscious and not available to the conscious mind . So when we’re first taught about them, it’s only natural to resist. (Not me! I have no desire for my mother’s or father’s body. WHAT?) It’s also common to resist being trapped by a circular concept that explains our resistance as a way of protecting us from what we’ve repressed–that is, from what we cannot consciously accept. Freud asks us to begin thinking about slips of the tongue–those instances when we accidentally say something other than what we’d planned to say, but which nonetheless makes sense and expresses something (we’re embarrassed to discover) we care more about. We may say the opposite of what we meant to say, accidentally say the name of someone we love or hate, or substitute something we discover makes sense only after some thought. The unexpected thought has emerged into our consciousness from some level of our unconscious mind. And the connection is formed by the simple principle of association. Puns–words with two or more meanings–are also ways of giving voice to unconscious, as well as conscious, thoughts. And dream images are another. Unconscious thoughts, desires, and wishes also emerge as fantasies and other products of the imagination. Role of Culture and Language: While dictionaries may define fantasy as resulting from "the free play of the imagination," the imagination is never entirely free. From the moment we’re born, our minds begin to be shaped by our culture–the place and procedure of birth, how our parents were trained to think about and act toward babies and children, our childhood training, the stories we’re read, and the pictures we’re shown. This does not mean we are trapped by this training, these stories, and these pictures, for we can combine and modify them in infinite ways. Nonetheless, our culture provides the basic store of ideas, stories, and images, as well as a basic set of expectations–which are continually reinforced by laws, religion, schools, books, newspapers, magazines, TV, movies, popular music, advertising, etc. Our culture does not determine, but it does shape–or to be more precise mediate (from in the middle)–what we think, believe, see, feel, imagine, and dream. This means that both our conscious and unconscious thoughts are mediated by or filtered through our culture. While their may be some universal ideas, values, and desires, they are filtered through–or mediated by–our cultural store of ideas, images, beliefs, and stories and, therefore, given specific form. And Freud has become part of our cultural storehouse. On the other hand, "our culture" includes subcultures that contain their individual storehouses of ideas, images, stories, desires, and values as well as those shared by all the subcultures, including the subculture of the white, middle class Between the 1890’s and the 1930’s Sigmund Freud revolutionized our understanding of the human mind. Perhaps most fundamental was his focusing the importance of the unconscious, which had been barely recognized. It certainly had not been recognized as a repository for both normal and traumatic memories of infant and childhood experiences, which, due to the process of socialization, were too disturbing to bring into the conscious mind. Perhaps next most fundamental to Freud’s contributions was his view that sex drives played a major role in human development and thought. The concepts of both the unconscious and the sex drives took root in the various modern movements of young people to liberate themselves from patriarchal Victorian repression (from the 1890’s to the 1930’s). Psychoanalysis began with his and Josef Breuer’s study of hysteria in middle-class women. They argued that the symptoms could be traced to traumatic childhood experiences that had been repressed (pressed into the unconscious) creating pent-up emotional energy that caused the symptoms–and that could be released by the patients’ recalling their memories under hypnosis. Freud went on to argue that the memories pent up in the unconscious were primarily sexual. They were pent up mainly because of middle-class socialization. He later demonstrated that sexual development–centering on erogenous zones around the lips, anus, and sexual organs- began in infancy. Stimulating her baby’s lips in the act of nursing, the mother arouses infantile sexual desire. Around the age of toilet training, babies become aware of a pleasure associated with the anus (and also take pleasure in talking about feces). And at adolescence pleasure is associated with the genital organs. While all this pleasure is normal, we are socialized to center on the genitals, to repress our sexual desire for our parents, and to enjoy only heterosexual pleasure. Freud has had a major impact on modern thought, art, and literature. He was widely read, and his symbolism was widely adopted, especially in the 1920’s. As a result, it has become a part of modern western culture. Artists, writers, and filmmakers use Freud’s notion of the unconscious and Freudian symbols either consciously or because his ideas and language have become part of our intellectual vocabulary. And, although much of his thought has been rejected, much has also been revised, adapted, or built upon. Freud is especially important for the study of imaginative literature, because the imagination derives at least as much from the unconscious as it does from the conscious mind: 1. Imagination: the power to form a mental image of something that’s not there or has not been seen in the "real" world. 2. Fantasy: a creation of the imagination–which may be probable or improbable. See Role of Culture and Language below. 3. Dream: a kind of fantasy produced by our unconscious. The psychological explanation, initiated by Freud, is that dreams are expressions of our unconscious wishes and fears. 4. Unconscious. The unconscious contains desires that are socially unacceptable and, therefore, unacceptable to our conscious minds. Such desires are usually normal. From our earliest years we have desires, some of which (like the desire to be fed right away) we’re taught to postpone or control, some (like the desire for our mothers body) we learn to transfer to other people. But, whether controlled, transferred, or transformed into something socially acceptable, the original desire remains. It is repressed (pressed down, held in check) into our unconscious, remains as a kind of force or pressure, and returns in disguised forms in dreams, works of art, etc. After studying thousands of dreams, as well as images in art and literature, Freud classified a number of these disguise strategies: those which substitute a part for the whole, allusions, images, and symbols. "Freudian symbols" include a great number of sexual symbols: long, upstanding objects (like sticks, trees, umbrellas, poles) and penetrating objects (pointed weapons like knives and swords, guns, but also pencils, pens, etc.) for the penis objects that enclose a space or can act as receptacles (caves, pits, jars, bottles, cupboards, rooms, houses, doorways, windows, etc.) for the female genitals.

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