6 Comments

How many 1960s writers I haven’t read or cited are ploughed into my sensibility? Never read a word of Marshall McLuhen or Gregory Bateson.

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There is such a thing as cultural osmosis--I think that's what you're referring to. But I don't think that's what was going on with Freud. More like: he didn't want his status as a groundbreaking founder tarnished.

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More please! This post reads like the beginning of a great mystery or love story or a mysterious love story. Conversation as confluence of ideas between Self and Other and the mysterious Other within, the never ending story of 'getting to know', the abiding curiosity that can fuel learning and the small, insecure self that so wish's we could conquer and know without one another's help, devotion and Lela-Play!

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Funny, my SJC senior essay was basically about this. I looked at Beyond Good and Evil as a kind of proto-psychoanalytic book re: Nietzsche's ideas about the unconscious. But I focused only on Nietzsche and didn't explicitly make connections to Freud in the essay.

I think it has to be obvious to anyone who has read both men that Freud was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche. My take is that Freud's disavowal of N's influence is basically his grandiosity coming through, the desire to be seen as the great founder of a movement, as an intellectual unmoved mover etc.

Love the Yalom recommendation, everything he writes is gold.

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Your essay as a harbinger of your future work--very interesting! I think your analysis of Freud's silence on Nietzsche is spot-on. Just look at how he treated Jung when the latter started thinking for himself.

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I admire Freud in many respects, but he was a bit of a tyrant. Didn't tolerate dissent well. I think his personality issues could fairly be blamed, at least in part, for putting psychoanalysis as an intellectual tradition and an institution on the wrong path from the start, eg it's self-imposed isolation from the rest of the scientific community, tendency towards rigidity, etc.

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