Wilhelm Reich

[Lark]

Mole, I think you're confusing things here.

I don't think Jung was a fascist, I'm aware of those accusations, but I just don't think there's any basis to it except that he was Swiss and Switzerland was a neutral country during the war, and Jung seemed to follow that line. And even if he was, it isn't a reason to dismiss his work, not anymore than Heidegger should be dismissed because of his sympathy for nazis.

Also, as far as Reich goes, I seriosuly doubt he would have approved of what you call liberal democracy, he was a revolutionary communist, not a liberal democrat or even a social democrat.

That all sounds about right.

Jung wrote repeatedly about how he was an individualist and disliked all the collectivist political ideals, including nationalism and communism, its all there in Modern Man In Search of His Soul or any of the books he wrote around that time.

A lot of the condemnation of people at that time for their apparent neutrality I kind of think is pretty rich coming from people in contexts which are free of the kind of things they encountered, the same thing happens with the Tin Tin author, its sort of hard to be an anti-fascist with the SS in the immediate neighbourhood. It also cheapens the actual bravery of open and covert resistors to presume that their courage ought to have been common place rather than the reality that it is often exceptional.

 

[Lark]

Yeah, Freud also considered the death instinct a driving factor of neurosis, not just the life instinct (which he equated with sex drive more or less).

I've read A LOT of Freud, I like him a lot as a writer, and I agree with a lot of sympathetic biographers or authors who've said that those ideas about the death wish arise out of Freud's experience of the first world war and also his work with shell shocked veterans of that conflict. I was already pretty cynical but the war made him go full on cynic. I dont know if he would have come up with it without that happening.

Like within his work, and possibly more so in some of his followers like Theodor Reik, unconscious hostility towards the self could be diagnosed in paranoid patients and was thought to be an indicator of closeted homosexuality. Post WW1, however, unconscious hostility and paranoia would be diagnosed as indicative of the death wish. Death wishes which everyone has and has to actively fight against. One commonplace example is the fear of heights being an unconscious mental conflict of survival against or with temptation to throw yourself to your death.

I think its all interesting, in some cases, maybe enough to confer some validity those observations could be correct but there will, as psychology is so individualised, be numerous exceptions too. I like the way that other authors have developed the biophilious and necrophilious ideas and conflicts though, for sure.

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What is difficult to digest is that Jung's psychosis was systematically concealed from his followers for more than seventy years.

Now that we know, we continue to follow Jung. What does this say about us?

It says we have no integrity.

Jung's psychosis?

Citation needed.

 

[Lark]

Not to mention Reich's idiopathic narcissism.

Yeah, everyone has something going on, I think of him as resembling Nietzsche, a lot of authors do, you have to try and figure out when exactly they went full crazy.