Opium of the People

‘Probably the most popular misquotation of modern times—certainly the most popular in this argument—is the assertion that Marx dismissed religion as “the opium of the people.” On the contrary, this son of a rabbinical line took belief very seriously and wrote, in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as follows:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to
give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower.

So the famous misquotation is not so much a “misquotation” but rather a very crude attempt to misrepresent the philosophical case against religion. Those who have believed what the priests and rabbis and imams tell them about what the unbelievers think and about how they think, will find further such surprises as we go along. They will perhaps come to distrust what they are told—or not to take it “on faith,” which is the problem to begin with.

Marx and Freud, it has to be conceded, were not doctors or exact scientists. It is better to think of them as great and fallible imaginative essayists. When the intellectual universe alters, in other words, I don’t feel arrogant enough to exempt myself from self-criticism. And I am content to think that some contradictions will remain contradictory, some problems will never be resolved by the mammalian equipment of the human cerebral cortex, and some things are indefinitely unknowable. If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me. And though I have met many people much wiser and more clever than myself, I know of nobody who could be wise or intelligent enough to say differently.’

– Hitchens. C. 2007. God Is Not Great London, Great Britain: Atlantic Books (2008) p. 9-10

10/ix mmxv

Mexican mole sauce can include chillies, cinnamon, garlic, chocolate, lard, and plantains.

Though Jones is the most common surname in Wales, there is no ‘J’ in the Welsh language.

A sheet of paper is a million atoms thick.

Sigmund Freud destroyed 14 years’ worth of notes, letters and manuscripts in order to confound future biographers.

The chance of cracking the enigma machine, used by the Germans to scramble their wartime messages, by chance is about the same as winning the lottery 11,000,000,000,000 times.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

On Anatomy

“Anatomy is destiny.”

– Sigmund Freud

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This appeared in The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924) and is adapted from Napoleon. Not many people remember what comes next: ‘The little girl’s clitoris behaves just like a penis to begin with; but, when she makes a comparison with a playfellow of the other sex, she perceives that she has ‘come off badly…’ The rest is history.

Hysteria‏

The term comes from the Greek hystera simply meaning ‘womb’. Hysteria was originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Hippocrates believed that the womb lived as a separate animal in the female and that all female irrational behaviour was caused by the uterus moving about.

Therefore, in medicine, the term has long been used to mean a mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability without an organic cause.

‘The typical cases of hysteria cited by Freud thus involved a moral conflict—a conflict about what the young women in question wanted to do with themselves. Did they want to prove that they were good daughters by taking care of their sick fathers? Or did they want to become independent of their parents, by having a family of their own, or in some other way? I believe it was the tension between these conflicting aspirations that was the crucial issue in these cases. The sexual problem—say, of the daughter’s incestuous cravings for her father—was secondary (if that important); it was stimulated, perhaps, by the interpersonal situation in which the one had to attend to the other’s body. Moreover, it was probably easier to admit the sexual problem to consciousness and to worry about it than to raise the ethical problem indicated. In the final analysis, the latter is a vastly difficult problem in living. It cannot be “solved” by any particular maneuver but requires rather decision making about basic goals, and, having made the decisions, dedicated efforts to attain them.’

– Szasz. T.S. 1974. The Myth of Mental Illness New York, United States: Harper Perennial p. 218

Die Grosse Frage

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”

– Sigmund Freud

Psychological Projection

A psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defence mechanism where a person unconsciously denies their own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, a tool, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings. It is known as one of the six main self-defence mechanisms.

Sigmund Freud

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

An example of this behaviour might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and redirect their libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or projecting, those same faults onto another.

According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a psychological defence mechanism whereby one projects one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else. ‘Emotions or excitations which the ego tries to ward off are spit out and then felt as being outside the ego […] perceived in another person’. It is a common process that every person uses to some degree. (The related defence of) ‘projective identification differs from projection in that the impulse projected onto an external object does not appear as something alien and distant from the ego because the connection of the self with that projected impulse continues’.

To understand the process, consider a person in a couple who has thoughts of infidelity. Instead of dealing with these undesirable thoughts consciously, they unconsciously project these feelings onto the other person, and begin to think that the other has thoughts of infidelity and may be having an affair. Thus one can obtain ‘acquittal by his conscience – if he projects his own impulses to faithlessness on to the partner to whom he owes faith’. In this sense, projection is related to denial, arguably the only defence mechanism that is more primitive than projection. Projection, like all defence mechanisms, provides a function whereby a person can protect their conscious mind from a feeling that is otherwise repulsive.

Projection can also be established as a means of obtaining or justifying certain actions that would normally be found atrocious or heinous. This often means projecting false accusations, information, etcetera, onto an individual for the sole purpose of maintaining a self-created illusion. One of the many problems with the process whereby ‘something dangerous that is felt inside can be moved outside – a process of projection’ – is that as a result ‘the projector may become somewhat depleted and rendered limp in character, as he loses part of his personality’.

Transference

Transference is a phenomenon in Freudian psychoanalysis characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. It is known as one of the six main self-defence mechanisms.

Possible definitions include:

– The inappropriate repetition in the present of a relationship that was important in a person’s childhood.

– The redirection of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new object.

– A reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences, especially of childhood, and the substitution of another person […] for the original object of the repressed impulses.

Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged its importance for psychoanalysis for better understanding of the patient’s feelings and feelings of rage.

During transference, people turn into a ‘biological time machine.’ A nerve is struck when someone says or does something that reminds them of their past. This creates an emotional time warp that transfers their emotional past and their psychological needs into the present.

A 1929 artwork depicting Sigmund Freud in a Session

It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or children – cross-generational entanglements. For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.

Carl Jung states in his Psychology of the Transference that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.

Oedipus Complex

The Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, is a group of largely unconscious – dynamically repressed – ideas and feelings which concentrate on the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex. According to classical psychoanalytic theory, the complex appears during the so-called oedipal phase of libidinal and ego development; between the ages of three and five years, though oedipal manifestation may be detected earlier.

Oedipus and the Sphinx

The complex is named after Greek mythical character Oedipus, who – albeit unknowingly – kills his father, Laius and marries his mother, Jocasta. According to Sigmund Freud, the Oedipus complex is a common phenomenon, and is responsible for much unconscious guilt.

Freud spoke of the mythical Oedipus in these terms: “His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”

Classical theory considers the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be developmentally desirable, the key to the development of sexual roles and identity. Freud posited that boys and girls resolved the conflicts differently as a result of the male’s castration anxiety – caused by Oedipal rivalry with the father – and the female’s penis envy. He also held that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality.

Classical theory holds that a resolution of the Oedipus complex takes place through identification with the parent of the same sex and temporary renunciation of the parent of the opposite sex; the opposite-sex parent is then rediscovered as the growing person’s adult sexual object.

In classical theory, people who are fixated at the Oedipal level are ‘mother-fixated’ or ‘father-fixated’, and reveal this by choosing sexual partners who are discernible surrogates for their parent(s).

The classical paradigm in a human (male) child’s psychological maturity is to first select the mother as the object of libidinal investment. However, this is expected to arouse the father’s anger, and the infant surmises that the most probable result of this would be castration. Although Freud devoted most of his early literature to the Oedipus complex in males, by 1931 he was arguing that females do experience an Oedipus complex, and that in the case of females, incestuous desires are initially homosexual desires towards the mothers. It is clear that in Freud’s view, at least as we can tell from his later writ, the Oedipus complex was a far more complex procession in female than in male development.

The infant internalizes the rules pronounced by his father. This is how the super-ego comes into being. The father now becomes the figure of identification, as the child wants to keep his penis, but resigns from his attempts to take the mother, shifting his libidinal attention to new objects.

See other: Hall of Fame Posts