Ep. 382: Freud on Group Psychology (Part Two)

The time has arrived for you to sign up for my big books in continental philosophy course that'll be kicking off in a couple weeks. Go to partiallyexaminelife.com/class for details. Hey, you're listening to the Parsley Exam in life. This is episode 382, part two. We've been talking about Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego. I think he'd spent plenty of time on the psychology of crowds and how they make us dumber and trying to figure out whether given that we're we're we live in the age of the Internet where crowds are not gathered together, they're asynchronous, There are people listening to their podcasts and their, newsreels and things. Newsreels. We just went back sixty years all of a sudden or more than that. They're little Instagram stories. That's what I mean. Film strips. Film strips. Like, going through their microfiche in the privacy of their own public library basements. We are dating ourselves as Gen Xers from the Amazon. Is on the march in Europe. Can we still be a crowd and have crowd psychology in that respect? Our, you know, our to what extent our the various kinds of organized groups, which is what, you know, Freud wants to immediately get into, can they be analyzed in terms of the same mechanisms as as crowds? So we were able to shift to, like, the weird way that Freud gives his own explanations, not just these common sense things that, you know, of the other authors that he wants to say, you know, they're fine. But so this is before he came up with the death drive. Right, Wes? This book? I think so. So this is 1921. Okay. So he's got it here. So I think yeah. It doesn't come up here. But it's there in, civilization and its discontents. But, yeah, I guess it's new at this point. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the paper where he Yep. And that's we get the date for that. Yeah. Well, you just gave it. 1920. Alright. So just to let me give my small understanding, and you can correct me. But if we're we're saying that the pleasure principle libido is the main thing, that we've got this energy that, you know, really really the thing that we want, we wanna be back in the womb. And so the substitute for that when after we're born is we have this very connecting, loving relationship, hopefully, with our mother, and so that sort of is the primary love object. I'm not, you know, in the womb. It could all just be just all feeling good, not pointed at anything in particular. Once we are out of the womb, then we focus it with this this one thing. So that's the sort of the original version of love, but then things can happen with that. Then he talks about the Oedipus complex, for instance, and maybe you end up, for instance, identifying if he has an …