Ep. 383: Freud on Love and the Primal Horde (Part One)

You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 383 is still what holds a social group together because we're still talking about Sigmund Freud's group psychology in the analysis of the ego from 1921. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com. This is Mark Linsonmeyer. Glad to share my flowing locks among my united fandom in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin reacting to the parasite with totemistic exogamy in Austin, Texas. This is Wes Alwin, nursing an object of exis of the anacolytic type in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey hypnotized in Madison, Wisconsin. So I think we got through about chapter seven. Is that right? Identification, or was there more from chapter seven? So there's identification between peers and groups. I mean, we've alluded to that. Have we really hit that? I mean, let's give the Freudian explanation for that. So we have made of the leader or the leading idea, but usually a person, our common object. And I I don't know actually he actually says says this in the section, but, maybe it's from a lighter chapter. We initially, you might think that you would have jealousy regarding that central focus. And he, as we're gonna get into this discussion, there's the idea of the primal family, the primal father, the first one who is the, the dictator overall. And, you know, initially, everybody, all the kids, wanna really relate to that exclusively, but because they are not allowed to, you know, kill the younger brother, kill the younger siblings, then they displace that and they feel identification. They feel a bond with the other instead. Yeah. So I think overall, just just to recap the the chapter right, he gives he gives examples of many different types of identification. So it's a big concept. And the thing to keep keep in mind, it is the developmental process by which we build up the superego, by which we acquire values and we identify with parents and cultural figures, teachers, authority figures, and then ultimately our peers. Right? And it forms a big part of our character. So it's there in the Oedipus complex, where identification replaces an emotional, loving tie to a parent or a trans. It kind of modifies it. We can't have the mother, so we identify with the father. It's there in neurosis, where we might imitate someone, like, right? So imitate a cough, the mother's cough, to be in a better position with relation to the father, if that's our love object, or imitating a symptom as a kind of regression. I think we covered that a little bit. And then we can identify with peers in groups in terms of a shared emotion, in terms of a shared interest. And that interest could be the leader. It could be a leading …