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

You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode three eighty three part two, finishing up our treatment of Sigmund Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego. We pretty much spent our whole time last time talking about one chapter, chapter eight, on being in love and hypnosis, and in fact, didn't really talk about the hypnosis part. And I think we wrapped up kind of thinking about what it is to be a self and is the idea that we've talked about in past episodes of having a circle of concern, a circle of ethical concern so that in a broad sense, anything I care about is part of myself. But we understand that it's in a broad sense so that, you know, my identifications implicate things in the outside world. I think that's a a form of self understanding that now, I'm thinking of it during the hour break, is completely compatible with Freud's oh, well, you know, you could still ask why you've extended your self concern. You could still, on some level, talk about the thing that you care about being literally yourself as being an extension of your libido, an extension of your ego or something. But he's just talking about something sort of under the hood, whereas our self understanding is just a different thing. So I don't think that Freud's, talk necessarily has to obscure or or cloud the waters of the other kinds of self understanding that we've talked about in this podcast and many other cases. There's two questions. Does one think that there might be an objection to depth psychology in general? Does one wanna think about the unconscious or about identity in this way or developmental processes? And it all becomes very, very speculative. Or the more narrow question is that, does Freud have it right? And Freud would admit, as he does many times. The more you read Freud, he's constantly saying, you know, this is is probably wrong and it's provisional. Or he's saying, Hey, back in this paper, I was wrong. He's just speculating to the best of his ability about this stuff. And then there are more than one hundred years of people amending his point of view and trying to make it, trying to get it to sharpen it. And so, there are a lot of things to be said about everything he's saying here in that hundred year conversation that follows. And it's very interesting to me, it's a very interesting conversation. So it's both the case that I don't Freud is a very, very this is the beginning of a fleshing out of a picture of the human psyche. This is the very beginning of that project, so it's very incomplete. And it's missing a lot. And you you can see that just even where he's listing all the different kinds of identification. It's a big idea, and it covers so much ground. Right? It's the basis of depression, but it's …