Reading Notes:

Interlude between Augustine and Freud

The Sexual Asceticism of St. Paul and St. Augustine --> Puritanism

The Mythology of Love
        Medieval Catholic Nuns as the Bride of Christ, Monks as the Bride of Christ
        The Folktales/Mythology of the Princess and the Knight/Prince - "Happily ever after." (film, tv)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Totem and Taboo

  

Freud is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern period, and he continues to be influential in what has come to be known as postmodernity.
Many argue that, after Augustine, Freud is the next most influential thinker in the West concerning our understanding of:
 As we will see, both Augustine and Freud were deeply concerned with sexuality, love, and religion, but their viewpoints differed greatly.

1. Many are unaware of Freud's influence
        psychological culture - mental health, counseling, psychotherapy
        ego, narcissism, complex (inferiority, superiority, mother, father), unconscious, psyche

2. Freud also proposed ideas that many consider controversial and/or eccentric
        Sexuality is the driving force behind much of human culture, human life, NOT religion
        Oedipus Complex: One unknowingly seeks one's mother as lover and kill the father.
        Religion does have a function, but most religion does not function well for human beings.
        In his early period (and some argue throughout his life), Freud experimented with many approaches, including giving his patients cocaine.
            (One might remember that this was a different time; there was even a time when cocaine was the key ingredient in Coca-cola.)
        Freud sees an evolution from Animism --> Religion --> Science (Psychoanalysis)

3. As different from Augustine as Freud was, they shared certain aspects of their thought.
        Personal history as the basis of the narrative self, or storied self, rather than the mythological dimension (Adam and Eve, Myth)
        Memory as key to unlocking the problem aspect of the self, so the self can go forward
        Focus on accurate accounting of personal history through remembering what really happened.

4. Structure of psyche: ego, id, super-ego; Ich, Es, Über-ich
        conscious, preconscious (able to be recalled into words), unconscious (appear symbolically from the unconscious, often in dream images)
        Eros and Thanatos, love/sexuality/death
        repression, unconscious, sublimation

5. The story of Oedipus ("swollen foot")
        Oedipus is born to King Laius and Queen Jocasta, but Laius hears of the prophecy that Oedipus would kill him and marry Jocasta.
        Laius pins O's feet together and abandons him.
        O is found by shepherds who rescue him, and he is raised by King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth.
        Oedipus learns of the prophecy about his father and mother the King and Queen, and so leaves Corinth.  
        On the way, he encounters a man on a chariot and slays him; in Thebes he answers the riddle of the Sphinx and marries Jocasta.
        Oedipus and Jocasta have children. Eventually, all is found out, Jocasta hangs herself, Oedipus blinds himself and live in exile.

6. Really? How did Freud come up with the narrative of the Oedipus complex, and everything else? 
        Freud really wanted to create a kind of science of mind, and so he saw psychoanalysis as a kind of science that supercedes religion. However, he held a place for the spiritual dimension as found in animism (the idea that there is a spirit that animates all living things) and in the religious language of 'spirit' and 'soul." He partially found a place for this dimension as necessary for explaining human behavior. So, he was a kind of anthropological thinker, a social scientist, who asked, "What accounts for people's strange behavior? It makes sense to describe them as being animated by impulses and drives that are unseen to the naked eye." It doesn't mean that spirits and the soul really exist, but these concepts serve an explanatory function. One could say more generally, humans act as if there is an unseen reality to which they are beholden ('self,' 'mind,' etc.).
       
The Story of the Primal Horde: 140-155.
        Anthropology began to flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and at that time, archaeological remains, oral traditions, and tribal peoples were studies as providing windows into early human society and behavior.
        Totems and Totemic Religion. Early tribes and hordes created associated the spirit world with animals and plants, and the worship of totems through ritual was designed to connect people to the spirit world. For example, one finds such totemic animals carved into totem poles of Native Americans.
        Totemic Sacrifice. Animals were often sacrificed to the spirit world as offerings by humans to connect them to the spirit world. So, animals could be regarded as sacred, but they could be sacrificed as vessels who provided conduits to the spirit world. Early Confucians offered up sacrificial sheep to the heavens, and that practice continues today. Freud suggests that originally, totemic sacrifice began with human sacrifice. There is considerable evidence of early human sacrifice, as found among the Mayans.  
       
       

   Totem and Taboo, 141:
Psycho-analysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father;and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing becomes a festive occasion - the fact that it is killed yet mourned. This ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the father....

There is, of course, no place for the beginnings of totemism in Darwin's primal horde.All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up. This earliest state of society has never been an object of observation. The most primitive kind of organization that we actually come across - and one that is in force to this day in certain tribes - consists of bands of males; these bands are composed of members with equal rights and are subject to restrictions of the totemic system, including inheritance through the mother. Can this form of organization have developed out of the other one? and if so along what lines?
Freud argues that this is the beginning of organized religion. Behind this, he argues, is human sacrifice, specifically, the son or sons killing the father.
He argues that most, if not all, religions can be traced back to early human sacrifice, including Christianity in which Christ on the Cross is a symbolic representation of this 'killing of the father.'


CASE STUDY: CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION "Lady Heather's Box, Episodes 3, 15 (2003)
        "You Can Always Say Stop" with Lady Heather
        "Slaves of Las Vegas" with Lady Heather