Freudian anthropology at the service of a repressive civilization

Herbert Marcuse, the quintessential critic of Freudian anthropology and one of the fathers of the current gender ideology

CWith this post I begin a series of entries whose contents will present the anthropological vision of Herbert Marcuse, one of the greatest critics of the anthropology proposed by Sigmund Freud and an icon of the countercultural movements of the 60s. His criticisms of Western civilization, which he considered repressive, focused primarily on the study of sexual repression resulting from that developed by S. Freud, proposing a liberation of sexual instincts (drives) as the only path to the integral liberation of man, society, and civilization.

I follow the same structure as your essay "Eros and Civilization" ((Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Investigation into Freud. 2nd reprint, 2015. Ariel, Barcelona; pp: 27-34)), introducing some comments not intended to convince anyone, but rather as personal questions for which I have not obtained a satisfactory answer from reading the aforementioned essay. Therefore, I am grateful for the participation of all those who can contribute to clarifying them.

Chapter I, He titles it: "The hidden tendency in psychoanalysis"Throughout it, he gives a general exposition of the foundations of Western civilization from the Freudian paradigm.

1. 1. H. Marcuse believes that the Freudian interpretation of our civilization, while its main enemy, is also its best defense. He states that "The history of Western man is the history of his repression"However, in light of our current knowledge, we must ask ourselves whether it is truly limited to Western civilization or, on the contrary, whether it is the repression of instinctive man in any civilized culture, or not. Is instinctive repression exclusive to Western civilization, or does it extend to other cultures, albeit with different repressive procedures? According to what cultural anthropology teaches us, it seems that the objective is the same in all civilizations, although with different interventions and regulations, according to the predominant frameworks of coexistence in each of them.

1. 1. He tells us that, for Freud, the Eros, the instinct for pleasure, without any limits it transforms into the death instinctThe demands of the pleasure instinct cannot be satisfied in our civilization, by imposing limitations on it through the principle of reality. Therefore, the latter, as a requirement to keep culture alive, must carry out a "mutability of instincts", a transformation of them through the ego defense mechanismsThese defense mechanisms displace man's most basic needs into the unconscious.transforming the pleasure principle into the reality principle. Man ends up repressing his true nature in order to integrate into his culture at the price of his freedom.

H. Marcuse tells us that "Absence of repression is the archetype of freedom; civilization is the enemy of that freedom.". Hence, man finds himself ontogenetically in the inescapable need to construct himself on two different psychological dimensions: the unconscious (continent of all that is repressed), and the superego (the continent of all norms and values ​​that will be imposed upon the instinctive values ​​inherent in human nature and unacceptable to culture). We are only permitted the fantasy which is considered a mental mechanism linked to the pleasure principle. Fantasy versus reason and pragmatism imposed by culture.

3. 3. The reality principle It begins to take hold in childhood through the family, educators, and the circumstances surrounding the child. The reality imposed upon us will penetrate the individual's psyche and be transmitted from generation to generation through the family, education, and institutions themselves, although its control over the pleasure principle, over humanity's primary instincts, will not be complete.

From this process arises what Freud calls "dynamics of civilization": which is nothing more than the result of the internalization of repression from within the individual (superego). It tells us: "The individual without freedom internalizes his dominators and their commandments into his own mental apparatus". The repressive mental apparatus is configured by the action of two different processes: the ontogenetic (the tax from childhood) and the phylogenetic (stemming from the socio-historical development of civilization). In the next post, we will deal with the ontogenetic processes of the repression of primary instincts (chapter II).