Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person.” There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the “initiatory act” when no one else had the daring to do it.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death (p. 135).
The psychoanalytic concept of transference–or projection–isn't without its problems, but it clearly points to a phenomenon that is undeniable. My problem with it lies in its assumption that we are isolated individuals who take our internal, personal psychic contents and project them onto some blank screen–the leader, the beloved, or, in a negative way, on the Other, the Enemy. This is very un-Heideggerian, and we are all Heideggerrians now, or we should be. But there's what I call Beam-in-Eye Syndrome, which is what the gospels pointed out millennia ago as the tendency we all have to project the dark, repressed parts of the psyche onto others.
The problem as I see it is not one of projection, but of our basic human condition as born into a symbolic system that must of necessity repress or filter out huge swaths of Reality. So because humans are living in states in which most of Reality is filtered out, and because human beings live in symbolic systems that seek to make sense of Reality within the constraints of their necessarily filtered experience of Reality, there is a tendency for humans to take partial disclosures of reality and to build delusional symbolic systems around them.
So the real problem is to distinguish between fantasy and reality. I'd like to argue that there's a difference between what is "unrepressed" and what is "disclosed", even if it's often hard to tell the difference. Psychoanalytical thinking is right, imo, when it talks about fantasy as being related to the repressed, but what is it that's repressed? Well, it's a lot of things. If Becker and Kierkegaard are right, and I tend to think that they mostly are, the fundamental repression is of our awareness of our contingency, frailty, and of our finitude and eventual death, but also of our power and potential, of our infinity. But the problem with repressed reality is that it doesn't stay repressed, it leaks out in different ways, many of which are delusional rather than disclosive. The human task is to become unrepressed in a lawful way, which by definition means to experience the unrepressed as reality, not as delusion.
With the Oedipus Complex, (which really needs another name) comes a forced delimiting of our infantile narcissism as we accept our role in the family and through the family or role in the larger culture. Our raw experience of the world becomes both filtered–this is where repression plays an essential role–but also ordered, interpreted, and given meaning by way our being embedded in the collective symbolic system into which we are acculturated. The Oedipus Complex functions as a necessary filtering system, but there are healthy and unhealthy filters. A healthy filtering system must allow limits what is available to consciousness so that we can navigate in the world it in the practical, everyday sense. But it must also provide the means for transcending the filters, i.e., gradually opening up the filters so that we can become more exposed to the fullness of Reality that the filtering system keeps out of view. A healthy society is healthy to the degree that religion and art perform this unfaltering or disclosive function for it.
Becker points out that most of the smartest people around around Freud–Jung, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi–understood that his ideas about the mechanics of repression were genius, but that his sexual reductionism was fundamentally wrong. Obviously human sexuality is a big deal, but Freud's ideas about it were absurdly reductive. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory and its idea of repression came into popular culture as justification to unrepresss ourselves sexually. But Becker argues that it's not sex that we repress, but Life, and we do it, he says, because we are cowards and need to take refuge in the collective. He points to Norman O Brown and Erich Fromm–and Kierkegaard–as wiser guides than Freud about how to open up the filters to let the life in.
But we tend to look at repression as this thing we need to get rid of, as if we just decided that if we behave in a disinhibited way, we have solved the problem of repression. But this is one of the really stupid consequences of pop-Freudianism. Repression is necessary because the individual would be drowned and overwhelmed by the flood of reality that is too much for him to deal with without "repressive" filters. We need filters, but we also, I would argue, need to grow something from within, a Self, that as it develops substantively, it gradually transcends or 'obsoletizes' the filters. I'm not being precise here because it's not really about obsoletizing or transcending, so much as it is about finding a way in which the symbolic system–language, etc–becomes more richly disclosive. Our symbolic systems both repress and disclose, the intersting question is how we get it to do more of the latter and less of the former.
I would argue that the human being without filters is proleptically imaged in the resurrected Christ. Christians believe that Christ as Logos is the symbol system itself made flesh, and his incarnation created the conditions for the possibility of humans resurrecting like him, which, I would argue, is to become unrepressed as Jesus was unrepressed, i.e., liberated from the Oedipus Complex. This is what makes Christianity different from Buddhism and Gnosticism. The goal is not to escape the constraints of the body, but to live in the body in a lawfully unrepressed way.
This particular idea of the resurrection of the body is explored by Norman O. Brown, and while I don't know of any orthodox Christian theologians who are Brownites in this sense, I don't think it's impossible to align with orthodox thinking. I'll explore that in some future post. But the point here is that the human project is to become substantive enough, strong enough to live in a symbolic system that discloses more than it filters. And so this is a project that needs to be culturally mediated, and so the health or illness of a culture can be measured by whether it provides a path, a method, that its members can choose to walk that will unrepress them in a lawful way.
By lawful I mean non-delusional, and to be non-delusional you need to have developed a substantive moral Self. Nazi brown shirts and southern lynch mobs were unrepressed, but unlawfully so, because there is little evidence of morally substantive selves in such expressions of unrepression. Growing a morally substantive Self is a tricky business and beyond the scope of what I want to discuss here, but it assumes that there are aspects of reality that are lawful and unlawful, and that we have the capabillity–the moral sense– to discern the difference. Someone like Heidegger clearly did not have this moral sense in any significant measure.
The problem with Heidegger, from what I know about him through what his friends Jaspers and Arendt have written about him, was that while he had depth of experience–i.e., he had a filtering system that was more porous and disclosive than most–he had not developed a substantive moral Self capable of discerning what was delusional from what was real. There was a kind of hypertrophied passivity about Heidegger that made him extraordinarily receptive to the disclosures of Being, but I think he had also a kind of vanity about his capabilities that produced a parody of the Self that stunted him spiritually, and in doing so stunted his moral sense. He was rather a moral cipher.
Wittgenstein, whose fundamental insights complement and enrich Heidegger's, had a biography that suggests to me that he was far more developed as a moral Self. He famously declared in his Tractatus that his book was like a ladder, and that if you ascended it to where it wanted to deliver you, then you could throw away the ladder. And there you will find yourself in a zone where anything worth saying is best left unsaid because it will be incomprehensible to those who have not climbed the ladder.
I think that culture–in Freudian terms, the Oedipus Complex–functions in the same way. If it is a healthy culture, it provides the steps that lead us to a place where we can transcend its limitations. To become unrepressed does not mean to become sexually liberated as pop culture has debased this idea of it, but rather to become more radically open to Life while still in the body. This is something that people accomplish progressively and in degrees, because none of us, even the great saints and yogis, can deal with too much reality. But some people are more unrepressed in this sense than others. And to be lawfully unrepressed is wisdom because we are wise to the degree that we are open to the fullness of Reality. But openness, as Heidegger exemplifies, is not enough. It is essential that one has developed a morally substantive Self capable of discerning what is healthful or lawful and what is not.
The problem for us now is that we do not live in a healthy culture. We don't know what's real and what is delusional, what is lawful/healthful and what is not. In America, we are living in Blue fantasy worlds and Red fantasy worlds–and all manner of purple ones, too–without any anchor in a tradition of wisdom that will help us to break out of the fantasy. In the blue sections of the electoral map, ideas about what it means to be unrepressed are trivial, and yet Blues, despite the fundamental groundlessness of their worldview, preach to the rest of the culture that this groundlessness is somehow superior because it's more rational and liberating. But why should rationality without any kind of ontological foundation be considered superior to any other ungrounded point of view? If there are no foundations, then all attempts at meaning are groundless fantasies.
And so it's no wonder that the folks in the Red sections of the electoral map reject the Blue world view and insist on the validity of the tradition, which for the most part the cultural dominance of the Blue worldview and its celebration of markets and technological progress has eviscerated. That tradition no longer is anchored in a lived sense of the Deep Real but rather only in the dead husks of it, which they fetishize for want of anything better.
They know that the Blues don't have a real answer, and they are right. They suspect that the Blues don't know what they are talking about, that their idea of progress trusts too much in glib ideas about liberation that parodies true liberation, and they are right. But the Reds have nothing to offer that's better because they live in a fetishized tradition rather than in a living one, There is none among them who is publicly recognized exemplar of true liberation. If there are such people, and I'm sure there are, they are living in quiet anonymity.
And so the Reds live in a state of repression that is dangerously prone to delusion. They are scared because they are feeling that history is leaving them behind, and they are right about that. They are resentful because they feel that they are being surpassed by a world view that is fundamentally wrong, and they are right about that. And they are too prone to project their hopes and fears on any demagogue who comes along and tells them that it's going to be ok, that he's got their back.
And, obviously, they are wrong about that, which is the point of the Becker epigraph. In the short run, the greatest danger to finding a way forward comes from the delusions of the Right. But in the long run, the Blues, while they are more aligned with a dynamically changing historical reality, are inclined to just go along with it no matter where it takes them regardless whether it is healthful or lawful. Heidegger surrendered temporarily to a 'disclosure' of historical reality in Nazism that was fundamentally unlawful and unhealthful. There is a passivity among Blues that is not unlike the kind Heidegger had.
Even if the symbol systems on the Left and the Right in their different ways are more delusional than disclosive, there are still many individuals who are not completely enclosed in those systems. If I have any hope at all for the future of the earth, it's that something new will develop from the moral sense of people whose filtering systems are open to Reality, and from their efforts to develop a healthy culture that is better aligned with the Deep Real whether they recognize it as the Logos or not. But not in my lifetime.
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