As for psychology, unfortunately I started my intellectual itinerary with Freud. I lost years reading Freud’s works, and after that the works of his disciples, deviationists, heretics, implementers to this and that: history, esthetics, politics and what not. I came to understand that something was wrong with the whole business of psychoanalysis when ethology came to be known and translated. I swiftly realized that Timbergen’s and Lorenz’s theory of istincts was sound, was not wild speculative affabulation as psychoanalysis was. And if so, all the freudian edifice was a cards’ castle. Freud postulated a single istinct (Eros), later two istincts adding to the first vital one a second destructive one: the istinct of death. If in animals the istincts were many (aggression, nest building, mating, copulating, protecting the offspring and so on why the heck should they in man be only one or two, as Freud would have? In the “Man of the wolves”, Freud couldn’t capacitate that the child knew what copulating (of the parents in the so called “primary scene”) was about and, after making all sorts of hypothesis, in the last pages of the essay, coult it be that the child has a connaissance of sex genetically trasmitted like that of animals? But he never developed this idea and all his disciples went on reshuffling Freud’s phancies. Some one still earns a living on this business. Except for Woody Allen’s shrink who, says Woody, now runs a vegan restaurant.
01 Feb 2007, 3:02 pm
but I can only do so from my own personal experience, and he is the writer who had had the most influence on how I see the world, how I understand myself and others. It's an ongoing process of discovery and I think I'd be lost without him now, but of course, horses for courses, and he's not for everyone.
