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

0:08 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 383 is still what holds a social group together? Because we're still talking about Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego from 1921. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partialexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer. Glad to share my flowing locks among my united fandom in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin reacting to the parricide with totemistic exogamy in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan nursing an object cathexis of the anaclitic type in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, hypnotized in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: So I think we got through about chapter seven. Is that right, identification or was there more from chapter seven?

0:58 Wes: So there's identification between peers and groups. I mean, we've alluded to that. Have we really hit that?

1:06 Mark: I mean, let's give the Freudian explanation for that. So we have made of the leader or the leading idea, but usually a person our common object. And I don't actually. He actually says it says this in the section, but maybe it's from a later chapter. We initially, you might think that you would have jealousy regarding that central focus. And he. As we're going to get into this discussion, there's the idea of the primal family, the primal father, the first one who is the. The dictator overall. And you know, initially, everybody, all the kids want to really relate to that exclusively, but because they are not allowed to, you know, kill the younger brother, kill the younger siblings, then they displace that and they feel identification, they feel a bond with the other instead.

1:59 Wes: Yeah. So I think overall, just, just to recap the. The chapter, right. He gives, he gives examples of many different types of identification. So it's a big concept. And the thing that keep. Keep in mind it is the developmental process by which we build up the superego by which we acquire values. And we, we identify with parents and cultural figures, teachers, authority figures, and then ultimately our peers, right? And it forms a big part of our character. So it's there in the Oedipus complex where identification replaces a emotional loving tie to a parent or a trance.

It kind of modifies it. We can't have the mother, so we identify with the father. It's there in neurosis where we might imitate someone like. Right. So imitate a cough, the mother's cough, to be in a Better position with relation to the father. If that's our love object or imitating a. A symptom as a. As a kind of regression. I think we covered that a little bit. And then we can identify with peers in groups and that in terms of a shared emotion, in terms of a shared interest or. And that interest could be the leader, it could be a leading idea.

So the kind of similar positioning towards a leader or an idea can form the basis of camaraderie, which just sounds like common sense. And then finally it's there in depression. Think we talked about that. He thinks it's a. It might be a basis for homosexuality. And then he ends by saying he's not going to write it's the basis of empathy. And we went into a lot of this in Scheler. But he says, well, that's the thing I'm precisely not really going to talk about. That's too big a subject. And that's the way he ends the chapter.

3:38 Mark: So chapter eight, Being in Love and hypnosis. And I know hypnosis, you know, it was a very popular thing at the time to be interested in. And it's one of the things that he finds fundamental. I found that the most tedious, that the maybe least helpful, but the being in love thing is central, right. And it actually seems like, and Freud points this out later, that being in love seems like a different thing. It's a counter pull to our being as social entities because being in love really is about fixating on one other person, which you want privacy, actually.

You don't want random people crowding in on this. So it has to actually be. You have to regress, he says, to want to like, have sex in public or have group sex or something like that. You have to regress to this stage where your fixation was not on one person, but was sort of a general I will get pleasure from whatever objects are around.

4:29 Wes: I think it's worth starting here at the beginning of the chapter because he makes an important point which is he wants to distinguish adult section sexual love from what he calls affectionate love. Right. You see this come apart in something like the Madonna whore complex. He. He makes these. This distinction famously in these. These two p. Written two papers he writes. One of them is called the universal tendency to. Towards debasement in the sphere of love, which he. Which he references in a footnote here. But it. Some people, when they get to adulthood, they have trouble combining sex and love.

And love is based on. He thinks is modeled on this affectionate relationship. We have to Our parents. And we end up choosing partners who are evocative of qualities that we. That, you know, might have been in our parents in some ways or related to qualities in our parents. And that triggers the incest taboo. So it's hard to be sexually interested in someone if they're going to be triggering the incest taboo because we've chosen them for reasons of affection based on our parents. So developmentally integrating these two things, integrating the sexual and the affectionate, currents to whatever degree we can becomes important to people's happiness.

So some people have psychological problems with enjoying sex. Impotence, for instance, that's not physiologically based, that Freud thinks is, is sourced in this problem. Not being able to integrate the sexual and the affectionate. And then being in love critically involves disintegration. So when we're in that kind of subjective state, very intense state of being in love, it's integrated. We have sexual feelings, we have affectionate feelings. And then we add to that this element of idealization to the point where, right, we might idealize to the someone, to the point where we are willing to sacrifice ourselves, where we're willing to.

Willing to commit crimes to override our conscience and generally to the point where we're not putting as much energy, we're not as self interested. But I think the idealization here is more important, the idea of overriding the conscience. Because this becomes the basis for the idea that in a group, our love, right, the leader or the leading idea can replace the superego. Essentially it can replace our conscience.

6:37 Mark: Why is it disintegrating? I mean, you said in extreme circumstances, right, You've substituted the love object for your superego for your entire conscience. And so, you know, if you've hooked yourself to somebody who's fundamentally messed up, then you go out and you have a crime spree together. They say, oh, I need diamonds and you go steal diamonds, whatever the thing is. But that's not the norm. So you're saying. But then in any love is somehow disintegrative of what? Of moral conscience?

7:05 Wes: No, not any love. I mean, I don't think he thinks that any love is. He just thinks there's always the possibility and the tendency. So someone, right, in chivalrous romance. So there's the self sacrifice part, chivalrous romance, right? There's a whole tradition of that. The idea of sacrificing oneself, being in service of the fair maiden, having an abject. I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy. Just worship. And then with conscience, right, you might, when you're in love, maybe you're less interested in moral imperatives that. That get in the way of that love. So if that moral imperative is, oh, that shouldn't have sex outside of my current marriage or shouldn't have sex before marriage, whatever the values are at the time, those become less important to you because the imperative to love becomes its own moral imperative. It becomes bigger than other values that I've integrated from society.

7:55 Mark: I want to see evidence that Dylan or Seth is interested in any of this.

8:01 Seth: So I thought that I start to check out when Freud starts making these just broad claims about, oh, well, and then the child does this and the child does that and, you know, this. But I thought the tension here in this chapter, the reason why it's called, you know, Being in Love and hypnosis, was he's established that the thing that bonds the individual to the group, or essentially what allows individuals to group together, is some form of libidinal relation. And we've also established that there's this disappearance of individual will and desire in the.

Into the group, which he likened to hypnosis. So is. Isn't the purpose of this chapter, or at least part of this chapter, to explain how this libidinal relationship in the group is not like something. Not like love or not like being in love? And he's got to somehow reconcile the. The kind of tension or perhaps contradiction between what love does and. And so this is how he explains this. He's talking about sublimation and so forth. Like he's got to make this distinction between sexual love and it's sublimation, which gives you a different kind of tie.

Is that kind of what's going on here?

9:25 Wes: I mean, I think it's complicated because it. There's a way in which love is important. Being in love is an important element of being a part of the group because there's something.

9:36 Dylan: Right.

9:36 Wes: It's just that the object, the love object is now the ego ideal. I love America. I love God and Christianity. I love Donald Trump. Even though people wouldn't put it that way, but obviously they do. They're. They're smitten. They're in love with him in a way where they just can't even see reality anymore.

9:56 Mark: Thanks, Wes, for providing a clip that I can take out of context and post everywhere.

10:02 Wes: You said we could talk about politics, so there is that element. But it is weird. I mean, I said think you're right to point to the fact that, that once we put it that way, once it, you know, an identification comes into the picture. And now we're talking about some ego ideal and we're talking about the superego. Then. Yeah, it's not your typical kind of love, but it does ultimately explain, you know, he wants to explain suggestion and this hypnotic state that crowds seem to be able to get into in terms of his, his theory here. So there is something, right? Being the hip, that crowd delusion and being hypnotized by a leader and all that stuff. I think he thinks that's that the kind of delusion that we can get into when we fall in love is similar and can explain that phenomenon in Civilization and Its Discontents.

10:48 Mark: He puts this maybe a little more existentially that we, you know, we have this libido, we have this energy. We really want to put it somewhere. You know, we ideally like to just sort of be back in the womb, but we, you know, or back having that primal relationship with the mother when we were babies, since we can't have that. The life of Eros, the life of love directed at one person at least, you know, provides a focus. In fact, it's not disintegrating, it is a channeling focus. It gives you something to build your life around. I understand that's why you said it's apart from other things you might have been taught by teachers and parents.

But it gives meaning in a very direct way. But it's also a risky way to live, right? Your lover could reject you, your lover could die. There's. So as a general coping strategy, a few choice individuals, the romantics can still live that way. But most people then as a safer strategy, transfer this eros, make it non sexual and spread it out to everybody else. So it's your level of humanity in general love of this group.

11:49 Wes: Yeah, these are the aim inhibited. Yeah, affectionate ties that we have to others. And the whole thesis of civilization and its discontents, right? And those aim inhibited ties towards others are established by identification. So we have aim inhibited ties to fellow Americans, but we can accomplish it by way of our relationship to America as an ideal. And that tie, it's aim inhibited still because it's not sexual per se. Right. But it's still much more intense than I have to some guy who lives down the street. So I could have this very intense relationship to America and it can create a lighter, fonder feeling for my peers within the country.

But since you brought up Civilization and Its Discontents, the thesis of that book is that identification is what makes us miserable. Why are we miserable? Why does civilization suck? Because identification, even though it forms the basis for our, you know, fellow fond ties to other human beings, is also the basis of our aggression and our hatred. But that's a whole other subject. It becomes the basis for extreme violence.

12:54 Mark: So I had seen emotion in there from this childhood affection to, you know, when you become a teen and you start focus, focusing on, you know, you get these crushes, you get these fantasies to the general adulthood where, you know, of course, you might still have a partner, you might still really, you know, have love, romantic love be a part of your life. But it is, as Freud says, sort of a distraction. It's a counterforce to civilization. You know, you're most of your day, you're out in the world, you're being a citizen, and then you go home and you have this thing that is, as you were saying, Wes, sort of disintegrating.

You know, it is pulling you toward our private little world and that that tension there. So I was seeing a overall telos that he feels like the mature person does not, for the most part, unless they're a romantic poet, live through romantic love. But they get most of their jollies out of being a general citizen, doing their job, et cetera. In this chapter, I see more that he's just giving this whole love thing as a contrast that, well, okay, there's being love, there's hypnosis, which is sort of halfway between being in love and being in a group.

And then there's being in a group. And that these are sort of separate. It wasn't necessarily that the natural growth is through love to group affection. Or do you see that in this chapter as well?

14:08 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure quite what you mean. Do you.

14:11 Mark: Can you just as if romantic love were a stage that is. Well, yes, that is most intense when you're a teen and that you more or less grow out of, you know, despite retaining the ability to have relationships.

14:25 Dylan: Hopefully.

14:26 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think. But we all know what happens to romantic love over time. It becomes less intense. But we can still have a loving relationship. So I think Freud is obviously aware of that. He's not. I don't think he's saying that we have to give up romantic. So patients come in for two of the big reasons. Patients to go go see psychoanalysts is love and work. And analysts are supposed to help them have better love relationships and a better relationship to their own creative life, to getting satisfaction out of work. So it's not just all about sublimation into work.

It's also those relationships are important and Romantic love remains important for a person's whole life. Is it that intense being in love, feeling forever? Probably not, but it's still romantic love. And it's so important that people integrate the sexual and the affectionate ties, as he calls it, lines of, as he calls them. So to be able to respect and love one's partner but also stay sexually interested in them, that that's a. Becomes a task in a relationship. And Freud thinks, you know, you know, that doesn't go away. It's important to people's happiness throughout their life.

15:34 Mark: Do we agree with his characterization of at least the mature approach to sex as really being focused on one person as opposed to general lust? That he's characterizing that as immature, that you want to have sex with anything that moves? The 12 year old approach.

15:54 Wes: I mean, wanting to do that is not a problem. Wanting something is not. People are lustful.

16:01 Dylan: So there's part of this that is about talking about the capabilities or sort of the ways in which we're wired and then how that builds our psychology and then how that's laid out in turn. When you use a word like maturity, like how does that line up from something that's unhealthy or pathological or bad for ourselves and other people up to things that are, what does good look like? What does flourishing look like? And I find that sort of the distinctions between those things and the examples and analogies I find myself trying to grip onto, what is it that I'm using to sort of think through the different situations?

And so we've been talking about, you know, libidinal energy is our general sort of outward action to be attracted to something or to, to go want to get something. And we have these energies to become, you know, you know, you could talk about romantic love or being preoccupied with something or obsessed with something. That's definitely a capability that we have. And I'm understanding that all of that's libidinal energy. You know, so when, you know, when you're someone is obsessed with another person, like romantically or whether you're obsessed with calculus.

Calculus, exactly. You know, that was exactly on my mind because I've been listening to biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman and there's lots of cases of, oh, I worked for 16 hours straight on this problem, right. Or three, four or five days. That's the same stuff. And that makes sense to me that that's all. That's the part about Eros and Plato's identification of it and Thumos, as we talked about before. Is being that. That directional energy that you're able to sort of. But then it becomes part of how you identify yourself.

17:53 Wes: Right.

17:54 Dylan: And that. That part seems to be the part where I'm not sure how to continue to think through it from Freud's perspective, is there's the positive aspect of identification that's going on, and then there's also, once you make identification, there's also a cost of stopping to identify yourself that way. Right? So that power.

18:15 Wes: Stopping to identify yourself what way?

18:17 Dylan: So if you say once you commit to saying, and you've fallen in love, and now part of the problem with breaking up can be that you lose the identification of being the person who loves that thing. And so, like, if you are dedicated strongly to a political position, and it's not just about loving, you know, like, oh, I love Donald Trump, that's not all that's going on there, Right. It's also a self identification as a person who is a member of that group. And then especially if you are super strongly dedicated to it, and then you fall out of that.

It's over. Having a faith even, right? Having a faith, you know, having a crisis of faith. It's part of your identity yourself, of how you understand yourself and how you present yourself to the world and to yourself, that it becomes falling out of love or changing, that there becomes an extra cost to it, which seems to me be part of the story, right. And that you're not. Your aggressive actions as a result of that falling apart are as much about the fact that you have your own self identity is falling apart and you're reacting against that as much as you're reacting against the.

Your inability to walk away based upon the intensity of that self identification is part of the psychology going on here, and it has to do with your own identity falling apart as a result of this.

19:43 Seth: Okay, I need help because this has now hopelessly confused the situation for me.

19:49 Mark: Well, if it's hopeless, we should just hang up,

19:53 Seth: please. Sorry, that was a turn of phrases. I'm hopeless. But perhaps you all can clear something up for the listeners. All right, page 76. And before we embark on a discussion of this delicate question, that is, can there be identification with the object retained? We have to. We have a. Embrace this other possible alternative, namely whether the object is put in place of the ego or the ego ideal. And about five pages later, page 80, he says he's talking about groups that have leaders but are not yet organizations. Let's say a primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.

And then he says this condition admits of a graphic representation which is literally of no use. This graphic representation which is on this page. It makes absolutely no sense and proves no point. However, I. Wes.

21:00 Wes: Proves no point.

21:03 Seth: What I understood from the last conversation we had was that the ego ideal is his. What he previously had called the superego, which is kind of like. Kind of like your conscience.

21:15 Wes: What he will call the super.

21:17 Seth: What he will call the super ego.

21:18 Wes: So it's conscience and includes conscience, but it's also like aspiration. My ambitions, what I want to be. My ideal self. Yeah.

21:27 Seth: Okay.

21:27 Dylan: Your identity partly is your identity.

21:30 Wes: It is.

21:31 Mark: Yeah. That's the question.

21:32 Seth: This is exactly my question. Is identity in the ego ideal or the ego?

21:37 Wes: Well, these are great questions. And the problem is, you know, when I call this, like Freud's the Greatest Hits, this is like listening to Greatest Hits album, and behind it lurks all the catalog. So you get these little snippets. And I think it's cool. But it. You know, it's interesting that he's doing this in this book to give all, you know, his favorite theories. But two years later, in the. In the Ego and the id, he'll clarify the superego in a way as a substructure of the ego. And in a way, the ego is a substructure of the libido. It sort of develops out of the libido.

The libido is the clay of which everything else is made. The ego just structures it, and then the superego structures the ego. And in a way, is like an ambassador between the. The ego and the ID in various ways. And then the outside world. So it's social requirements. So I think, you know, Dylan. It's very important to point out, as Dylan has done that. Yeah. When Freud is talking about the ideal ego ideal or superego, he's talking about. And what I have said is thumos in ancient philosophy. He's talking about the locus of character and identity.

That is what we get it through identification. Identification builds the superego. It's built up out of superego. Out of superego is built up out of identifications. It's what gives us our values and our. These sorts of identificatory ties to other people. But the point here is that in this case, right, We. The ob. The ego ideal becomes the object, in a sense, and then we identify by way of that. We get the special tie of identification to other people. Which are, he wants to say, are now ego identifications between egos.

23:13 Mark: So the fact that there can be repression and unconscious stuff going on here really complicates the matter over our many previous discussions on the scope of the self. So if you say I identify as a Christian, are you identifying with Jesus? Well, no, Jesus is the leader. But he says at the end of this that, you know, it's actually being a Christian is different than being like in an army, because in an army you definitely don't identify with the general. You know, you're the happy soldier who is following the general, who's looking to the general. But he does not think that it's the same with Jesus. He thinks that actually you do on some level identify with Jesus and therefore love in the way that Jesus loved all the other Christians.

24:01 Seth: So.

24:01 Mark: But even though you would not, if somebody asked you, are you Jesus? Like, well, no, I'm certainly not. I don't identify with Jesus. But because you can have a sort of an unconscious identification, seems like it makes it more complicated.

24:12 Seth: Yeah, that the fact that the only time he discusses Christianity or the church in here is also in conjunction with like the army is somewhat strange to begin with. But the concept of identification with Christ imitatio DEI is a form of. It's a level of moral requirement that is not mandatory for Christians. That's not the level at which participation in the group of Christianity there are those who take it to that level, like, but that would be anti grouping because if you're trying to be Christ, like self sacrificing in that way, etc. Etc. Typically tends to lead to asceticism.

And in traditional Christian. So it's like that's not actually a good model. You shouldn't actually be Christ like you should be Christian, which means having certain kind of values but not trying to imitate Christ. So I think the analogy between the army and the church is actually, it is somewhat different, but it's actually more alike than Freud, than Freud gets. Although I'm not sure I buy the whole thing that you identify with the leader in the army anyway.

25:19 Dylan: But I think what holds them all together is that there's like an outward act of the identification that you're identifying to. So I think you're right to say, well, you could be identifying, I identify myself, I'm a good Christian. Or maybe the manifestation of that is the way in which I'm a good Christian is that I identify with Jesus as an object and so I want to be like Jesus or, or maybe It's I'm a good Christian and I. And being a good Christian is being like the priest that's in my community. And the same thing goes with the army. I identify with this object of the army and being a good soldier.

There's a. I have that. Or maybe being a good soldier is wanting to be like the general. But all those are. Seems to me they're all very similarly outward. I'm taking on in the way Freud's talking about it, I'm taking on an object that I am using to identify with. And then there's the act of self understanding is I am a person who is a good Christian. And how I understand myself is as that which is a recursive relationship in sort of the wholeness of your own character.

26:31 Wes: So we just to make a quick point, we're now talking about pages 110 to 111 where he addresses this all explicitly and he says he becomes ridiculous if he tries to identify himself with the general. He says it so the identification is not with the general general. He thinks Christianity is unique in that it calls upon Christians to identify with Christ. But in the end he'll say on page 111 that's not necessary to the constitution of the Christian group. It's a tall order.

26:58 Mark: Let me throw out another example because I just kind of want to stop us to just talk about what it is to compose a self as we've talked about in other episodes and as what Freud adds to that. So when you add the calisthenics that are involved in mourning. So I have lost my beloved and I become depressed. And his analysis of that is I have taken the beloved into myself and I'm saying fuck you beloved. Fuck you beloved. But I'm actually saying it to myself because I'm identifying. I don't know that I'm identifying with the beloved. I would never.

Oh, I would never say fuck you to the beloved. It's my unworthiness that my loss. I myself torture because I have made this identification that is not part of my self understanding whatsoever. And so it just. This is much different than some of the the past. You know when we've talked about identifying yourself as Dylan, as you were saying, Identify myself as the person who loves this. And now because I don't no longer have that thing now I don't know what to do. Right. When you add unconscious stuff to identification, it adds a whole new dimension that makes it very difficult to untangle what we are considering part of the self.

28:09 Dylan: I took them to be the same thing just that you might not be as in the unconscious, you might not consciously hold. Understand yourself as. Identify as holding that as part of your self definition. And it's actually a revelation to you about how painful it is that yourself, your own identity is being undermined by this thing happening. And the better. I mean, and if I. If we go down the road of, well, let's talk about what it means to actually have a flourishing self, a flourishing soul, a positive, you know, it's going to be. It all goes in the direction of sort of a kind of intentional self consciously holding these things and recognizing both those points of yourself that you hold hold well, and also the unconscious challenges that, you know, the things that you're, you know, sort of battling against.

To me there, it's another dimension, certainly to have the unconscious be part of this, but it's not different.

29:05 Mark: Well, I feel like you've added even another dimension that's not Freudian in the way that we could hold identifications that we don't realize that we hold identifications that you could take for granted that you are an American. You don't feel particularly American. But then you spend time in another country and you're like, oh, I had this common language and things, and I just, I didn't realize I was so identified in this way. You know, you don't miss something until it's gone. So there could be part about.

29:32 Dylan: Yeah, yes, for sure.

29:34 Wes: But also just. Just to add to that, if you go to another country and you're dealing with someone from another country who's shitting all over America, for instance, I don't know if you've had this experience and you never thought of yourself as patriotic and you yourself have criticized America many times, but. Times. But you find your hackles being raised a little bit. Were you just thinking of the same. Yeah, weird word as I was. I was ambivalent about actually saying it. I'm like, do people use this word anymore? But yeah, I don't know if you guys have had that experience. But then you realize, holy crap, I was way more identified with being an American than I thought I was. Why would I get this defensive just because it's a foreigner now making these criticisms that I would make as well.

30:17 Mark: And we've already said that you're feeling like you're in a group with somebody. You're part of a we is in part identification. You identify with their circumstance, but you certainly don't identify with yourself as them. Right. If we want to say we are all brothers in Christ or something, you're not literally thinking on any level that your neighbor is you.

30:37 Wes: It's like, I'm like, not equals.

30:40 Mark: Like. Yeah, but we've talked in the past a little about. And maybe Freud is amenable to this sort of a selfishness by definition.

30:50 Wes: Right.

30:50 Mark: If you say everybody is always selfish, but what you could consider self is like, well, my family is part of myself, so my self servingness, my self sacrifice to my children is actually an act of selfishness. And Right. That goes along with Freudian sort of speaking, that I'm identifying them as me. And so my apparently selfless act actually is not selfless at all. It's just I have a weird sense of self. Is that Freudian in character?

31:17 Wes: I don't think so. I don't think he wants to say it to reduce selflessness to selfishness.

31:23 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I think you're just pointing to. There's a version of selfless selflessness that is really more about yourself than them. That's the criticism, Right? The criticism is that when I'm being selfless, is this really more about me? I think you have both cases going on. Somebody who's actually. There's the cases where people are acting in a genuinely sort of selfless manner. And of course it's always going to come with a little bit of this is the kind of person. This is who I am, and part of what I. I'm doing this thing. But it is selfless.

It's not weighted with a lot of self aggrandizement and I'm virtue signaling in my selflessness. But the other happens all the time too. You know, I mentioned this. I'm reading this biography of Richard Feynman, and he had this challenging relationship with his mother, and she was unhappy about when he was in his early 20s. You know, he got engaged and married this woman who was very sick. And she was totally against it. And she wrote him these amazing letters about how awful he thought he was being and made his choices. But they're all like, through her, like, you're being bad to me by doing this, even though she's couching it, like, I'm afraid for your future.

And then when his wife dies, she. They're estranged and she writes back to him about how she feels so bad about the fact of their estrangement. But the whole letter is about all about how much harm has been to her in this whole thing. And so her self, it's not about him at all. And that's where you get selflessness that is really actually just selfishness.

33:01 Wes: Right. The being a martyr.

33:04 Dylan: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

33:05 Mark: Thought for some reason that Freud added to this problem just in his notion of the object, that when you have an immediate creation of the object of love, that there's something that. Okay, you are literally putting your affection in something that is not you. So it's the opposite of narcissism.

33:23 Wes: Right.

33:23 Mark: Because you could just not have an object and put the object or take the object back into yourself. But does the fact that we have these capabilities to introject and extroject. I forget what the opposite. Abject. Abjection. Is that what we talked about with. With Kristeva? Yes. That you have this ability. So it's not straightforwardly like you find something that you find worthy. And so you are lauding praise upon that. That there always seems to be something that I have pushed out part of my. By just loving it. It's like I'm putting the energy of my libido into it.

And libido is the clay out of which the ego is built. So it's like I'm putting something of myself into anything that I love. And so all love is in some abstract way, love of self. Right. Because that's just the stuff of. Love is the stuff of self. To love something is to extend yourself into it. Are you actually identifying with it? Well, I guess that's a question. Clearly, when I love someone, I love them for them. I don't love them explicitly for me. But you could say, well, you only love them because of the joy that you get out of it. Or, you know, you could make these sort of cynical.

34:35 Wes: He does think that narcissism can play a big role in romantic love. Especially if I'm. You know, sometimes my love of the person is predicated on all these things that we have in common. It's like I've found my other self, or someone who's perfectly complimentary or. But he does compare. But this is early on, so. But he does have this metaphor of the way we love outside objects as being something like an amoeba who extends a pseudopod. Right. Extends a part of its body out to the other, so that the primary libidinal energy is in a way directed towards the self, in the sense of self preservation. But it gets complicated because he says we replace the ego, the love object, with the ego ideal or with the superego. That is narcissistic.

35:25 Mark: Yes.

35:26 Wes: It's not bad, narcissism. I mean it necessarily. And when we're sublimating into creative work, that's narcissistic anything, because anything that. Right. The libido comes back inward in a way. So when I have a value, if I strongly value being good to other people, being generous, there's a sense in which that's quote unquote narcissistic. My energy is now gone towards an ideal and towards being a certain type of person. It's about me in that sense. Maybe the mark. That's what you're getting at.

35:56 Mark: Yeah. So I'm just trying to determine whether this added vocabulary, these added, you know, subconscious possibilities give us a richer idea of what the self is or actually just reduces all these conflicting explanations into nonsense that it's. That it's a reductio. Because if there's. If I can't know my own identifications, if I can't clearly say in a way, you know, that, oh, you're actually being selfless because you're pointing at something, you're putting your energy, you're putting your value into something that is not you like, I want to preserve those sort of surface level self identifications.

And it seems like Freud just bulldozes all that. And so it makes the whole idea of what is the self, what is not the self. Is the correct explanation for our group membership that I'm identifying with these other people? Or is it not? Or is it just that, like, I like being around them, you know, some sort of more shallow explanation? You know, how do you actually judge whether these Freudian explanations are helpful and legitimate?

37:00 Seth: Well, you sort of dovetailed here into exactly where. Exactly where my mind is right now at this stage in the conversation, the recording, which is, you know, are these explanations or are they interpretations, are they helpful? Are they not helpful? And if this becomes a discussion about Freudian theory as opposed to group psychology, then we've kind of like lost track somewhat. And I think there's, you know, what I've gotten out of it up to this point, right. Is there are characteristic behaviors of individuals when they join together in groups.

There are different kinds of groups. So let's be specific about what kinds of groups we're talking about. Not organizations, we're talking about something more like mobs, you know, or drum, drum circles or something like that. So what are some of these characteristics? Well, one of the characteristics is that the individual drops some agency and substitutes what might be considered two things. One, individual aspirations for aspirations of the group and inhibitions about certain kind of behaviors, particularly violent and aggressive behaviors.

Okay, so great question then. Okay, where do the aspirations of the group come from the leader of the group or the idea, some leader like idea, what have you. And so to me, at least I don't want to say intuitively, because I'm trying to die without using that word meaningfully for the rest of my life. But it feels as though as a characterization, that's perfectly reasonable, perfectly acceptable to say that individuals sacrifice some sense of self, some sense of their individuality when they form together in groups and they substitute things that were previously theirs with something that's provided by the larger group.

Because the trade off in that loss of individuality is a sense of belonging, which we haven't explicitly talked about, but which he does bring up somewhere in these last two chapters we were just talking about, and that belonging is very important to us. And then the question becomes, okay, if all that mechanism seems descriptively correct or at least interpretively reasonable, then, okay, what is the mechanism by which that all works or takes place? Then we start talking about love, relationships and trying to explain why would somebody sacrifice the one on one sexual or hypnotic relationship in exchange for the sublimated libidinal group relationship?

Or why is it more powerful? Maybe even. Or is it even more powerful? Is there really even a trade off here? That it's just, you know, this is just a continuum that he's using descriptively and so forth. And then at that point for me anyway, it's like, do I want to try to learn enough about the Freudian theories and the Freudian structures in order to be able to kind of tease out the nuances?

40:08 Dylan: Or.

40:08 Seth: Or do I want to let the characterization sit and say, yeah, I'm not sure psychologically how this all takes place, but I don't need to know that in order to be able to agree with the characterization, unless I want to do some kind of an intervention.

40:24 Mark: All right, let's let that be the last word for part one. We'll come back for part two and discuss the rest of this book. Finally, get to the primal horde, the climax of the book. So stay tuned. If you are a Partially Examined lifestyle supporter, that should be the next thing in your feed. Partialexaminelife.com support gives the options for that or why not become one? Otherwise, just wait till next week.

40:45 Seth: Thanks.

40:46 Dylan: Thanks.

40:46 Seth: Good night.

40:47 Dylan: Thanks.