Arnon

No.

Sorry, i meant not necessarily.

Neria

Are you insatiable?

David

Theoretically no.

David

But i'm taking a break now because i am not clever enough to deliver my arguments without causing much distress. i end up appearing like an OCD, which is not true. i think i just need to point out that children can't bear children and it means they cannot be driven by any libido. i'm leaving this site now (hoping that Jan T might want to continue developing this argument).

Bye, and enjoy the opportunity to communicate in this virtual cafe :)

@Neria
As a toddler I was driver by a very strong libido, that is what I remember, but maybe I was a much stressed toddler caused to near psychotic parents. A disclosed sex life is as futile to me as wearing Prada or not.

A goodbye?

@to all
It will be difficult for me to comment on this site. My new PC at home (a Packard Bell xtreme Gold) makes problems when loading long Adobe Flash player files; a post with more than ten comments is impossible to load.
My older PC at work gives no problem at all BUT the policy of our company (my boss) had denied access to Grunberg.com. Grunberg.com is treated as a pornographic site now. We may still watch sports, fashion and any kind of games…
So if I stay silent, it a pure matter of censorship or a technical problem. No offence, I am much obliged to you all and especially to Arnon.
Keep on truckin’ !

Jan

It's a shame. i'll really miss your comments.

Big hug!

i hpoe you'll be able to come back soon.

Jan T

Please contact Sander, he might be able to solve your problems. And as I mentioned before Sander is working on a site without flash.

@Arnon, Neria,…
Thank you all, but I will contact Sander. To post this comment now I had to try more then 20 times to load the site.
See you later, I hope.

Grunberg.com

Isn't that a great achievement, to be treated as a pornosite and that without Britney naked, faut le faire....

People who build their identity upon their sex life are surely healthier
than those who build their life on the disease they are suffering of.

Arnon and some others

Slavoj Zizek, commenting in a documentary I recently saw (‘The perverse quide to cinema’) on classic scenes in the history of cinema with the use of more or less classic psychoanalytic ideas, in a slightly confusing, yet admirable way, characterised the Freudian libido as ‘undead’, a force beyond life and death. This at least illustrates how far psychoanalysis has to be placed from nowadays popular ideas as ‘selfish genes’.
Concerning the question of sex, as Zizek in the documentary rightly emphasizes, psychoanalysis is not so much about sex, as about fantasies which for the human being are crucial to get engaged into sex. Fantasy sustains the sexual act.
In ‘Eyes wide shut’, the last Kubrick movie, the roles are reversed, the fantasy of seduction of Nicole Kidman has a disturbing effect on her husband, Tom Cruise, and at the end of the movie, when Nicole says she loves him, she adds: ‘And now we have to do something as quick as possible: fuck’. In ‘The piano Teacher’ by Michael Haneke, another film commented on by Zizek in the same film, the realisation of a perverse scenario has devastating effects on the subject and in this case the fantasy sustains the subject only as long as it is not realised.
In general, of course, a sexual experience can function as a revelation and as such have a profound effect on the identify of the subject, but let me add immediately that such experiences seems to me rare and perhaps there is a tendency to overestimate the meaning of sex, stressing the word ‘meaning’here, as an enigma that speaks to us. Just as in ‘Eyes wide shut’, a film in which the idea of transgression, in spite of the orgy, is hard to find, sex often functions not to question our fantasies but, as you write, to get rid of them.
Ijustr ead the entry on your weblog on Freud from a couple of days ago and the following discussion. Just curious, if you criticize Freuds book on the interpretations of dreams as too much ‘wordplay’ who are the ‘some others’ that you mention? Maybe Wittgenstein, who had the experience of a dazzling contingency reading the dreambook. The problem is that the interpretation of dreams is read in general as a book on dreams and their interpretation, which undeniable it is, but it is also a book on the technique of analysis; what looks merely as wordplay shows itself in the analytic experience to be determined and repeated to the point of boredom. The message of the unconsciousness is always the same. But I can hardly blame you if you as a real man feel more comfortable with what Zizek calls ‘the passion of the real’ as the lightness and trifles of wordplay.
One final remark on the dream of being a prostitute. In the discussion you mention some interesting details. Obviously the dream is about masturbation and the fantasies that accompany it about a person who is unaware about it, which, of course, is part of the enjoyment. To dream to be a prostitute is not so shocking, quite the contrary it has here a reassuring effect, in this regard we should not be mislead by the unconsciousness. It is hard to say, but it seems to me that the dream is haunted by a question: what is the object inside me, not so much the object inside me that I enjoy through masturbation, but this mysterious object that is strange to me and that makes me an object of desire for the others? So the dream is about female desire.

Johan Schokker

There are occasions that Freud explains a dream based on similarity of words that only in German share this similarity. In other words a non-German speaker who would have had the same dream would have needed another explanation/ interpretation.
Maybe I've misundestood the technique of dream interpretation but I remember clearly that I found this off-putting. (Karel van het Reve makes such a remark as well in one of his essays.)
Fantasies are crucial to our sex life, but not always. Does a prostitute need fantasy to engage in sex? Does a wife who feels disgusted by her husband but stays for whatever reason need fantasy to engage in sex? It’s probably easier for women engage in sex without lust, but I would argue that even men could do this.
If fantasies are crucial, then it is not the selfish gene that seduces us to engage in sex, but our (often troubled) fantasies. So what are we looking for in sex? Combat soldiers are told that masturbation is good against stress. But I think we don’t engage in sex to relief stress, and most of us are not combat soldiers.
A last question regarding the dream about being a prostitute: is female desire the same as being desired by the other? If so how would you define male desire?

Arnon

Some remarks.
Under the influence of Wilhelm Stekel, one of those awkward figures of the first psychoanalytic circle in Vienna, Freud gave much more attention on symbols in dreaminterpretation in the later editions of his dreambook. Now, one can make an argument for the use of symbols in the interpretation of dreams, but in general this leads you astray. In Freuds time perhaps people were still innocent concerning matters of the unconscousness and the symbols that appeared in dreams, but nowadays we are more or less aware of the meaning of the umbrella, walking up stairs etcetera and symbols do no longer function to disguish the meaning of the dream. The main argument however is that in the interpretation of dreams Freud argues extensively that dreams have to be interpreted through free association in order to lay bear the dreamwork, which is the way the unconsciousness has operated to produce the dream. Thus THE meaning of the dream is nonexistent, and it is perfectly possible that two people have exactly the same dream, and yet that these dreams have totally different meanings for one and the other; simply because the path that is taken towards the dream is different and, as you surely know, for psychoanalysis what is relevant is not the manifest contend of the dream, but the path leading towards it. So, the truth of an interpretation is not restricted to a given language, it is even worse: the truth of a dream is always a particular truth.
It is the same with symptoms and even speech. Symptoms do not function as direct signs. What does it mean to have a paralyzed arm? There is no way to tell in advance, the person in question has to be analyzed/speak about it.
Second point; fantasy is a kind of image, a snapshot, a cinematographic moment, freezing all the characters. The function of fantasy is to structure our desire, and the fantasy is often half-consciousness, to appear to us at a sudden moment as a flash. Understood in this way, and not in the usual way as a mental activity, it is not so contradictory to suppose that the prostitute, while she engages in sex with her clients, has no fantasies at all, but thinks about her grocery list. But the point is then that making up a grocery list while engaging in sex, in order to make this split possible, a kind of fantasy scenario is necessary to sustain the subject. It is not a question of becoming an automaton just by the turn of a switch, not that under extreme circumstances people can become automatons, but probably only with serious psychological damage as a result. The film ‘The Piano Teacher’ is instructive here, but the main character seems to me to be more on the psychotic side, completely missing the coordinates for a sexual encounter and that is why the realisation of her pervers fantasy has such dramatic consequences.
Third point: what are we looking for in sex? Well, the satisfaction of the drives I suppose, Eros and Thanatos, forgetfullness, death even, says the one, feeling alive, says the other. But, as you undoubtedly know, according to Freud, the finding of an object is always a re-finding of an object. In other words, what characterizes human sexuality is that it has not one period as in the animal world after biological maturation, but three periods: infantile sexuality, a latency periode and what we call ‘normal’ sexuality. And here too, besides sexual satisfaction, it is the path towards it, what is called pre-pleasure, that is most revealing because the partial drives that ruled in infantile sexuality find their expression here: the desire to look or be looked upon, the desire to incorporate, but also cruelty, the desire to master the object et cetera, drives that in most cases are inhibited through shame, disgust, tenderness. The pervert has a preference for this domain of pre-pleasure because he is fixated in his pre-genital sexuality. Thus the typical pervert prefers to postpone the orgasm as long as possible or even replace it by pain or to urinate on the sexual object et cetera. You are right in what you wrote in your entry ‘Slow’ a couple of days ago, perversion is a way to replace the orgasm with something that can take on endlessly untill the pervert himself is changed into that statue of stone which, in his fantasy, he desires to be.
Hope this was some help to you. I leave the subject of female and male desire for the moment.

@Johan Schokker

Is it possible that a neurotic parent who is already too busy dealing with his own pain will therefor regard the natural needs of a baby as cruelty? How an independent creature who did not choose to come to the world is cruel?

Isn't sexuality first and foremost related to biological maturity? Could it be that a neurotic parent will feel and describe his baby as sexual because he himself (the parent) needs attention?

Correction

'dependent' (and not independent).

Neria

We all pass our neurosis and fantasies on to our childeren; it our fate. Among them the fantasy of the innocent child.
As to sexuality, I do not believe it is simple a question of biological maturation. Freud remarks somewhere that basically love is just as animal as it has always been, but most of us like to see it differently

@Johan Schokker

i think it is possible to be cured of neurosis and to put an end for this heredity.

i accept the definition that love is fulfilling needs, it means that you don't do drugs while you're pregnant because this is torturing the fetus. It means you don't try to hold your baby back while he's attemtpting to break free from womb because you fear the pain. It means you need to participate in the delivery, taking care to stay focused and breath because your baby needs oxygen etc etc. i think each developmental stage brings with it different kinds of needs. i think that once you secrete hormones that make your body ready to breed it means you start developing sexual needs. i think it is very dangerous to confuse between the need for sex and love in general. It is very important at each stage to stick for what the normal needs are, and what i was saying was that neurotic people will fail to recognize their own normal needs and inevitably will be unable to recognise (and fulfil) their kids needs, with the painful result of upbringing more neurotics.

But i'm illiterate when it comes to Freud writings, anyway, the more i learn the more i find them destructive. It feels a little bit like he could have been a prophet but lost it, this is not judgmental considering the fact that he himself was brought up by two neurotic parents.

Further i agree with you that generalising anything from symptoms and symbols is a mere intellectual amusement in its best and enhancing defences at its worse.

Lastly, i agree with many that major traumas which affect the brain (and the body's) constitution happen usually before our verbal development takes place (like lack of oxygen at birth, feeding according to a schedule, circumcision, depresion of the caregivers...) and psychoanalysis, which is based upon verbal interaction, only activates the frontal cortex and fail to make any connection with areas in the brain which might store the memory of the trauma.
It makes sense maybe to use psychoanalysis if you want to process a trauma that happened in an older age, and our world supply enough of them too. Apart from a temporal relieving effect it has no meaning (maybe it does, to the therapist bank account).

@Johan Schokker

And as to what you're naming 'the fantasy of the innocence child' it belongs to the field of philosophy, theology, the realm of faith. i don't think a man is born good or bad (innocent or a sinner for that matter) and as Thijs observed, i therefor cannot judge. But what it means is that i don't think a child is something you have exorcise demons from, all you need to do is to be normal and fulfill his needs (but it has to start from the caregiver and not from the child).

pseuds corner

Darwin was a great thinker, Freud was a novelist, not a scientist. Why reference your work to Freud? It does fit in with angst-ridden upper Westside of New York, but is derivative of tripe.

Richard (Dick) Dawkins is a poor man's Darwin in drag. He can only be a "Darwinist" becasue Darwin is dead.

Dawkins hasn't come up with anything Darwin didn't already think about. The title of his most famous book, "the selfish gene" is apt, as it has been reported by Andrew Brown in the Guardian 27/8/08 that Rrichard Trivers said ;"My first wife, a wonderful woman, used to refer to Dick as the Selfish Gene, just because of the way he acts".

Neria and J Brown

Neria, your criticism of Freud could not convince me. Sometimes it really helps to read the book first before criticizing it, sometimes.
Mr. Brown. Freud’s discovery that the libido is the center of our being should not too easily be discarded. The fact that so many people still hate him is in my opinion a sign (one of the many) that he is still important.
By the way, he’d hoped to get the Nobel Prize for Literature.

@Arnon, ok, which book exactly do you want me to read first?

Previous Comment

I'm so sorry, I didn't want to write this comment in Dutch. I accidentaly posted the Dutch version in stead of the English one. And I don't know how to delete it.

Neria

I would say: Civilization and its discontents, Totem and Taboo, Mozes and monotheism.
But as I said before I haven’t read the complete Freud.

Monica

Do you want me to delete your comment?

To Arnon

yes please.

Monica

Consider it done.

@Arnon, let me ignore the stupid two-comments-rule because i'll read them, but since you already did i really want to know what is it about: is it literature or science. If it is science, i want to know how Frued measures neurosis, if Psychoanalysis is healing, and then again - how is a successful healing is determined.
Dissecting worms is not enough, where enters neurobiology into his writings and how a century of research in that field has affected Psychoanalysis today? Plus, not enough research has been done on fetuses for example but i would really like to know how today's surgeries done in fetuses affect this population later in life, because i tend to believe they will be prone to be neurotics or worse and Psychoanalysis will be futile with uprooting their pain.
But ok, i'll get the books.

Neria

Do you want to do research on fetuses? And what kind of research exactly f I may ask?
Are you one of those who is inviting men to her bedroom by saying “let’s do some research”?

@Arnon
Fetuses, babies and children are regarded as objects. i can't remember which philosopher claimed that if one is incapable of saying: "i'm pained" then he isn't pained (maybe i made a little variation here). But obviously babies, animals and people who don't speak your language cannot say they're pained. i'm saying that because it's a very old and rooted tradition that affects many cultures till today. Strictly vegetarian as i am i think more research should be made to measure fetuses pain. If they secrete six times stress hormone than an adult as a result to a painful procedure i think it might change the structure of their brain. Also, this might be checked by statistics of neurotic cases in adulthood among premature babies and/or adult which are known to have gone a surgical procedure as fetuses. If a connection will be proven (and of course, you can always be born in a normal birth and then fall on abusive parents who will arrange for your safe path into a neurotic tormented future too) there might be more legislation done here. Instead of admiring the godly surgeon the fetuses (and later human being) quality of life will be taken into consideration. Maybe it would make more sense not to force life on them by all means.

i already have two stalkers i can't answer your question in this forum.

Neria

I believe you are more than anything else in need of a stalker. Why not start www.desperatelylookingforstalker.com.
A few of your fellow commentators might like the idea.

@Arnon. It wasn't a joke, and i don't enjoy it.