Many Jewish European visionaries have profoundly changed the way we think and see the world and ourselves. A handful of examples: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Martin Buber.
As I started to get my 1928 apartment in fighting trim for the fall, I came across the often hilariously pensive little volume of Freud's, Civilization and Its Discontents / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1929). It's a wonderful jumping off point for all sorts of creative endeavors. Reading through it again, it reminds me that Woody Allen's filmic worldview dovetails nicely with much of this work. As does much of Fellini's. Just as Fellini remarked about recreating the Remini of his memory via Ostia, Italy, so Freud speaks of the layered remnants of ancient Rome: "Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction."
In the first two sections of the 92-page book, Freud examines all sorts of things dear to artists: the pleasure principle/pain avoidance, the reality principle, the libido/id, the ego, plus the nature of love, art, religion, and life. His comic Woody Allenesque gloominess asserts things like: "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures." He then goes on: "There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind is indispensible." Ah, yes.
And what is it about these three measures he has in mind? "Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to cultivate one's garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life. The intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has its place in this series. We must look further afield." He goes on to say that organized religion is a "mass-delusion." Freud was a funny man, indeed. I was lucky enough to check out his main dwellings and office spaces in Vienna and London back in the 1980s. He died in London in 1939, having escaped from the Nazis.
(British) English translation by James Strachey (1961).
Auf Wiedersehen!
6 comments:
Then it is this! You are looking distraction in new stoppings? Also taste to run away from the daily reality, to travel, to dive and to take care of of my animals! As well as it made Freud! (laughs) Good trip! Beijus
I agree w/Freud's comment on organized religion... Why would God create everything on the planet, including ALL of humanity, and really care which group of people should live in a certain geographical area? Or why would He only speak to certain people through certain books, and leave out whole groups of people, condemning them to eternal damnation just because they never heard a preacher tell them a certain group of words, a certain prayer, they could say and be "saved?" How could one suffer eternal damnation without a body to feel it? It just doesn't make any sense to me. --R
I wonder what would happen if a Bond-like criminal mastermind carried out a "Goldfinger Option" and made Jerusalem, Mecca and Vatican City simultaneously radioactive and unliveable. How would people deal with being permanently exiled from their holy places, like Adam & Eve from their proverbial Eden?
I'm with you on the Storm God side of religion. But there's a peaceful side to religion, too, isn't there? Buddhism, Taoism, the turn the other cheek of Jesus and Gandhi? The basic humanity of Confucius? The Sufi and Jewish mystics, etc.? God, let's hope so ;)
I studied Freud in Psychology class... a lot of what he said was whack... although, some of it made sense too.
Ahhh yes, "to make light of one's own misery." I can relate to that. --Jim
Yes, Erik, I believe there's a peaceful side to it, more peaceful in most eastern religions, like Buddhism. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that religion, especially western religion, Christianity in particular, is man-made, used to conquer whole groups of people, and feel justified about it. I don't think Jesus ever intended events like The Crusades. He, Buddha, the Sufi and Jewish mystics have said virtually the same...peace within comes before peace without. War will never bring peace, only retaliation. --R
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