![]() You alone, of all the animals, repress your true desires, live in continual conflict and guilt, and construct for yourself a corporate neurosis you call civilization.īrown's solution to your problem is the resurrection of the body. Erotic energy is sublimated and turned to the production of objects, character structures, and political organizations that yield little pleasure. As a result, you cannot recognize the realities of existence. He says that society represses you, and, to please society, you repress yourself. The pleasure you used to feel wherever and whenever, you now confine to the relatively rare act of sex, in a darkened room, with the blinds shut. You eventually concentrated sensation to a single, small, hidden part of your body, your genitals. So that you are not driven mad with pleasure and pain, you deadened your ability to sense. You performed, not for your own pleasure, but for her’s. Instead of playing freely, you did the things that effectively brought your caretaker to your side. So, what did you do? You suppressed your desires, especially your desire for your caretaker to come immediately, so that you were not made miserable by your desires. This is what is meant by the Oedipal Phase and Penis Envy, two other widely misunderstood Freudian terms. ![]() You wished you could have whatever they had, so that you could have your caretaker anytime you wanted. Something else, or someone else, was more important than you. You found that you were not the master of your domain. It began to change the moment your caretaker didn’t come when you called. Furthermore, because your parents sheltered you from many of the realities of the world, childhood was a prolonged period of privileged freedom. You learned fast, because you were so open to experience and able to experiment. ![]() The whole world, including yourself, was your plaything. This state of affairs made you, as a baby, the observant, engagable creature that you were. In addition, it was easy to take pleasure because you could suck your thumb and take a dump anytime you wanted. Freud didn’t mean that babies are sexual in the same way that adults are sexual, only that any sensual stimulation that was not pain was pleasure, everything from sucking your thumb to taking a good dump. This is what Freud meant by Infant Sexuality, or the equally misunderstood phrase, Polymorphous Perversity. Babies experience the world with the same level of intensity, the same level of pleasure and pain, that you, as an adult, experience sex. ![]() Since it’s a book that only the most psychoanalytically-minded shrink will enjoy, I’ll summarize it for you, so you don’t have to read it. I recently finished reading Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History by Norman O. ![]()
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