Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Reich did to Freud what Marx did to Hegel


Although neither Hegel nor Freud were idealists in the sense that Marx or Reich caricatured them to be their focus was definitely one-sided with only hints of the material side. For example drawing up a schema for general character types Freud writes:

Observation teaches us that individual human beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate need to distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall at the start have the choice as to what characteristics and what points of view we shall take as the basis of our differentiation. For that purpose physical qualities will doubtless serve no less well than mental ones; the most valuable distinctions will be those which promise to present a regular combination of physical and mental characteristic (Libidinal Types, p. 217).



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