THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MY ADDICTION

I don't know much about freud - but I agree about the good vs evil and animal vs human part.

This community is beneficial. This fight is not really a public one, we don't go out to our jobs or schools or whatever and fly an anti-porn flag. But while we're here we can band together and identify the enemy and rally one another in our effort to trample the enemy underfoot.

 

I know some about Freud.
And Jung.
Do you follow both or just the one?

 

The problem with Freud's model is that the super-ego is seen as repressive of the id, and so the ego [you] becomes a bundle of neuroses and addictions. One must therefore liberate the id at the expense of the imperial super-ego. In the end, the id is seen as most real. This model could only have arisen in fin de siecle Vienna.

Freud's model is itself a neuroses generating by a cultural conflict between celestial and terrestrial politics.

 

Your caps lock button is stuck on again, stop yelling at us.

 

It's always on

 

I suggest you stop writing in all caps. It’s not more legible, it just makes you look like a screaming maniac.

 

Psyche, Super-ego, Ego and Id - Another Reading

The SUPER-EGO [the intellectual] is the creator of identities. It inhabits a pure detached objective space, and sanitizes that space from its engagement with practical culture. The SUPER-EGO, as that substitute for the authoritative culture of the past, provides for the mass an ideology with which they are to find their identity and functionality. This ideology, in its various forms, provides for the polarity of a consciousness consisting of subject and object, and so we have the constitution of a rational/ political EGO. This EGO is also the self-consciousness of a consumer, for ideology is the primary consumption of the ego, as it is the primary production of the SUPER-EGO.

As this is always second-hand knowledge, a passive consumption, the EGO is always alienated from its own intelligence. Where the EGO suffers ‘language illusion’*, the SUPER-EGO is merely self-deluded. And yet identity, as constructed, is fragile. Fault-lines open up, a splintering occurs, and a multiplicity of identities may find themselves confronting each other in identity politics. Within the ideological and egoistic mode of thought, there is no possibility to defuse the tension as ideology has itself led to the multiplicity of these identities. Politics is no longer diplomatic, where a pragmatic principle, or power, forged unity out of diversity – it is now doctrinaire. And easily radicalized, it slides into fanaticism.

This is the failure of secular ideology [as contrasted to the authority of a political culture]. It thought to replace the past with a more equitable program, and yet its reading of human nature, has proven to be too facile. Perhaps it was only feasible insofar as there existed a public media, which could serve to both influence and edify that nebulous entity we know as public opinion. But presently, with the splintering of the media, this is hardly possible. And when the relation between the SUPER-EGO [dominant political and intellectual culture] and the collected EGO of public opinion breaks down, then the established norms and identities are also unsettled. Before long, new ones arise.

Whereas in the past ‘a contradiction’ in ‘society’, could organize at a mass level, we now see many contradictions arising, all with their own media, their own identity, their own cause. It’s a proliferation of contradictions, and, no doubt, the logical consequence of pluralism. And yet the old tolerance breaks down, for we now have the ID, generated by various neuroses, breaking out with renewed and chaotic force, in all its pride and prejudice, to have its revenge on a repression it suspects itself to have been laboring under for so long.

If underlying all EGO and ideology, is the ID’s will to power, then the impasse facing us today is largely the failure of an experiment in the past, that of the so-called project of Enlightenment with its facile and optimistic reading of human nature. Well provisioned by a millennial long culture, it struck out confidently though today finds its energy near spent. The culture is gone, and with it parasitic ideology, and yet the technology remains. Where civilized power lay in its imaginative reach over the mind - that is, in the Greco-Roman submission or sublimation to the ‘will to reason’, now power can be no more than a form of control over our bodies and behavior. And so the reversion to barbarism.

Of course, what is outlined in sketch here can in no way be a totality. It remains open-ended, for there are gradations of reality to be had, in the vertical direction, moving from the ID to the EGO, from the EGO to the SUPER-EGO, and finally from the SUPER-EGO to the fully-fledged PSYCHE, where the PSYCHE can effectively incorporate all the previous stages and restore them to other modalities of philosophy outside the scientific/ epistemological one. In this restoration is found a renewed interest in aesthetics, ethics, history, culture, art, literature, and religion. But this brings us back to the reality of our own psychology, with which ‘society’, ever in the abstract, is but a dim reflection.

*to be compared to money illusion

 

That's understandable and a respectable decision

 

The reason people are bringing it up is because it’s universally recognized in text etiquette as yelling. No matter what you want all caps to mean, you’re still yelling in text. It’s like if you used the middle finger emoji and say that in your language, it means “much respect”. No doubt you can type however you want, but it will be interpreted accordingly.