A case of the Sigmunds

I heard Jim picked it up while changing wounded soldiers bandages in th
Franco Prussian war.

Daniel

-----Original Message-----
From: James Rovira
I know. I KNOW it sounded Freudian. But it wasn't Freud who first
developed these ideas. You see a pretty complex idea of projection in
Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_. The one that really hit home for me,
though, was in Max Stirner. He was an early to mid 19th century German
philosopher, an Egoist (along the lines of Nietzche, but he wrote before
him). He criticized Marx and was ridiculed by Marx in turn in _The
German Ideology_. His main work is _The Ego and His Own_. He described
God as a projection of everything we fear and loathe about ourselves.
 We don't accept, say, Quality "X" about ourselves, so we imagine a God
that hates and punishes Quality X -- God is the projection of our self
hatred, in this case. I'm not sure if Stirner wrote at the same time as, or
after, Feuerbach,
so it's quite possible Feuerbach is still the first person to really
describe God in this way. That's what I saw going on in Fight Club. Brad
Pitt's character was a projection of the other character's unacceptable
aggression.
You could use pyschoanalytic terms to to talk about the movie. They do
indeed fit well in this case. But you don't have to believe in Freud's
structure of the mind to understand that we project inner qualities
outwards onto others. Freud's defense mechanisms were a convenient and
clear categorization of habits of thought that had long been observed
and understood.

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

> '... an important statement about projected aggression being
> the result of suppressed aggression ...'
>
> Good Lord. You'd almost think for a moment there someone
> had been unwittingly infected with a slight case of the Sigmunds.
>
> Come on now, Jim. Don't try & tell us you picked it up off
> a lavatory seat.
>
> Scottie B.
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Received on Thu Dec 12 10:26:57 2002