On Tiger

I'm rather heartbroken at Tiger's admission. I almost feel like a six-year-old whose hero was just exposed as a fake and a fraud.

Tiger Woods has always been an idol of mine, an athlete whom I considered the most dominant and focused in the world. I always admired him for avoiding the media. He's been one of the most famous people in the world for the last fifteen years, and yet we scarcely hear a thing about him. Here's a guy, I always thought, who was above glamour and fame, who only wanted to play the game he loved at the highest level imaginable. Tiger Woods, so I told myself, was a different breed of celebrity, a paragon that other celebrities might look to.

From a subjective point of view, everything has changed. And while I understand (and indeed echo and agree with) the arguments being marshalled forth in his defence -- namely: he didn't do anything wrong legally; he deserves to keep his endorsements; the decision made by his extra-marital lover to release his voicemail to the public is a reprehensible and despicable invasion of his right to privacy; having sex is not a crime, etc. -- all things considered:

The days of me cheering for Tiger are over.

And the main reason is this: Tiger has shown his true colors. He doesn't want privacy because he's attained a higher level of enlightenment. He simply wants it so he can go around fucking waitresses in Vegas. Tiger is just like everybody else. And that breaks my heart. All of his traits that I used to explain away by referring to his impeccable character, suddenly can be explained away by the fact that he's an egotistical, rich, spoiled, self-serving athlete.

You're dead to me, Tiger. I hope you never win again.

book review

The Heart of Man, Its Genius for Good and Evil by Erich Fromm

My review rating: 1 of 5 stars

A maddening book. Fromm came so close, early in his career, to a theoretical breakthrough. This book, published in 1964, represents a serious regression in his thought. Rather than treat the psychology of ethics in scientific terms, he attempts to translate mental health into an existential idiom. In the process, he forfeits any hope he had at achieving an objective framework from which to judge human action.

Rather than situate mental health within biology, Fromm relies heavily upon traditional notions of good and evil, and dark and light. He rejects the most radical aspects of Freud's thought, finding him guilty of a "mechanistic materialism." In his effort to translate Freud "into a new frame of reference," Fromm talks of "necrophilia," "narcissism" and "incestuous fixation," while robbing each them of their libidinal foundations. Suddenly, all these categories become obstacles to some some vague notion of spiritual independence, or "biophilia." Without Freud's psychosexual/evolutionary foundations, Fromm's whole project becomes meaningless proselytizing: we must make the positive choice; we must not resign ourselves to nuclear war; we still have the power to change the course of the future; we can still make the world a better place if we just hop on the noble path; etc., -- all stuff that's been said before.

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Paradigm Shift

It occurred to me that I might try expanding the range of topics about which I write. I enjoy posting book reviews, but, believe it or not, Freudian metapsychology just isn't a subject that attracts a lot of readers!

I'll continue to post book reviews, but I'll also occasionally offer some immodest & obscene opinions about the American sports landscape. The great thing about sports is that it brings people together over long distances, especially in such a large geographical country like America. Actually, it's not just an American thing -- it connects people all over the world. The only time my girlfriend's father (a Canadian ex-pat who lives in Thailand) and I feel the need to contact each other is when something of interest happens in the NFL. (You know, a free agent signing, an arrest, orgies caught on tape). It also keeps me in touch with my family back home in Buffalo. Sports are inherently associative, and that's reason enough for me to follow them closely -- despite the fact that most of the fanaticism devoted by the masses to sports would be better spent trying to stop genocide in Western Sudan, or putting an end to sweat shops in third world countries...

So, I'll do my best to silence the Marxist voice in the back of my head which denounces sports as a corporate evil, and instead embrace my irrational passion. Plus I'll take pride in the fact that this might be the only blog in the world devoted primarily to the Buffalo Bills & Sabres, as well as to the history of psychoanalysis!

Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is an astonishing treatment of Freud's metapsychology. Marcuse is a remarkable dialectician. He weaves a complex fabric of dialectics, collapsing in the process seemingly un-reconcilable antagonisms. Most importantly, Marcuse attempts to reconcile the antagonism between work & Eros. Ananke , for Freud, necessitated repression & instinctual frustration. With the rise of material abundance, however, repression has reached a surplus level -- unnecessary for the survival of the species. Repression now encourages the continuing domination of a certain class. Marcuse speaks of a time "Beyond the Reality Principle" in which the entire personality of the individual becomes eroticized -- which means a movement away from the genital supremacy ("genitofugal") that has accompanied the capitalistic performance principle. Such a world has heretofore been dismissed as Utopia and phantasy -- inpracticable ideas with relevance only for artists. But Utopian longings are practicable beyond the aesthetic dimension.

Marcuse finds evidence within Freud's own theoretical framework to suggest that work is not necessarily opposed to Sex & Eros. He indicts the "cultural school" & the "Neo-Freudian revisonists" (most especially Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan) for abandoning Freud's most important findings, namely, his phylogeny, his ontogeny, the idea of a Death Instinct, and the Oedipus complex. By ignoring his metapsychology, the revisionists lose a critical thrust, and become necessarily apologetic for the status quo. Pleasure from work, according to Marcuse, must come libido -- otherwise the pleasure simply serves the purpose of glorifying dehumanization as pleasure. Truly, there is an anti-humanistic force behind the philosophy of productiveness. Logos is, from the very beginning, a program of domination, domination in the deepest ontological sense. Idealistic ethics have no place within a society wherein alienation has reached totalitarian levels. There must be a fundamental change within the cultural and instinctual structure.

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Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Where does one begin...?

I've been trying to think of something meaningful to say. One thing is for certain, as Jonathan has pointed out: Dostoevsky doesn't like it when people think too much. But beyond this, what conclusions can be drawn? Any conclusions one might draw also have an antithetical negation. Is it possible that Roskolnikov is a philanthropic misanthrope? Although reducing human relations to a cold calculus, does legal positivism safeguard us from an otherwise terrifying & arbitrary sociology? Is religion necessary even if it's not true, in the ultimate sense?

The psychological depth of the characters, particularly the main character, is breathtaking, chilling, and disturbing. Dostoevsky's ending, is, well, surprising. The moral of the story, it appears, is that intellection can only take us so far: we cannot dispense with affection, and that we are never beyond hope, even the most wretched among us. How lovely -- Dostoevsky's a sentimental fool...

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Freud: Biologist of the Mind by Frank J. Sulloway

Freud, Biologist of the Mind : Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend by Frank J. Sulloway

My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
An ambitious, and almost absurdly long, scientific/intellectual biography of Freud. Sulloway focuses on Freud and the question of science, which is to say, he focuses on the scientific influences in Freud's thought, as well as the scientific status of psychoanalysis. The material is complex, exhausting, and nearly interminable, but the argument is simple: there is an essential continuity in Freud's program from beginning to end. As a committed psychobiologist of the mind, Freud understood the proximate (that is, the physiological & the psychological) as well as the ultimate, (that is, the evolutionary biological) ingredients that made up the riddles of human nature. Freud's system was influenced by the nineteenth century idea that inborn predispositions that serve as the basis for ontogenetic development mirror the phlogenetic development of the human species. (i.e., "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." -- it's worth looking up.) Sulloway rejects the notion that the death instinct represents an essential break in Freudian scientific logic, which depends upon, from beginning to end, physiological reductionism, Darwinian evolutionary biology, and the mathematics of a genetic sexual biology. Pretty groovy, eh? Freud, and his followers, hid the biological underpinnings of psychoanalysis for political reasons, in order to gain acceptance from the scientific community, and to achieve existence as an independent scientific discipline.

It's a remarkable achievement, although rather dry. At times it reads like the longest historiographical essay ever known to woman, but it's really invaluable, at least for my purposes. I'd love to hear from anyone else in the entire world who has read this book! Anyone? Anyone?

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The Legacy of Erich Fromm

The Legacy of Erich Fromm by Daniel Burston

My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Burston gives us a much needed intellectual biography of Erich Fromm. He divides the book thematically, sketching out Fromm's: Freudo-Marxist- anthropological-matriarchal synthesis; his contributions to the clinical setting; his contributions to sociological empiricism, including his studies of authoritarian personalities both with reference to the psychology of Nazism and in terms of the characterlogical marketing (i.e., hoarding, i.e., automaton conformist) orientation of post-War America; his humanism and existentialism; his notion of the pathology of normalcy; his scholarly contributions to the historiography of psychoanalysis and Freud; the reception and appraisals he received from his colleagues; and, finally, Burston poses some unanswered questions about the rather vituperative Fromm/Marcuse debate, which centred on a disagreement on the validity of Freud's death instinct.

Burston is certainly a competent Frommian scholar. While clearly an admirer of Fromm, not once does Burston approach hagiography. Burston is quite critical of many of Fromm's key concepts, including his over-compensation for Freud's biological mechanism, and his monolithic and incomplete understanding of the unconscious and the wherefore of human repression. His command of Fromm's rather large body of work is impressive. The book is a little light on context, but context can be found elsewhere. (Jay, Jacoby, Funk.) Burston's writing, is, well, hopelessly academic. But that can hardly be avoided, given the difficulty and complexity of the subject matter. Very few intellectual traditions are irrelevant to Fromm's story: not only Freud and Marx and the Frankfurt School, but Kant and the German enlightenment, mysticism, the Talmudic tradition, Plato, anthropology, Weber and sociology, all figure prominently in Fromm's work.

Finally, what are Burston's conclusions regarding Fromm's legacy? The fact that he strove to be accessible, coupled with his popular success and his willingness to commit to a positive human anthropology somewhat doomed Fromm's reputation among his Frankfurt School colleagues. Of that there is little doubt. Additionally, his emphasis on qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, research simply does not align with the current paradigms in the social sciences. Notwithstanding, Fromm's work offers valuable (and, I would hasten to add, powerful and profound) insight into the human condition, not simply on an existentialist/humanist plane. The Authoritarian Personality and Social Character in a Mexican Village: A Sociopsychoanalytic Study are two remarkable studies that are completely ignored. The research and empirical methods in these two works, according to Burston, deserve the attention of the intellectual and scientific communities. Fromm himself deserves more attention, especially in America...


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