A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today - PT 2 Education and Civilizational Crisis

A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today - PT 2
Education and Civilizational Crisis: 2:00 – 3:30 pm

A Colloquium of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation
and L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud

For Participant information visit : http://www.helixcenter.org/roundtables/a-freudian-perspective-on-what-ails-the-world-today/

For the further illumination of and greater appreciation for the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis, the The ADAPes Freud Committee, founded in 2014, is organizing its first colloquium abroad in order to fight against contemporary ills: crises of identity, religious and nationalist extremism, and failures in education…Freud’s thinking appears to us to be a key to an understanding of these global realities.

The distinguished members of the Comité and the Freud Fund are thus most pleased to inaugurate a series of international conferences in dialogue with American peers, through the joint sponsorship of the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Professors in the humanities and social sciences, psychoanalysts, and cultural and political personages will hold roundtable discussions on three themes:

Identity formation
Education and the thirst for knowledge
Knowledge to overcome religious and nationalist extremism
The ordinary, psycho-physiological preconditions of identity formation, which characteristically belong to a closed system (whether familial, national, linguistic, or religious), are, in effect, all encompassing and exclusionary. Freud’s teachings on the psychology of the masses – usually far removed from educational programs – are required to make a clear distinction between the homeland (patrie, the open political system decided by the will of the citizens) and the nation (a closed, blood-related system embodying a will ascribed to a hypothetical ancestral founder). The latter definition is even more applicable to religious communities, accounting for the possible integration of civil and religious powers.

Freud held that education was one of the impossible professions, along with government and psychoanalysis. The growing secularization of the individual world leads to the belief that one can expect more gratification from an organic connection to the environment than from spiritual and communal connections. If that is the case, what is there to teach other than technological pragmatism, that is to say, tools adapted to mere organismic life, and the idea of “every man for himself”?

The voice of God-as-Savior, which was heretofore hoped for and beloved, has no more currency in our world, now obscured or extinguished by the din of the music and the messages blaring continuously through our headphones. The voice of the teacher is lost, stifled by that of entertainment. If, as Hegel put forth, the primary desire of man is not to satisfy basic needs, but rather to be recognized, then his last recourse – which was once the guiding voice of God – is the desire to know.

Perhaps we are now tasked with facilitating access to, or rather, midwifing the rebirth – since it was present at our Hellenic origins – of something akin to the ruckus of the gods.

In a context of globalizing consumerism, the cultural uniformity of lifestyles and behaviors may provoke an exacerbation of identity problems, an autarchic withdrawal, the selling out of law, and manifold social violence. Such phenomena are found almost everywhere, in conjunction with an unprecedented and unrelenting economic and social crisis, tied to resurfacing nationalism and populism, and to the brutal expression of religious fundamentalism. The world’s democracies are in jeopardy. Nationalism feeds off of a double illusion: the ego-ideal joins with the momentum of the crowds led by lawless leaders, and with a view towards satisfying uninhibited drives (desires) without exterior constraint.

As a consequence, the fringes of the population are further marginalized and are ready to “withdraw from reality.” In the face of this malaise, the political response is muffled by the noises and resentments of the masses. “Whenever I have expressed feelings of national exaltation,” wrote Freud, “I have tried to suppress them as disastrous and unfair.” He wrote elsewhere, “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually they have wreaked havoc; but not always.”

Freudian knowledge represents a return to reason, against the downward slide of identity crisis, religious and nationalist extremism; it gives meaning to humanism and cosmopolitanism.

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