Slavoj Zizek - The vagaries of the superego To understand pr | Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Slavoj Zizek - The vagaries of the superego

To understand properly Freud’s Crowd Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, one should locate it in the context of his reactions to the Great War. Today, one tends to forget the traumatic impact of this war which shattered the very foundations of European trust in progress and gave birth to phenomena like Communism and Fascism. Even Freud, whose theory of the unconscious libidinal processes seemed to prepare him well for the explosion of ‘irrational’ violence, felt the need to radically reformulate his basic theoretical premises. He dealt with the problem in three steps. First, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he introduced the notion of death-drive to account for dreams and acts which generate no pleasure but only pain. Then, in Crowd Psychology (1921), he analyzed the formation of social groups which bring individuals to forsake their ‘rational’ behavior and surrender to self-destructive violence. Hans Kelsen, the leading Austrian legal philosopher, reproached Freud that his theory of crowd-formation cannot account for social formations held together by normative structures, and, in reaction to Kelsen’s critique, Freud wrote The Ego and the Id(1923) where he addresses the question: how does the a-sexual social space distinguish itself from the domain of libidinally-cathected interactions? For Freud, the operator of this a-sexualization is superego.

https://lacaneman.hypotheses.org/2098