Liberation as Impulse Control: Sigmund Freud, Radical Anti-Capitalist?

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http://www.alternet.org/visions/liberation-impulse-control-sigmund-freud-radical-anti-capitalist



Many of us struggle for personal identity in a capitalistic culture that pushes immediate gratification for every need. Why postpone anything when you can get it now? Yet while quick fixes are often fundamentally dissatisfying, we hurry toward the next hit without a thought about what it may mean to stay with the frustration.

It turns out that a deeper understanding of Sigmund Freud sheds some light on why dissatisfaction and malaise can dominate our lives. One of the smartest writers today on psychological issues is Adam Phillips, a Brit, a big thinker, and an author of a number of provocative and thoughtful books: On Tickling, Kissing and Being Bored, andMissing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life among them.

Phillips has written a new biography about the young Freud, with a novel take as to why psychoanalysis was headed to the dustbin of history, but is worth saving. He argues that essentially psychoanalysis is a powerful process that can liberate patients from the compulsive need for gratification and the enormous pressures of material advertising messages — and help us hang more in the ambiguity of life, where there is potentially more wisdom and satisfaction.

One of Phillips' points is that failure to understand and grapple with the unconscious is missing in our psychological growth. The avoidance or contempt of the unconscious has also led to the demise of psychoanalysis. Phillps explains that the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis has:
Everything to do with statistics, consumer satisfaction, the belief in science and neuroscience in particular. These are all old-style materialist causal accounts of who people really are as though, if one day, somebody can actually explain how a brain works, we'll know everything. But knowing how a brain works is not going to help somebody, e.g. whose child has just died. ...