A description of a universal process is either false (the universal process does not exist as a universal process), or false (the universal process does exist but the description is inaccurate), or true (the universal process exists and the description is accurate).
The most prominent criticism of Freud on this issue, AFAICT, seems to be that it is, in fact, not based on or supportable by empirical evidence.
Hm. That seems unlikely.
I feel like my four-word rebuttal has as much support as did his initial statement.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I don't know about anyone else, but your four words taught me nothing about the subject matter.
You know what they say: "facts don't care about your feelings."
As a single example, I'm pretty happy with his concept of psychological projection, despite the fact that I'm pretty critical of his ideas on cocaine. How does your essay show my position here is untenable?
What your valuation (of projection over the use of cocaine in medical treatment) describes has more to do with the social and psychological economy from which you have received Freud as a body of texts and paratexts, than anything about Freud as a total system. What I've argued prior is that on account of the way Freud constructs psychoanalysis, and sets psychoanalysis as the means by which one can track their own place in discourse, means that everything is mediated psychologically, and therefore everything written by an author must be connected for that author. To take Freud, then, not as Freud as such, but as Freud as a body of disconnected texts, would be a disingenuous reading: still, possible, but not at that point Freudian. At that point, you'd be developing your own theory with reference to Freud.
This new essay seems to be completely unrelated to the original essay.
I don't think I'm asking too much.
So I guess we should just agree to disagree.
tl;dr
By the way thanks for all your great work! I’m honored to have been scolded by dang!
Short comments admit of many interpretations, and the bias (including mine) is towards negative. That's my excuse!
The Oedipal triad, therefore, is the first and most basic articulation of this drive towards death in its social function, even if it is made particular for the time and place where Freud lived, it is necessary as a part within the larger system: a part which relies on the regular function of others, like the death drive, like repression, like the unconscious. Each part of the system is defined in relation to all the others, and defined in relation to its appearance in a symbolic system and its authorization at the level of discourse; that is, at the level at which one speaks, since it is only within symbolic exchange that one first enters into a social world. One gains language through the word "mama," not because mama, the most basic, repetitive sound that any child can make, has any significance, but because the very appearance of a word that has come in place of the "actual" object of desire implies an infinite separation already from that object in its full sensuous reality: the object, once announced, is already lost, on account of the fact that it can be announced as separate from the very thing it supposedly describes. And from then on, the child is "castrated," i.e. cut off from the source of pleasure through their very entrance into the world of symbolic structures; through, more simply put, their entrance into language.
This implicates all other systems of thought, giving to all other discourses a biological, material explanation for the formation of language itself, but one which is always permanently separated from the very biological origin by that very excess towards which it aims--the drive towards death, which, for Freud, always points to a pre-animated, pre-vivified world. A world before language and the psyche that would come to describe it. So that the materiality, and the relation to the material world of every discourse, is always established as a permanent site of loss, to which (very fortunately for itself) psychoanalysis always has a method to prepare a way forward despite this loss, through the rigorous analysis of its own development.