Robert Samuels - Freud for the Twenty-First Century: The Science of Everyday Life

Robert Samuels

Freud for the Twenty-First Century The Science of Everyday Life

Robert Samuels

University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-24381-4 e-ISBN 978-3-030-24382-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24382-1

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With this nimble volume, Samuels emerges as a peerless Freudian life coach. Without ever abandoning Freuds own belief in the value of science, and engaging with key contemporary advocates of the enlightenment doctrine, he articulates the so desperately needed, poetic wisdom for our times. This is a book to be read and re-read, ad infinitum .

Dany Nobus, Brunel University London

Contents

This chapter argues that Freuds theories and practices can help us live better lives by applying the scientific method to everyday life. Although Freud resisted giving advice, and he focused on abnormal psychology, my goal is to show that we can take his ideas and apply them to how we understand our selves and the world around us in the twenty-first century. Not only can we live more rational and satisfying lives, but we can also overcome many of our political and social problems if we understand how reason, emotions, desires, and the unconscious work.

In this book, I argue that Freuds theories and practices can help us live better lives by applying the scientific method to everyday life. Although Freud resisted giving advice, and he focused on abnormal psychology, my goal is to show that we can take his ideas and apply them to how we understand our selves and the world around us in the twenty-first century. Not only can we live more rational and satisfying lives, but we can also overcome many of our political and social problems if we understand how reason , emotions, desires, and the unconscious work.

The first step in this process is to define the scientific process and how Freud applies it to everyday life. As I discuss in Chapter

In Chapter , I turn to Freuds misunderstood theory of the pleasure principle to examine why people are driven to remove themselves from tension and conflict by repressing their own sense of guilt , shame, responsibility, and freedom . Freud posits that the core drive of human beings is to use as little energy as possible by avoiding all stimulation, and this type of psychic death leads to lives dominated by addiction and makes it difficult for us to address important interpersonal and social problems. In fact, I argue that the biggest threat facing humanity is our ability to derive instant pleasure from new technologies, media, and drugs.

As I describe in Chapter Moreover, Freud insisted that infants naturally hallucinate the satisfaction of their wishes, and so they have to be taught to differentiate between their internal fantasies and external reality. I claim in this chapter that the primary way that people escape reality and satisfy the demands of the pleasure principle is through wish fulfillment in the unconscious .

In Chapter , I discuss how Freuds theory of transference and narcissism relate to the way that we make a call to others to fix reality and help us satisfy the pleasure principle . Not only do we turn to others to satisfy our desires, but we want our others to verify our sense of being good and right. Moreover, this structure of obsessional narcissism helps to explain the limitations of contemporary liberalism and the failure of many forms of analysis and therapy.

In Chapter , I examine some of the many ways that people misunderstand psychoanalysis and global progress. In reviewing the distorted interpretations of the pleasure principle , the reality principle, the primary processes , and transference , I reveal how psychoanalysis has been repressed from within psychoanalysis itself. I also connect this repression to the ways people deny the evidence concerning our global progress.

The final chapter looks at Yuval Hararis 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to examine why liberal academic culture often rejects global progress and focuses on negative portrayals of the world. By using Freuds fundamental concepts to analyze Hararis work, I provide a model for psychoanalytic cultural criticism. The goal then of this work is to show that psychoanalysis is not only still relevant today, but in actuality, Freuds theories and practices have never been more essential for understanding and changing ourselves and the world around us.