Thursday, June 23, 2016

Sublimation, Labor, Narcissism

Marcuse posits the possibility of a healthy mode of Sublimation--when repression of Pleasure-seeking is not a means, in alienated conditions, to greater productivity.  Implicitly, therefore, a healthy Psyche is one not alienated from Labor and its fruits.  Now, entailed in that condition is a recognition of one's modification of one's environment as one's own.  Thus, on that standard Marxist analysis, it is that recognition that is the Psychic foundation of a Socialist society.  Accordingly, Marcuse's positing of Freudian Primary Narcissism is subject to the Marxist criticism that it abstracts from Labor as the fundamental mode of Being-in-the-World, with which even Heidegger might agree, insofar as his concept is essentially a Practical one.

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