Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Money Wisdom #193

"More generally, according to Hegel, time is what man makes out of death; the dialectic of history is the dialectic of time, and 'time is the negative element in the sensuous world'; time is negativity, and negativity is extroverted death.

Freud does not have that concept of historicity which is Hegel's strength: Hegel, although trying to grasp the psychological premises of man's historicity, has only only an intuitive psychology. And yet Hegel may help us understand death. Hegel needs reformulation in the light of the psychoanalytical doctrine of repression and the unconscious. It is not the consciousness of death that is transformed in to aggression, but the unconscious death instinct; the unconscious death instinct is that negativity or nothingness which is extroverted into the action of negating nature and other men. Freud himself... .... derived affirmation from Eros and negation from its instinctual opposite. On the other hand, Hegel's doctrine of the connection between negation and time is essential if psychoanalysis is to make the breakthrough... ....to a psychoanalytical theory of time."

Norman O Brown Life against Death - The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) p.103