A Freudian slip

I love Freud. I don't really care whether his theories were right or not (although some of them seem to fit pretty good some of the time)--at least they are entertaining.

One aspect of his thought that seems pretty solid is the one developed in the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. This is where he develops the idea that apparently meaningless and accidental things that slips of the tongue (or what some of my friends call "mouthographical errors") or in writing, mistaken actions, losing or forgetting things and such express unconscious thoughts and ideas.

These are the Freudian slips, in other words, where the cat gets out of the bag whether the holder wants it to or not. It can happen to the best of us. It happened to me yesterday.

Right here.

After being up late watching election returns and then getting up early, I banged out a red-eyed post-election analysis, starting with Senator-elect Joe Manchin's race. I meant to write that Manchin handily defeated his Republican challenger John Raese, but this is what came out:

"Governor Joe Manchin handily defeated Republican challenger Joe Manchin for the late Robert C. Byrd's senate seat."

This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep. I corrected it almost as soon as I posted it but some people saw the not-ready-for-prime-time version. A friend who saw it even thought it was clever.

The unconscious is pretty clever. In this case, it really was a classical Freudian slip in that it expressed something I probably really thinking about the whole thing.

A GOOD QUESTION. Given all the talk about taking back America, a retired rabbi who served in the Charleston asks a good question: which American are we talking about?

HEALTH CARE. The former director of the OMB calls for saving health care reform here.

URGENT SCARY LOOKING ANCIENT SHRIMP UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

Dreams are a perennially fascinating topic. It's pretty amazing that each night as we sleep our minds produce such wild images, stories, and ideas--or at least it seems that way when we wake up. Some animals even seem to do it.

El Cabrero is not an expert on sleep or dream science, but it seems like the latest research indicates that dreams play an important mental function connected with memory and the processing of the information and stimuli of waking life.

Freud shook the scientific community with the publication of his The Interpretation of Dreams at the turn of the last century. His ideas that such phenomena were meaningful seemed ludicrous to materialistically oriented scientists, but in fact it concurred with the opinions of pretty much all humanity throughout pretty much all history. Dreams probably influenced the development of a lot of human myths and religious beliefs and practices--including the belief in life after death as people dreamed of encounters with the departed.

Some dreams seem to be just residual static from the previous day's events, but others appear to have a clear or disguised meaning. Occasionally, some are downright deep.

I've always been interested in this subject, but dreams really got my attention when I discovered the ideas of Freud and Jung in my youth. I'm not an orthodox Freudian or Jungian now (though I lean towards the former most days), but I agree with their main idea that these creations of the unconscious have a lot to tell us.

I take dreams pretty seriously, especially strong ones, and they have even influenced some of the most important decisions of my life. It's not that I think they are messengers from beyond--although some sure seem that way--but rather that they express a lot of the mental activity, thinking and feeling that go one beneath the surface of our ordinary awareness. They have triggered insights and creativity from scientists as well as artists.

Dreams will be the guiding thread through this week's posts.

Speaking of which, here's a funny dream I had when I first read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which argues that they are basically wish fulfillments. I wished I was able to interpret dreams--so I dreamed I could. Pretty cute.

DEALING WITH RECESSION. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on what it would take to provide a strong stimulus to a slowing economy.

TIME FOR DISASTER POPULISM. Here's Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on how the right is great at cashing in on bad news and how the rest of us need to dial in.

MINE SAFETY. Ken Ward had a good one in the Sunday Gazette-Mail about how many coal companies ignore fines for unsafe conditions.


COMBAT TRAUMA is increasingly a factor in courtrooms around the country in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

MEAT. More and more people are rethinking carnivorous habits, or at least the ways we satisfy them.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALFRED ADLER?

Caption: Psychologist Alfred Adler, by way of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope. This week it's old school psychology with a heavy dose of current events and commentary.

When the early history of psychoanalysis is discussed, three names are usually front and center: Freud, Jung and Adler. While Freud and Jung still have large popular (not to say cult) followings, Adler (1870-1937) is by far the least known. Ironically, his work can be seen as a forerunner of the current cognitive behavioral approach to psychology and psychotherapy.

Adler was a Viennese physician who was an early collaborator of Freud's. The relationship continued for around 10 years, with Adler eventually serving as president of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. However, Adler wasn't shy about developing his own ideas and Sig was never a great celebrator of theoretical diversity, and the two parted ways in 1911.

Adler was nowhere near as sexy as Freud, whether you take that literally or metaphorically, or as occultish as Jung. His basic idea was that people try to move from a perceived negative state to a positive, more complete situation as they understand it and that the best way to do this includes relating productively to other people. He called these striving for superiority and social interest, about which more tomorrow.

LABOR'S LEGACY. Here's a good op-ed from down Florida way that appreciates labor's legacy for all Americans.

FROM THE WEST COAST, here's a good item reminding us that markets are not God.

COMING HOME? A disproportionate number of homeless people are veterans, according to this study.

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC. Here's an item in praise of Latin which also notes how many things have gone south since its study declined. El Cabrero is thinking of taking up Latin if I ever get anywhere with Greek.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAVE TO GET BACK IN THE PREHISTORIC WATER, a pretty nasty new one has just been found. You can count on Goat Rope to keep you up to date with dinosaurs and other things that happened millions of years ago. We might get behind on other stuff.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE OTHER GUY

Caption: RX Sig. A prescription written by Freud himself. His contemporaries probably couldn't read it either.

Aside from links and comments about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is psychology.

El Cabrero can still remember stumbling onto the subject in high school through the writings of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (I can't remember which came first). At the time, I found the text and pictures of Jung et al's Man and His Symbols intoxicating with all the talk about the collective unconscious and its archetypes.

And as for Sig, after plowing through The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, nothing ever looked the same. That was the work where he discussed what we now call "Freudian" slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, "forgetting," and other actions in which unconscious thoughts and emotions expressed themselves.

If you read about the early history of the psychoanalytic movement, three names are prominent. Aside from Sig and Jung, the Other Guy was Alfred Adler, who is by far the least known. Ironically, Adler's ideas have probably held up better in psychological circles than either of the others. He can be viewed as one of the grandparents of contemporary cognitive psychology and related forms of therapy.

I became interested enough to give Adler a whirl recently after discovering that his approach to psychology is an influence in my daughter La Cabrita's graduate psychology program. Goat Rope verdict: Dude ain't bad.

More about Adler tomorrow--same Bat time, same Bat channel.

WILL IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE? US intelligence agencies say that Iran abandoned its quest for nuclear weapons years ago. But then this administration has never allowed facts to get in the way of an unnecessary war.

A NICE IDEA.Bush administration cutbacks in veterans' services have made it hard for some vets to call home when they receive treatment at VA facilities. Veterans for Peace is urging people to buy phone cards for veterans this holiday season.

STOP THE PRESSES. Chimpanzees are better at math than you may think.

FIGHTING FOR SICK DAYS. Allied groups yesterday announced a drive to require paid sick days for workers at WV businesses employing 25 or more people. SEIU is taking the lead, but many other organizations have signed on as well.

WV ONES TO WATCH. A lot of other economic justice issues are percolating in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia these days. Here's an AP item by Lawrence Messina about concerns over the privatization of the workers' compensation system. Also, on a positive note, an interim legislative committee has supported what labor supporters call the Worker Freedom Bill, which would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend meetings where they pusy their views on unions, religion, or politics.

PITFALLS OF PERFECTIONISM. Speaking of psychology, this one from the NY Times is interesting.

ON A RELATED NOTE, a mental health study of Katrina survivors finds it has a continuing impact.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GROWING UP POE-ISH

Photo credit: sektordua by way of EveryStockPhoto.com.

Welcome to Poe Week at Goat Rope. Why now, you may ask? Why not?

Besides, we are approaching the bleak December and it won't be long before each separate dying ember will have wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Also, Poe was a big factor in my life. El Cabrero was a haunted child, thanks largely to the efforts of my old man.

When I was a very little kid, my dad took great delight in reading Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems aloud to me. They scared the bejesus out of me, and I loved every minute of it.

The Telltale Heart, The Black Cat, etc., and especially The Raven, much of which I once memorized.

My brother, who was eight years older, was keenly aware of all this. He took his own great delight in picking up a phone, pretending to dial the Plutonian shores, asking to speak with the Raven, and requesting that he come get his little brother Ricky.

The Poe factor was amplified when I spent time at the ancestral farm in Tazewell, Va., just across the McDowell County line. It was an old crumbling place in an isolated hollow with a mouldering family graveyard on the hill. Nights were darker there. I spent a lot of time alone soaking up that atmosphere as a kid.

Holy fall of the house of Ussher, Batman! I'm not saying it was haunted but it definitely had hoodoo.

Normality was never an option.

Aside from link and comments about current events, there will be a Poe theme here every day this week.

Only this and nothing more...

TALK ABOUT SOMETHING SCARY. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses the nightmarish Bush legacy here.

ON THE SAME NOTE, here's a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that does a good job of mythbusting about tax cuts.

ARCHIVEGATE GOES NATIONAL. The fallout from the Manchin administration's unsportsmanlike firing of a dedicated WV state archivist continues. Here's a summary from Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

THIS IS KIND OF FREUDIAN. Old Sig could have a field day with Poe--jeez, where would you start? According to this article, Freud is alive and well in university classes, but not so much in the psychology departments.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOOD CROWD, BAD CROWD

Caption: This is a bad crowd.

Large groups of people have a pretty bad reputation in many circles.

The Christian existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said "The crowd is untruth."

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote the popular Extradordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wherein he said,

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Our old pal Nietzsche said that "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, saw in any crowd a potential mob, noting that

when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification.

Gustave Le Bon, an earlier writer who influenced Freud, said "In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated."

Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom described the ways people sometimes seek to evade anxiety by seeking submersion in a larger group.

The dangers of the egotism and imperialism of groups was the theme of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's classic Moral Man and Immoral Society (although Niebuhr had some doubts about the morality of individuals as well).

Earlier series and posts in this blog looked at the problems caused by obedience to authority and conformity.

Some interesting things have been written recently, however, that talk about the good side of groups. But that will keep until tomorrow. As Scarlett said, "Tomorrow is another day."

THIS COULD GET INTERESTING. West Virginia native and country music star Kathy Mattea is starting to speak out about mountaintop removal mining and climate change, as Ken Ward reports in today's Charleston Gazette. She is currently working on a project of coal-related music.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT PENGUINS. This is not a burning issue of our time, but scientists have discovered a 5 foot tall penguin that lived 36 million years ago in Peru. This baby had bigger jaw muscles than the current crop and a foot long beak.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FREUD AND DOSTOEVSKY (AND WAL-MART, IRAQ AND GLOBAL WARMING)

Caption: This man is now portraying the devil that appeared to Ivan Karamazov while the latter was a little unhinged. Is it Ivan himself, a real devil, or just his fevered imagination?

El Cabrero begs the reader's forbearance while he attempts to get Dostoevsky out of his system. The last two posts didn't quite do it...

Sigmund Freud once called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written."

This is no doubt because the theme of the book is the murder of a father by a son and Sig never met a story about parricide he didn't like. After all, according to his theory of the Oedipus complex, that was something all sons unconsciously wanted to do.

I'm not sure how Dostoevsky would feel about that. He didn't have much use for what passed for psychology in his day, once saying "I am not a psychologist. I am a realist." His version of "realism," however is pretty out there, given his menagerie of characters, which includes intellectual axe murderers, saintly prostitutes, brooding nihilists, and holy fools and elders.

As William Hubben wrote,

All of Dostoevsky's stories belong to the literature of extreme situations. An ominous restlessness broods over the men and women in his novels. Frequently their reaction to seemingly small incidents is excessive, and events take a most unexpected turn.

The author would probably agree with that anyway. He once wrote "Always and in everything I go to the extreme limit." In his view, part of the human condition is the fact that we don't know our limits:

The ant knows the formula of its anthill; the bee the formula of its beehive...but man does not.

Ironically, it is said that in his later years, Freud couldn't abide reading Dostoevsky's novels in the evening because the characters were too much like the patients he dealt with during the day.

(OK, one more thought--how come nobody gets brain fevers any more like his characters got?)

TAX SUBSIDIES FOR WAL-MART. Good Jobs First is a policy resource center that promotes accountability for corporations and governments in economic development. They recently updated their Wal-Mart subsidy report. If you go to the site, you can click on your state to see how much the giant has gotten in corporate welfare. In El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, that number is around $9.7 million. Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First executive director sums it up pretty well:

That a company with a predatory business model and a poverty-wage labor policy can even qualify for job subsidies suggests many public officials still don’t get it.

DISPLACED IRAQIS. This is from AP:

More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.

The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in "impoverished shanty towns," she said.

THIS IS JUST GREAT. Remember the part about the Bush administration getting serious on global warming? Nevermind...

The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DARK SIDE, WITH THE LATEST ON INCOMES AND INEQUALITY

This is the fifth and final day of Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud Week. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to the earlier posts.

This series is about some of Sigmund's more interesting ideas, some of which hold up better than others.

As Freud got older, he became more pessimistic. This is understandable given the events of the time such as the First World War, the rise of totalitarian movements, and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany and Austria. Here's a quick tour of some of his later works, some of which are speculative and even bizarre in nature.

(Disclaimer: El Cabrero is neither a psychologist nor a Freudian. While some of his ideas still may have some life others are way out there but interesting anyway.)

*Totem and Taboo (1913). This one is WAY out there. Among other things, in this work Freud speculates that human society had its origin in a primal horde where power and sexual access was monopolized by a father figure. The younger males killed the father, whom they also admired. The guilt that resulted from this led to the dead father being venerated as a sacred figure. This was thought to be the origin of the Oedipal complex, religion, and a whole bunch of stuff. It would be a challenge to find someone today who subscribes to this.

*Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1920). If you've ever noticed that group behavior does no favors to human intelligence and morality, don't skip this one. Freud believed that in certain mob or group settings, people regress to a more primitive level. He reprises some of the ideas from the previous book as well, which probably detracts from the work for contemporary readers.

*Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this dark book, Freud speculates about another human drive that may rival eros or the libido, i.e. thanatos or the death instinct, which represents the desire of organic matter to return to a simpler state and could result in acts of destruction. Again, this one is a stretch today (but sometimes I wonder about it...).

*The Future of an Illusion (1927). Freud wrote often about religion, but in this work he characterizes it as an illusion, which basically is something we believe in because we want it to be true. He saw the belief in a good and provident God who would take care of us as a kind of wish-fulfillment that reflects an infant's or child's view of his parents.

*Civilization and its Discontents (1930). This one lays out his basically tragic view of human social life. People depend on society increasingly for survival but doing so necessarily involves the frustration of our instinctual drives. And we're stuck with both.

There's way more to ol' Sig than this week's posts have hinted at. Even if you disagree with many of his ideas (as most people probably do), you may find him worth a look or two.

And as for that cigar...who knows?

THE LATEST ON INCOME INEQUALITY. Here's the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute:

Newly released data on income inequality reveal that all of the gains in 2005, the most recent year for data of this type, went to households in the top 10%. Moreover, those even higher up the income scale—say, the top 1% and above—saw the largest gains of all.

The economy expanded in 2005, with gross domestic product and productivity both posting solid gains (3.2% and 2.1%, respectively). Yet, as shown in the chart below, real market income (i.e., income aside from government transfers) actually fell slightly (-0.6%) for those in the bottom 90% of the income scale....

These trends lead to two clear conclusions. First, the factors driving inequality—diminished union presence, globalization, surging CEO pay—are funneling growth to the top of the income scale and dramatically shaping the economic fate of America's working families. Second, these income trends clearly argue against further regressive tax cuts that continue to favor the wealthiest and exacerbate the seriously skewed pre-tax income distribution.

A LITTLE JUSTICE. Massey Energy was fined $1.5 million by the federal government for its "reckless disregard" for safety at the Aracoma mine, where two men were killed in a fire in Jan. 2006. This from the Charleston Gazette...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OEDIPUS WRECKS, PLUS NEWS ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND THE FEDERAL BUDGET

Caption: The little guys here are in the oral phase.

This is the fourth installment in Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud week. If this is your first visit, please scroll down to earlier entries.

Disclaimer: El Cabrero is neither a psychologist nor an orthodox Freudian. I think he was probably WAY wrong about a lot of things but that some of his basic ideas still have merit. Or are at least entertaining.

The area of his theory that most scandalized his contemporaries had to do with child development. He believed that the passions that drive adults are present in children from earliest days in a different form, who ordinarily go through a series of phases of development(oral, anal, phallic, latent, and mature adult).

Most scandalous of all was his theory of the Oedipus complex, which took its name from the classic Greek myth of the tyrant of Thebes who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother.

He believed that young children, especially boys (the psychology of females was...problematic for him) wanted exclusive possession of their mother or female caregiver and resented adult males, especially their fathers. He believed that how the child negotiated those early entanglements and conflicts shaped the rest of his life.

To put it mildly, his ideas on this point are not widely accepted today (although they do seem to fit for some people). Is there anything worth keeping in here?

Here's the official Goat Rope verdict: a little.

It's hard to deny that when kids roll out, it's all about the mouth as the main focus of energy and attention. After a while, they do become fascinated with all things having to do self control of certain bodily functions. Then there's the period where they run around playing with themselves (some people seem to get stuck there). After a while, about the time kids now enter school, they chill out and are fairly calm for a few years. Then, in adolescence, the beast reawakens.

That's pretty close.

And while not many people believe the Oedipus complex is a universal fact, there is a great and growing body of evidence that early interactions shape a child's approach to others over the course of a lifetime. Attachment theory was first developed by John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst, in partnership with Mary Ainsworth.

Freud's theory of child development has influenced many future theorists, even if some developed their ideas in direct opposition to his. Erik Erikson's theories of the stages of psycho-social development are a further elaboration of Freud's initial ideas.

His ideas have also influenced studies of how gender affects child development, particularly of how boys often come to define themselves in terms of separation while with girls relationships are more important.

The mother/child relationship is an emotionally powerful one, as El Cabrero was recently reminded in a conversation with his 3 year old grandson. I tried to say that his mother (my daughter) was a woman. "NO!," he screamed indignantly, "She's my MOM!"

That was pretty complex.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Speaking of family conflicts, the federal government reported in March that violence against intimate partners is down dramatically in recent years:

Criminal violence against intimate partners fell by nearly two-thirds in recent years and has reached a record low, according to preliminary government
figures.

The declines were greatest for nonfatal attacks, which fell by about 65 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicides among intimate partners dropped by roughly a third.

The figures are based on the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which counts criminal abuse against spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends and former spouses, whether it's been reported to police or not. The information,collected in thousands of confidential interviews, is the most widely used instrument for charting U.S. crime trends.

Homicides involving a domestic partner were down by roughly a third over the same period, although sadly you wouldn't notice the decline from the all too frequent incidents of relationship homicide from watching the headlines. It's still unfortunately all too common and it's important to remember that domestic violence is still underreported.

A lot of the credit for this reduction should go to the domestic violence movement, which has worked long and hard to change laws and policies; educate the public, the police, the courts, etc. about the issues; and provide services to people facing intimate violence.

FEDERAL BUDGET. As the U.S. House takes up the budget, a number of groups are urging people to contact their representatives to support human needs funding. Here's a link to ECAP (Emergency Campaign for America's Priorities) and Sojourners on the topic. The vote may happen today, if you're interested, don't delay.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

Caption: The cat is analyzing the dog's dream.

This is day 3 of Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud week. Please scroll down to earlier posts if this is you first visit.

For the record, El Cabrero is not a Freudian. I think he was probably wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, on lots of things, but some of his big ideas hold up pretty well (or at least look that way from Goat Rope Farm).

One trademark idea of Freud's that I think is a keeper is the whole idea of the unconscious and the role it can play in our lives. He believed that the conscious part of the mind was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg and that there's a lot more going on than we often realize.

Like goats on the farm, the critters in the unconscious pop out whenever they get the chance in the form of dreams, (Freudian) slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, symptoms, etc. They can also be the source of much creativity and insight.

Freud believed that dreams are mostly disguised wish fulfillment. I don't think that's always the case but some are (and some aren't all that disguised). I had a classic Freudian dream while reading his Interpretation of Dreams. At the time, I wished I could interpret my dreams. Then I dreamed that I could.

Score one for Sig...

The book of Freud's that got my attention as a teenager was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which was quite a hoot. He argued that many common events in our lives reveal the activity of the unconscious.

Some examples:

*If you've ever "lost" your car keys when you had to go to work, maybe part of you didn't want to go to start with;

*If you've ever "forgotten" something and left it at someone's house, then possibly part of you wanted to go back;

*If you've ever forgotten the name of someone you know perfectly well, it may be because that person has associations with someone or something else.

I had another classic in that department a few years back when I attended the funeral of a friend. There was someone there I'd known, liked, and worked with for years and for the life of me I couldn't remember her name. It turned out she had the same name as someone I was having some disagreements with at the time.

Score two for Sig.

(The main problem of thinking that way is that if you do it too much you don't think anything is an accident. Sometimes the cigar IS just a cigar.)

FEDERAL BUDGET ITEM. It looks like the U.S. House and Senate have better budget priorities than the administration, which wants to keep slashing social programs to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy and its unnecessary war in Iraq. Here's an item from this Sunday's Charleston Gazette-Mail about the Senate version.

NEW LABOR LEGISLATION INTRODUCED. Recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board could potentially deny millions of workers the right to join unions by classifying them as "supervisors." Last week, a bill was introduced which would correct this problem. Here's some info from the AFLCIO blog:

One of the major contributors to the middle-class squeeze is the difficulty workers face when trying to join together and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. That freedom has been further reduced by several misguided decisions by the Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which eroded the ability of millions of workers to exercise their freedom to join unions.

...a bipartisan bill was introduced in the House and Senate that would begin to reverse some of the most egregious of those NLRB decisions. The Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradeworkers (RESPECT) Act would reverse a Republican party-line NLRB vote in September 2006 to slash long-time federal labor law protections of workers’ freedom to form unions.

The RESPECT Act would clarify the National Labor Relations Act to ensure it is not misinterpreted or undermined on a fundamental question of coverage.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WAR WITHIN, plus the privatization of war and global inequality

Caption: Seamus McGoogle's main psychological conflict is due to his inability to break the window and get to the bird feeder.

This is the second installment of Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud Week. This means that in addition to snarky commentary and links on social justice issues, each day will highlight one aspect of ol' Sig's thoughts that are still interesting today.

(Disclaimer: El Cabrero is not a psychologist and is also fully aware that a lot of what Freud talked about not only would not hold up to scientific investigation but is on the order of science fiction. Good though.)

One idea of Freud's that I think is a keeper is the vision of people not as totally rational animals nor yet as robots conditioned by stimulus and response but rather as inherently conflicted critters.

We are divided and the different parts of ourselves do not always or even usually play nicely with each other. Much of human life consists of trying to reconcile drives and demands that aren't all that reconcilable.

He believed that not only is the human mind partly conscious and partly unconscious but that it it also divided between the id or "it" that wants what it wants when it wants it (usually RIGHT NOW!), the superego or "over-I" of internalized social norms whose job is to tell the id it can't have what it wants, and the ego or "I" that has to deal with the demands of the external world and try to mediate the demands of the other two warring factions.

Actually, this idea is way older than Freud. Plato in the fourth century BC used the analogy of the rational soul as a charioteer trying to control two very different horses, one of which is "is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control" while the other is "companion to wild boasts and indecency...shaggy around the ears--deaf as a post--and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined." Elsewhere Plato talks about the soul as having three parts, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive.

St. Paul also spoke eloquently of the war within. In the Epistle to the Romans, he says

The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do...I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. (7:19, 23)

and in Galatians

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. (5:17)

For Freud, the war within goes on pretty much all the time, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. It makes human life not only tragic but interesting.

THE WAR WITHOUT. In Joseph Heller's classic Catch-22, the hyper-capitalist Milo Minderbinder says "Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry." What was once a laugh line is becoming a reality. In the April 2 issue of The Nation, Jeremy Scahill has an interesting feature on the privatization of war titled "Bush's Shadow Army."

GLOBAL INEQUALITY. A brief item in the Spring issue of Yes Magazine highlights the wealth gap on a world scale:

A new global study of personal wealth shows that the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of global household wealth. The study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, Helsinki was based on data from the year 2000. It showed that the richest 1 percent of adults (those worth at least $500,000) controlled 40 percent of global assets, and that the richest 10 percent of adults (those worth at least $61,000) owned 85 percent of the world total. Meanwhile the bottom half (those worth less than $2,200) together owned barely 1 percent of global wealth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOMETIMES A CIGAR...PLUS MORE ON HEALTH CARE AND THE ECONOMY

Caption: This man takes out his psychological conflicts on a toy money.


Since El Cabrero has been on a psychology jag lately, I’ve decided to quench not the spirit. Instead, I’m pleased to proclaim this is Goat Rope’s official Fun with Freud week.

I still remember when I first discovered Freud. It was about the same time I ran into Nietzsche and the effects on me were similar to those that occurred when I got into my mother’s homemade wine as a kid. I was buzzing!

I was at that stage of life when one is trying to figure out oneself and others (before I realized it couldn’t be done) and I still have a soft spot for old Sig.

Imagine my disappointment when I took my first college psychology class. My professor belonged to that idiotic tribe known as behaviorists and he scoffed at the idea of consciousness, much less of the unconscious. (There may have been loopier and more evil ideas than behaviorism in psychology, but I can't think of any at the moment.) That was the end of my major in psychology.

Not that I’m a Freudian fundamentalist today. He’s taken quite a beating over the years (some of it possibly deserved) but I think he was right about some big ideas even if he was wrong about the specifics.

So this week, in addition to whatever else comes up, will include Sigmund’s greatest hits.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but you never know…

HEALTH CARE FRONT AND CENTER. The traditional U.S. connection between employment and health insurance is increasingly frayed. The Employee Benefits Research Institute reported this month that

In 2005, 50.1 percent of workers were employed at a firm that did not offer health benefits to any workers. Nearly 18 percent worked for an employer that provided benefits, but were not eligible for them; and nearly one-third were offered benefits but chose not to participate

Whatever the final outcome of the 2008 election may be, one issue that is likely to dominate public debate is health care. Here's a NY Times article on a recent forum for presidential candidates. So far, Edwards appears to have the most detailed proposal. For those looking for ideas on the subject, I'd recommend the Agenda for Shared Prosperity's Health Care for America proposal.

THE GREAT RISK SHIFT. The health care proposal mentioned above was developed by Jacob S. Hacker, who is also the author of the book The Great Risk shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back. For a review by Charleston Gazette staff writer Paul Nyden, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED