Provisional Thesis on Eliminative Materialism
The upshot of Eliminative Materialism is not to "eliminate" something from art, nor to eliminate it from psychology, nor from philosophy, and certainly not from everyday life.
The point, rather, is to eliminate something from
epistemology,
and therefore from
politics.
NOTES
" . . . nor . . . from psychology, . . . and . . . from politics . . . "
Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul (orig. 1930). Translated by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman (1998).
Psychoanalysis must be understood as therapy in the widest, illusion-promoting sense. The psychology is based on the relation of "I" to "thou," whether we interpret this relation religiously (as does Jung), or socially (as does Adler), or as infantile (as does Freud). This psychology neither knows nor acknowledges the individual as such, whose will is explained "causally" as sexual libido and whose consciousnss is ultimately determined by the "unconscious." With his theory, Freud tried to explain the whole person in causal terms, and individuality per se; but individual means meta-causal, transcending causality.
. . .
. . . it is the false, "noncausal" connections in our soul that make it possible to adapt and function in the real world; we make reality bearable through denial, displacement, and rationalization, not by recognizing psychological truth, which is destructive. Paradoxical as it may sound, the false connections in our soul are the truly causal ones, for they are the "cause" of all the human reactions we observe and study in psychology. This dethrones psychology as self-knowledge and reestablishes ethics and epistemology in its place.
(pp. 122-123)
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