I am going to use parts of the following essay as it relates to animal exploitation and my recent posts regarding the self-other:
http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/rk-zizek.html
According to Slavoj Zizek, the fundamental level of ideology is that of an "(unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality”. Norman O. Brown's writings on culture and fantasy in Life against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) allow us to expand upon Zizek's theory of ideology. Freud believed that anything arising from within that seeks to become conscious must try to "transform itself into external perceptions."
The unconscious battle for existence/survival between the societal self and the authentic self is played out through projected/constructed ‘realities’ – containers and coliseums that we and animal others appear to operate in.
Repressed impulses must first "find real objects in the external world and attach themselves to real objects before their nature can become manifest to the subject."
Animals become scapegoats - containers of envy, guilt, and inevitably anger…. introjected into the self at an early age (by adults)and then projected out into the world, to be *reacted to* by the self. It is an attachment by way of early dependency/identity survival needs.
Traditionally, psychoanalysis studies and treats individuals within the clinical situation. Brown proposes another method for studying and treating the subject based on looking outward to observe how desires, conflicts and fantasies are projected into cultural objects. Ideologies from this perspective constitute "containers" for shared fantasies; cognitive structures that allow members of society to project their fantasies into reality.
Parents/adults pass on the societal ideologies (of animal exploitation) into the children much like a drug being introduced into the womb. The self, with structural ties to the original foundation of *Being* reacts to this toxin with a protective layer in order to keep its own life-supporting (post-birth) gestation going. The societal self, defensively constructed, is *born*. This is the first true splitting within the self that formulates the 'other' of which the conflict is projected onto the outside world.
How may we account for the structure and shape of particular ideologies, and the passion with which they are embraced? Whereas Lacanian theorists view the mind as a product of the symbolic order, Brown seeks to explain the nature and shape of the symbolic order itself. Brown states that culture represents a set of "projections of the repressed unconscious. Culture exists in order to allow human beings to "project the infantile complexes into concrete reality, where they can be seen and mastered."
There is a symbiotic relationship where one (mind) does not seem to precede the other(society). The self is ‘by its nature’ propagated by social relations, yet has an underlying infrastructure *prior* to cultural fertilization. This “I” infrastructure is socially wired for the parent-child (secondary) gestation, but also has roots in the ‘Being/nothing/becoming’ foundation (originating from the Big Bang), which also organizes its faculties to live in the world. This foundation is part of the ‘infantile complexes’ and becomes part of the battle for existence (apart from cultural impositions), to be ‘seen and mastered’. Animals become stand-ins in this battle.
The concept of transference grows out of the clinical situation. According to psychoanalyst Herman Nunberg, "Transference is a projection." The patient's inner and unconscious relations with his first libidinal objects, Nunberg says, are externalized. The patient displaces emotions belonging to an unconscious representation of a repressed object to a "mental representation of an object in the external world."
As in recent posts, born out of fear of annihilation, the societal self confines the authentic self(and its ties to animals in terms of unconditional love), and goes on to *match* the cultural self, as indoctrinated by the parents and supported by the rest of outer society (itself a collective projection of this secondary gestational battle).The societal self *dominates* and retains/fixates on a sense of self/oneness that mirrors the first libidinal ties: sexuality –as- orality. Ingesting *as and equal* to existence, this is mastery via consumerism. Animals and Nature representing (dominance and securing the ‘breast’ as the way for the “I” to be in the world).
I will continue to utlize this essay in part 2, but right now will do a bit of summarizing/unifying/forshadowing :
The consumerist (oral fixation) of the infant relation with the parent is projected out onto the world in the form of consumer ideology (with devastating effects upon nature). This ideology, constructed materially and socially, is transferred back into generations of infants (via parents) which in turn get stuck the the oral consumer level of development (thus mirroring/completing the circuit).
Attempts to individuate from the dependency of the ideologically -constructed 'parental' mass producing culture occurs by way of 'local', 'organic', 'sustainable' 'hunting' etc. Yet these efforts retain the parental/societal ideology of 'others' as exploitable resources/parts (thus continuing the unresolved inner conflict). The pseudo-oneness and separateness experienced in the 'outside world' belies the false individuation, and is part of the fantasy structured around defending against experiencing the earliest fear issues of loss. in my view, I am not ready to commit to the view that society is merely a product or effect of the mind based on inner mechanisms and dynamics encountered through others. Nor an i ready to say that the mind is only a collective construct/imprinting of the surrounding culture. The mind is not a machine driven by material impulses seeking their own pleasure of gratification. It seeks relatedness as an end in itself. Psychoanalytic structures serve as a functioning 'tool' of Being, not the culmination of Being itself. It serves as a vehicle for the "I" of self to evolve - at times alongside nonhuman others. It can be a tool to expand upon a current situation's creative possibilities embedded from the original Big Bang. The procreation possibilities of human beings who grasp their finitude in it's fullest immediacy will counter the fears of annihilation :(the death object is the mirror-yet misguided 'opposite' of finitude's object) and end the deaths of innocent nonhuman beings whom these fear/envies are acted upon in pathological ways. The death/destruction must be grasped as attempts towards life affirmation, however counter they are to this end (in actuality). More constructive ways to meet these life forces must be forged.(More on this later.) If all of this seems rather human-centric, the goal is to separate our needs and get them met without exploiting others. At the current rate, the world is becoming more diseased from our pathologies, and we need to find our foundation with the original Being -from-Nothing again for the benefit of all.









