I do something similar financially. I am afraid of living in poverty, so I invest and save to such an extent that I live in a poverty that protects me from poverty.

Don discovering your videos and vision has made me alliiiiivveeeee. Thank you Sir

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

Great! Thanks

Hello Dr. Don. I really enjoyed your talk despite my shallow knowledge about Freud. Also, I really enjoyed chatting with you today in my car. Its a great pleasure to get connected to you and your thoughts.

Comprehensible, wise thoughts! Thank you!

Such a great concise examination of death drive and love the inclusion of song lyrics. Timely topic and brings comfort, too. I still don't fully understand how death drive works, good to get this historical overview to contextualize my own ignorance :-) thanks again, Dr. Carveth!!!

Great halloween show.

You answer your own question/doubt yet you fail to see it? It is only when we truly face/embrace/accept that inevitable march, our mortality/death, that we feel alive, live. Hence, quite simply, the opposing compliment is necessitated, inherent. Think thrill seekers, they do not really wish for death, are not pathologically self destructive, but to feel sublimely, completely alive in the face of death, their mortality.

I can’t help but to believe that there is an instinct to death; but, even if there wasn’t, Jung liked to think of Phobos, instead of Thanatos, which means Jung thought that fear was something innate…

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

That makes a lot more sense than an innate drive to die

@JoshBarzell

2 жыл бұрын

@@doncarveth I’m trying to sell a theory that whether we think of Phobos or Thanatos, we react to fear and death by competing, albeit unconsciously. I have called this the competitive complex in Autism, or CCA. So, it might not be fear or death at all - but innate competition…

How did you get through this marvelous talk without using the word , "consciousness "? Death is like the state of profound sleep, sleep without dreaming. In this sense, the human need for a nightly rehearsal for death is a drive (Trieb), but not to die (Triebshicksakle), but to retreat into nirvana, the life after the daily death of living.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

The idea of death is dreamless sleep is appealing, but very misleading, in that from sleep we generally wake up.

@sabiaknows

2 жыл бұрын

@@doncarveth Exactly, and that daily awakening to consciousness ostensibly passes through REM sleep, dream sleep both to and from profound sleep without unconscious dream content or care about the daily wear. It's the little nirvana one goes to without fear..in fact joyously. It's interesting--the correlation between too much REM sleep and depression.

@sabiaknows

2 жыл бұрын

N.B. When I say "nirvana " , my perception includes both Freud's overlapping neurological concepts of constance and intertia, as well as the definition of Schopenhauer. It's interesting how this reflects back on your presentation of masochism, it was in " The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) that Freud started to get tangled up in his Thanatos concept, perhaps the result of many sleepless nights!

This might have been a good subject in which to consider the false self concept, in you Q&A you were asked how it related to Fairbairns system. Also, maybe the more universal way of being dead, rather than just isolation, repetition. The more i have read about Fairnbars system, the more it seems to make sense for me. The idea about how the child resorts to fantasy in attempts to control the bad object and forms a closed system where these relationships are then repeated and nothing new really gets in. That one can be isolated from the outside world, even if they still keep interacting with it on some level. "The child not only internalizes his bad objects because they force themselves upon him and he seeks to control them, but also, and above all because he needs them …. Even if they neglect him, he cannot reject them; for, if they neglect him, his need for them is increased. (Fairbairn, 1952c, p. 67)"

It has been showen in certain mammals that endocrine changes leading to cardio vascular deficits happen in reaction to social situations where one individual was inferior in position fights against an other. Interpreted as in service of genetic selection by reducing even more the probability to reproduce themselfs through an earlier death, can this (like other examples that you have mentioned) be seen as a biologically grounded mechanism relatable to something like an innate potential for a death drive?

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

Well and then each potential for a death drive doesn’t sound like a drive. Drive implies innately there from the beginning, not a potential to develop. In Freud‘s understanding drives do not develop, they are there from the get-go. Certainly we have lots of biologically grounded innate potential‘s but that is a

I think we have to start with our pseudologia fantastica and go from there to real living, as Masud Kahn wrote.

Have you seen the movie Marriage Story? 2019, Noah Baumbach film. Adam Driver sings Being Alive. Clips are on youtube. The movie is good, worth checking out.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

Yes

❤

The concept of a 'death instinct' I find particularly bizarre, especially when we understand entropy as the equal and opposite of Eros (life force) . Going with the idea of a 'death drive' (trieb), it is also interesting to consider in the context of this piece, that in the Greek Mythos, Thanatos has a twin brother Hypnos, the 'god of sleep'. Was Freud confused by the 'twins'? Was this confusion because he was so heavily defended against all things 'mystical', in that the thousands of years of literature on what one might (badly) label the experience of 'ego death' with samadhi (the experience of oneness, or no-thing described in the various wisdom traditions).

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

I’m not sure the wisdom traditions are always or necessarily wise. And being dead and being asleep both contrast with being alive.

@carlt570

2 жыл бұрын

@@doncarveth Indeed. It is interesting to note that the most consistent reflection from a 'mystical experience' / encounter with the numinous, is one of 'being more alive', and that the this experience is 'more real than real' (in the same sense that being awake is experienced as 'more real' than dreaming). hence the term in the ancient traditions - to become Awakened. ps - the reports of these experiences are fully confirmed with the latest research data from current studies into psychedelic treatments for various mental health conditions.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

@@carlt570 Yes, I agree, but I am sceptical about psychedelic treatments: I experimented extensively with LSD in the 1960s and every trip was worse than the one before. But it melted my defences and led me to seek psychoanalysis for which I am ever grateful.

@militsakrivokapich-boss7259

2 жыл бұрын

Geezuz, Dr. Carveth! I would never have imagined you as the sort of man who did this LSD stunt, never, given your very erudite lectures, your honest dialogue with all of us, your unhesitating ability to open your world to us, your listeners. Wow! I am so surprised, but it also gives me some sort of hope, because I may resort to such, given Rolland Griffith's ongoing research (I was the managing editor of Transcultural Psychiatry here at McGill back in 1995, and I was the editorial coordinator of the Journal of Neurochemistry for a decade afterwards, so I follow the literature). I am seriously considering some type of latter-day (NOT the 60s primitive protocols), very sophisticated psychedelic treatment, down the line, IF all of my very hard work does not yield results. I was in analysis with one of our Montreal analysts for 5 years and now I see a CBT gentleman every 3 weeks, which is yielding good results. I am not facing demons of the mind, but a genuine legal horror, these 4 years, which will soon be put to rest. Analysis helped me in so many ways and I am ever so grateful for such, which is why I continue to read articles, books, and then watch videos on such (your videos, for example). But there is a tiny handful of us, out there in the world, who seem not be to able to find peace, the basic common peace of the mind which we all long for? Something that just gives us a tiny break from "mourning and melancholia" to quote Freud? From a life-long trauma? Thank you for writing this--it certainly made me reflect and then I was prompted to write this here, in this public medium. Much love to you from Montreal and thank you for all of your reflections and your posts. You make my heart glad.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

@@militsakrivokapich-boss7259 Thank you Militsa. I hope your future experiences with psychedelics are happier than my own. But I confess I was not careful about “set and setting.“ All the best

Thanks Don. Another great video! Being alive reminds me of the challenge of relinquishing infantile omnipotence and the move from being in the Garden of Eden (illusion) to the acceptance of reality. ‘Fallen man’

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

Exactly

@jonashjerpe7421

2 жыл бұрын

Good point about the fall. It is inconclusive though. The truth here is inherently paradoxical. We need to relinquish childish omnipotens, but we also need to rediscover our true nature and again live in, from and through the garden of Eden.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

@@jonashjerpe7421 At best, back to the garden only in moments of grace.

@jonashjerpe7421

2 жыл бұрын

@@doncarveth Once you have seen how said moments of grace shifts to days and weeks of stable, warm timeless presence, you start to trust that there is a divine nature living in you, through you and as you. Even in the midst of hellfire. But surely, he who has not devoted his life to search for the holy grail beyond all dogma shall not enjoy the taste of the wine it contains either. I have been hell and back numerous times throughout my search, but I have found,as it were, nirvana in samsara. The moments of grace has been replaced by moments of its absence.

@doncarveth

2 жыл бұрын

@@jonashjerpe7421 Replaced by moments of the absence of grace?

A lot on interview tomorrow , but went for a walk and reflected it appears to me there is a huge difference between the life Freud lived and his theoretical constructs, his own obvious abusive behaviour , his pathology and his early work ie all his patients were hysterical ? Mainly women obviously his Mother and obviously his transference hostility or neurosis, Or this is how he saw them ? And mythology of the man,a great intellectual genius , which I doubt very much , his thinking is often two-dimensional and banal stating things as facts when they are clearly not givens that he was the founder of analysis . There are way too many assumptions ! For me, a bit like outdated Newtonian mehanics ... except this is inherently much more useful. No intelligent physicist would say there are entities that actually exist calleds atoms ie they exist as such in space-time this would be laughable and totally incorrect ie imagined a fantasy , one of your favourite buzzwords ! Onto spirituality , how can you be an Atheist Christian that is an oxymoron isn't it ? The death drive ? Also that there is the neti neti , or self abnegation , even hate oneself of Christ that is supported by St Paul in regard to the natural versus spiritual self and how one opposes the other and that perhaps Freud was in a Jungian sense picking up on this renaming it "death Drive" which is actually born from a kind of automatic realization of the need for the carnal to do to become perfected or Christ like this is in alot of other religions and spiritual approaches , so not that unusual ie the natural becomes an obstacle to spiritual devlopment . How can you speak of freud in his monstrous behaviour alot of his life and jesus this to me seems something to do with a need for a super tight rationalk defense ? So is this desire taken as a drive lke you I do not believe we have drives as such, but I would go a lot further, i do NOT think the assumptions of analysis are correct . There may be alot in the neurotic --depressive position that is about denial and that the client then becomes the patient , the pathologized one and is forced via intellectual circumlocutions to carry the pathology ! So I think what i am saying is that bothe your recent videos point to some anomaly in psychoanalytic thinking or theorizing and why I like Balint so much he seems intuitively to pick up on this , saying he never found the theories that usefull . Wondered why he wasted so much time in them ! If you think about it and I have a lot the ego sense , self sense or whatvere you call this form of concretization (later symbolization /crystallization )must be inherently unstable as it is a fall or descent from a truer being state , when repressive internal mechanisms begin in the so called healthy baby /child it becomes neurotic depressive eventually or not ? ( but still dysfunctional ?) or remains in a more primitive defence state Par schizoid ( fear of death through abandonment etc ) , so we have a model which allows a subject ( therapist ) >pathologizing object > as patient, and necessarily then obscures the repressive projection of the analysts or ratifies it in terms of a weak sense iether allowed or OK counter transference , that it is a second not a first ,who is transferring onto whom initially , who wants power oveer or to dominate and convince who ,we might ask ? it is slight of hand isn't it ? So what of Psychoanalysis ? A magical conjuring trick ?,This seems the trick of analysis and is never really talked about, although I think you allude to it in narcissism of the therapist or our narcissistic tendencies , in the extreme as the author you quote is what happens , people like Otto Kurnberg seem to ratifying a very dichotomized model of wellness or mental health ? We are the OK ones and you the patient must accept our qausi scientific diagnosis or else and then endure countless months of therapy or even medicalization or you will be sectioned or labelled it's us or them buddy , the man is quite clearly on a self-made pedestal, a nastly littl demi gurg , defining and elaborating a fixed position which he assumes people inhabit , nonsense of course ! but patients like in charcotts hospital will play along just to get attention , I cannot imagine being in therapy with him f...g awfull experience ! The projection of the therapist is never brought into clear view in the analysis, maybe later in supervision but even then the therapist has had a chance to delete and confabulate, maybe . I rest my case , question it all would be my advice , take more time out walking exercising meditating and being , God Bless ( supernaturally ) without qualms or reservations . Am I mad ?