RT Article
T1 Technology and Freudian Discontent: Freud’s‘Muffled’ Meliorism and the Problem of Human Annihilation
JF Sophia
VO 49
IS 1
SP 95
OP 111
A1 Holowchak, M. Andrew
LA English
YR 2010
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785590782
AB This paper is a comprehensive investigation of Freud’s views on technology and human well-being, with a focus on ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In spite of his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, I shall argue that Freud, always in some measure under the influence of Comtean progressivism, was consistently a meliorist: He was always at least guardedly optimistic about the realizable prospect of utopia, under the ‘soft dictatorship’ of reason and guided by advances in science and technology, in spite of due recognition in his later years of the possibility of annihilation through technological advances in warfare. The possibility of human annihilation, then, muffled Freud’s meliorism. Freud’s ‘muffled meliorism’, however, was not a quiet commitment to viewing technology as something good. Ultimately, Freud steered a middle course between techno-advocacy and techno-antagonism. The technologies of science, like the discoveries of psychoanalysis, were tools for humans that could be used for human betterment or, as war showed, for human degeneration.
K1 Benchmark problem
K1 Meliorism
K1 Restless technology
K1 Techno-advocacy
K1 Neo-Luddism
DO 10.1007/s11841-009-0160-1