The Comedy in Tragedy
What is the fundamental error of psychoanalysis, and why did it succeed not despite this error - but because of it? Why did Nietzsche, who was in love with Greek culture, fail to create a tragedy or myth, while the Jewish Freud succeeded in doing so? The leading philosopher of the Netanya school bids farewell to the ex-girlfriend
By: Romantic Failure
Psychoanalysis is mistaken - we do indeed repeat failures in relationships and partner choices, but we don't necessarily recreate the relationship with our parents or between our parents. Instead, we recreate our first romantic relationship, which is quite random, or the first significant one. In other words, the mistake is rather accidental and occurs long after childhood. Afterwards, we are already attracted to partners who resemble previous ones, and our path is relatively set, because even the not-so-good traits, especially those, become associated with love for us, due to the human brain's tendency to become addicted to inconsistent positive feedback. But the specific problematic feedback we're drawn to is determined because we met this first love by chance. And we do learn from failed relationships, it's just that the learning is too expensive and sometimes requires too big a blow - and often too late.
But - all this stems from what allows us to maintain a relationship in the first place. The moment we learn too quickly - no relationship will last. And that's what happens in late bachelorhood. We see the flaws before we become attached. Sometimes, under the bad influence of psychoanalysis, we look for the opposite of our parents, unjustifiably. In short, psychoanalysis erred in the early determinism of its explanation, hence the resistance to it - both to its earliness and to the poverty of its explanation. To say that our first relationships influence us, or that the relationships between parents influence - this is true and logical. That's why it sometimes works. It's partial. Because sometimes a later ex-girlfriend influences just as much. The stubbornness with which we cling to this doesn't mean it was imprinted in childhood. Even in adulthood, we are infantile.
Tragedy determines that everything is predetermined, and therefore it has sublimity and consolation, and Oedipus is simply the greatest tragedy. By chance. But comedy is more fitting, randomness is a greater disaster than genes, than fate. Most creatures in evolution died from randomness, that's why genes develop slowly. Most wars also broke out by chance, albeit in circumstances where they are possible, but the outbreak or non-outbreak of war is chaos. Therefore, the comedy of errors is more suitable for true historical description than tragedy, which is more suited to the human mind that seeks a reason in everything, meaning tragedy is preferred in our Kantian mind. And in this, Nietzsche failed to break free from Kant, preferring the sublime over the ridiculous. Therefore, in art one should strive for the tragic, which is indeed imprinted in the human soul, and in life one should strive for the comic. Psychoanalysis was right in that it identified the genre beloved by the soul, tragedy, and erred in identifying tragedy as specific. There are many tragedies, as the Greeks knew, and this in itself is also a bit comic, and also a bit tragic.
The infatuation with the one tragedy is the myth. Psychoanalysis turned the tragedy of Oedipus into the myth of Oedipus - an important myth of the twentieth century. The Greek myths, due to their multiplicity, were not so mythical, and only history, which sifted out many that were lost, made them a bit more mythical, but still less than the infatuation with the one tragedy in religions, like the tragedy of Eden, of Jesus, of the chosen people, of the Shiites. The multiplicity of tragedies is the enemy of the anti-random causality at the basis of tragedy, so tragedy becomes more tragic as the creative period of its multiple creation recedes, and remains a great tragedy at the expense of the small ones, or includes in a kind of tragic ideology the small ones (everything is because of and part of original sin, of destruction, of the injustice to Ali in Muhammad's inheritance, etc.), and the infatuation with it is the myth.
Therefore, Islam is a non-mythical religion, it has no strong story, Buddhism too, no strong story, just tales of revelation, Fascism too, no strong tragic myth, Communism not mythical enough, Nietzsche completely failed in creating a strong and interesting myth, precisely because he understood the mechanisms of myth but the mechanisms of myth are not mythical. Freud succeeded a bit more because he was Jewish. That is, there are such ideologies that spread based on the principle of simplicity of explanation in the human brain, which Kant did not see enough - the power of simplicity, of the too-big explanation, which aesthetically gives sublimity. And there are those that spread based on the determinism of the explanation, which gives sublimity. These are two different aesthetic moments: the sublimity of generality and the sublimity of causality. Science, by the way, is like Nietzsche - it takes the mechanisms, but the mechanisms themselves do not have the properties of what they create. Therefore, only scientists and mathematicians understand the sublimity of science, and these indeed have a religious relationship to the matter.
