Libidinal economy is socially malleable
Johnston, PhD, 22
(Adrian, Phil@NewMexico, Communism and Ambivalence Freud, Marxism, and Aggression in Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique ed. Mills and Burston)
Furthermore, Hilflosigkeit entails a plasticity of human nature. As Freud indicates, for the psyche rooted in an initially helpless body, “the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted.” Of course, the most important features of “the real external world” are social ones, namely, emotionally important others as exerting the decisive influences modulating the nascent subject’s id and helping to sculpt its emerging ego. The Freudian psyche, with its plasticity, is naturally preprogrammed by helplessness to be socially reprogrammed. So not only is Eros substantially empowered by the naturally given and ontogenetically primary couple Hilflosigkeit-Liebesbedürfnis – this couple also brings with it a psychical plasticity amounting to the susceptibility of the libidinal economy to being tamed and domesticated by its social milieu. Others’ impositions of a social reality principle significantly shape the routes and directions of drives and their derivatives. More specifically, these impositions mold the contours of sublimations. Indeed, social valuations, as determining the substitutive object-choices of libidinal thrusts confronted with social prohibitions, are inherent to the very definition of sublimation as a concept in Freudian psychoanalysis.75 As Marcuse comments apropos psychoanalytic drive theory, “The ‘plasticity’ of the instincts which this theory presupposes should suffice to refute the notion that the instincts are essentially unalterable biological substrata.”76
*For context:
Freud’s reflections bring up the connection between infantile Hilflosigkeit and “the need to be loved” (Bedürfnis, geliebt zu werden) or “the need for protection (Schutz) – for protection through love (Schutz durch Liebe)” (or also, as he puts it in a passage from 1933 quoted by me a while ago, the “Liebesbedürfnis”).