The dialectic of civilization: A psychoanalytic approach to the problem of anthropocentrism.

摘要

This dissertation takes a psychoanalytic approach to anthropocentrism, the central problem in deep ecology. Herein examined are the neurotic underpinnings of the ideology of Lord Man, who perceives himself as the active agent in the created cosmos, alone meant to improve the universe and provide it with meaning. It is argued that the agency of this heroic perspective is a pathological paradigm on the grounds that it provides a poor and unsustainable land ethic and an alienated, schizoid model of the human self. This schism is reflected in the split image of an antinatural God as well as in the Freud's drive theory model of subjectivity (id/ego/superego). The split is also seen in the ontologically fragmenting economics of civilization (the practice of building cities), which serves a preservative ideological function to promote the domestication (castration) of the irrational impulses, and in praxis perpetuate the ideation of a dualistic world divided between: city and wild; idea and matter; masculine and feminine. Examining the origins of this bad faith, this ideology of civilization reveals the compulsory features of a neurosis constellated around the organizing principle of a patriarchal despot. Frankfurt theorists Adorno, Horkheimer,and Marcuse, as well as Norman O. Brown and Deleuze and Guattari, give illumination to the historical replication of this imperialistic ego consciousness through the mechanism of the Oedipal complex. It serves the anthropocentric and phallocentric rationalization at the expense of sublimating the sensuous toward a production ethic. Nature is sacrificed in this consciousness, only to be replaced by a manufactured world of commodity fetishism. Essentially, the mall replaced human longing for earthly relationality with an ersatz hyper-reality. Critical theory's approach in critiquing the dynamics of power serves to deconstruct the imperialist consciousness that was used to colonize nature. Following luminaries like Nietzsche, this criticism opens the door in an ambling jaunt into new wildernesses of authentic subjectivity. Concluding this research is an argument for how deep ecology and phenomenology are being used to construct an enchanting transformative language to human subjectivity, influencing new social movements, "back-to-Earthers," and the prospects for a green redemption from the sins of history.