Sunday, November 27, 2011

WWFD (What would Freud do?)


Dear Sigmund,

I hope you will forgive me for going all Jung on you here, but I think these Black Friday ads for the Target discount chain somehow are an expression of one facet of Western civilization's collective unconscious, which, I am happy to report to you, seems to be linked somehow to your observation of our death drive -- our Thanatos syndrome, as it were.

I say these are an expression of our collective unconscious -- again, apologies for the Jungian theorizing -- because they seemingly are presented quite unwittingly by Madison Avenue as an inducement to self-annihilation. Ironically, they urge us into mortal consumerist combat with one another by exposing to us our unified (violent?) subconscious (a super Id, perhaps?) under the guise of humor. Look at what I mean here.



THE ACTRESS in these television commercials urges us on toward consumerist combat -- literal combat, given the statistical probability based upon years of observational data -- thus bringing us closer psychically and physically to the obliteration we unconsciously crave, in the service of wholly materialist objectives which at best serve only as a temporary distraction to our collective sense of alienation and despair.

I sense this may somehow be related to the Oedipus complex, though I am unsure of this.


FINALLY, as the Target advertisements urge us on toward unfulfilling aggression and, re: Durkheim, anomie, the TV spots simultaneously transcend the primary function and become pure metaphor for what we are as a society and what the consumerist imperative demands even more intently of us.

What I am wondering, Sigmund, is this: Do you suppose it may be that Thanatos, as it were, is one and the same as Jung's collective unconscious? Has it always been thus, or is this a new evolutionary stage that inevitably leads to extinction -- one quite random and pointless as the dinosaurs' by asteroid impact?

Can this be true, Sigmund? Alternatively, could the apparent self-destructive goal of evolution be a means of making room for the emergence of yet-higher life forms?


Yours in inquiry,

M. Favog

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