Sixteenth Century
1580: Erotica. Two lavishly illustrated picture albums are known to have been wood-block printed — in color — in China, perhaps as early as 1580.
Seventeenth Century
1600: First children’s toys – concept of childhood invented
1651: first printed sex-manual in Kyoto Japan Koso myoron, known in English as The Marvelous Discourse Between Emperor Huang and the Natural Girl
First mass-production of erotica.
Some consider the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687 as the first major enlightenment work
Eighteenth Century
https://www.melaniephillips.com/secular-inquisition/
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment ushered in the modern age by breaking the power of the church to control the terms of debate and punish heresy. Church and state were separated, and a space was created for individual freedom and the toleration of differences—the essence of a liberal society.
1756: Onania: or, the heinous sin of self-pollution and all its frightful consequences (in both sexes) considered with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice https://archive.org/details/b20442348/page/n1
An advertising gimmick that created a moral panic about masturbation for the next 200 years, said to lead to gonorrhea, blindness, insanity, etc.
1770: Western scientists first became involved in hypnosis around 1770, when Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), a physician from Austria, started investigating an effect he called “animal magnetism” or “mesmerism”
The French king put together a Board of Inquiry that included chemist Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin, who constructed an experiment in which a blindfolded patient was shown to respond as much to a non-prepared tree as to one that had been “magnetised” by d’Eslon. This is considered perhaps the first placebo-controlled trial of a therapy ever conducted. The commission later declared that Mesmerism worked by the action of the imagination.[6]
1789 Jeremy Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation which developed his theory of utilitarianism, which states that all legislation should aim to produce “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Bentham campaigned for gender equality, and even made one of the earliest arguments for the legalisation of homosexuality. https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=2519
Nineteenth Century
French Polynesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_sexuality#French_Polynesia
The Islands have been noted for their sexual culture. Many sexual activities seen as taboo in western cultures were viewed as appropriate by the native culture. Contact with Western societies has changed many of these customs, so research into their pre-Western social history has to be done by reading antique writings.[17][18]
Children slept in the same room as their parents and were able to witness their parents while they had sex. Intercourse simulation became real penetration as soon as boys were physically able. Adults found simulation of sex by children to be funny. As children approached 11 attitudes shifted toward girls.
Premarital sex was not encouraged but was allowed in general, restrictions on adolescent sexuality were incest, exogamy regulations, and firstborn daughters of high-ranking lineage. After their firstborn child, high-ranking women were permitted extramarital affairs.
The next day, as soon as it was light, we were surrounded by a still greater multitude of these people. There were now a hundred females at least; and they practised all the arts of lewd expression and gesture, to gain admission on board. It was with difficulty I could get my crew to obey the orders I had given on this subject. Amongst these females were some not more than ten years of age. But youth, it seems, is here no test of innocence; these infants, as I may call them, rivalled their mothers in the wantonness of their motions and the arts of allurement.
— Yuri Lisyansky in his memoirs[19]
Adam Johann von Krusenstern in his book[20] about the same expedition as Yuri’s, reports that a father brought a 10-12-year-old girl on his ship, and she had sex with the crew. According to the book[21] of Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu and Étienne Marchand, 8-year-old girls had sex and performed other sexual acts in public
Informally, spatial organization and sleeping arrangements may contribute to sexuality education of the young. Ford and Beach (1951) reported that among the Pukapukans and Marquesans, families often slept in one room, thereby providing children an opportunity for sexuality education through clandestine observation. This, however, must be placed in cultural context. Parents were not putting on an open display for children; but, because families slept in close proximity, this provided children an opportunity to secretly observe their parents copulating. In these societies, discussions about sex with children were also very open and frank as part of a pattern of sex positiveness. For example, among the Ra’ivavaens studied by Marshall (1961:241), children were aware of orgasm, the role of the penis (ure) and the clitoris (tira) in sexual arousal.
Other avenues for sexuality education included practices around childbirth. Oliver (1989) recounts that on old Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, childbirth was a social event in which the whole community attended, including children, and even male members who also assisted in childbirth.
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Among the Pukapukans, Mangarevans, and the Marquesans, during indigenous times prior to Christianization, a tolerant attitude was taken toward childhood sexual expression. Among the Pukapukans, children masturbated in public with no opprobrium. The parents apparently ignored their behavior (Ford and Beach 1953).
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According to William Davenport (1973), in traditional pre-Christian Tahiti, masturbation was sanctioned positively for young women and men.
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According to Oliver (1974) on Tahiti, coital simulation became actual penetration as soon as young boys were physiologically able. The Tahitians found children’s imitation of copulation humorous. Other evidence suggests that young girls may have engaged in copulation before age 10 (Gregersen 1983).
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Kirkpatrick’s research (1983), based on twenty-five months of fieldwork in the Marquesas (primarily on Ua Pou and Tahiti during the late 1970s) provides much information on the life cycle, gender identities, and the integration of traditional patterns with new cultural influences. According to John Kirkpatrick, babies are massaged with oils and herbal lotions to make their skin smooth, and baby girls are given vaginal astringents to make the genital area sweet smelling. Such treatments for girls continue through puberty and include menstrual preparations as well. The application of fragrant oils, and the concern with cleanliness and personal hygiene, is tied into a wider Polynesian valuing of beauty and the body embedded in the traditional precontact culture. Suggs (1966:25) comments that in traditional Marquesan society, girls may have had their first coital experience by age 10, and boys were circumcised between 7 and 12 years old.
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The Tahitian attitudes to children playing at copulation was one of amusement (1981:366). However, as children approached the age of 11, adult parental attitudes shifted in regard to young females but not males. Oliver points out that parents objected to girls engaging in sex prior to marriage, an ideal that coexisted with an open and sex-positive attitude.
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Marshall’s study of Ra’ivavae (1961), based on reports from the archives of ethnographer J. Frank Stimson, his own ethnographic research with elderly consultants, archaeological, and linguistic analysis, presents a picture of a highly eroticized Tahitian culture that has been largely dismantled by colonialism and Christianity.
The clitoris, among ancient Ra’ivavaens, received a great deal of cultural attention. Marshall reports that the clitoris was elongated by the child’s mother through oral techniques as well as tying it with an hibiscus cord. An elongated clitoris was considered a mark of beauty. According to Marshall’s research, the king would inspect a girl’s clitoris to see if it was sufficiently elongated for her to marry. The girls who were ready for marriage would display their genital attributes at a sacred marae (Marshall 1961:272-273). Both cunnilingus and fellatio were practiced among traditional Marquesan youth and adults
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Sex and eroticism were made public in other ways as well. Linton’s 1939 report of the Marquesans revealed that naked dancing, along with public group copulation, was practiced as part of feasting and festivals as a pre-Christian traditional pattern. Linton disclosed that women would pride themselves on the number of men they had sex with. In ancient times, Pukapukans of the Tuamotu Archipelago would reserve places called ati, where men and women could go for sex parties. These were organized by a person who also acted as a guard, to prevent conflict by angry ex-lovers and husbands (Gregerson 1983).
One of Marshall’s (1961:273) Ra’ivavaen consultants contended that, in traditional times, public sex followed men’s prayers in the sacred temples. According to this particular consultant, various positions were used, cunnilingus was practiced, and “sperm was smeared upon the face and in the hair as a kind of mono ‘i’ (coconut oil)” (Marshall 1961:273; Elliston 1996). Ceremonial copulation was integrated within the spiritual ethos, which, according to Marshall, was saturated with eroticism as a central theme. The erotic was related to fertility, reproduction, and the sacred.
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Extramarital sex was also part of precolonial French Polynesian cultures. The Pukapukans celebrated a successful fishing expedition with extramarital sex. Apparently, women would initiate sexual joking as the men returned with their catch. This was followed by trysts in the bush. Both single and married people participated in these extramarital opportunities with no opposition from their spouse, provided they respected class and incest prohibitions (Oliver 1989b).
Invention of childhood (referred to in Anticlimax), – laws outlawing child labour in Lancashire Mills – beginning of sexual repression to facilitate capitalism.
1830: Cannibalism still widespread in NZ
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/565543/Book-reveals-hidden-history-of-cannibalism
Paul Moon – infanticide was also widely practised because tribes wanted men to be warriors and mothers often killed their female daughters
Cannibalism was still practiced in Papua New Guinea as of 2012, for cultural reasons[13][14]
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BudAbor-t1-body-d1-d2-d3.html (1851)
revenge has been the principal cause of Cannibalism among the Polynesians generally.
The last authentic account of cannibalism was the case at Tauranga, in 1842 or 1843
Polygamy greatest hindrance to spread of Christianity in the Pacific
1832: On Self-Pollution by Sylvester Graham – early promoter of vegetarianism, perhaps one of the first people to claim that stress causes disease.[1]:19
invented dry crackers to soak up men’s sexual desires.
Checklists.
contributed to the masturbation scare – he believed it caused blindness.
1840: John Humphrey Noyes Oneida Community in NY State practiced “complex marriage”. Men and women were allowed to switch partners regularly.
1842: The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the term “hypnotism” in his unpublished Practical Essay on the Curative Agency of Neuro-Hypnotism (1842) as an abbreviation for “neuro-hypnotism,” meaning “sleep of the nerves.” Braid fiercely opposed the views of the Mesmerists, especially the claim that their effects were due to an invisible force called “animal magnetism,”
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According to his writings, Braid began to hear reports concerning the practices of various meditation techniques immediately after the publication of his major book on hypnotism, Neurypnology (1843). Braid first discusses hypnotism’s historical precursors in a series of articles entitled Magic, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, etc., Historically & Physiologically Considered. He draws analogies between his own practice of hypnotism and various forms of Hindu yoga meditation and other ancient spiritual practices. Braid’s interest in meditation really developed when he was introduced to the Dabistān-i Mazāhib, the “School of Religions”, an ancient Persian text describing a wide variety of Oriental religious practices:
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As he later wrote,
Inasmuch as patients can throw themselves into the nervous sleep, and manifest all the usual phenomena of Mesmerism, through their own unaided efforts, as I have so repeatedly proved by causing them to maintain a steady fixed gaze at any point, concentrating their whole mental energies on the idea of the object looked at; or that the same may arise by the patient looking at the point of his own finger, or as the Magi of Persia and Yogi of India have practised for the last 2,400 years, for religious purposes, throwing themselves into their ecstatic trances by each maintaining a steady fixed gaze at the tip of his own nose; it is obvious that there is no need for an exoteric influence to produce the phenomena of Mesmerism. […] The great object in all these processes is to induce a habit of abstraction or concentration of attention, in which the subject is entirely absorbed with one idea, or train of ideas, whilst he is unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, every other object, purpose, or action.[10]
1843: Invention of vulcanised rubbed facilitates to modern condoms
On 28 August 1844, Marx met the German socialist Friedrich Engels
Invention of class warfare (enemy within society instead of outside)
1848: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
A serious nervous disorder appeared in 1877 and protracted insomnia was a consequence, which Marx fought with narcotics.
Bakunin was “Marx’s flamboyant chief opponent” and “presciently warned against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism that would take power over working people”.[11] Bakunin’s maxim was that “[i]f you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.[13]
1861: Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World.
by Johann Jakob Bachofen, a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841[1] to 1845.
Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy. He assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic “mother-right” within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion.
Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and “matriarchal studies” in 1970s feminism.
Bachofen’s 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other:
- Hetaerism: a wild nomadic ‘tellurian’ [= chthonic or earth-centered] phase, characterised by him as communistic and polyamorous, whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy proto Aphrodite.
- Das Mutterecht: a matriarchal ‘lunar’ phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the emergence of chthonic mystery cults and law. Its dominant deity was an early Demeter.
- The Dionysian: a transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy began to emerge. Its dominant deity was the original Dionysos.
- The Apollonian: the patriarchal ‘solar’ phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.
Friedrich Engels analysed Bachofen’s views as follows:[2]
- That originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term “hetaerism”;
- that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;
- that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);
- that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period.”
1866: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Prestupléniye) is literally translated as ‘a stepping across’, not crime. Raskolnikov’s theory of a ‘right to crime’ for a select group of extraordinary men. Dostoevsky was envisaging the new, politically and culturally nihilistic ideas that were entering Russian literature and society in this watershed decade, ideas with which he would be in debate for the rest of his life
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Solovyov felt that the meaning of the novel, despite the common failure to understand it, is clear and simple: a man who considers himself entitled to ‘step across’ discovers that what he thought was an intellectually and even morally justifiable transgression of an arbitrary law turns out to be, for his conscience, “a sin, a violation of inner moral justice… that inward sin of self-idolatry can only be redeemed by an inner act of self-renunciation.”[48]
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Philosopher and Orthodox theologian Nikolay Berdyaev shared Solovyov and the symbolists’ sense of the novel’s spiritual significance, seeing it as an illustration of the modern age’s hubristic self-deification, or what he calls “the suicide of man by self-affirmation”. Raskolnikov answers his question of whether he has the right to kill solely by reference to his own arbitrary will, but, according to Berdyaev, these are questions that can only be answered by God, and “he who does not bow before that higher will destroys his neighbor and destroys himself: that is the meaning of Crime and Punishment“.[53][54]
1879: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. …Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
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Book Five: Pro and Contra Here, the rationalist and nihilistic ideology that permeated Russia at this time is defended and espoused passionately by Ivan Karamazov while meeting his brother Alyosha at a restaurant. In the chapter titled “Rebellion”, Ivan proclaims that he rejects the world that God has created because it is built on a foundation of suffering.
,,,
Smerdyakov claims that Ivan was complicit in the murder by telling Smerdyakov when he would be leaving Fyodor’s house, and more importantly by instilling in Smerdyakov the belief that in a world without God “everything is permitted.”
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James Joyce wrote: Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius… I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.[30]
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One of the best-known passages of the novel, narrated by Ivan, is entitled “The Grand Inquisitor“, and is arguably one of the best-known in modern literature due to its ideas about human nature, freedom, power, authority, and religion, as well as for its fundamental ambiguity.[33]
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“The Grand Inquisitor” is a poem recited by Ivan Karamazov, who questions the possibility of a personal and benevolent God, to his brother Alexei (Alyosha), a novice monk.
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The Inquisitor states that Jesus rejected these three temptations in favor of freedom, but the Inquisitor thinks that Jesus has misjudged human nature. He does not believe that the vast majority of humanity can handle the freedom which Jesus has given them…. He states that “anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him”.
1870: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Charcot
Charcot is just as famous for his influence on those who had studied with him: Sigmund Freud,[7]
After Charcot’s death, the phenomenon of “hysteria” that he had described was no longer recognized as a real neurological condition, but was considered to be an “artifact of suggestion”.
The Charcot-Janet school, which formed from the work of Charcot and his student Janet, contributed greatly to knowledge of multiple personality disorders.[41][42]
Ultimately, Charcot was accused of operating as a carnival showman, training his patients in theatrical behaviour, which he would attribute to hypnosis.[3]
1873: Anthony Comstock’s crusade to ban birth control devices and abortionists. Comstock law made it illegal to mail material advertising “obscene rubber goods”. Charles Knowltton’s book The Fruits of Philosophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married People (1833) was censored.
Moses Harman was an American schoolteacher and publisher notable for his staunch support for women’s rights. He was prosecuted under the Comstock Law for content published in his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer. He was arrested and jailed multiple times for publishing allegedly obscene material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Harman
Lucifer, the Light-Bearer
1877: Ancient Society by Lewis Morgan elaborated upon his theory of social evolution. He traced the interplay between the evolution of technology, of family relations, of property relations, of the larger social structures and systems of governance, and intellectual development.
Published in Europe, influenced Marx and Engles.
Scholars of the Communist bloc considered Morgan as the preeminent anthropologist.[53][54]
1879: The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading was a pornographic monthly magazine issued in London from July 1879 to December 1880 It was closed down by the British authorities for violating contemporary standards of obscenity.
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Lazenby would go on to publish three subsequent pornographic magazines, The Cremorne (1882), The Oyster (1883), and The Boudoir (1883). The popularity of pornographic magazines like The Pearl were part of a trend that began in the 1860s of capitalizing on the profitability of writing about sex,
In 2011 an Australian alderman was convicted for possession of “child exploitation material” because a digital copy of The Pearl was found on his laptop.[12]
1882: God is Dead – Nietzsche used the phrase to sum up the effect and consequence that the Age of Enlightenment had had on the centrality of the concept of God within Western European civilization, which had been essentially Christian in character since the later Roman Empire
Greatly influenced by Dostoevsky
The idea is stated in “The Madman” as follows:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann[1]
the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.
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Nietzsche was a profound influence on figures like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault who have become prominently associated with the political Left, who supported overcoming society’s remaining moral and traditional barriers to self-creation. Other figures influenced by Nietzsche moved to the political Right, including the libertarian Ayn Rand
1884: New Zealand Freethought Association founded https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/new-zealand-freethought-association-founded
New Zealand’s first freethought organisation, the Auckland Secular Society, appeared in 1854 but lasted just two years. Atheist Charles Southwell established an anti-Māori, anti-missionary and pro-settler newspaper in Auckland in 1856, alarming the government. The Auckland Secular Society re-emerged in 1866 as the Auckland Secular Association, but that too faded away. By 1884 there was an Auckland Rationalist Association, and a Freethought Conference was held in Dunedin that year. Freethinkers were not fringe radicals but included influential men such as Robert Stout (premier from 1884 to 1887) and John Ballance (premier from 1891 to 1893). In Christchurch William Collins, another former Liberal MP who was president of the local freethought association, published a monthly journal, the Examiner, from 1907 to 1917.
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At the time political observers were more struck by the well-known fact that neither Stout nor Vogel was a professing Christian. Vogel was a broad-minded Jew. Stout was an avowed freethinker, and at Easter that year he had been elected the first President of the New Zealand Freethought Association. The Vice-President of that Association was John Ballance, the M.H.R. for Wanganui, who was in Stout’s cabinet as Minister of Defence and Lands. In the eyes of horror-stricken clerical onlookers, New Zealand seemed to have cut its Christian roots, and declared itself a pagan nation. http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1985/NZJH_19_1_05.pdf
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In Christchurch a large Society was established in 1881 under the presidency of William T. Pratt, the original owner of what became Ballantyne’s drapery shop. Freethought was not welcomed by everyone in a city like Christchurch, and no bookseller would agree to stock their literature.18 However Pratt had access to a hall in Worcester Street which seated 150 persons.
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Collins served as a member of the House of Representatives from 1893 to 1896 and from 1899 to 1902. His later attempts to return to the House failed, and he instead kept the cause of Freethought alive in Christchurch, and issued a magazine, the Tribune, from 1907 to 1917
1884: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels http://libcom.org/history/engels-was-right-early-human-kinship-was-matrilineal
Based on Lewis Morgan’s description of Iroquois long-house society matrilineal clan Women could act collectively to control males, even chief. Nuclear family household isolated an dis-empowered women, leading to patriarchy.
With regard to the topic of ‘primitive promiscuity’, Engels commented: ‘It has become the fashion of late to deny the existence of this initial stage in the sexual life of mankind. The aim is to spare humanity this “shame”’.[12] The reference here was to Edward Westermarck, scholarly defender of individual marriage and the family who was later to inspire the young Malinowski. Westermarck had chosen to turn public opinion against the theory of ‘primitive promiscuity’ by associating it with modern prostitution. To this, Engels retorted: ‘To me it rather seems that all understanding of primitive conditions remains impossible so long as we regard them through brothel spectacles’.[13]
1889: The First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism was held in Paris, France, on 8–12 August 1889. Attendees included Jean-Martin Charcot, Hippolyte Bernheim, Sigmund Freud and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault.
1895: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.
Inspired Freud and Bernays, also Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini.
Said women’s lower intelligence was “so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment.”
Le Bon developed the view that crowds are not the sum of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the “racial unconscious” of the crowd.
From 1871 on, Le Bon was an avowed opponent of socialist pacifists and protectionists, who he believed were halting France’s martial development and stifling her industrial growth; stating in 1913: “Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists.”[14]
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Crowds
Le Bon theorised that the new entity, the “psychological crowd”, which emerges from incorporating the assembled population not only forms a new body but also creates a collective “unconsciousness”. As a group of people gather together and coalesces to form a crowd, there is a “magnetic influence given out by the crowd” that transmutes every individual’s behaviour until it becomes governed by the “group mind”. This model treats the crowd as a unit in its composition which robs every individual member of their opinions, values and beliefs; as Le Bon states: “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”.
Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: i) Anonymity, ii) Contagion and iii) Suggestibility. Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning, and emotional. This lack of self-restraint allows individuals to “yield to instincts” and to accept the instinctual drives of their “racial unconscious”. For Le Bon, the crowd inverts Darwin’s law of evolution and becomes atavistic, proving Ernst Haeckel’s embryological theory: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviours and individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest. Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved; as the crowd coalesces into a singular mind, suggestions made by strong voices in the crowd create a space for the racial unconscious to come to the forefront and guide its behaviour. At this stage, the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members. “The leaders we speak of,” says Le Bon, “are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”
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1898: Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman
Gilman argued that male aggressiveness and maternal roles for women were artificial and no longer necessary for survival in post-prehistoric times. She wrote, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.”[40]
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argued, among other things, that women are subjugated by men, that motherhood should not preclude a woman from working outside the home, and that housekeeping, cooking, and child care, would be professionalized.[43]
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but racist, advocating enforced labor of black Americans, “men, women and children”.[3] who she considered were “of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior” to whites.
Twentieth Century
1905: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud
J.Peterson: F believed adult neurosis caused by childhood trauma, and that good upbringing – disputed from the start by existentialists who thought psychopathology was built in to the human experience. There is no need to look for extra causes.
While his ideas, such as psycho-sexual development and the Oedipus complex, have been rejected, acknowledging the existence of child sexuality was a significant change.[5]
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According to Freud’s theory, personality developed through a series of five stages throughout childhood. These stages are focused on erogenous areas. The oral stage (0–1.5 years), the anal stage (1.5–3.5 years), the phallic stage (3.5–6 years) which culminates in the resolution of the Oedipus complex, latency phase (6–12 years of age), and the genital (or adult) stage. Freud believed in the libido, which he referred to as psychosexual energy. To Freud, the libido was the driving force behind all of human behavior.[1]
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In the phallic stage, a girl’s Electra complex is her decisive psychodynamic experience in forming a discrete sexual identity (ego). Whereas a boy develops castration anxiety, a girl develops penis envy, for she perceives that she has been castrated previously (and missing the penis), and so forms resentment towards her own kind as inferior, while simultaneously striving to claim her father’s penis through bearing a male child of her own. Furthermore, after the phallic stage, the girl’s psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from the infantile clitoris to the adult vagina.[24]
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Therefore, the satisfactory parental handling and resolution of the Electra complex are most important in developing the female infantile super-ego, because, by identifying with a parent, the girl internalizes morality; thereby, she chooses to comply with societal rules, rather than reflexively complying in fear of punishment.
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Freud first proclaimed his seduction theory on April 21, 1896 before Vienna’s prestigious Society for Psychiatry and Neurology to which he presented a revolutionary paper, ”The Aetiology of Hysteria,” tracing hysterical symptoms to ”the memory of earlier experiences awakened in association to it.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/24/science/freud-secret-documents-reveal-years-of-strife.html
In a published and much-studied letter of Sept. 21, 1897, Freud wrote Fliess to confide ”the great secret” that ”has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months.” He explained, ”I no longer believe in my neurotica,” that is, the seduction theory.
Among the reasons Freud gave was ”the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse – the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable.”
On Aug. 28, 1933, Freud wrote a letter complaining that Ferenczi believed he was getting revelations from his hypnotized patients ”but what one really gets are the fantasies of patients about their childhood and not the story.” Freud added, ”My first great etiological error also arose in this very way.”
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Ferenczi kept a diary that he apparently never dared to show Freud and to which he confided his observations and secrets.
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It lists, among other things, a ”register of the sins of psychoanalysis,” including what he called latent sadism, ”sadistic pleasure in patients’ suffering” and a tendency to drag out an analysis for financial gain, turning the patient, Ferenczi says, ”into a lifelong taxpayer.”
1910s
1912: Edward Bernays became coeditor of Medical Review of Reviews and Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette…
by virtue of his mother, Freud’s sister, and of his father’s sister, Martha Bernays Freud, who married Sigmund. The Bernays family moved from Vienna to the United States in the 1890s.
…
they took up the cause of Damaged Goods, an English translation of Les Avariés by Eugène Brieux. After publishing a positive review of the play, Bernays and Robinson wrote to its lead actor, Richard Bennett: “The editors of the Medical Review of Reviews support your praiseworthy intention to fight sex-pruriency in the United States by producing Brieux’s play Damaged Goods. You can count on our help.[14] The play controversially dealt with venereal disease and prostitution—Bernays called it “a propaganda play that fought for sex education.”[15]
…
During WW1 28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918 Bernays referred to this work as “psychological warfare”.[21][22] The term is used “to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people”.[2]
1920s
1919 – 1929 Roaring 20s burlesque strip joints common till forced out of business by purity crusaders during the depression.
1923: Crystallizing Public Opinion by Edward Bernays a pioneering study of the importance of something called public opinion.
Citing works of writers such as his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysisto control them in desirable ways.[5][6]
…
and taught a course at New York University. Both of these are considered firsts in the modern field of public relations.
…
Bernays’ vision was of a utopian society in which individuals’ dangerous libidinal energies, the psychic and emotional energy associated with instinctual biological drives that Bernays viewed as inherently dangerous, could be harnessed and channeled by a corporate elite for economic benefit. Through the use of mass production, big business could fulfill the cravings of what Bernays saw as the inherently irrational and desire-driven masses, simultaneously securing the niche of a mass-production economy (even in peacetime), as well as sating what he considered to be dangerous animal urges that threatened to tear society apart if left unquelled.
1927: Reich coined the term orgastic impotence in 1924 and described the concept in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus,
1927: Sex and Repression in Savage Society is a 1927 book by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
It is considered “a famous critique of psychoanalysis, arguing that the ‘Oedipus complex’ described by Freud is not universal.”[1]
Full text: https://archive.org/details/sexrepressionins00mali
1928: Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, effect social change, and lobby for gender and racial equality.[1]
“Engineering consent” of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy.[5] Bernays explains:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”[6]
…
He asserts that the emotional response inherently present in propaganda limits the audience’s choices by creating a binary mentality, which can result in quicker, more enthused responses.[10] The final five chapters largely reiterate the concepts voiced earlier in the book and provide case studies for how to use propaganda to effectively advance women’s rights, education, and social services.[11]
…
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/02/stephen-bender/karl-rove-the-spectre-of-freudsnephew/
the focus group – a technique innovated by Edward Bernays.
…
he contended “physical loneliness is a real terror to the gregarious animal, and that association with the herd causes a feeling of security. In man this fear of loneliness creates a desire for identification with the herd in matters of opinion.”
…
Quoting Wilfred Trotter and Gustav Le Bon [two leading turn-of-the-century social psychologists], Bernays agreed that:
“the group mind does not think [emphasis in original] in the strict sense of the word… In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles in mass psychology.”
To sum up, what Bernays called the “regimentation of the mind” is accomplished by taking advantage of the human tendency to self-deception, gregariousness, individualism and the seductive power of a strong leader.
The allure of determined leadership – one can read all about it in management and self-help books – is heightened in times of turmoil.
1928: Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa
based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Ta’u in the Samoan Islands.
theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead’s advisor, Franz Boas, writes
conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal.
Boas went on to point out that, at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as “unavoidable periods of adjustment”.
in addition to work for adolescent girls: “All of her [additional] interest is expended on clandestine sex adventures.”
Mead concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood (adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States.
Mead concluded that this was due to the Samoan girl’s belonging to a stable, monocultural society, surrounded by role models, and where nothing concerning the basic human facts of copulation, birth, bodily functions, or death, was hidden.
Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex
In 1983, five years after Mead had died, Derek Freeman – a New Zealand anthropologist who lived in Samoa – published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged all of Mead’s major findings.
1928: Propaganda by Edward Bernays drew more criticism for its advocacy of mass manipulation.[77]
His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist “Torches of Freedom”
Reich in his book People in Trouble (1953) :
“In January 1929 the leftist newspapers carried out the first brief notices about the ‘Socialist Society for Sexual Counseling and Sex-Research,’ which had opened several sex-counseling centers for workers “and salaried employees.
“After several months of preparation at considerable personal expense, I had founded this organization with several younger psychoanalytic colleagues who were my pupils and three gynecologists”
…
“It was also new to attack the neuroses by prevention rather than treatment.
“This depended basically on the handling of sexuality in children and young people.
“The centers immediately became so overcrowded that any doubt as to the significance of our work was promptly removed.”
1929: The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0096.xml
a detailed description of the social organisation of sexuality (social rites, partner choice, etc.) “tracing the Trobriand lifecycle from birth through puberty, marriage, and death”.[1]
Children do not submit to a system of “domestic coercion” or “regular discipline”: they “enjoy considerable freedom and independence”. The idea of a child being “beaten or otherwise punished in cold blood” by a parent is viewed as unnatural and immoral
https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/01/22/writing-his-life-through-the-other-the-anthropology-of-malinowski/
is a long and detailed ethnography of Trobriand family life: courtship, marriage, divorce and death, pregnancy and childbirth. Malinowski’s explicit descriptions of sexual behaviour – including as depicted in folklore and fantasy – only narrowly escaped censorship, and for several years the cellophane-wrapped volume was hidden under bookshop counters. While avoiding pornography, it mounted a subversive assault on late Victorian prudery; in the changing mores of the time it had a liberating appeal along with the writings of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence. Needless to say, it was a pioneering study of human sexuality and of the social and cultural factors which shape it.
Commenting on Malinowski’s study, Wilhelm Reich wrote:
“Children in the Trobriand Islands know no sex repression and no sexual secrecy. Their sex life is allowed to develop naturally, freely and unhampered through every stage of life, with full satisfaction. The children engage freely in the sexual activities which correspond to their age. Nonetheless, or rather, just for this reason, the society of the Trobrianders knew, in the third decade of our century, no sexual perversions, no functional psychosis, no sex murder; they have no word for theft; homosexuality and masturbation, to them, mean nothing but an unnatural and imperfect means ofsexual gratification, a sign of a disturbed capacity to reach normal satisfaction”. In contrast to the distrust, anxiety, neuroses, perversions, suicides and general repressions of our Western “civilizations”, Reich concludes that “the determining factor of the mental health of a population is the condition of its natural love life.”
https://www.melaniephillips.com/tearing-up-sexual-contract/
Single parenthood redefines the family as a unit without a man.
Yet this violates a fundamental law of kinship. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote in 1930: ‘The most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of kinship is that no child should be brought into the world without a man – and one man at that – assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community… This is by no means only a European or Christian prejudice; it is the attitude found amongst most barbarous and savage people as well… I think that this generalisation amounts to a universal sociological law.
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According to Malinowski, the rule of legitimacy was universal in all societies. There was no single instance in anthropological literature, he wrote, where legitimate and illegitimate children were given the same social status. Legitimacy had ‘a great sociological significance which is not yet sufficiently acknowledged’. He wrote: ‘It means that in all human societies, moral tradition and law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a sociologically complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here again on entirely the same lines as natural endowment: it declares that the human family must consist of the male as well as the female.
1929: Marriage and Morals is a 1929 book by philosopher Bertrand Russell, in which the author questions the Victorian notions of morality regarding sex and marriage.
cost him his professorial appointment at the City College of New York due to a court judgment that his opinions made him “morally unfit” to teach.
1930s – the Great Depression 29 October 1929 – 1939
1931: The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality by Willhelm Reich http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/invasion_of_compulsory_sex-morality.html
It was rounded out by the extraordinary material Bronislaw Malinowski presented in 1930 in his comprehensive book The Sexual Life of Savages. My study of the origin of human sexual morality was written in September 1931 in the midst of the social storm that rocked the German republic before Hitler’s ascendancy to power;
1932: The Sexual Struggle of Youth by Willhelm Reich http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/sexual_struggle_of_youth-2009_03_21.html reprinted in USA 1945 asThe Sexual Revolution
The terms and concept of sex-positive (German: sexuell positiv) (or, alternately sex-affirmative (sexuell bejahend)) and sex-negative (sexuell negativ) are generally attributed to Wilhelm Reich. His hypothesis was that some societies view sexual expression as essentially good and healthy, while others have a generally negative view of sexuality and seek to repress and control libido.[5]
he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called “orgastic potency”.
The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.
1933: The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Willhelm Reich http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/mass_psychology_of_fascism.html
He understands fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary, biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.
The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church are carefully analyzed. Reich shows how every form of organized mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses.
http://libcom.org/files/Anarchy%20105.pdf
Reich claimed that antisocial behaviour springs from secondary drives which owe their existence to the suppression of natural sexuality.
“The individual brought up in an atmosphere which negates life and sex acquires a pleasure-anxiety (fear of pleasurable excitation) which is represented physiologically in chronic muscular spasms. This pleasure-anxiety is the soil on which the individual re-creates the life-negating ideologies which are the basis of dictatorship. . . . The average character structure of human beings has changed in the direction of impotence and fear of living, so that authoritarian dictatorships can establish themselves by pointing to existing human attitudes, such as lack of responsibility and infantilism.”
Second World War – 1 Sep 1939 – 2 Sep 1945
1940s
1940 book Die Entdeckung des Orgons Erster Teil: Die Function des Orgasmus, published in English in 1942 as The Discovery of the Orgone, Volume 1: The Function of the Orgasm, Reich defined orgastic potency as “the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.”[13]
1943: A Theory of Human Motivation by Abraham Maslow, founder of Humanistic Psychology, which has been called the third school of psychology, along with Freudian psychology and behaviorism, was first outlined in articles Dr. Maslow wrote in 1943. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a “bag of symptoms.”[3] At Wisconsin he pursued a line of research which included investigating primate dominance behavior and sexuality. Maslow’s early experience with behaviorism would leave him with a strong positivist mindset.[17] A former colleague said that some recent manifestations of Dr. Maslow’s school are Syna non, the drug addiction re habilitation center, and the Esalen Institute, one of the best‐known centers practicing the group encounter form of psychotherapy. he found another mentor in Alfred Adler, one of Sigmund Freud’s early colleagues.
Best known for creating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.[2 the horrors of war inspired a vision of peace in him leading to his groundbreaking psychological studies of self-actualizing. The studies began under the supervision of two mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. Introduced concept of peak experiences
Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. He focused on self-actualizing people. Self-actualizing people indicate a coherent personality syndrome and represent optimal psychological health and functioning.[33]
This informed his theory that a person enjoys “peak experiences”, high points in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. In Maslow’s view, self-actualized people can have many peak experiences throughout a day while others have those experiences less frequently.[34] He believed that psychedelic drugs like LSD and Psilocybin can produce peak experiences in the right people under the right circumstances.[35]
…
The basic principles behind humanistic psychology are simple:
Someone’s present functioning is their most significant aspect. As a result, humanists emphasize the here and now instead of examining the past or attempting to predict the future.
To be mentally healthy, individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions, regardless of whether the actions are positive or negative.
Each person, simply by being, is inherently worthy. While any given action may be negative, these actions do not cancel out the value of a person.
The ultimate goal of living is to attain personal growth and understanding. Only through constant self-improvement and self-understanding can an individual ever be truly happy.[61]
Humanistic psychology theory suits people who see the positive side of humanity and believe in free will. This theory clearly contrasts with Freud’s theory of biological determinism.
1944: The Psychology of Women by Helene Deutsch a colleague of Sigmund Freud. was one of the first psychoanalysts to specialize in women. According to Deutsch, the girl blames her father, not her mother, for the lack of a penis; thus, she stops identifying with her father and masculinity. Because of this relationship with her father, she develops libidinous fantasies of being raped. Thus, the rape fantasy is universal and non-pathological, a key part of female sexuality.
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Deutsch claimed that women were inevitably masochistic because they could experience full sexual desire only by being dominated.
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became paradoxically something of an Aunt Sally ‘in feminist circles…her name tarnished with the brush of a “misogynist” Freud whose servile disciple she is purported to be’
… It was, however, arguably ‘Deutsch’s eulogy of motherhood which made her so popular…in the “back-to-the-home” 1950s and unleashed the feminist backlash against her in the next decades’
1948: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male[1] by Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin
1950s
1951: Gestalt Therapy by Fritz Perls
In 1927 Fritz Perls became a member of Wilhelm Reich’s technical seminars in Vienna. Reich’s concept of character analysis influenced Perls to a large extent.[1] And in 1930 Reich became Perls’ supervising senior analyst in Berlin.[2]
Eventually (1963), he settled at Esalen, and even built a house on the grounds. One of his students at Esalen was Dick Price, who developed Gestalt Practice, based in large part upon what he learned from Perls.[7] At Esalen, Perls collaborated with Ida Rolf, founder of Rolfing Structural Integration, to address the relationship between the mind and the body.[8][9]
Perls’ approach to therapy was included in criticism by Jeffrey Masson[11], a psychoanalyst who feuded with journalists[12] and the psychoanalytic community generally over his controversial theories disputing the effectiveness of psychotherapy.[13]
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/24/science/freud-secret-documents-reveal-years-of-strife.html
The somewhat misnamed seduction theory that Freud first developed in Vienna nearly a century ago traced mental illness to repressed memories of sexual abuse (not really seduction) suffered in early childhood and released by other events. Later Freud decided that the traumas were usually universal sexual fantasies of the patients projected backward from adulthood. That later view, embodying the Oedipus complex, has dominated psychoanalysis, with far-reaching implications ever since.
Dr. Masson contends, however, that Freud’s patients were in fact telling the truth. In espousing that view, the researcher stands virtually alone in the pschyoanalytic community.
”The lies,” Dr. Masson maintains, were not the patients’ but ”came from Freud and the whole psychoanalytic movement.”
The issue, he argues, is more than academic.
Dr. Masson contends that, by doubting the reality of a patient’s early memories of trauma, today’s psychoanalyst, like Freud, ”does violence to the inner life of his patient and is in covert collusion with what made her ill” in the first place. ”The silence demanded of the child by the person who violated her (or him) is perpetuated and enforced by the very person to whom she has come for help,” he asserts. ”Guilt entrenches itself, the uncertainty of one’s past deepens and the sense of who one is is undermined.”
1953: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female[2] Kinsey estimated that approximately 50% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives.[34] Among the sample, 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 females from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex.[35]
1953: Playboy Magazine launched by Hugh Hefner.
1953: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir published in English(written 1949)
It sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, she accepted Jean-Paul Sartre’s precept existence precedes essence; hence “one is not born a woman, but becomes one.” Her analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other. This de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women’s oppression. She argues women have historically been considered deviant and abnormal and contends that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire.
START OF SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM
1954: American Medical Association conference charged Kinsey with creating a “wave of sex hysteria”.
1955: the view, proposed for example by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), that “industrialization demanded erotic austerity.”[37] “radical rethinking of Freud”
member of Frankfurt school of critical theory. Synthesis of Marx and Freud. 1970 N.Y.Times said “most important philosopher alive.”
Reevaluation of key statement Freud made in the 1930s about human nature: that sexual repression was necessary for civilization to survive.
Marcuse claimed repression only necessary in times of scarcity and that it was not necessary in a wealthy society.
“No longer used as a full time instrument of labour, the body would be resexualised. The regression involved in this spread of libido would manifest itself in the reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy.”
“This change in value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to the disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organised, particularly the monogamie and patriarchal family.”
1956: Reich’s books burned in USA https://brooklynrail.org/2012/02/express/wr-the-wanderings-of-a-lost-soul
1956: The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm – Humanist Socialism
Biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.
…
According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one’s uniquely human powers of love and reason.
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Fromm viewed the experience of “falling in love” as evidence of one’s failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.
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Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. We need to exercise the “freedom to”. As ‘freedom from’ is not an experience we enjoy in itself, Fromm suggests that many people, rather than using it successfully, attempt to minimise its negative effects by developing thoughts and behaviours that provide some form of security.
Conformity: This process is seen when people unconsciously incorporate the normative beliefs and thought processes of their society and experience them as their own. This allows them to avoid genuine free thinking, which is likely to provoke anxiety.
Authoritarianism: Fromm characterises the authoritarian personality as containing both sadistic and masochistic elements. The authoritarian wishes to gain control over other people in a bid to impose some kind of order on the world, but also wishes to submit to the control of some superior force which may come in the guise of a person or an abstract idea.
Destructiveness: Although this bears a similarity to sadism, Fromm argues that the sadist wishes to gain control over something. A destructive personality wishes to destroy something it cannot bring under its control.
1959: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O Brown shared Marcuse’s determination to discredit Freud’s thesis that repression was necessary for civilization. He also hoped to sexualise the whole body.
Marcuse and Brown became household names in the communes of the 60s
1960s
1961: The Pill first available in USA
“In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire” – philosopher Ashley Montagu.
1962: Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown unashamedly promoted sex before marriage.
“Sex was here a long time before marriage. You inherited your proclivity for it. It isn’t some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you’re a bad, wicked girl.”
1963: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan widely credited with starting the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States. She had helped conduct a very important survey using her old classmates from Smith College. This survey revealed that the women who played a role at home and the workforce were more satisfied with their life compared to the women who stayed home. The women who stayed home showed feelings of agitation and sadness… Friedan described this as “The Problem That Has No Name”.[14] The perfect nuclear family image depicted and strongly marketed at the time, she wrote, did not reflect happiness and was rather degrading for women
Many historians view the second-wave feminist era in America as ending in the early 1980s with the intra-feminism disputes of the feminist sex wars over issues such as sexuality and pornography, which ushered in the era of third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.[3] … The beginnings of second-wave feminism can be studied by looking at the two branches that the movement formed in: the liberal feminists and the radical feminists. The liberal feminists, led by figures such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem advocated for federal legislation to be passed that would promote and enhance the personal and professional lives of women.[52] On the other hand, radical feminists, such as Casey Hayden and Mary King, adopted the skills and lessons that they had learned from their work with civil rights organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and created a platform to speak on the violent and sexist issues women faced while working with the larger Civil Rights Movement.[53]
1963: An ABZ of Love by Inge and Stan Hegeler published in the UK – Scadinavia
Quoted in Anticlimax by Sheila Jefferies:
“The Hegelers applied moral relativism to the sexual abuse of children. To the Hegelers this was not really a problem at all and often pleasurable and desired by the children concerned. It was only a problem if damage to the child’s body took place.”
1964: Erotic Minorities by Lars in Ullerstam Sweden argued for toleration of paedophillia (and incest and just about anything else)
1965: Christian activists Casey Hayden and Mary King published “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo“[26] detailing women’s inequality within the civil rights organization SNCC – start of Radical Feminism (vs Liberal). “Personal is Political”.
1966: Human Sexual Response Masters and Johnson discredited Freud’s theory of vaginal orgasm.
findings also revealed that men undergo a refractory period following orgasm during which they are not able to ejaculate again, whereas there is no refractory period in women: this makes women capable of multiple orgasm.[2][3]
1966: The Harrad Experiment novel by Robert H. Rimmer https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228376.The_Harrad_Experiment
A new-age “experiment” takes place in the 1960s at Harrad College, a privately endowed and liberally run school that admits carefully selected students. This social experiment encourages premarital living arrangements
The original Harrad Experiment sold more than three million copies. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue describing the startling “Harrad/Premar Solution,” a fully up-to-date and annotated bibliography of books that support the daring, joyfully subversive premises outlined in Harrad, and Robert Rimmer’s candid, controversial autobiography.
Quote from book Make Love, Not War The Sexual Revolution An Unfettered History by David Allyn (2000):
“The books’ thesis was clear: If individuals took a rational view of sex, there would be no more jealousy, no more monogamy, no more shame – all products of Judeo-Christianity’s superstitious anti-sex agenda.
1966: The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. by Steven Marcus. New York: Basic Books,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Marcus#The_Other_Victorians
draws on archival materials from the Kinsey Institute to analyze sexual subcultures in nineteenth-century Britain. Marcus culls the official views of Victorian society from physician William Acton, whose writings anxiously deny the existence of childhood sexuality even as they make elaborate recommendations to suppress it.
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Marcus’s most famous conceptual contribution is his coinage of the term pornotopia to describe a utopian fantasy of abundance where “all men . . . are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.”
…
In his 2009 preface to the reissue of The Other Victorians, Marcus returned to a Freudian framework to analyze “residues of infantile and childhood sexuality” in contemporary sexual behavior and observed that women’s erotic lives continue to be understudied in the twenty-first century.[47]
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Michel Foucault developed the most comprehensive challenge to the “repressive hypothesis” that pervades Marcus’s account of Victorian sexuality, signaling his challenge to Marcus by entitling Part 1 of his study, “We ‘Other’ Victorians”.[49]Marcus had earlier characterized Foucault’s scholarship as “impenetrable” on account of “the author’s arrogance, carelessness, and imprecision”.[50]
1967: Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man’s aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.
1968: Toward a Psychology of Being.[62][63] by Abraham Maslow In this book Maslow stresses the importance of transpersonal psychology to human beings, writing: “without the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic”
During the 1960s Maslow founded with Stanislav Grof, Viktor Frankl, James Fadiman, Anthony Sutich, Miles Vich and Michael Murphy, the school of transpersonal psychology. Maslow had concluded that humanistic psychology was incapable of explaining all aspects of human experience. He identified various mystical, ecstatic, or spiritual states known as “peak experiences” as experiences beyond self-actualization. Maslow called these experiences “a fourth force in psychology”, which he named transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology was concerned with the “empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of the finding relevant to, becoming, mystical, ecstatic, and spiritual states”
In 2005, author and former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers and practicing psychiatrist Sally Satel asserted that, due to lack of empirical support, Maslow’s ideas have fallen out of fashion and are “no longer taken seriously in the world of academic psychology.”[79]
One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (2005) https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=sVT_i83KAhMC&dq=one+nation+under+therapy
1968: 1968ers sexualised children to avoid ‘bourgeois’ shame culture
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/1968ers-sexualised-children-to-avoid-bourgeois-shame-culture-1.633237
Like other such groups springing up around Germany, Kommune 2 eliminated social conventions like private property and monogamous relationships. The communards propagated free love and polygamy as antidotes to the poisonous control system of shame, in their eyes the chief weapon of bourgeois societies to control citizens’ will, thoughts and sexuality. Taking this argument to the next level, they decided that it would be a good idea to promote child sexuality before shame could take hold.
1969-70: One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.
How the Left Took Things Too Far
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html
Does what happened in a number of the Kinderladen qualify as abuse? “Objectively speaking, it was abuse, but subjectively it wasn’t,” says author [+ victim] Dannenberg. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherents to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.
1969: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – first publication about masturbation
1969: Stonewall Riot beginning of gay liberation called for
“the removal of all restrictions on sex between consenting persons of any sex, of any orientation, of any age, anywhere, whether for money or not, and for the removal of all censorship.” (ref make love not war book footnote 33 – quoted in Teal The Gay Militants“)
1969: Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Fritz Perls
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.If not, it can’t be helped.
1969: Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment ed by John Money and Richard Green
He coined the term Gender Identity, and argued that children could be molded into a sexual identity by their upbringing, and recommended that a little boy should be surgically transformed into a girl. In 1997 ‘Brenda’ revealed that she always felt like a boy, he married a woman but committed suicide in 2004.
1969: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/15/the-power-of-andrea-dworkins-rage/
In New York, the women’s movement was in its first exhilarating years. Just two months before Dworkin said “I do,” Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone founded the action-oriented radical-feminist group Redstockings
…
Though one day Willis would become Dworkin’s enemy, Firestone would first become her hero for writing The Dialectic of Sex (1970). And the Redstockings’ winning tactic of forcing their stories into the public record—of which their disruption that day was just one early example—would become Dworkin’s guiding principle, her religion.
…
Now [ Nov 71] she hid from him on a farm, on a freezing houseboat, or in the basement of a nightclub, with the help of a new lover, Ricki Abrams. Abrams brought Dworkin books—Firestone’s, which introduced the concept of the sex-class system, Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (all published the same year)—and together the two women began to work on one of their own. (Abrams decided not to be part of the final version).
…
Her reputation, forged through thundering speeches and legislative efforts as well as her writing, is one of stridency, man-hate, and paranoid histrionics.
…
The author of the book’s [Pornography 1981] negative review in The New York Times was none other than Ellen Willis. She opened with a pointed question: “Who would have predicted that just now, when the far right has launched an all-out attack on women’s basic civil rights, the issue eliciting the most passionate public outrage from feminists should be not abortion, not ‘pro-family’ fundamentalism, but pornography?”
To Willis, unmoved by Dworkin’s polemic, the “peculiar confluence” of the feminist anti-pornography movement and the cultural agenda of the right was “evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.” In her view, both religious moralism and Dworkin’s bleak view of male power offered no path forward for women’s sexual liberation. Although “the misogyny Andrea Dworkin decries is real enough,” she granted, the author’s argument is, Willis wrote, “less inspiring than numbing, less a call to arms than a counsel of despair.”