February 02, 2006: Displacement
It seems to me that certain of Freud's concepts can be useful tools for analyzing ideology.
I found an interesting example recently in an emotion-laden debate over global warming. There's a good jolt of emotional punch powering much of the back-and-forth. Examine the comments posted to this WashingtonPost.com blog. What are these people getting worked up about?
I think, not global warming per se. Rather, global warming is here a stand-in for a different topic: capitalism. People are "really" arguing about free enterprise. Many who try to ridicule global warming do so because they want to defend capitalism. Many who decry global warming do so because they're skeptical of the wisdom of free markets. These views are "displaced" -- Freudian technical concept -- from the proper object, capitalism, to a stand-in, global warming. The emotional juice goes with it.
Trouble-Tickets defines "ideology" as discourse which makes the obvious invisible. In his work on dreams, Freud theorizes mechanisms which do just that. Dreams are distorted via a process of censorship which has specific techniques available to it. One of these is displacement, which works in Freud's theory just as I think it does in this debate about global warming. The purpose of dream censorship is to make parts of the dream content invisible.
Are Freud's other dream-related concepts equally useful? Note that this is not the same question as, Is ideology a form of dreaming?
