Cyberculture and Psychoanalysis: the Freudian theory of narcissism and its relation to the cyberculture of Pierre Lévy

• Grant number: 11/17076-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2011
• End date: October 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Hélio Rebello Cardoso Júnior
• Grantee: Mariana Lima Valente
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project intends to inspect some aspects of the relation between Adorno's culture industry theory (1947) and Freud's repression theory. Freud (1915) established the concept of repression as a sine qua non for the existence and cultivation of the unconscious. Our culture is in debt to him for a new vision of the individual and its relation with society, as long as the individuals can not accomplish all their desires when he lives in a society where they are supposed to repress them. From this theory, we will analyze the mechanisms established by the culture industry to impose essentially its bourgeois ideology. It shows, for example, through the consumer's struggle to obtain happiness. This ideology is inserted in products linked to television, radio, magazines, and other media that have a large impact. This linking allows the manipulation of individual repressed content through the provocation and deprivation of desire satisfaction. Therefore, it reflects directly the spread of the status quo. This intersection of theories will allow us to analyze the theorists - Adorno and Freud - both in their agreements about the dynamism of the human psyche and in their disagreements. It is besides an up-to-date theme since the culture industry influences increasingly several individual and social characteristics nowadays.(AU)