Freeing Energy Up To Relate & Create

Freud realized that there were various and diverse inhibitions within people that prevented them from realizing a fuller capacity for life and living. Love and relationships were frustrated in the form of repressed/denied libido. There were chains on the human capacity to be free and unfettered in relationships.

Work and creativity were also frustrated due to similar reasons. Human-beings, Freud saw, were paralyzed in their creative pursuits. And whle Freud saw mainly psycho-social reasons for such a state of affairs (inhibitions that manifested in the psyche in the form of what Freud termed the 'superego') it was Karl Marx who saw mainly historical-material reasons for humanity's troublesome relationship with work.

For Marx work was difficult for far too many people because of historical forces that lay outside of the individual. Marx tended towards an 'outside-in approach' relative to work. If the conditions within a society were made friendly to human labour then labour would thrive and people would be far more prone to self-actualize. This is why Marxism has tended to give rise to a revolutionary zeal: just remake the social and cultural fabric (e.g., Mao's Cultural Revolution) and people will experience a newfound freedom in their labours.

Of course, we know that in practical terms that has not tended to be the case. It doesn't mean that there isn't a need for social and cultural revolution in certain circumstances, though it does point out how it is not possible to 'change people from the outside-in.' People oftentimes, make their own chains. As Freud saw too well--and as many of his intellectual descendants have in his wake--there is a prison-house within that no amount of external manipulation in the social and cultural value-spheres can ever touch.

It is a point that has been argued convincingly by Integral philosopher Ken Wilber. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality Mr. Wilber expounds on the necessity of an 'transformation of consciousness.' Short of an internal shift--a further unfolding of Spirit in the form of human-beings--there is no hope. This is not Mao's 'cultural re-education' we are talking about, as much as it is a way of pointing to the fact that unless human-beings become free and unfettered within--in relation to the Psyche--there can be no free and unfettered loving or working, relating or creating.

The Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within, as a wise man once proclaimed. Trouble is it is often concealed behind the mists of our own inherited guilt and cultural shame. Those societal shoulds and organizational oughts cripple the soul of man, the spirit of woman, the essence of everyone. As Mr. Wilber also has stated, 'we fall into hell,' and it becomes as close as our own mind. Something that no manipulation of matter can ever address in a way that results in a freeing up of the energies locked within us so that we might love more and better, not to mention work with a full heart.