Professor David Peimer
Freud: Ideas for the 21st Century
Summary
Professor David Peimer explores some of the main ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), focusing specifically on those that still resonate still for him today.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, I think he’s Jewish despite himself. I think he’s, what I’m saying with the enlightenment, he’s trying to be universalist about ideas and about a way forward for humanity with a theory of the mind, the conscious and unconscious. And I think he’s trying to be universalist in that tradition of the enlightenment. Freud even talks about the enlightenment, so does Einstein. So they’re very aware of that tradition that they identify with and the universalizing impulse in the enlightenment.
Now that’s another whole fascinating area which evolved from Freud again, talk therapy to drug therapy. You know, is it just a quick bandage or is it a profound change? And what will happen when AI comes in, which it’s coming in already. So talk therapy, drug therapy, and then AI with little chips to change as well, which will come, there’s no question. So but it comes from the Freudian idea of ways to help the individual and the community in a sense, through dealing with it like this, as opposed to the ideas of the many, many centuries before.
Yep and he also, he said America was a remarkable experiment, which was possibly doomed to fail, which is an interesting thought.