I attempted to comment on Paul H. Rosenberg’s latest essay, titled Fighting The Politics of Illusion, at AlJazeera this morning. The tweet of my comment was visible but my comment was absent. Was I ,perhaps, too pointed in my reply? My essay began with the question: Is Paul H. Rosenberg the last Freudian? Does he live in a time warp, in which the scholarship of Frank Sulloway, E.M.Thorton and Frederick Crews have yet to be historically manifest? Is Anna Freud, the author of The Ego and The Mechanism of Defense, on which he bases his essay, suffering from the effects of her ‘unresolved Oedipal strivings’ as intellectual heir and explicator of Freudian Science? Is Mr. Rosenberg intellectual curiosity and scholership mired in the year 1960? I am recalling what I wrote, rather than quoting directly. Mr. Rosenberg attempts to psychologize the the roles of political/ economic actors of the Economic Crisis of 2008 and the apologists for the aftermath. He offers no usable insights into the practice of wholesale thievery and the intellectual rationalizers of Free Market Economics: while one could hazard a guess at the idea and practice of greed, as a motivation for such conduct. That is following the Law of Parsimony, that the simplist explantion for any observed phenomenon is the best. Is Mr. Rosenberg’s use of the work of a prominent Freudian theorist, simply a manifestation of needing an intellectual prop and garnish to add a kind of luster to some not very original thinking?

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