Episode Details
Back to Episodes“The Fourth Humiliation” by Nathalie Kirch
Description
Much of this post directly translates Freud's lecture “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis” (1917), and the analogy of the fourth wound was told to me a few years ago by my favorite philosophy professor. Similar ideas about a fourth humiliation have been expressed in various other texts, for instance by writers such as Donna Haraway, but I still think that it is worth sharing here.
Three times mankind has been humbled. It seems we are due for a fourth time.
A humiliation, a narcissistic wound (Freud's word is Kränkung, which can mean “wound” or “insult”), in psychoanalytic terms, is what happens when an illusion that a person's self-love is attached to gets destroyed. Freud believed that every person is born with all of their self-love (what he calls libido) attached to themselves. He called this state narcissism, after the Greek myth of Narcissus. Over the course of one's life, libido gradually becomes attached to external objects. This process is normal and necessary to mature but also exceptionally painful.
In 1917 when Freud gave his lecture, he argued that mankind had, on a collective level, experienced three such humiliations.
The first humiliation: The universe does not revolve around [...]
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Outline:
(01:21) The first humiliation: The universe does not revolve around us
(02:08) The second humiliation: We are not separate from animal
(02:58) The third humiliation: We are not masters of our own minds
(04:11) The fourth humiliation: Our intelligence will be surpassed
(07:37) Healing a Narcissistic Injury
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First published:
August 20th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JdNjeYC5bk83Kf2Cw/the-fourth-humiliation
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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