NY Times Book Review: “Revolution in Mind”
A new book on Freud that sounds interesting, although the review is somewhat mixed. The author is George Makari, whom I’ve never heard of before, but apparently he’s the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, although I’ve never heard of that either. Anyhow this bit sounded interesting:
In “Revolution in Mind,” Makari argues that we’ve been blinded to the cultural reach of psychoanalysis by the magnitude of Freud’s stature and the magnetic pull or repulsion of his personality and theories. In Makari’s view, much contemporary discussion about the relevance of psychoanalysis is based on a false choice: “Freud as everlasting genius, or Freud as relic and fraud.” To Makari, the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, this dichotomy is artificial. Instead, he argues, we should look to the rich, polyphonous context that gave birth to and was influenced by the analytic enterprise: “the culture of Kant; the assumptions of Geisteswissenschaft and a European classical education,” along with “evolutionary biology, positivism and Newtonian physics.”
Sounds similar to what I’m trying to do with my own thesis on Lacan.
Can Psychoanalysis Think Biopolitics?
An old post by Jodi Dean worth reading.
A Quick Fix for the Soul
Darian Leader in the Guardian links the popularity of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with the rise of neoliberal ideology:
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
… Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through “work” on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher’s dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one’s existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
I suggest giving the whole article a read. Leader’s criticism of CBTs seems spot on to me: the problem isn’t that it’s merely an attack on psychoanalysis, but instead that it is an attempt at a quick fix, a cost-effective method to conform people’s psyches to the so-called “realities” of the market-economy. And, as k-punk suggests, “it is the idea that positive thinking is mandatory which most closely links neoliberalism and CBT.”
Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
The New York Times Health section publishes a rare insightful account of the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, which has (rightfully and wrongfully) found itself under attack from the medical establishment, psychology, neuroscience, and biopsychology, just to name a few of the usual suspects. Benedict Carey writes:
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that psychodynamic therapy is making a comeback, largely as a reaction to CBTs, which research suggests only make short-term progress on unconscious symptoms. Yet the mere fact that psychoanalysis might be re-entering the mainstream is one that should not be taken as in itself a good thing: what is important is precisely how it will manifest itself. It’s up to informed psychoanalysts, particularly in the Lacanian field as opposed to ego psychology, to ensure that the path psychoanalysis takes in its ostensible resurgence is one that places the unconscious, and therein the signifier, at the center of analysis. What this amounts to is the proper re-politicization of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis as Spirituality
Patrick Lee Miller in The Immanent Frame:
Psychoanalysis strives, first of all, to reveal the meaning of symptoms (not to mention dreams, slips, free-associations, transferences, and anything else mysterious in someone’s mental life and behavior). But this meaning is none other than the apparent but illusory good sought by the analysand. He may inquire, for instance: “What is the meaning of my coming late to sessions every day?” The hard-won answer will be something of this form: “I want my analyst to feel as though I don’t need him; I want him to feel worthless, to snub him, so that he will know how he makes me feel.” When such an apparent good comes to light, it reveals itself as illusory: “My analyst doesn’t make me feel unworthy, he’s waiting there patiently for me everyday; I think the person I really want to snub is my father; he’s the one who made me feel worthless.” When the analysand exposes such illusion himself, he grows in wisdom, not least by the acknowledgment that he unconsciously chose that illusory good and has clung to it all the while. He grows further in wisdom when he recognizes that his boss, and no doubt many others besides, have been victims of his illusion, since he has sought its apparent good from other relationships as well. His character changes, finally, when he can relate differently to these others, seeing them not as ghosts of his father—or his mother, or his siblings, or whomever—but instead as the unique individuals they really are.
I don’t know how I feel about conceiving of psychoanalysis as a “spiritual” science, which to me reeks of New Age obscurantism. I recommend giving the whole article a read though. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
As Johnnya says, it’s about time that “mainstream” science finally catches up with basic psychoanalytic concepts. The mirror graphic in the article is also worth checking out.
Other-than-me, More-than-me, Other-than-mine
The Psychoanalytic Field:
However, while an adult subject may come to see that the found object that supports a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community) is never truly a property, a much younger subject will reject even the slightest suggestion that the toy or blanket it has found is not entirely its own; it will not look kindly upon the adult’s attempts to mend or clean or in any way alter said toy or blanket; it will tolerate even less the prospect of having to share anything it has found with those around it. As the first “other-than-me” possession, the found object is not automatically registered as “other-than-mine.” The implication here is that the passage from “other-than-me” to “other-than-mine” is one that the subject will have to undertake if it is to look both forward and backward in time on the objects it has found, and experienced, and eventually acknowledge them as such.
Taking this line one step further, it seems as if Winnicott may have inadvertently set the ground for an assessment of the experience of “private” property as inherently childish.
Conditions of Receptivity
Dr. Sinthome:
At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? … I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.
America: A Nation of Whiners
Posted at 5:10 PM
It is undoubtedly the case that America is a nation of whiners. It is and always has been, how else do you think it came into existence? I don’t think anyone will contend otherwise, which is probably why the media has focused almost solely and unrelentingly on the “America is a nation of whiners” sound-bite from Phil Gramm’s recent diatribe. Even the blogosphere is partly to blame for this. Of course, this focus is essentially a reaction-formation designed to obscure and repress the far more ideological claim on Gramm’s part that economic failure is “psychological,” i.e. subjective.
The subjectivist theory of economics has long been a staple of neoliberal ideology, which argues, for example, that the value of a commodity, rather than being the objective cost of the labor required to produce said commodity, is in fact reflective of its marginal utility. But on the specific issue of the business cycle and economic crises, marginalist theory fails to provide an adequate explanation: instead it has to rely on its late-capitalist ideological counterpart, New Age obscurantism, which promulgates that the problems we experience, and our reality in general, are purely of our own making. And clearly the liberal rejoinder that “it has real consequences!” is not enough. It is a prototypically pathetic response, as it accepts the neoliberal framing of the debate, simply adding that subjective reality can lead to actual, concrete harm to human-beings.
There is obviously a grain of truth to the liberal argument, but the more important issue at stake is whether economic crisis is “psychological” in nature, or part in parcel of an objective process. Marx articulated the latter view in his Theories of Surplus-Value. His formulation of crisis theory, which points to an inherent tendency of capitalism to undergo crises as a result of the over-production of fixed capital, is perhaps one of his most important contributions to the critique of capitalism.1
As Marx writes, “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed.” To take that a step farther, crisis also reveals these very same contradictions and antagonisms within our political discourse. Here the link between Marxism and psychoanalysis becomes quite explicit: it is the goal of the analyst to confront the analysand with the contradictions inherent to her/his discourse in order to fully expose to them their relation to the unconscious truth, a truth which contradicts every discourse, including its relation to itself. The whole debacle involving Gramm points to an unconscious repression of class struggle, which is the sine qua non of the political struggle.
That is why I will be voting for Stalin come November.
The Symptom 9: Universalism vs. Globalization
I haven’t really been following its publication recently, but there looks to be a bunch of interesting pieces in here, including J.-A. Miller’s essay, “Extimity,” Zizek’s essay on the Lacanian Real and television, and several of Heidegger’s political tracts from the early 1930s. (Via Larval Subjects.)
Laruellian / Lacanian Clones
An interesting take on Lacan’s borromean knot and the notion of “cloning,” taken from the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle. I’m not totally sure how reading Lacan through speculative realism (or vice versa) illuminates anything in particular, but then again I don’t think I quite understand what the author is getting at. It’s definitely an article worth reading though.
The Possibility of Time Travel
I just ran across this interesting article on time travel published by BBC News. The basic idea is that there are essentially two formulas: (a) time travel is not possible (ostensibly because we have never encountered its affects in the present) or (b) time travel is possible, but something is preventing it from changing the present. As the article points out, option (a) seems more intuitive, but option (b) is certainly plausible insofar as Einstein’s general theory of relativity points to a space-time curvature in which time loops back over itself (and, derivatively, that quantum physics does not distinguish between moving back and forward in time).
In attempting to articulate a more cohesive materialist formula for examining history, I thought this passage was particularly interesting, especially in regards to its Hegelian flavor:
It is as if, in some strange way, the present takes account of all the possible routes back into the past and, because your father is certainly alive, none of the routes back can possibly lead to his death.
I think it’s also worth pointing out, at least humorously, that the entire article is postulated around the murder of one’s father, which will no doubt elicit a smirk from psychoanalytically-informed readers.
There is No Subject
I can’t recall if I’ve posted a link to this website or not yet, but in the case of the latter it deserves repeating: No Subject is a terrific Wiki-based resource for all things related to psychoanalysis (mostly Freudian and Lacanian). Whenever I am unsure of a term, this website usually provides a decent analysis of it, although some of the articles are a bit incomplete, hodge-podge or contain noticeable errors. But, hopefully with more visitors and editors, the website will become an even better and more complete resource for psychoanalytic theory.
It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine… Putting out fire by micturating… was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use… Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.
—Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, pp. 42-43