The Freudian Unconscious shrivelled up and died during the promiscuous, drug addled, Sixties. By the Seventies, the joke was that people unconsciously didn't want to sleep with Mummy or stab Daddy even if they kept taking drugs and doing both because of peer pressure or just for shits & giggles.
Amia Srinivasan disagrees. She writes, in the LRB, that
The unconscious is back.
While Biden was President, you might have to censor you thoughts on the uselessness of diversely disabled darkies. Now, you can shout about it on Twitter. You can even have a go at goody goody Hindooooos like Amia or Usha Vance.
Why now?
Perhaps Amia is unconsciously aware that she teaches shit and holds highly mischievous views. I'm kidding. She isn't aware of anything.
Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite.
It is possible that Amia- a kaffir deserving of death- unconsciously supported the Israelis and reviled Hamas butchers.
The Israeli state performs its self-defeating
successful. It has gained territory. Hezbollah is on the back foot. Iran's nuclear program has been set back.
operations under the sign of Jewish ‘safety’,
which has been enhanced.
and for that reason with the widespread approval of Jews in Israel and much of the global diaspora.
People only pretend to care about Palestinians. On the other hand, Jews are smart and are widely resented for that reason.
Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration.
There was no genocide. There were a lot of civilian casualties- just like in the War on Terror.
In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:
Just as Amia is doing now.
As Hitler ... once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’
The dude ate a bullet. I suppose he was scared of what would happen to him if the Jews got hold of him. His pal, Mussolini, got off light.
'We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.'
What should be worrying Amia is that there are now more and more White people in the UK & US- not to mention Europe- who want to get rid of darkies like me and her.
As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis,
the word means 'Freudian slip'. In Romm's case, the word he meant to write was 'Para-fucking-noia'.
a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’
Hamas had guns. Israel had better guns. Hamas commanders probably made way more money, but Israel traded blood for land. Money gets frittered away. Land is permanent. God isn't making any more of it.
The refusal of genocide’s repetition – ‘never again’ – becomes the mandate for its inverted return: yes, again, genocide.
War, not genocide. Anyway, ever since the invention of the H-bomb, genocide is small potatoes. Anything less than the destruction of all life on earth is not worth getting out of bed for. Even Pakistan- which is as poor as shit- has a Field Marshal who boasts of being willing and able to blow up half the world- Inshallah.
As a consequence, Palestinians are left to excavate the bodies of their dead from the ruins of war and rebury them in the open-air cemetery of Gaza.
Palestinians are left. Had there really been a genocide, this would not be the case.
The difficulty of the task arises not just from its magnitude – how to grieve more than seventy thousand people, a third of that number children?
In the same way you mourned the one hundred thousand of your fellow Tamils who were killed in Sri Lanka. Unlike Palestinians, many of the women were first gang-raped. Why has Amia kept silent about this? Is she ashamed of her Tamil heritage?
– but also from an ongoing occupation
Gaza wasn't occupied. It was run by Hamas. That's why it turned to shit. The West Bank is occupied. It is much less shitty.
that erodes the psychic conditions necessary for mourning.
Nope. However shitty things are, you will still weep for your Mummy or Baby or spouse.
For Freud, the work of mourning
Trauerarbeit. Ironically, he propounded this during the Great War, when soldiers mourned their comrades without taking their time over it. That's one reason Chaplains of various faiths were attached to the Armies. Rabbis found ways to compress & simplify 'Avelut' for the Jewish soldiers in the trenches.
requires time in which the ego can discover the reality of its loss,
If you believe in God, the loss is unreal. That is what mourning teaches you.
and then choose its own life, moving beyond the fixation that he calls ‘melancholia’. But under occupation, loss is continuous,
During the Great War, 10 million soldiers died. But melancholia wasn't the big problem. It was shell shock.
the choice of life never a given, and so the time for mourning never arrives.
People who have been bombed or who have lost family members to terror attacks have worse traumas to deal with. Mourning is a piece of cake compared to shitting yourself anytime you hear a loud bang. Admittedly, I wasn't actually subjected to a terror attack. But somebody said something really mean about one one my tweets. Mummy can be very cruel sometimes. Still, it's nice to have at least one follower.
What is occupation, the Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar asks, but a ‘perpetual deferral of mourning’?
Occupation, for the West Bank, was paradise compared to Hamas rule for Gazans. Abdaljawad teaches in Ramallah. He is perfectly safe and comfortable. What he has perpetually deferred is an acknowledgment that Palestinians are their own worst enemy.
But surely the unconscious had made its presence felt even earlier, in another ongoing war, one perpetrated by a diverse coalition of authoritarian strongmen, feminists, manosphere influencers, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and centrist liberals who are, they insist, just worried about the kids.
No. They genuinely hate woke shitheads. True, they may also want to prevent said shitheads from gender-reassigning their toddlers but, speaking generally, that is a secondary consideration.
The crusade against so-called ‘gender ideology’ is
popular. It wins votes. It helped defeat Kamala even though she owns a gun
more than an epiphenomenal culture war, waged cynically to distract from the material sources of social immiseration.
Whereas the worthless shite this woman spouts isn't a distraction at all from the fact that there are plenty of women of her own racial heritage who suffer more than Palestinians every day of their lives- not just during a war.
Freud says a dream expresses a wish.
He was wrong.
We can say the same of war.
No we can't. People wish the other side would surrender unilaterally. They go to war because their wish is not coming true.
What wish does the war against ‘gender ideology’ express?
None. Many different types of people find the thing noxious or a nuisance. There is no single wish here.
There is again the wish for total safety, which requires the eradication of all possible threats, however remote.
Ban death. It's totes bougie.
In her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021), the ‘gender critical’ philosopher Kathleen Stock argued that being trans should be legally protected as a species of gender non-conforming behaviour – but only, Stock qualified, to the extent that trans rights do not threaten the safety of non-trans women. This means, for Stock, not just the familiar demands for trans women to be excluded from women’s changing rooms and loos. It means that trans women have no right to female pronouns.
As opposed to everybody's right to free speech.
The expectation that I, a non-trans woman, use ‘she’ and ‘her’ for someone who I suspect might be biologically male can operate, Stock says, like ‘cognitive Rohypnol’, slowing down my mental processes and making me more susceptible to violence –the violence, that is, of trans women.
Stock has a vagina. That's not what makes her stupid. It is the fact that she chose to study and then teach imbecilic nonsense. Still, it is true that if a woman refers to a table as 'it' rather than 'she', that table will rape her and she won't even realize this has happened till she finds splinters of wood in her vagina. Female philosophers really do have the lowest possible opinion of women.
So total is the cis woman’s right to safety that she cannot even be asked to stop and think of the other; just as the total right to Jewish safety means that any appeal to the dignity of Palestinian life is already an antisemitic assault.
The total right to Israeli safety is the same as the total right to British or American safety. Amia has lived and worked in both of those countries. If some Jihadi nutter fatwas her, her total right will be protected by the British Government.
Vladimir Putin, like many authoritarian leaders a hero of the gender wars, longs for the restoration of the Russian Empire not just as an end in itself, but as a means, he says, to bezopásnost – total security, literally ‘the absence of threat’.
No. The word is a compound of 'without' and 'danger' and simply means security. Not total security. Just security. It is the principle upon which all Government's act.
But there is a still deeper wish contained in the war on ‘gender ideology’.
We want to turn into hermaphrodites and fuck ourselves incessantly and give birth to umpteen children.
Like all our deepest wishes, it is an unthinkable wish,
in which case Amia can't tell us what it is.
and so Freud says, one that must be repressed from consciousness. Indeed, for Freud it is the deepest of all wishes: not the wish to sleep with your mother or kill your father, but to be both mother and father, to transcend the forced choice represented by what Freud called the ‘great antithesis’ of male and female.
He had some stupid theory about Moses & Akhenaton.
The trans person reminds us of this denied wish, and so reveals that our sense of ourselves as simply a woman or a man is, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams’.
Coprophagous Amia reminds us of our own repressed wish to eat our own shit.
The trans person is the chimera we all desire and dread.
No. The trans-person is simply a person. It appears that modern medicine can help them lead happier lives. This pleases us.
It is no surprise, then, that the increasing visibility of trans life has led to the reassertion of sex as a self-evident distinction, rooted in biology and underwriting a natural social hierarchy.
No. What happened is that some crazy shitheads started cyber-bullying people like J.K Rowling. Nobody likes a bully.
Nor is it a surprise
Nothing is a surprise to Amia- provided it is a paranoid fantasy
that this reassertion of sexual division and hierarchy plays a central role in the global advancement of the far right.
In which case, Amia herself has played a role- small though it may be- in the defeat of Kamala whose Mum was as Tamil as Amia's own Mum.
On the day of his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order: ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. The order affirms that there are only two sexes, male and female, as a matter of ‘immutable biological reality’; that men are biological males and women biological females; and that any suggestion otherwise has a ‘corrosive impact’ on ‘the validity of the entire American system’.
The 'virulent wokeness' of Jason Stanley & Amia Srinivasan contributed to this outcome. They must be so proud.
This is the declaration of the reinstated father,
as opposed to the Daddy Amia killed and ate
who promises to restore the rule of fathers everywhere;
Freud's primal father makes no such promise.
to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.
Kathleen Stock was psychically castrated. So was J.K Rowling.
In fact, the unconscious never left the scene.
Frasier has a re-boot. It is shit. Is that what Amia is getting at?
Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere.
Amia is speaking of herself. She alone is gassing on about the unconscious and how everybody is totes jelly of trans-people because what we really want is to become self-impregnating hermaphrodites incessantly birthing babies.
No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice.
Only because an utterly crazy claim is being made.
We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.
Amia may need to because she teaches stupid, useless, shit but smart folk in STEM subjects have no such need.
To what end? Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident.
Amia is happy to lend credence to any stupid, paranoid, shite.
You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de Beauvoir complained, seems to assume precisely what’s to be explained.)
To explain why Spiderman would win in a fight with Dracula, assumptions are all you can rely upon. But the Beaver was just as bad as the Fraud.
But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware?
Sure. The thing is easily done.
Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories?
Yes. Otherwise we leave ourselves open to being gas-lighted.
That, to put it mundanely but not inaccurately, each of us brings with us a helluva lotta baggage?
You have baggage. I have luggage.
The interesting question to my mind is not whether there is truth in psychoanalysis, but whether its truth will set us free.
The answer to both question is no. Don't be silly. Still, if you have the cash, why not pay some poor sap to listen to you drone on?
This might seem an odd question for a philosopher to ask. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with questions of truth and knowledge – and in the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science.
Sadly, Philosophy can't pronounce a verdict. But any medical therapy can be evaluated by the same statistical methodology.
But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it
i.e. creating a backlash against woke libtards such that Trump gets into the White House.
– the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despair of our political moment.
If Freud & Co couldn't do shit about Hitler, fuck can his method do now?
There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia.
No. It was born out of the need for Doctors to make money. It turned out treating 'neuroses' was profitable because those who had them could hold down a job and thus make their weekly payments. Treating 'psychoses' wasn't profitable unless you were the head of an Asylum or had the capital to start up a nut-house for the rich. Also, the thing was slightly less disreputable than selling cocaine to your patients.
In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony,
ceased to exist because of the 1873 financial crash and growing Pan-German sentiment. As in Germany, 'Throne & Altar' sought to do a deal with the Social Democrats.
with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason
i.e. anti-Clericalism
and social progress,
i.e. the supremacy of the 'Third Estate'
was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist.
Socialism isn't essentially anti-liberal.
In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor.
He was a good Mayor doing much for the City. But the Emperor preferred useless nonentities.
Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism,
it was the 'Slav-hating' which was more worrying than the 'Jew baiting' demagoguery. The Dynasty needed the Slavs to counterbalance the overmighty Magyars and the Pan German 'little people'.
refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration.
He smoked a lot of cigars. He died of cancer.
But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will,
Papal intercession
and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close.
It had ended 20 years earlier.
Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the
American
historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence ... these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’
Actually, things were looking up. There was rapid economic growth. Karl Lueger helped transform Vienna. But Parliament was a bear-garden. It would be true to say that the only people who really supported the Dynasty were the immigrant Polish Jews.
Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own:
Why did it spread? The answer is that the Great War created a large number of shell-shocked men. They couldn't all be confined to lunatic asylums. Some new gentler therapy was needed for 'abreaction'. The other point was Vienna, shorn of its economic hinterland, had to export 'invisibles' to feed itself. Vienna was cheap for foreigners. What you were paying Dr. Freud was peanuts. Also after being analysed, you could yourself become an analyst. The thing was a racket. But there were plenty of other fraudulent types of therapy back then.
a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous,
Shell-shock affected tens of thousands. Clearly, trauma was a real thing. The good news was that 'hysteria' declined.
and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive.
Liberalism has always been considered naive.
In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis.
No. He was part of a professional class on the make.
In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it.
Freud thought of himself as a scientist back then.
Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.
If hysterical women were prepared to pay doctors to masturbate them, why not get paid just to pretend to listen to them? What were Freud's other choices? He couldn't rise to become the head of a State run Asylum because of his religion. He couldn't just go on writing prescriptions for cocaine. He had to rise in private practice preying upon second or third generation descendants of 'kaftanjuden' who had made a decent sum of money in trade. His couch was a sort of secular confession box.
In any case, there were no particularly terrifying political manifestations. That's why Viennese Jews didn't emigrate with as much avidity as the Russian Jew.
Where things got really scary, there was no fucking psychoanalysis.
As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt.
He and his ilk had no power and thus could bear no guilt.
In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene.
Lasalle was a hero of Freud's. This was because he had shit for brains. Had Lasalle lived, Bismarck would have pumped and dumped him.
The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal.
i.e. he needed to piss but was conjuring up an off putting image so as not to do it in bed.
On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics
Shame, maybe. Not guilt. Freud had done nothing heroic. The question was whether he'd make money as a Doctor or end up having to treat poor people in the slums.
– to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything.
i.e. wouldn't make lots of money. But given his stupidity, Freud did well enough for himself.
On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide.
Amia may want to knife her Daddy. But this is not a universal desire. Nor is it the case that everybody wants to become a self impregnating hermaphrodite.
The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.
No Jewish dad of the period wanted his son to become a revolutionary. He did want him to get rich. Freud's parents had made a very heavy financial investment in his education. He was 30 years old before he started a private practice and thus could afford to marry.
For Freud, the task of psychoanalysis is to help the patient unearth the origins of their neurotic symptom, finding at its root some unbearable idea that has been repressed by the conscious self into the unconscious.
You don't need to be an M.D to do this. You need to be Sherlock fucking Holmes.
In so doing, the analyst promises to give to his patient a greater measure of agency, a new freedom to decide what to do with their previously unthinkable thought.
It was a false promise. Why not just say 'you feel shitty because you have offended a particular demi-god. I will help you identify that genie and propitiate it. Payment is cash in advance. No refunds.
Say it is an idea similar to the one Freud finds in his own dream: I wish to destroy my father and sleep with my mother. And, to make things more interesting, let’s also say that the patient is a woman rather than a man. Through the laborious process that Freud calls ‘working-through’, she comes to know the wish she has long repressed, and finds herself in a position to do something with this knowledge.
Become an analyst. Cheat others as you have been cheated.
She may accept the reality of her wish and act on it, engaging in the ‘perversion’ of homosexuality – which is the reason Freud said that the opposite of a perversion is a neurosis.
Vienna had lots of perverts. But syphilis was rampant. Maybe paying a shrink was preferable to your nose falling off.
Or she may accept that her wish cannot be acted on, not without grave social sanction, and so set it aside in favour of a compensatory wish, substituting her desire to displace her father with, say, a desire to have a son.
Freud really was as stupid as Amia makes him out to be.
Psychoanalysis, in its orthodox Freudian form, makes no judgment between these options.
It is a just so story.
This is not a comment on Freud’s own social views – in fact he was an advocate for the loosening of moral taboos against homosexuality – but rather a corollary of the principle that what matters, psychoanalytically, is not external reality, but the individual’s psychic representation of it.
What matters is whether the individual can pay for therapy
Not the actual aristocracy (the political class that dominates your social world) but the aristocrat in your head, who is really your overbearing father.
A father may be a King or a Mayor or a Headmaster. He can't be an aristocrat because aristocrats are subordinate to the monarch.
It follows that Freud’s many feminist critics, from the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney, to Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, were both right and wrong
but not both stupid and smart. They were wholly stupid
to charge Freud with encouraging women to ‘adjust’ themselves to patriarchal realities.
They themselves adjusted themselves to the reality that they needed to gas on about Freud whereas people with dicks didn't need to bother to gas on about them.
As Juliet Mitchell argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974),
Why is there no book called Psychoanalysis & Dudes?
orthodox psychoanalysis charts a principled indifference between social accommodation and resistance.
But it does insist on getting paid. Also 'hour' means 'fifty minutes' which means 'forty five minutes' which means 'just fucking fuck off you boring twat.'
The task is to help the patient put her psychic reality in better order,
there are now people who charge big bucks to help you put your wardrobe in order
an achievement which was compatible with multiple relations to social reality, and which could only ever be partial. Thus it is a mistake, Mitchell says, to read Freud
She would have been right if she had stopped there.
as just another proponent of patriarchal morality, telling women they would be happy if only they submitted to the dulling pleasures of wifely and maternal duty.
This was certainly true of some women. Others aren't cut out for either role. Nothing wrong in that at all.
Indeed, Freud came increasingly to emphasise the impossibility of the ‘feminine’ role, the catastrophic splittings and sacrifices it demanded of the psyches of even apparently ‘normal’ women.
In other words he came to realize that bitches be kray kray.
At the same time, feminists are right in that Freudian psychoanalysis sees nothing disturbing in the woman who manages, perhaps against the odds, to remedy her neurosis by embracing the role patriarchy has assigned her – much less that patriarchal society is a moral disaster that must be collectively overcome.
It doesn't exist. Amia's daddy didn't trade her for a couple of sheep.
Freudian psychoanalysis, then, is a form of self-historicising
No. If a therapist isn't getting paid, it isn't psychoanalysis
in the service of individual psychic liberation.
If you think you are being held prisoner by imaginary patriarchs, medication is the way to go.
It is individualistic not only at the level of practice, as an intimate and drawn-out encounter between patient and analyst, but also in its theoretical focus on the inner life of the patient. And yet, many powerful radical thinkers since Freud –Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler
weren't or aren't powerful at all. Mao was a radical thinker who had a lot of power. I suppose the same could be said of Margaret Thatcher.
– have seen psychoanalysis as a tool for a more general, social liberation: from the psychically disfiguring systems of fascism, capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy.
Then came Tim Leary and the notion that putting LSD in the water supply would make everything better.
In just the last few years, a younger left has rediscovered in psychoanalysis, so recently dismissed as another expression of boomer decadence, a powerful framework of political critique.
Nonsense! The infantile left is banging on about 'settlers'- which is an old fashioned term for immigrants. Also, there is no scope for psychoanalysis where gender reassignment surgery for toddlers is regarded as a human right.
The pages of Parapraxis seem a confirmation of what an older generation of theorists have long been saying: that the missing term in radical political discourse is ‘psyche’.
That's a Freudian slip. 'Sense' is the missing term.
Freud himself took an eventual if cautious turn towards politics, impelled by the ravages of the First World War.
It was the Bolshevik Revolution followed by Bela Kun's seizing power in Hungary which scared Freud shitless.
In 1919, the Social Democrats prevailed over their reactionary Catholic and German nationalist opponents, winning the right to govern Red Vienna.
Vienna was too big for the small country of which it was now the Capital.
Their programme of Austro-Marxism stressed rational planning and scientific humanism.
Nobody stresses irrational planning or unscientific humanism.
They made deep investments in social housing,
because rent control laws had driven out the private sector
adult education,
which some US states had from the mid '80s
psychology clinics
the first such in the world was started in the US in 1896
and child welfare centres,
Vienna was much behind London or New York in these matters. Why? It was poorer.
winning over disaffected liberals, Freud among them, to their cause
because hyperinflation and bank failures had wiped out their wealth
At the same time, and reversing his prewar position that analysts should charge handsomely for their services, Freud called for the creation of free outpatient clinics ‘so that men who would otherwise give way to drink, women who have nearly succumbed under their burden of privations, children for whom there is no choice but between running wild or neurosis, may be made capable, by analysis, of resistance’.
In other words, if there aren't enough rich people, pretend to cure the poor.
Vienna’s free clinic, the Ambulatorium, was founded by members of Freud’s circle in 1922.
Some such initiatives closed in 1931 because of the financial crisis till the whole thing was closed down by the Nazis. But the initiative wasn't considered effective which is why it wasn't revived till 1999.
All the most important ‘second generation’ psychoanalysts – Erich Fromm, Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud – served in free clinics, providing pro bono analysis for poor and working-class patients.
All were useless.
The younger members of Freud’s circle tended to be socialists or Marxists rather than liberals.
If they survived, they ran away to nice Capitalist countries.
Under the de facto leadership of Reich (who joined the German Communist Party in 1930),
but ran away to Capitalist New York. Sadly, he was sent to jail for trying to make money out of his fraudulent 'orgone accumulators'.
they enthusiastically debated how best to synthesise psychoanalysis and politics, Freud with Marx.
but what they really wanted was US dollars.
Reich himself, unsatisfied with his work at the Ambulatorium – he wanted, he said, to prevent rather than merely to treat neurosis – began a mobile clinic which offered free sex education, contraceptives and Marxist instruction to young working-class people.
Jeffery Epstein chose to dedicate himself to sexually educating young working-class blonde girls.
Reich’s efforts would grow into his ‘Sex-Pol’ movement (short for the German Association of Proletarian Sexual Politics), whose motto was ‘Free Sexuality within an Egalitarian Society’.
Sadly, his 'sex boxes' couldn't cure cancer. Also, after he was sent to jail for fraud, they couldn't make him lots and lots of nice US dollars.
For Reich, all neurosis was created by the social suppression of a naturally free and healthy sexuality – as Freud disparagingly put it in 1928, Reich thought ‘the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis’ – and all sexual suppression was the result of a wholly surmountable economic form: capitalism.
Selling orgone accumulators is pure capitalism- albeit of a fraudulent kind.
With this simple formula, Reich brought together Marx and Freud,
and Capitalism- albeit of a fraudulent kind.
albeit at the cost of Freud’s most fundamental commitments: that the Oedipus complex is a ‘universal event of childhood’,
even if the kid is brought up in an orphanage or a nunnery
produced not by any particular familial or social arrangement, but by the psyche’s necessary
wholly imaginary, not to say incompossible,
attempt to constitute itself as a subject in a world of taboo and prohibition;
a world where the US justice system sends you to jail for fraud if you try to sell 'orgone accumulators'
and that repression is the precondition of civilisation, capitalist or not.
Self-domestication is not repression. Nor is being sent to jail for fraud or everybody making fun of you because you re talking stupid bollocks.
For Reich, sexual and political liberation went hand in hand:
he went to jail in hand-cuffs
sexual rebellion would undermine the bourgeois moralism that ideologically scaffolds capitalism,
so would raping babies or putting LSD in the water supply
and, in turn, ‘revolutionary struggle against economic exploitation’ would erode the material basis of sexual repression.
e.g. being sent to jail for raping babies.
For Freud – who was, more than a liberal or a progressive, a tragedian – it could never be so simple.
He was a charlatan. Still, he made good money even after he stopped pushing cocaine.
Reich sought to both politicise psychoanalysis and psychoanalyse politics.
He failed. Six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in a US jail.
Psychoanalytic practice was to be radically democratised and socialised, emancipated from the strictures of bourgeois medicine.
i.e. the notion that medical treatment should cure actual illnesses.
At the same time, and though Reich insisted that it was no substitute for Marxist sociology, psychoanalytic theory could help illuminate the present dispensation. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich sought to explain why Europe’s working classes were drawn to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.
It was because Fascism was less shitty than Communism. Also, people believed their country could become better off by conquering territory.
At the origin of the phenomenon, Reich argued, was the patriarchal family, whose sexual repressiveness produced in its members an unsatisfied longing that could all too easily be channelled by authoritarian strongmen and blood-and-soil mysticism.
Patriarchal family is very evil. Daddy should chop off his own dick.
The book was published in 1933, the same year in which Hitler became Chancellor, and Reich was banned from the Communist Party of Denmark, where he was then living, on account of his sexual heterodoxies.
To be fair, Stalin did recriminalize homosexuality.
In an attempt, both foolish and doomed, to save psychoanalysis from Nazi inquisition as a ‘Jewish science’,
The Nazis were cool with Jung's analytical psychology.
Freud and his more conservative associates denied that psychoanalysis had anything to do with politics.
Because it didn't.
In a letter to Ernest Jones, the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Anna Freud wrote that her father couldn’t ‘wait to get rid of’ Reich.
because he was crazy.
‘What my father finds offensive in Reich,’ she explained, ‘is the fact that he has forced psychoanalysis to become political; psychoanalysis has no part in politics.’
Reich couldn't force anything. He was a loose canon, that is all. Freud's problem was that he had to tolerate a substantial number of nutters, fraudsters, sex-addicts and so forth
A year later, in 1934, Reich was formally expelled from the Psychoanalytical Association. This and other appeasement measures didn’t prevent the Nazi state from ‘aryanising’ psychoanalysis: it burned Freud’s books, absorbed Berlin’s free clinic into its death apparatus and made refugees of nearly all its German and Austrian practitioners. In 1938, Freud fled to London ‘to die in freedom’. Three of his five sisters were killed in Treblinka.
Because they were psychoanalysts? No. Because they were Jews. Amia is totes cool with Hamas which has the same basic idea as Husseini & Hitler.
Of the dual ambitions shared by Reich and the other second-generation ‘political Freudians’ – to politicise psychoanalysis and psycho-analyse politics – it is the latter that has been more fully realised.
No. Both were stupid shit and failed immediately. If you are 'neurotic', get CBT. If you are psychotic, medication plus 'Hearing Voices' groups are the way to go. As for politics- it is about solving 'collective action problems'. It isn't about curing your mental illness or spiritual malaise.
This is not to forget the important attempts, historical and contemporary, to politically reimagine psychoanalysis and mental healthcare more broadly.
There were stupid and inconsequential.
In the 1950s, before he became the fiery spokesman and charismatic intellectual of the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon sought to revolutionise the psychiatric clinic.
Fuck off! He wrote fashionable tosh. Since he didn't know Arabic, he could achieve nothing therapeutic in Algeria. Incidentally, his own country was smart enough to remain part of France. The nutter he supported in Algeria was soon toppled by his own people. His widow committed suicide in Algiers.
Before his arrival there in 1953, Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital was a typical example of the so-called Algiers School of colonial ethno-psychiatry, founded on the premise that native Algerians were constitutionally primitive, puerile and stubborn. (Fanon witheringly called this a ‘fertile idea’.)
Why the fuck did the cunt not learn Arabic and Berber?
Drawing on his mentor François Tosquelles’s idea of ‘social therapy’, Fanon worked to transform Blida-Joinville into a place where patients, French and Algerian alike, could ‘rediscover the meaning of freedom’.
They already knew the meaning of freedom.
He set up a Moorish café in the hospital, where patients drank coffee, played cards and enjoyed performances from Arab musicians and storytellers.
Anti-colonialism in Algeria was Islamic. Why not study Islam?
He also laid out a football field, still used today, enthusiastically organising the patients’ matches.
Laying out a football field isn't a high IQ activity.
In an academic article he co-authored with his intern Jacques Azoulay on the experiment at Blida-Joinville, Fanon wrote that ‘a revolutionary attitude was essential, because it was necessary to go from a position in which the supremacy of Western culture was evident, to one of cultural relativism.’
He cold have 'walked the talk' by learning Arabic and converting to Islam.
Fanon increasingly became convinced that, however much it was endowed with a culturally specific sociality, the psychiatric hospital ‘condemns [the patient] to exercise his freedom in the unreal world of fantasy’.
Fanon had studied under Jean Delay who did good useful work on lithium salts- most notably chlorpromazine in 1952. By then Fanon had gone down the rabbit-hole of writing Satrean shite and pretending to be a revolutionary. Delay was Foucault's shrink. Maoists forced him out of the medical profession at the end of the Sixties. French psychiatry is still pretty shitty. Why? It's own indigenous tradition perished and was replaced by mindless pill popping.
The asylum could not de-alienate the mad patient, just as the colonised subject could not be de-alienated through the ‘unreal’, as Fanon called it, world of traditional religion.
Ibn Saud showed the opposite was the case. Traditional religion permitted Afghanistan to kill and expel Soviet or American troops
What was needed was freedom, not its simulacrum.
Everybody gets freedom when Imperialism stops being able to pay for itself.
Only by emancipating the mad person from forced confinement and into the world
and by freeing child rapists so they can kill babies
could the meeting of doctor and patient be ‘an encounter between two freedoms’.
The prison doctor may himself be a prisoner. The question is whether he can cure his fellow prisoner.
In his final days, as the Algerian revolution raged, Fanon set up an out-patient centre in Tunis. He hoped it would serve as a model of mental healthcare for the decolonising societies that were struggling into being – and which, Fanon knew, would have to address their ‘pathology of freedom’.
Fanon went to the US for medical treatment. Sadly, freedom is not immune to the pathology of cancer.
Today, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, founded in 1926,
is utterly shit.
continues to offer low-fee therapy to a limited number of patients.
You get what you pay for. Sadly, it is still shit even if you pay a lot.
It is, according to the directory of the Free Clinics Network, one of more than 250 autonomous clinics in twenty countries which offer low-fee or free psychoanalysis to poor and otherwise marginalised patients.
You can also get very low cost haircuts from trainee barbers. Also, there are free soup kitchens for the homeless.
In Palestine, psychoanalysis has had a long life as a liberatory praxis, one that seeks both to understand and address the psychic ravages of occupation.
But 'pay-for-slay' is more lucrative. Also you get 72 virgins in Heaven even if you blow yourself up before getting close enough to any kaffirs.
The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, one of five Palestinian clinics listed in the Free Clinics Network directory, is the largest mental health service in Gaza.
Oddly, it isn't as crazy or evil as the governing institutions. Still the International Psychoanalysis Associations did condemn Hamas's atrocities.
Despite Israel’s destruction of its centres, and the death and displacement of its staff, the programme continues to provide psychosocial services for a population suffering from trauma that, UNRWA has agreed, is too ‘chronic and unrelenting’ to fit the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. The programme’s interventions focus on Gaza’s children, 96 per cent of whom reported last year that they felt death was imminent, and nearly half that they wanted to die.
Cool! If you want to die, Hamas has a job for you as a suicide bomber.
Even outside the extreme context of a genocidal war,
against Israel which, currently, Israel is winning
attempts to democratise, much less socialise, psychoanalysis – an essentially exacting, intimate
useless
and
mercenarily
drawn-out practice – always struggle with the mismatch between therapeutic supply and neurotic demand.
If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder, get cognitive behaviour therapy. Don't waste your money and time on useless shite.
This is especially true today, with our twinned global crises of ‘care’ and ‘mental health’.
There is no such crisis.
As Freud warned, ‘compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world ... the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible.’
Freud's greatness was to get quite good livelihoods for his acolytes. Alchemists, too, at one time were earning good money and were respected by society. But that was long ago.
Little wonder then that the impulse to synthesise psychoanalysis with radical politics has more often expressed itself in theory than in practice. It is Fanon the diagnostician of colonialism’s psychopathology, rather than Fanon the caring doctor, whom we remember and revere.
He was shit. The people of Martinique understood this. That's why they stayed with France.
‘ For Shulamith Firestone,
she gave up activism quite quickly and returned to doing art. Sadly her mentally illness got very much worse. Still, at least she didn't kill herself, like her brother, and there was a period when she was receiving support from the Visiting Nurse Service. After this stopped, her condition deteriorated. She probably starved to death in her apartment circa 2012.
Freud corrects Marx, revealing that the root cause of all oppression (economic, political, racial, sexual) is ‘the biological family – the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled’.
She got a lot crazier after her parents decided to emigrate to Israel in the mid Seventies.
In turn we come to know, Firestone says, that we require ‘a sexual revolution much larger than ... a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems’.
I agree. All dicks, save those used for purely homosexual purposes, must be chopped off immediately. Start with the biggest dicks and then work your way down to me. That way there will be a brief moment when I have the biggest dick in the world.
For Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalysis tells us that the unconscious is the seat of ideology, its mechanism of interpellation and transmission.
Mitchell was part of the British New Left in the Sixties. Sadly, it turned out that the only person with an ideology was Mrs. Thatcher.
What’s more, because the law of sexual difference is a basic law of human society and thus too of the unconscious (a law against which every unconscious protests), feminism as the study of sexual difference takes us not to the ‘cultural’ edges of politics, but to its very heart.
Mrs. Thatcher got to the very heart of British politics. Blair decided to follow her path. Rishi Sunak & Priti Patel & Kemi Badenoch are her spiritual grandchildren.
For Judith Butler, psychoanalysis helps us see in acts of domination and violence a disavowal of our radical, mutual dependency.
Also, if a kid refuses too invite you to his birthday party he is disavowing radical, mutual, dependency off the sort which permitted you to stab him and steal all his pressies last year.
For Jacqueline Rose, psychoanalysis warns of the perilous temptation to reify the event of trauma
i.e. to join a class action suit so a to get a big settlement. Lawyers can help you get money. Psychoanalysts are parasites.
into the identity of ‘victim’ – perils played out, for Rose, in both Zionism
which prefers vengeance to victimhood
and radical feminism.
which refuses to let rapists into female-only spaces.
While ‘psychoanalysis does not give us a blueprint for political action,’ Rose writes, it is in ‘a privileged position to challenge the dualities (inside/outside, victim/aggressor, real event/fantasy and even good/evil) on which so much traditional political analysis has so often relied’. Psychoanalysis compels us to recognise, as Rose puts it, the ‘infinite complexity of the human mind’ – including the minds of our oppressors.
Lunacy may cause us to recognize crazy shit. But even lunatics think Rose lives in a fantasy world
Unsurprisingly, the contemporary rise of powerful far-right movements and leaders – in the US, UK, Brazil, India, Philippines, Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – has turned many political thinkers, including Richard Seymour,
who had a brief moment of glory when Jeremy Corbyn appeared to represent the future of the Labour party
Dagmar Herzog, Christina Wieland, Claudia Leeb and Joan Braune,
useless tossers
back to the puzzle that preoccupied Reich and other left Freudians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, that of the psychic allure of authoritarian strongmen,
as opposed to weak cunts who permit themselves to be sodomized by goats
blood-and-soil nativism
as opposed to bending over for invaders. Churchill was notorious for this type of Fascist behaviour. Why didn't he just sit quietly sucking off SS officers?
and regressive sexual and familial norms.
i.e. heterosexual couples kissing and cuddling their babies.
And like their 20th-century predecessors, these thinkers find themselves reaching not just for terms such as aggression, revenge and anxiety, but also desire, phantasy and pleasure.
So, useless shite which was known as such 100 years ago is being regurgitated by shitheads who teach nonsense.
... in politics, we always arrive at the vexing question: how to put one’s knowledge into practice?
Mrs. Thatcher knew the answer to that question. Win elections. Take the top job. Implement what you have learnt from Friedman & Hayek.
How to pull off the feat of simultaneously describing the world and changing it?
By quitting the Academy and getting elected to high office. Harold Wilson started off as a don.
Marx was wrong
about everything because he was stupid and ignorant
to suggest that so far the philosophers had only tried to do the former.
they hadn't tried to understand the world. They had talked ignorant bollocks.
In fact, philosophers have long tried, and try still, to do both.
No. They teach nonsense to cretins. Smart peeps don't do Philosophy. The thing has turned into a branch of Grievance Studies. Amia is a Professor because she is a dickless darkie.
But philosophers tend to operate on the assumption, inherited from Plato, that knowledge of the Good is not just necessary but more or less sufficient for virtuous action – that, put differently, most wrongdoing comes from moral ignorance.
In other words, philosophers have shit for brains. Wrongdoing comes from either bad mechanism design- i.e. the thing isn't punished properly- or impulsiveness, addiction, irrationality, or just flat out being a bad hombre.
If this is your starting point, then it makes sense to spend your time coming up with arguments to show that, say, gross inequality is unjust, that settler-occupation is impermissible, that none of us has the right to destroy the Earth for our personal gain.
It is unjust that Amia get paid good money for talking bollocks at a time when plenty of lunatics are saying even stupider things.
If, however, you take a different view of things – a more psychoanalytic view, on which all sorts of mechanisms of resistance, defence and disavowal might get between people’s beliefs and their actions – then the philosopher’s quest to change the world by morally enlightening it will seem foolhardy.
It is obvious that people do bad things if they like doing so and can get away with it. The solution is 'mechanism design'. It isn't saying 'rapists don't understand that rape is bad. Once we make them understand this, they will stop raping.'
Psychoanalysis is not in the business of moral enlightenment, at least not directly. Its knowledge is descriptive rather than prescriptive: about the way things are, rather than what they ought to be. For those who have read their Marx, this is already a step in the right direction – that is, in the direction of a theory capable of producing change.
No. Marxism is an economic theory. Cheating the bourgeoisie out of a little money under the pretence of 'therapy' is no more consequential than cheating them by pretending you can put them in touch with their dead relatives.
For example, the politically important question, surely, is not whether Israel’s genocide is a grotesque moral abomination
It isn't. It is small potatoes compared to the War on Terror.
– every Palestinian already knows it is –
only to the extent that every Muslims knows kaffirs are worthy of death
but what possibilities exist for bringing it, and the state of occupation that produced it, to an end.
None. Israel has nukes. If Muslims succeed in killing them, lots of those Muslims will die.
To answer that question we need a better description of the Palestinian situation.
I just gave it to you. Jews are smart. We don't want to piss them off. Jewish terrorism will make Islamic terrorism look like a fucking walk in the park.
We need what the Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall
useless tosser
called a ‘conjunctural’ analysis: a descriptive mapping of the forces
these cunts can't map shit
– economic, political, social, ideological
fuck do low IQ shitheads understand about econ?
– at play in a given historical moment,
the present historical moment involves people who can 'map' economic or political forces getting very very rich or very very politically powerful or both very rich and very powerful. They aren't teaching cretins for a modest wage.
a mapping that can be used to identify possibilities for, and obstacles to, practical intervention.
I suppose it is cheaper to let nutters teach cretins rather than medicate them or keep them in padded cells.
Psychoanalysis, if you accept its basic power to describe aspects of reality,
i.e. if you are stupid and crazy
can in principle contribute to conjunctural analysis.
to the same extent as alchemy or astrology
But for Hall, not just any true description of the conjuncture will do. It may be that Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people
some of them. There are plenty more in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria etc. Sadly, they haven't made themselves very popular.
is in part driven by a history of unmetabolised trauma,
Zionism was associated with the trauma of Tzarist pogroms but a lot of its sponsors were wealthy British or German or French Jews.
a trauma that is deliberately reproduced by Israel’s culture industry
as opposed to the BDS industry
and weaponised by the Israeli state.
this woman weaponizes stupidity in between eating her own shit.
What follows? Would knowing this help the Palestinian liberation movement identify sites of intervention, decide which levers to pull?
Their propaganda has been quite successful. Their big problem is internecine conflict and a kleptocratic leadership.
Or, on the contrary, would it lead to a strategy with unintended consequences – the reification, say, of the Nazi Holocaust as a singular, hyper-trauma that excuses in advance any atrocity produced in its name?
The Nazi Holocaust was silly. Genocide is more cheaply done by mobs with agricultural implements.
The difficulty is that psychoanalytic knowledge is always knowledge of human vulnerability,
gullibility. Charlatans prey on the stupid.
of the helpless infant within each person, however outwardly powerful they may be. While he was giving haven, inside the Blida-Joinville hospital,
he was there for only three years- '53 to '56
to the Algerian rebels of the National Liberation Front
founded in '54. He joined in '56 after he resigned. It is ludicrous to suppose that a darkie was allowed to shelter Arab rebels in a Government institution.
Fanon was also treating the French servicemen who were involved in torturing them.
No. He was treating lunatics. Torturers were getting medals and promotions.
For Fanon, as his biographer Adam Shatz writes, the French torturers too ‘were victims of a colonial system whose dirty work they were required to perform’.
Rapists are victims too.
But this did not stop Fanon from arguing, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), that ‘for the colonised, life can only materialise from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.’
His cadaver started rotting quickly enough. But that was in Capitalist America where he went to get medical treatment.
Decolonisation, defined by the demand that
native kleptocrats take over and turn the country to shit
‘the last shall be first,’ required an inversion of the dichotomy between coloniser and colonised; the humanity of the colonised subject must be absolutely affirmed, and the colonist enemy be made to suffer the symbolic and material terror that he so long perpetrated.
Whites and Jews left quickly enough. Their material standard of living tended to improve. Being a pied noir sucked ass compared to working in the Peugeot factory and getting to buy fancy shoes. But Algerian Muslims too soon found that life in France was better.
It is true that Fanon longed for a humanist future, in which race was transcended and all men recognised one another as equals.
No. He longed to get cured of cancer in the US. He didn't give a shit whether the oncologist was white or black.
But this future had to be achieved through a violent confrontation of radical unequals in the present.
It was achieved by selling Peugeot cars and paying the spot price for petroleum. Colonialism was a waste of blood and treasure.
The psychoanalytic gaze, by its nature levelling, egalitarian and humane, could theoretically illuminate colonialism. But it could not, Fanon believed, provide the practical attitude required for the actual work of decolonisation.
i.e. killing peeps. But, it turned out, killing peeps didn't matter. Money is what makes the world go round. It took a lot of money spent on cancer research to greatly improve outcomes for leukemia sufferers.
By contrast, money and time spent of Psychoanalysis was completely wasted.
For Freud, psychoanalysis was the third ‘impossible’ profession, along with teaching and governing –
teaching STEM subjects is both possible and desirable. Governing isn't a profession. It is a vocation. But though many are called, few are chosen.
the profession of politics. In all three, he said, ‘one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results’.
This could also be said of taking a dump or dropping off to sleep. Sometimes you can do neither though would dearly like to.
For Freud, it made sense to think of politics as akin to teaching and analysis;
Politics is about solving collective action problems. Teaching and therapy and 'rival' & 'excludable' services. Freud was stupid.
turn-of-the-century liberalism also endeavoured to form rational and free persons out of the raw matter of human beings.
No. It endeavoured to maintain 'checks & balances' on the branches of government. It failed. Total war means total mobilization of factors of production
But following the Second World War, liberalism grew wary of the project of subject-formation,
Which is like saying 'the Pope grew wary of the project of forming a Satanic Soviet Republic
seeing it as the path to authoritarianism, the avoidance of which came to be both liberalism’s central aim and its chief selling point.
No. Liberalism was about trying to roll back 'Wagner's Law'- i.e. the Government's share of the GNP. That's what got Reagan & Thatcher elected. It's what Trump's DOGE is about.
For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism,
Socialism. The silly man didn't get that, because of Knightian Uncertainty, we are already behind a veil of ignorance which is why what we choose is collective insurance not lexically preferencing of the needs of the poorest.
Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by
talking ipse dixit bollocks
reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from 1955 Rawls
who didn't understand Harsanyi's 1953 paper or its 1955 elucidation
wrote:
'What disturbs us about psychoanalysis ... is that it suggests ... that the self is a system of powers which doesn’t know itself in vital respects;
Nothing wrong with that. Evolution forbids a Momus window into the heart. We need to be ignorant of at least some of our motivations because otherwise we can be 'hacked' by a predator or parasite.
although it is significant that for Freud the self as a system of full conscious powers was the goal to be won. What common sense takes for granted he regarded as a rare and difficult achievement. Thus what psychoanalysis might lead us to think is that people are not really, or not fully, persons.
Sadly, Psychoanalysis does not lead us to think. It is stupid shit.
For Rawls, to treat one’s fellow citizen as an analyst might treat her patient – to diagnose, say, their Zionism as resulting from a state-cultivated trauma,
or their anti-Zionism as resulting from the suspicion that Jews chopped off their dicks and forced them to sit down to pee
or their hostility towards immigration as expressing an infantile drive for safety and control
babies aren't hostile to immigrants though they may try to bite our noses or throw away our glasses. Also 'infantile drives' have to do with grabbing things and putting them into their mouths. Middle Management has a drive for Health & Safety & Cost Control. That's one reason few middle-managers are babies.
– is to cease thinking of them as a person, and so to abandon an axiom of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy has to do with statistics & game theory. People have to be seen as part of large statistical classes based on strategic alliances.
There is something to this.
There really isn't.
If we were all to engage one another all the time in the spirit of what Paul Ricoeur called – thinking of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche – the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, we would drive one another quite literally mad.
No. We simply wouldn't transact very much business. There are plenty of 'low trust' societies. What is lost is the possibility of rapid catch up growth or better mechanism design.
Social life would become impossible.
No. It would simply be cramped and restricted.
The contemporary culture war gives us a glimpse of this prospect.
Trump won that war. Get over it.
Psychoanalysis has no truck with the crude reductionism involved in saying that someone believes such and such ‘just because’ they are a white, cis, straight bourgeois male – any more than because they are a queer, brown, female metropolitan elite.
But it does have truck with the crude reductionism involved in charging good money for worthless shit.
(Indeed, one way of putting the core insight of psychoanalysis is that none of us is simply any of the categories under which we fall, no matter how much we may consciously identify with it.)
If that is a core insight, so is understanding that you are not a cat even if you occasionally say 'woof woof'.
But in its basic imperative to read people as determined by more than just the reasons they consciously avow, psychoanalysis shares something with this reductionist reflex. It is for this reason that the queer literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, observed that the choice to engage in a hermeneutics of suspicion is ‘ethically very fraught’ and should be seen as a ‘strategic and local decision, not necessarily a categorical imperative’.
It is seen as stupid shit done by low IQ shitheads teaching nonsense while pretending to themselves that they have some political role or relevance.
Freud, though one of the founding fathers of paranoid reading,
he read Judge Schreber's memoir of his mental illness and came up with an ever crazier theory which posited Moses as a priest of Akhenaten.
would have agreed with Sedgwick.
No. He thought morality was the direct heir of the Oedipus complex but discouraged the suspicion that he was a charlatan and the Oedipus complex doesn't actually exist.
In a footnote to his 1931 essay ‘Female Sexuality’, in which he argues that the girl’s envy of the boy’s penis is pivotal to her subject-formation, he wrote:
'It is to be anticipated that men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that such notions spring from the ‘masculinity complex’ of the male and are designed to justify on theoretical grounds his innate inclination to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of psychoanalytic argumentation reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dostoevsky’s famous ‘knife that cuts both ways’. The opponents of those who argue in this way will on their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision.'
Doestoevsky was saying that psychological analysis can be used to support any thesis whatsoever. In other words, the thing is fraudulent. As the leader of a Ponzi scheme, Freud was saying 'the buck stops with me. I'm the fucking Pope, mate. The alternative is every analyst saying something different. That could cause the market to collapse because 'second opinions' will diverge.
Psychoanalysis is a knife that ‘cuts both ways’. My attempt to psychoanalyse you can itself be psychoanalysed. The Freudian can be put on the couch, just as the Marxist can be accused of dressing up his envy as class consciousness. When this happens, we arrive at a dialectical impasse; psychoanalysis then goes limp as a ‘weapon of controversy’.
Socrates defined philosophy as being the field where just as good an argument for or against a thesis can be made. Dialectical impasses are resolved by verification- e.g. empirical confirmation.
In the therapeutic setting, the patient’s resistance is carefully managed, its energy redirected towards self-knowledge.
No. It is directed at ensuring the sucker keeps shelling out money.
But in politics, where there is no mutually agreed ‘patient’ and ‘doctor’, it is less clear that psychoanalysis has anything to tell us, in such moments, about how to go on.
Politics is about solving collective action problems. It has nothing to do with mental illness of any type.
In their recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler attempts to psychoanalyse the global hysteria over ‘gender ideology’.
There was no hysteria. The thing was a nuisance and damaged those woke politicians who catered to it.
In a chapter on trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler does not just make the now familiar but crucial point that such feminists, whatever their intentions, give material and ideological succour
which was useless because feminists have shit for brains and everybody hates them- especially wimmin.
to a patriarchal regime that harms all women, especially lesbians.
Judith's dad sold her for a couple of goats. Amia's father insisted on getting paid in sacred Hindu cows which is why he wasn't able to get her off his hands.
(I say ‘whatever their intentions’, but surely many know better. After Trump’s second inauguration, Hadley Freeman and Janice Turner
both so utterly useless they wrote for the Guardian
respectively called Trump a ‘feminist kween’ and ‘feminist hero’.) Taking J.K. Rowling, a
billionaire. Not a
survivor of intimate partner violence, as a case study, Butler identifies a ‘phantasmic sliding’ from a personal experience of male violence to the idea that all men, or all people with penises, are violent, and then to the idea that trans women must pose an existential threat to cis women.
Especially if they are convicted rapists.
‘Violent crimes are real. Sexual violence is real,’ Butler writes. ‘But living in the repetitive temporality of trauma’ does not produce an adequate account of social reality ...
Butler wouldn't know social reality if it bit her in the leg
None of us was violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way.
If it feels that way, you are mentally ill.
To refuse to recognise trans women as women because one is afraid that they are really men and, hence, potentially rapists, is to let the traumatic scenario loose on one’s description of reality, to flood an undeserving group of people with one’s unbridled terror and fear.
In other words, it is the stock in trade of woke nutters who, if they are not worried about getting raped by Trump, are screaming their tits off because of Gaza.
As I read this bit of Butler’s book what I wanted to know was not whether the analysis was correct,
because it obviously wasn't
but how it would be received.
by whom? Anybody who mattered? No.
Would trans-exclusionary feminists welcome it as a dialectical shift, seeing in it a refusal to write them off as moral monsters?
One may welcome a dialectical shit if one is constipated but dialectical shifts don't matter unless the thing is being done by a Politburo which can send you to a Gulag.
An attempt to empathise with their justified anxiety about male violence,
especially if they weigh 300 pounds, have bulging muscles, and are as ugly as shit
even if not an endorsement of the politics in which that anxiety results?
Being a feminist means having to empathize with elderly spinsters who think George Clooney is hiding under their bed and is planning to pleasure them with his tongue.
No. Kathleen Stock called Butler’s account ‘a compendium of smears’ and summed up the argument as follows:
'If you are anti-gender ... then you are very probably a patriarchal racist Christian nationalist nutjob, and also secretly gay. She is probing your unconscious, remember, and understands you better than you do yourself. Or perhaps – and this is about as charitable as it gets – you are simply a naive and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about gay marriage and LGBTQ+ library books acts as a psychic substitute for reasonable fears about climate change and neoliberalism.'
Also, you don't have a dick and have to sit down to pee. That's why you don't have a brain and have to go in for Gender Studies or saying boo to Neo-Liberalism or other low IQ shite of that sort.
Striking a similar note, the philosopher
i.e. low IQ shithead
Nina Power wrote that Butler’s ‘diagnostic and psychoanalytic’ project is
low IQ shite?
'remarkably handy if one wants to accuse people of holding beliefs they don’t actually hold.
Nobody gives a shit what beliefs you hold. That wasn't always true. At one time there was the Spanish Inquisition.
'Thus the pope, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, mothers on message boards, doctors and psychologists, and whoever else you don’t like are all fundamentally bearers of the same bad thought. They have no good reasons for their position, because all their motives are unconscious (and bad).'
They are all rapists and are currently hiding under my bed hoping to pleasure me with their tongues the moment I drop off to sleep.
It would presumably not help to persuade Stock or Power to point out that their resistance to Butler’s diagnosis would, for Freud, hardly be evidence of its falsity
Telling Freud he had shit for brains was taken him by him to be evidence that he was a freakin' genius.
– and indeed, on the contrary, that it might be a sign that we are approaching what Freud would have called the ‘pathogenic nucleus’ of trans-exclusionary feminism.
Which is just feminism. Women are very angry that policies which make life better for women also help men including chicks with dicks.
In the ugly war over ‘the trans question’, it would seem that ‘the use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision’.
Because 'analysis' is stupid shit.
For Stock and Power are correct about this much: psychoanalysis does not presume that we in general know our own minds.
It has shit for brains.
Psychoanalysis is not ‘charitable’ in the philosophical sense (it is telling, I think, that both Stock and Power are trained philosophers)
i.e. as stupid as shit
of assuming the maximal rationality and self-knowledge of the other.
These cunts have zero rationality or self-knowledge.
If psychoanalysis involves charity,
it would be given away for free
it is the charity of empathy, not presumed rationality: a willingness to see, even in the most rebarbative aspects of human behaviour, an intelligible response to our shared condition.
The condition of having shit for brains is not widely shared outside this lady's intellectual ghetto.
With the substitution of empathy for charity comes the danger of what we might call ‘hermeneutical domination’:
i.e. the danger that people will put words in your mouth. Tell them to fuck off. That puts and end to the danger.
that in the name of liberating the other, we will imprison her in our favoured interpretation, insisting on the rightness of our diagnosis in the teeth of her violent resistance.
In which case her resistance isn't violent enough. If she doesn't want to use a knife or gun, she could just shit herself and then run around trying to smear her shit on those doing the diagnosing.
This danger has animated the critics of psychoanalysis, and worried some of its practitioners, from the start. Freud’s Hungarian associate Sándor Ferenczi, in his 1928 paper ‘The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique’, diagnosed ‘over-keenness in making interpretations’ as ‘one of the infantile diseases of the analyst’.
It was also the senile disease of the analyst as well as everything in between.
The remedy, Ferenczi said, was for the analyst to cultivate intellectual ‘modesty’ and ‘tact’.
Don't show patients your dick and say it is taller than the fucking leaning tower of Pisa.
It was Fanon’s growing anxiety about the ‘master/slave, prisoner/jailer dialectic’ of the traditional therapeutic relationship that led him to abandon the asylum as a model of care.
He resigned and moved to Tunisia after getting death threats from the OAS.
In his History of Madness, Foucault condemns Freud for ‘freeing’ the madman from the asylum, only to arrogate, to the single person of the analyst, ‘all [the asylum’s] powers’ to watch, judge, punish and induce confession. Freud, Foucault writes, thereby ‘amplified’ the doctor’s ‘virtues as worker of miracles, preparing an almost divine status for his omnipotence’.
Foucault was one sick puppy. Fortunately, his psychiatrist was less shit than Fanon.
Rawls, as we have seen, thought psychoanalysis incompatible with the respect we owe each other as ‘persons’:
We owe known to shitheads who teach nonsense.
a game of unreason that had to be kept out of the public square. Stephen Frosh, an academic and former clinical psychologist at the Tavistock, observes that psychoanalysis ‘accentuates the power of the therapist to such a degree that it appears to validate authoritarianism’.
Change your therapist if the fucker gets above himself.
Nowhere do we find more anxiety about psychoanalysis as an authoritarian practice than in the work of Jacques Lacan, Freud’s most influential interpreter.
Lacan said Freud didn't aim at curing anything. He was right. What he didn't say was Freud aimed at getting paid.
Lacan both defended Freud and, to do so, radically rewrote him. Using the same terms as Rawls, Lacan insists that psychoanalysis ‘respects the person’.
Nobody respected La-con.
For this reason, he says, it would be ‘paradoxical’ for the analyst to ‘aim to break down the subject’s resistance’ in order to secure his acquiescence to a favoured construction. Lacan insists that psychoanalysis, as Freud both understood and practised it, refuses hermeneutical domination, the ‘complete brutality’ of the ‘inquisitorial’ style of analysis, the ‘violence that speech can bring with it’. In Freud, Lacan protests somewhat too loudly, we find not the will to interpretative power, but ‘a more nuanced attitude, that’s to say, more humane’.
Taking money from the gullible is very humane.
Underwriting this defence of Freud is Lacan’s transformation of psychoanalysis, from an archaeological science
not a science. The thing was a stupid cult.
that seeks to recover or reconstruct the actual, infantile crisis that prompted the subject’s repression, into a structural endeavour that aims to articulate, and thereby reconfigure, the analysand’s relationship to the other’s desire.
Hopefully, the cunt wants to be cheated. Also, thanks to 'transference', she definitely wants to suck my cock.
The ‘correctness’ of a psychoanalytic interpretation is no longer primarily a matter of its historical accuracy, a matter of tracing the true origins of what Lacan calls the analysand’s ‘fundamental fantasy’. What truly matters is the productivity of the analyst’s intervention – that the analyst’s speech, and his silence, allows him to embody, for the analysand, the enigmatic lack around which her desire circulates; and that, in turn, the analysand is prompted to speak that which is currently unspeakable for her.
In other words, a verbose crazy cunt wants to put words in the mouths of the poor shmucks who pay him.
In this schema, the analyst transmits no expert hermeneutical knowledge or aetiological discovery to the analysand. On the contrary, the analyst must refuse, Lacan says, the epistemic authority that the analysand ascribes to him, abdicating the role of ‘the subject supposed to know’.
Coz the dude is a stupid charlatan.
In fact, the Lacanian analyst does know many things: that desire is by its nature unsatisfiable;
It isn't. There's only so much you can eat or fuck.
that the ego is a fragile mask for an essentially divided self;
It is essentially united though there may be some possible world where the person has multiple personality disorder or is half dolphin.
that the analysand must come to assume responsibility for the structure of her desire, seeing it not as an alien imposition of contingent circumstance but as something she chose.
You chose to waste your time and money talking to a fucking shithead. Live with it.
But this knowledge is to be operationalised, never performed. Indeed, the analyst must insist on a Socratic self-effacement:
Socrates wasn't self-effacing. That's why his people sentenced him to death.
he knows ‘nothing other than his [own] desire’.
i.e. he knows nothing. He just wants to be seen as smart.
For Lacan, the analyst’s theoretical grasp of psychoanalysis is less important than his practical know-how, his ability to ask the right question in the right way at the right moment.
It's a good idea to consult a Psychiatrist with Medical training. Your symptoms may have a physical cause.
This practical ability, Lacan says, is akin not to philosophical knowledge, but to the knowledge evinced by wise statesmen: ‘If Themistocles and Pericles were great men, it was because they were good psychoanalysts.’
No. They were good at solving 'collective action problems'- for a time. Themistocles had to take refuge with the Persians.
Lacan thus contains the threat of hermeneutical domination by reimagining the analytic task.
Meanwhile, actual Scientists were finding medicines which benefitted millions of mentally ill people.
In making his case, he also downplays – we might say resists – what we know of Freud’s actual clinical practice, which often shows a man, as his biographer Peter Gay put it, engulfed by a ‘rage to cure’.
He wanted to get paid and build up his practice.
That rage is on disturbing display in Freud’s case study of ‘Dora’, an 18-year-old patient whose real name was Ida Bauer. During their sessions, Freud reports barraging Bauer with his diagnosis of her hysterical symptoms: namely, that the young woman was in love with her father’s friend ‘Herr K.’, whose sexual aggressions she had begun enduring at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and which she had violently rejected. Bauer’s anger at her father – for his long-standing and flagrant affair with Herr K.’s wife, and his willingness to sacrifice his own daughter to Herr K. in sexual exchange – was, for Freud, in fact an Oedipal desire, reawakened by Bauer’s repression of her love for Herr K.
Freud was paid to take this course. I
Freud took Bauer’s repeated refusals of this interpretation as confirmation of it, just as Herr K. had taken Bauer’s repeated rejection of his sexual advances for a secret ‘yes’. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester write that Freud’s readings of Bauer were ‘like erect, violating members requiring her assent’.
Whereas the dude was simply doing what he had been paid to do. Just put out to Herr Kerr already. Don't rock the boat.
As he pressed ‘himself on Ida’, they ask, ‘what did she feel – beneath his outer garb of civility, concern, acute comments and unexpected surprises – but the penetrating hardness of his theory?’
Women really aren't obsessed with 'penetrating hardness'. On the other hand, they may have very large electric dildos which throb and pulsate.
After eleven weeks of this ordeal, Bauer quit her treatment, which Freud interpreted as his tiresome patient’s desire to enact her revenge on him as a substitute-father. Bauer then took matters into her own hands, confronting Herr and Frau K. about their respective transgressions. Both husband and wife admitted the truth of the young woman’s allegations, and her symptoms temporarily subsided.
She converted to Christianity, got married and had a kid who become an Opera conductor in San Francisco. She survived two world wars and died in New York in 1945.
In criticising Freud’s treatment of Bauer, I do not mean to suggest that his interpretation was mistaken,
It was. Her daddy was paying him. At least he wasn't asked to sign off on locking her up in a loony bin.
at least not wholly: that there was no part of the young girl that had been excited by Herr K.’s attentions or that her feelings about her father’s affair were simply ones of moralised judgment. Even so, we should press Freud on his assumption that the actual realisation of the girl’s phantasies would bring her satisfaction, would not in fact be emotionally disastrous for her. In a famous paper on child sexual abuse, Ferenczi writes that ‘if more love or love of a different kind from that which they need is forced on ... children,’ it may ‘lead to pathological consequences in the same way as the frustration or withdrawal of love’.
14 year old girls don't want to have babies or abortions. They want to rise by their own efforts.
Might it not be the horror of a phantasy coming real that made the adolescent Bauer react with such disgust to Herr K.’s sexual advances – rather than, as Freud insists, her jealousy that he had given similar attentions to the governess? And if so, isn’t Freud’s suggestion – that ‘the only possible solution for all the parties concerned’ was for Herr K. to divorce his wife and marry Bauer, leaving Frau K. to Bauer’s father – an indication of an all too literal understanding, on Freud’s part, of the workings of phantasy?
The reason Freud's writings were useful was because Doctors could read between the lines. There's stuff you have to do to build up your practice. It isn't always ethical and, often, you do more harm than good. But, maybe- just maybe- the therapy you provide isn't a con. Some scientific basis for it will be found in the distant future. The odd thing was, something like this did exist for, Freud's crazier pal, Fleiss.
Later in his career, Freud would warn analysts not to ram interpretations down a patient’s throat, counselling something like Ferenczi’s ‘tact’. ‘As a rule,’ Freud wrote shortly before he died, ‘we put off telling [the patient] of a construction or explanation till he himself has so nearly arrived at it that only a single step remains to be taken, though that step is in fact the decisive synthesis.’
Don't piss off paying patients. Even with the indigent, you need to be careful. They may kick your head in.
But Freud never renounced the constellation of ideas that Lacan plays down on his behalf: that the analyst has expert knowledge which the patient lacks, knowledge not just of analytic technique, but of the true origins and meaning of the patient’s neurosis; that it is part of the analyst’s task to help the patient acquire this aetiological knowledge for herself; and that, more often than not, the patient will refuse this knowledge, though it is precisely what is needed to set her free.
In other words, Freud believed he was a smart dude practicing proper Medicine.
For Freud, successful analysis was nearly impossible. If the analyst was going to cure, he required a formidable suite of psychic, epistemic and ethical virtues. Perfect normality was an ‘ideal fiction’ that even the analyst could only approximate.
Patients are 'cash cows'. Curing them kills off a revenue stream.
Nonetheless, the analyst required ‘a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness’, and indeed ‘some kind of superiority, so that ... he can act as a model for his patient’.
Don't shit yourself and, hopefully, your patients won't shit themselves. Couches are expensive to clean.
It is hard not to bristle at that phrase, ‘some kind of superiority’. Hearing it, we should think – again, insofar as we are thinking politically – of psychoanalysis as a materially instantiated practice,
i.e. some guys made money doing it
one that has so often been recruited for projects of social repression and normalisation, especially of female and queer sexuality.
Not often at all. It really isn't the case that every other person you meet is secretly a psychiatrist keeping you under observation. Also, nobody really cares that you are dating a wallaby unless it is currently married to Rupert Murdoch.
Lacan’s horror of the analyst’s enactment of epistemic ‘superiority’ and hermeneutical prowess, and his disavowal of such claims in Freud, has its mirror in liberalism’s horror of claims to privileged knowledge on the part of a designated sect, class or nation – claims, as Rawls says, that destroy the ‘game of reasoning’.
Fuck off! Rawls did claim to have privileged knowledge of this sort on the basis of his failure to understand Harsanyi's thought experiment.
For Rawls, the remedy is to meet reason only with reason.
He met stupid shit with stupider shit. The fucker didn't understand that risk averse people buy insurance. They don't agree to a distributional rule which features moral hazard.
But for Lacan, this would amount to meeting the other’s ego with one’s own, when it is precisely the ego – our sense of ourselves as unified, coherent wholes – that needs to be ruptured.
No. Nobody needs their sense of self to be ruptured or raped or reamed.
Reason is not to be met with reason, but with punctuation, silence and what Lacan calls ‘oracular speech’, gnomic utterances that disrupt the analysand’s smooth understanding of herself.
Unless they do it to you first.
‘You say you cannot be safe so long as Palestinians want you dead. What dead do you want?’
You want the guys actively trying to kill you to go bye bye.
There is a difference, I want to suggest, between allowing a rational fear of domination to shape our politics, and making that fear the totality of our politics.
Because there is a difference with things which shape a thing and the totality of the thing itself.
When we think of hermeneutical knowledge and its assertion, and the political risks such assertions carry with them, we should not think only of doctors and scientists and other custodians of expert discourses, whom Adrienne Rich called ‘the makers and sayers of culture’, and who are always presumptively male and Western and educated.
Mrs. Thatcher & J.K Rowling changed this country. Shitheads teaching nonsense to imbeciles have had zero impact.
To do so would be to abandon something vital to any liberatory politics,
i.e. nonsense
namely the recognition that knowledge often resides precisely where ideology says it is least likely to be found.
up your asshole
Or, as Hegel put it, that it is the slave who knows the master best.
Not if the master has an Estate Manager in which case the slave may not know the master at all.
In 1931, Ferenczi wrote some notes published under the extraordinary title ‘Aphoristic Remarks on the Theme of Being Dead – Being a Woman’.
He died soon enough. Sadly, he didn't turn into a woman and fuck himself to death.
He asks whether becoming a woman is a process of traumatic adaptation, a ‘partial death’. If so, could this explain ‘the higher intellectual faculties’ found in women?
By then, there were plenty of genuine female Scientists and Mathematicians all over the place. Sadly, 'higher intellectual faculties' could not be found amongst Freudian frauds.
‘In the moment of the trauma,’ Ferenczi writes,
'some sort of omniscience about the world associated with a correct estimation of the proportions of their own and foreign powers and a shutting out of any falsification by emotivity (i.e. pure objectivity, pure intelligence), makes the person in question ... more or less clairvoyant ... the instant of dying – if perhaps after a hard struggle the inevitability of death has been recognised and accepted – is associated with that timeless and spaceless omniscience.'
The fucker was as mad as a hatter. Oddly, it wasn't because he was syphilitic. Maybe it was a side-effect of pernicious amnesia.
We should hesitate to go all the way with Ferenczi.
Especially if he has syphilis. Second base is far enough.
Trauma is no guarantee of pure objectivity or omniscience,
there is no connection between these things
as indeed the Nakba and everything that has followed, including the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, remind us. It would be a dangerous romanticism to think that the Gaza genocide will result only in Palestinians seeing Israelis with greater psychic and moral clarity. Ferenczi himself thought that the same traumatic mechanism that produces women’s ‘omniscience’ also produced the capacity to take pleasure in renunciation and self-destruction – the pathology of female masochism.
If you aren't actively fisting yourself as your read shite like this, you aren't getting your money's worth.
But surely there is something to the idea that some people, by virtue of the place they are allotted in the world, do see things more clearly than others – indeed, sometimes see others more clearly than those others see themselves.
No. Some people may be better at seeing stuff and thus may be put in particular positions but it is not the position that matters. It is the skill or talent the person has.
We can ask:
if we are as stupid as shit
what is lost, ethically and politically, when this something is abandoned,
there is no such thing
so that we can uphold politics as a ‘game of reasoning’?
Nobody does that. Actual politics is about solving collective action problems. It isn't some shite taught by cretins to credential craving imbeciles.
Is this game guaranteed to end in dignity?
There is no fucking game.
Can the occupier be trusted to know himself?
Amia can't be trusted to say anything sensible.
Psychoanalytic practice is essentially
fraudulent
dyadic, a collaboration between patient and analyst, however asymmetric or uneasy, and however many others (mother, father, society, Other) may invisibly populate the analytic scene. In this sense, the use of psychoanalysis to illuminate politics – in theoretical texts by Butler or Rose, Fanon or Firestone
has failed miserably.
– is, strictly speaking, not an instance of psychoanalysis, but a derivative application of its theory.
which failed miserably.
In such cases, the subject of the analysis cannot speak back; ‘collaboration’ becomes an effective impossibility. Resistance is almost guaranteed.
No. There is no fucking Fanonian resistance to the Algerian regime. Nor has Butler and her acolytes gone underground to overthrow Trump's evil regime.
It follows that the political import of psychoanalytic texts
is zero
rarely comes from any transformation in the psyches of the subjects they analyse Рfrom emancipating the minds of far-right populists, climate-denialists or g̩nocidaires.
nobody can emancipate Amia from stupidity and uselessness.
As political theory rather than praxis, psychoanalysis can do other things. It can help us better understand how the world, including our oppressors, works,
provided they are imaginary
and so what we might do about it, and them; and what wishes we might have for collective life, and which of these the reality principle demands we set aside.
Just say 'ban dicks. They cause RAPE!' and be done with it.
Perhaps it is churlish to ask psychoanalysis to do more. But it is important, I think, to see that the distinctive connection between knowledge and freedom that Freud drew, operating through the crucial mechanism of the second-person address, is – in the standard way of bringing psychoanalysis to bear on politics – no longer at work.
It was never at work. True, it did sneak on to the factory floor for a crafty wank, but it was detected and ejected quickly enough.
This is not a criticism. But it may contain a warning. In a moment in which psychoanalytic theory is returning to the cultural centre,
It really isn't. Amia is stuck in a time warp.
but psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice remains exceedingly rare, it is very easy to forget what underwrites Freud’s original promise to liberate:
Stupidity. Ignorance. Fraud.
that is, a conversational encounter between self and other.
even if the other works in a call centre.
So too is it easy to forget that, from the psychoanalytic point of view, the will to greater and greater theoretical mastery can itself be a form of resistance to the real work of practical transformation.
No it can't. You can't resist imaginary shite.
Indeed, I find it striking how few thinkers propose to bring psychoanalysis into politics as a technical craft (the ‘talking cure’) that might make us more effective political agents, more endowed with the judgment and tact required to engage our fellow humans, especially when they are ensnared in bad ideology.
If the thing worked, it would have been used to flip Islamists in Guantanamo Bay. The thing doesn't work. It is sheer magical thinking.
The contributors to the 2020 Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory apply a psychoanalytic lens to illuminate contemporary political phenomena, including populism, racism, nationalism, capitalism and neoliberalism. In an essay on the climate crisis, Sally Weintrobe
who is as old as fuck and twice as useless
observes that:
'disavowal is disavowal.
Nobody gives a shit about what useless tossers vow or disavow.
There is no talking to someone who does not want, is not able, or is not ready to take something in.
Sure there is. Just keep telling them they are stupid and useless and should just fuck off and die already.
Climate communicators seem to forget that when they argue over the best way to tell people about climate change.
Scream your tits off. It helps if you are neuro-diverse dwarf like Greta Thurnberg.
The implication is if they could just find the ‘right way’ to break the news, then people would take the subject seriously.
The right way has to do with incentives. There's money- lots of money- in green energy.
Psychoanalysts are familiar with this issue in the clinical setting, aware that insight, while it can be helped to form, can never be ‘imparted’ from analyst to analysand.
Because the thing is a fraud. If it weren't, stuff could get 'imparted'- stuff like 'take your fucking meds, you fucking retard.'
It is always a spontaneous, owned, creative construction of the analysand that involves a radical shift in perspective.
These useless tossers are obsessed with radical shifts. But what they are is non-radical shits.
This seems an important corrective. A friend of mine who has worked in climate advocacy for decades calls the idea that you can just tell people the facts and their behaviour will change ‘the lie of the 1990s’.
A friend of Amia is bound to have a very low IQ. Any 'work' they did was bound to be counter-productive.
Talk of ecological apocalypse,
is not as credible as the notion that immigrants will cook and eat our cat
when global capitalism has alienated most of us from almost any sense of social belonging
Amia is a nowhere person. Whatever social group she belongs to is useless and shitty.
and collective power, is more likely to deepen impotence than it is to enliven agency. So it would be welcome were Weintrobe – a practising psychoanalyst – to offer guidance on the way to achieve ‘a radical shift in perspective’ in those who currently deny reality. But Weintrobe does not offer this.
Because she is as old as fuck and as stupid as shit.
Instead she gives a theoretical account of the relationship between climate disavowal and neoliberalism:
Neoliberalism is cool with green energy. Lots of money to be made. Energy markets would be less volatile. Also, there is the possibility that you can disintermediate illiberal petroleum producers.
a perfectly plausible account, but not one that responds to the practical problem with which she opens – and on which our collective fate as a species, and the fates of many other species, rests.
It really doesn't.
In another chapter in the Routledge volume, on ‘Hate’, C. Fred Alford
who is as old as fuck
argues that psychoanalysis illuminates the importance of early bystander intervention in an unfolding genocide.
No such 'early bystanders' have ever existed. Either there is a genocide or there isn't. What a good journalist can do is alter outcomes by motivating military or other intervention.
Such intervention, Alford argues, interrupts the ‘shared pleasure in hatred and destruction’ of the genocidal psyche.
Similarly, intervention can prevent people farting by interrupting the 'shared pleasure' in stinking up the place.
But the intervention, he cautions, should not take psychoanalytic form:
Nor should it involve sticking your head up your butt.
‘It is neither necessary nor desirable that bystanders interpret the acts they observe as ones of sadism and pleasure in destruction.’ In other words, we should not speak aloud the psychoanalytic understanding of genocide. To do so would be to betray genocide’s ethical significance: to mistake ‘mass murder’ for ‘a teachable moment’.
The guy taught worthless shit. What he thinks is a 'teachable moment' is actually an occasion for punitively shitting on his head.
We are left then only with the recommendation that bystanders should intervene. But this thought, Alford concedes, is ‘not new’; it’s a standard ‘part of literature on genocide and its prevention’. On the practical question of what to do or how to do it, psychoanalysis has nothing to add.
Because the thing is useless.
Slavoj Žižek, the most famous of the so-called ‘Left Lacanians’, comes closest to modelling political action on psychoanalytic technique.
Politically, he is utterly inert.
Žižek celebrates what he calls ‘the Act’: an intervention that would, he says, ‘traverse’ the ‘fundamental fantasy’ of the hegemonic political order – just as the Lacanian analyst, at the moment of cure, ruptures his patient’s relationship to the phantasy that sustains her falsely coherent sense of self.
The one 'act' of Zizek we would celebrate involves his sticking his head up his own rectum.
But for even Žižek this is more analogy than application. Examples he gives of the Act include the French and Russian Revolutions, hardly instances of the attentive listening and sparse interjection that Lacan prescribes to analysts.
Very true. Lacan did not prescribe mass murder.
If such instances are going to be found in politics, it will be in the practice known as ‘organising’: the laborious task of persuading ordinary people, person by person, that their sense of powerlessness in fact conceals an untapped power.
That of telling stupid cunts to fuck the fuck off.
Indeed, the most effective political organisers may know already what psychoanalysis can hope to teach them: about being sensitive to unspoken fear and desire, listening more than speaking, holding space for agency while acknowledging constraint, the importance of timing and ‘empathy’ and ‘tact’, even the workings of transference and projection.
Fuck that. What's important is money and Big Data. I suppose AI figures in this somewhere but you can subsume AI under the rubric of money.
In the 1940s, the American civil rights leader Ella Baker travelled extensively in the American South, visiting churches, barber shops, pool rooms and grocery stores to organise poor black people. Despite her relative privilege – Baker was middle class, university educated and lived in New York – she dressed with deliberate modesty.
Because she wasn't a hooker.
Reflecting on this choice, Baker said:
'I’ve had women come up to me and say, ‘Your dress is just like mine.’
Which was cool because she wasn't a hooker. That's why she didn't try to slash the face of 'competition'.
And that’s an identification. See, they don’t know how to deal with the verbal part, but they are identifying with you. And instead of you turning up your nose to turn them off, you can say something that shows that that’s good. We’ve both got good dresses.
Baker was from New York. The hicks understood that she was ahead of the curve fashion wise.
Baker sees in the comment ‘Your dress is just like mine’ nothing less than a moment of identification, not only with Baker herself, but more incipiently, more unconsciously, with the ‘verbal part’, the content of Baker’s speech: with the desire for Black liberation. And she answers with an affirmation of the unspeakable desire: ‘We’ve both got good dresses.’
The desire to wear a nice dress is eminently speakable.
But not everyone is Ella Baker, with a preternatural ability to have what the American labour organiser Jane McAlevey called ‘hard conversations’.
She didn't move the dial. What changed was the Cold War and the need to keep African Americans on side.
The recentring of psychoanalysis in contemporary left thought
senile left thought maybe
provides a renewed impetus to see conversation as a technical craft,
one which Trump is good at. But only because he is saying things people want to hear.
one, as McAlevey put it, that aims at getting people ‘to self-analyse the crisis in their life’.
These guys have no 'crisis' in their life. There is merely the lysis of senile decline into yet more useless tosserdom.
In turn, a left that was better at having hard conversations – at listening to the desire behind the refusal, the anxiety behind the apathy; at asking the right question in the right way at the right moment – is a left that would have less reason to treat theory as a refuge to which to flee.
In other words, it would be a left which didn't give Amia or Jason the time of day. There is little point having an Ivy league Professor on your team if everything thinks the subject they teach is horseshit.
For organisers, ‘self-analysis’ is a means rather than an end.
It is irrelevant.
The aim of organising, unlike that of psychoanalysis, is always collective action – with emphasis on both those terms: ‘collective’; ‘action’.
No. You can organize your wardrobe. I suppose Amia is thinking of Labour Organization or getting people enrolled in political parties or other pressure groups.
And underlying this difference in aims is a subtly
stupidly
different account of the relationship between mind and action. For Freud, as for Plato, behaviour flows from the psyche;
it is mainly mimetic
the symptom speaks the truth of the subject’s inner reality.
Unless it doesn't. The therapist got it wrong.
To change our behaviour, we must first change our mind.
No. Chose a better mimetic target.
Here, despite their apparent differences, is a fundamental moment of convergence between
shitty
psychoanalysis and
shitty
philosophy. Both presume that real change in our outward lives – becoming ethically better, less neurotic, more capable, as Freud says, of ‘love and work’ – requires first an inner, epistemic shift. It is knowledge that will set us free.
Not if we are currently slaves. In that case, it might take the Union Army.
But organising rests on the insight – which was also Aristotle’s rejoinder to Plato – that the psyche can flow from action,
No. Organising requires a type theory and a sorting principle.
that what is sometimes needed to become the sort of subject who feels empowered to stand up to the boss or the police or the state, is simply to act, in some small way, as if you already were that sort of subject.
Start acting like a soldier and you become a soldier. This isn't rocket science.
To stand up, and find yourself standing with others, find yourself winning with others.
You are J.D Vance. Divorce your wife. She is a Hindooooo.
And then to find yourself a subject with a greater measure of freedom and power, and more desire too, than you ever knew.
So not Kamala then. Sad.
