archive › psychoanalysis
Ontological, But Not Realist
Levi has recently posted an argument on psychoanalysis and ontological realism, which I felt was worth responding to, if only because he tries to annex psychoanalysis towards object-oriented ontology, a view that I am obviously opposed to.
To begin, I find Levi’s argument interesting, as opposed to his earlier attempts to somewhat naïvely convert Marx’s entire body of works into ontological objectology in one fell swoop, but in my opinion I don’t find it entirely convincing, for basically one simple reason.
The beginning of his post does a decent job of outlining the difference between epistemology and ontology. Levi talks about how epistemology is premised on “bracketing” entities as they are in themselves and privileging the sensible realm of how we perceive things: accordingly, epistemology is, obviously, a philosophy of access. No one was claiming otherwise. On the other hand, ontology, etc., etc.
What I don’t understand is this: Levi goes from talking about the difference between epistemology and ontology (let’s call this “axis 1”), and then, after quoting very large excerpt from Roy Bhaskar, he switches to talking about the difference between anti-realism and realism (let’s call this “axis 2”). In other words, it seems to me that Levi’s argument makes sense only if we agree with this clever rhetorical substitution (I’m tempted to use the word “trick,” but I’ll give Levi the benefit of the doubt) of “axis 2” for “axis 1.” Note that the first reference to the word “realism” (occurring as “anti-realism” in Levi’s post)…
The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1825-26
To be honest, I don’t know much about the names dropped below, but the book about Caspar David Friedrich linked above is worth checking out or even buying.
[Caspar David] Friedrich’s own destiny is part of the psychological landscape of his age. In almost every one of the poems by Wihelm Müller that Schubert set in his Winterreise, there are lines that seem to mirror the painter’s distraction and dread of human contact:
Durch des Bergstroms trock’ne Rinnen
Wind’ ich ruhig mich hinab–
Jeder Strom wird’s Meer gewinnen
Jedes Leiden auch sein Grab. (Irrlicht)(Down the mountain stream’s dry gullies
I calmly pick my way
Every stream will reach the sea,
Every sorrow finds its grave.)
NY Times Book Review: “Revolution in Mind”
A new book on Freud that sounds interesting, although the review is somewhat mixed. The author is George Makari, whom I’ve never heard of before, but apparently he’s the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, although I’ve never heard of that either. Anyhow this bit sounded interesting:
In “Revolution in Mind,” Makari argues that we’ve been blinded to the cultural reach of psychoanalysis by the magnitude of Freud’s stature and the magnetic pull or repulsion of his personality and theories. In Makari’s view, much contemporary discussion about the relevance of psychoanalysis is based on a false choice: “Freud as everlasting genius, or Freud as relic and fraud.” To Makari, the director of Cornell University’s Institute for the History of Psychiatry, this dichotomy is artificial. Instead, he argues, we should look to the rich, polyphonous context that gave birth to and was influenced by the analytic enterprise: “the culture of Kant; the assumptions of Geisteswissenschaft and a European classical education,” along with “evolutionary biology, positivism and Newtonian physics.”
Sounds similar to what I’m trying to do with my own thesis on Lacan.
Can Psychoanalysis Think Biopolitics?
An old post by Jodi Dean worth reading.
A Quick Fix for the Soul
Darian Leader in the Guardian links the popularity of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with the rise of neoliberal ideology:
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
… Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through “work” on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher’s dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one’s existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
I suggest giving the whole article a read. Leader’s criticism of CBTs seems spot on to me: the problem isn’t that it’s merely an attack on psychoanalysis, but instead that it is an attempt at a quick fix, a cost-effective method to conform people’s psyches to the so-called “realities” of the market-economy. And, as k-punk suggests, “it is the idea that positive thinking is mandatory which most closely links neoliberalism and CBT.”
Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
The New York Times Health section publishes a rare insightful account of the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, which has (rightfully and wrongfully) found itself under attack from the medical establishment, psychology, neuroscience, and biopsychology, just to name a few of the usual suspects. Benedict Carey writes:
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that psychodynamic therapy is making a comeback, largely as a reaction to CBTs, which research suggests only make short-term progress on unconscious symptoms. Yet the mere fact that psychoanalysis might be re-entering the mainstream is one that should not be taken as in itself a good thing: what is important is precisely how it will manifest itself. It’s up to informed psychoanalysts, particularly in the Lacanian field as opposed to ego psychology, to ensure that the path psychoanalysis takes in its ostensible resurgence is one that places the unconscious, and therein the signifier, at the center of analysis. What this amounts to is the proper re-politicization of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis as Spirituality
Patrick Lee Miller in The Immanent Frame:
Psychoanalysis strives, first of all, to reveal the meaning of symptoms (not to mention dreams, slips, free-associations, transferences, and anything else mysterious in someone’s mental life and behavior). But this meaning is none other than the apparent but illusory good sought by the analysand. He may inquire, for instance: “What is the meaning of my coming late to sessions every day?” The hard-won answer will be something of this form: “I want my analyst to feel as though I don’t need him; I want him to feel worthless, to snub him, so that he will know how he makes me feel.” When such an apparent good comes to light, it reveals itself as illusory: “My analyst doesn’t make me feel unworthy, he’s waiting there patiently for me everyday; I think the person I really want to snub is my father; he’s the one who made me feel worthless.” When the analysand exposes such illusion himself, he grows in wisdom, not least by the acknowledgment that he unconsciously chose that illusory good and has clung to it all the while. He grows further in wisdom when he recognizes that his boss, and no doubt many others besides, have been victims of his illusion, since he has sought its apparent good from other relationships as well. His character changes, finally, when he can relate differently to these others, seeing them not as ghosts of his father—or his mother, or his siblings, or whomever—but instead as the unique individuals they really are.
I don’t know how I feel about conceiving of psychoanalysis as a “spiritual” science, which to me reeks of New Age obscurantism. I recommend giving the whole article a read though. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
As Johnnya says, it’s about time that “mainstream” science finally catches up with basic psychoanalytic concepts. The mirror graphic in the article is also worth checking out.
Other-than-me, More-than-me, Other-than-mine
The Psychoanalytic Field:
However, while an adult subject may come to see that the found object that supports a cultural experience (an idea, a relationship, or a community) is never truly a property, a much younger subject will reject even the slightest suggestion that the toy or blanket it has found is not entirely its own; it will not look kindly upon the adult’s attempts to mend or clean or in any way alter said toy or blanket; it will tolerate even less the prospect of having to share anything it has found with those around it. As the first “other-than-me” possession, the found object is not automatically registered as “other-than-mine.” The implication here is that the passage from “other-than-me” to “other-than-mine” is one that the subject will have to undertake if it is to look both forward and backward in time on the objects it has found, and experienced, and eventually acknowledge them as such.
Taking this line one step further, it seems as if Winnicott may have inadvertently set the ground for an assessment of the experience of “private” property as inherently childish.
Conditions of Receptivity
Dr. Sinthome:
At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? … I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.
America: A Nation of Whiners
It is undoubtedly the case that America is a nation of whiners. It is and always has been, how else do you think it came into existence? I don’t think anyone will contend otherwise, which is probably why the media has focused almost solely and unrelentingly on the “America is a nation of whiners” sound-bite from Phil Gramm’s recent diatribe. Even the blogosphere is partly to blame for this. Of course, this focus is essentially a reaction-formation designed to obscure and repress the far more ideological claim on Gramm’s part that economic failure is “psychological,” i.e. subjective.
The subjectivist theory of economics has long been a staple of neoliberal ideology, which argues, for example, that the value of a commodity, rather than being the objective cost of the labor required to produce said commodity, is in fact reflective of its marginal utility. But on the specific issue of the business cycle and economic crises, marginalist theory fails to provide an adequate explanation: instead it has to rely on its late-capitalist ideological counterpart, New Age obscurantism, which promulgates that the problems we experience, and our reality in general, are purely of our own making. And clearly the liberal rejoinder that “it has real consequences!” is not enough. It is a prototypically pathetic response, as it accepts the neoliberal framing of the debate, simply adding that subjective reality can lead to actual, concrete harm to human-beings.
There is obviously a grain of truth to the liberal argument, but the more…
The Symptom 9: Universalism vs. Globalization
I haven’t really been following its publication recently, but there looks to be a bunch of interesting pieces in here, including J.-A. Miller’s essay, “Extimity,” Zizek’s essay on the Lacanian Real and television, and several of Heidegger’s political tracts from the early 1930s. (Via Larval Subjects.)