Okay, I normally work very hard not to say stuff like this. I seek to repress the impulse to publicly express things like this. But I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself. I am compelled, you might say, by a vexing and unconscious drive – a symptom, no doubt.
For real though, why do people like psychoanalysis? More to the point, psychoanalytic theory? By which I mean the use of psychoanalytic categories to do things other than practice psychoanalysis. Particularly to talk about like, you know, politics and stuff. I’ve yet to encounter anything of the sort that I don’t find to be off-putting, trivially true, and/or a much simpler point (often similar to one made by others previously in another idiom) expressed in a complexifying and faux profound idiom.
Ah well. To be fair, I guess it’s just different strokes for different folks. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to judge me for wanting to sleep with my mother. So who am I to begrudge people their desire to indulge in psychoanalytic musings? Maybe they just bug me because they remind me of my father. Like I always say, fort da.
Before I forget:
How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change the lightbulb and another to hold the penis – uh, I mean, the ladder!
I had an academic advisor at one stage who used to psychoanalyse my impulses to disagree with him. Strangely, our many agreements were apparently asymptomatic… ;-P
Completely off topic, but while I’m here: thanks again for the book recommendation the other day - I picked it up from Melbourne Uni yesterday, and read through around half of it last night - it’s quite helpful in providing a broader context sliced in a way that’s actually very useful to the questions we’re fumbling through (why we ever decided to do a paper on something about which we know so little is another thing - I really gotta stop using conference commitments as a substitute for final exams… ;-P). The trip to pick up the book also gave me the opportunity to watch the Melbourne Uni staff decorating the library for Christmas - with Halloween ornaments. ;-P My favourite was this bright red demon mask, to which they’ve attached cotton balls to make a kind of beard. It was strangely unnerving…
Has this gotten your thread sufficiently off track? ;-P
Comment by N Pepperell — December 17, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
This is a good question. Reading Zizek, his main shtick it that nothing makes total sense or rather they would be much better if you added Lacanian concepts of into the mix. One of these called ‘the big Other’ as some kinda larger unwritten rules of how people act that orders how people think. My prof couldn’t explain it in any way that I couldn’t say this sounds exactly like/or you could better explain that better with Gramsci’s common sense. In their favor psychoanalysis is a bit of an unexplored realm.
But at the same time, I guess that’s why they like it. Since we know hardly anything about how/why people think, the field to explain this is left open to whatever type of interpretive analysis you wannna make up to fill that void. And the more you can make up, the more you write books on those concepts, and the more books you write, the more…. i think you get the picture.
Comment by Adam W. — December 17, 2007 @ 6:33 pm
hi NP, Adam,
Adam - after much resisting I finally concluded that Zizek is a fraud or a clown or a scumbag or some combo thereof. I hate that guy.
NP - glad the book was helpful. Tom Rockmore has a new(ish) book out on Hegel and analytic philosophy. I’ve not read it but I bet it’s good. I remember really liking his book on Marx and Fichte. If you’re into the German stuff another one you might be into is Andrew Bowie’s book on Schelling. It’s been a while since I read it but I remember thinking it was amazing. Bowie doesn’t respect historical or geographic boundaries b/w continental and analytic, but the book never seems eclectic. I know he has a lot to say on Rorty (he introduced me to Rorty), but I don’t recall if Brandom appears or not.
That Halloween/xmas party sounds fun, and please derail any thread here that you see fit to derail. Specially one where I’m just complaining. Okay, gotta get to be bed, it’s become dangerously close to an all-niter from trying to finish the thing on laundries. Stupid … something. Dammit, I wish I had a better object to cathect. Or simply to blame! At least I can (meta)blame psychoanalysis for my lack of a proper object - the scum!
g’nite,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 18, 2007 @ 6:10 am
did you know that i wrote my thesis on the source of ethical normativity from a psychoanalytic perspective? I no longer care about psychoanalysis, but here’s what i think is useful. there are divisions in the mind because conscious and subconscious elements. Authority can be internalized developmentally, and rendered into subconscious elements.
back that up with systems theory and cognitive science about how the mind structures data based on shared cognitive apparatus, and you can get a way to have intersubjective value judgements based in an individuals psyche and derived from social development. ….”ish”
Comment by todd — December 23, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
hi Todd,
I remember that, yeah. You and I come at things from pretty different starting points I think. I’m just not concerned with grounds for norms and such, or in their derivations. I’m kind of a relativist in that sense - any one normative assertion is just as sensible as any other, ultimately. I like Rorty’s quip on this, that he’s not a relativist cuz he’s ethnocentric. That’s how I feel. I’ve got no more ultimate justification, but that doesn’t bother me - I still insist on my values. I do think psychoanalysis might be useful in some settings - like whatever it is that psychoanalysts do (not meant to be flippant or dismissive) - and I could see stuff exported from psychoanalytic practice being fruitfully deployed in other contexts too, as tools. The proof there, though, is in their utility, pragmatically speaking - for resolving problems and such.
Gotta run.
happy holidays!
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 23, 2007 @ 1:38 pm
Zizek — he’s definitely trying to write about everything. One of those days I’m gonna find him in my fridge, passing me the milk. But seriously, I actually do know some people who regret he hasn’t yet written a book called What Should You Eat for Breakfast, they’d treat that diet religiously.
As for the lasting appeal of psychoanalysis, it seems to me that what people enjoy so much about it is the chance to do some amateur mythologizing. In therapy, it allows you to construct a private mythology of your childhood, giving it validity as a narrative. It does a similar thing for society and politics: suddenly reality’s full of Ulysseses and Electras and it makes us all feel grand, as if there was a divine logic imposed on actions, smoothing facts to simple, analyzable patterns. This is just my impression. I am sure there’s more to it than this simple analysis which, in itself, is “analyzable,” I’m sure.
Comment by Januaries — January 10, 2008 @ 4:22 am