Opinions, art, debate
Yes, I can. And I know exactly where I can buy it: http://www.amazon.es/
I achieve nirvana by placing Spanish books on every surface around me and sitting there with a stupid grin as I press a bunch of them to my chest. It’s so good to know that they exist and that I can read them.
N. and I went out today for a belated celebration of the International Women’s Day. At dinner, he made the following toast:
Let’s drink to femininity both in you and in me.
He’s so perfect.
As I said before, I’m not a scholar of psychoanalytical theory. I will not write complex theoretical posts because I have neither the knowledge nor the interest to do so. Given that most of the people in this country are grievously ignorant about psychoanalysis, I want to provide the most basic information my readers might find useful in their approach to the subject.
I vastly prefer the Jungian model of psychoanalysis to the Freudian for the two simple reasons I want to share with you.
1. Four and a half years ago, I was packing up my stuff at the apartment where I’d lived during my doctoral studies in preparation to moving back to Montreal. A grad student accumulates a lot of books and papers, as I’m sure you can imagine. All I did for weeks was pack books into boxes (I’m an old lady, so that was before the Kindle era.) I didn’t see the light of day for these book-filled boxes. And when I slept, I persistently dreamt of packing books into boxes, which is not surprising, given that it was all I was doing all day and every day. At that very time, I was reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Imagine how I felt when I discovered that dreaming of packing books into boxes meant I was feeling sexual desire for my brother.
To begin with, I don’t even have a brother. And at that moment, I was completely sexually satisfied because I had just met N., and we were living together. I analyzed and overanalyzed my every thought but, as hard as I tried, I could not convince myself that the dream I was having had anything to do with some imaginary unfulfilled sex drive and not with the very real situation I was living daily. If a box filled with books cannot sometimes simply be a box filled with books, I had no use for that theory.
Jung, bless him, changed all that. He believes that any dream analysis should start with the discussion of what has happened to the analyzand recently. To give an example, a Jungian analyst shared the following story at a Russian-speaking forum:
“One day,” he wrote, “an analyzand told me of a dream where he was persecuted by horrible monsters. I was an inexperienced analyst, so I immediately proceeded to analyze the dream. I created an entire theory of what the monsters in the client’s dream could mean. And then, I remembered to ask him what he had been doing on the day before he had that dream. “Oh, nothing special,” the analyzand responded. “Went to work, came home. Then my wife and I watched a horror movie before going to bed.” So it turned out that the monsters that persecuted this client had not come from the depths of his subconscious. They had come from the horror movie.”
The Jungian analysis of dreams never goes beyond what feels right to the analyzand. The interpretation is correct when the client feels that it makes sense to her or him.
2. Freud’s “penis envy” was his great blunder. It is also the big gun that people roll out whenever they want to ridicule psychoanalysis. I’m sure that when those people get to laying the foundations of an entire field of knowledge, they will not make a single mistake. Freud, however, was not only birlliant but also human and, hence, fallible. He really messed this one up.
Jung, however, departs from the “penis envy” model of gender entirely. His alternative theory of animus / anima has always made a lot of sense to me. When I look at my own life through the prism of this theory it makes every possible sense to me.
My university is seriously considering hiring an administrator from Texas A&M as our new Chancellor. Texas A&M is a horrible, horrible place. Why would anybody in their right mind plan to hire anybody from there? The faculty there are exploited horribly. The place is a total diploma mill of the worst kind. Bleh, bleh, and once again bleh.
We’ve had a fantastic Chancellor who is now retiring. This is a person who wanted to raise the research profile of the institution and did a lot to make it possible for young scholars to do research. The last thing we want is a money-hungry business-model worshipper from a stupid place that is the laughing stock of the country.
I’m upset, people. The other candidates are also from some lousy places in Texas. We are so screwed.
So I decided it would be fun to record a video of me and post it to the blog to make it more personal. It looks like a have weird teeth in the video, which I don’t think I do in real life. So now I’m very preoccupied about my teeth and keep staring at them in the mirror. In any case, here is the video:
P.S. Yes, I have an accent. What did you expect?
And to conclude this series, I wanted to mention that I’m living with a man who is agnostic, of which I’m extremely respectful and which I would never try or want to change.
If we do have a child, I have already prepared the answer to a question about religion. I’d say the following:
“I believe A. Daddy believes B. Grandpa and Grandma believe C. There are some people in Israel who believe D. And some people in Egypt believe E. And some folks in India believe F, G, and H. And also there are people called “atheists” who believe I. The great news is that you get to decide for yourself what you want to believe. Or you can start a completely new system of beliefs. And you can change your mind at any time. Isn’t that neat?”
On the subject of Christianity’s compatibility with feminism, I can say that this religion is a fantastic vehicle for feminism. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that other religions aren’t. I have no knowledge that would enable me to make that judgment. I also warn you that when I say “religion”, I mean a system of beliefs. The fact that many people choose to do weird things and call that “Christianity” is as relevant to me as the actions of confused folks who call themselves feminists while doing decidedly unfeminist things. So, please, refrain from laying the blame for any horrible things that some churchy people did at my door. Do you think that if some men rape then all men are rapists? No? Then I’m not guilty for anything Rick Santorum has to say.
So why do I say that this is a powerfully feminist religion? Let’s look at a small excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
And there is more in the same vein. Are you seeing any gender divide here? Any suggestion that rules are different for men and women? Of course, you don’t. Because it’s not about that at all.
Then, there is also the famous,
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
No male or female, got it? The message couldn’t be clearer. I don’t even know what else could be said on the subject. In the eyes of God, men and women do not exist. Gender is meaningless and immaterial. That’s precisely the extent of my feminism, too, which is why I read these quotes as the perfect feminist manifesto.
Reader Evelina Anville asks:
At some point, (assuming you are comfortable) I would like to hear more about you reconcile your religious and your feminist world views. (Not that I think that a religious and feminist worldview can’t be reconciled: it’s just that they so frequently exist at odds with one another.)
I don’t have a tendency to persecute people with my religion, as I’m sure everybody has noticed. Even David Bellamy, one of the earliest and most constant readers of my blog who has probably read most of the 3,500+ posts I have published had no idea until very recently that I identify as Christian. Since Evelina Anville, one of my favorite readers, wants to know, I will gladly write about religion and I hope that nobody accuses me of being preachy.
I was raised in an atheist country where people only discussed religion in very negative terms. There were some folks who went to church but these were either very elderly or very weird people. So I was a fully atheist kid and very happy to be one.
Until I had a mystical experience. It was a kind of experience that came completely out of nowhere because it wasn’t like I even knew that mystical experiences could happen. It was completely non-sexual in nature, if you are one of those weird folks who sees sex in all mystical experiences. So after that, I did not have a choice but become a religious person. It was a huge secret from everybody because it would have shocked people too much and they would have ridiculed me.
I’m the kind of a religious person who wasn’t baptized, never goes to church, has only a very vague idea what people do in churches, and is terrified of folks who discuss their religion in public. I’m only sharing my religious beliefs on my blog because I was asked to, but in real life you will not find a person who has heard anything from me on the subject. This is an intimate issue that I do not inflict on anybody.
I also have no use for the debates as to whether Jesus existed. Somebody came up with the words in the New Testament, so the code name for that person or group of people is “Jesus.” Who was born where and to whom is of absolutely no interest to me. As a literary critic, I’m not into the biographical approach to a text. I dig the words but the life circumstances of their author bore me.
I left this comment on one of the threads but it’s important, which is why I want to amplify it and put it into a separate post.
If you have an “everybody for himself” worldview and you maintain it consistently in every aspect of life, then I respect that. I don’t share it but I recognize that it’s your right to have that worldview. It’s the lack of logic and consistency that angers me, but alternative worldviews definitely do not. For example, a transphobic pro-choicer makes me livid because that position is not logical. But a straight-out dog-eat-dog Libertarian does not anger me at all because s/he is logical and consistent.
Of course, when I see a self-proclaimed Libertarian who believes that the government should decide what women do with their bodies, then that’s not a Libertarian. S/he is either a huge hypocrite or a simple idiot. That I do not respect and will ridicule viciously. Or, say, a Marxist who waves around his copy of Das Kapital but lives off of the proceeds from his factory.
I respect people’s right to have alternative worldviews. A worldview, however, is not a bunch of unconnected opinions that you gathered from a variety of TV shows and articles because they somehow felt right for some unspecified reason. I believe that it is a duty of every rational human being to work on elaborating her or his worldview. Such a way of being in the world will have organizing principles, will be consistent and coherent. This is a life-long project we embark on and it is one of the greatest joys of being human to be capable of doing that.
A great variety of worldviews makes our shared human reality fascinating. As much as I dig my own worldview, I recognize that this planet would be a very boring, miserable place if we had seven billion Clarissas walking around, all thinking exactly like me. So if you have a worldview that is very different from mine, then I’m very interested in hearing about it. This is why I read and promote on my blog articles by people like Dan Miller and Charles Rowley. They obviously vote Republican but they are thinkers, intellectuals who have worked a lot on elaborating their vision, and I’m very curious about what they have to say on a variety of issues.
If, however, you are too lazy to elaborate a worldview and want to bore me with some unconnected, illogical, incoherent opinions, then do not expect any respect from me for those opinions.
P.S. My thanks go to reader and fellow Canadian Titfortat who inspired this post.
So I decided to listen to David Bellamy’s advice and step back from my article for a while. This means breaking the Seinfeld Chain. It was a good chain that lasted 38 days. I think that, for my very first chain, it’s a great result.
The article needs a very significant intellectual breakthrough to be made as good as it can potentially be. But I’m completely blocked and exhausted right now. I’ve been staring stupidly at the text for three days, creating meaningless ugly sentences. I believe that I need to get some rest during the final part of the spring break and then attack the article with new-found strength. I don’t think it makes sense to drive myself to the point of a physical collapse here. This is pretty much where things are going right now. I don’t sleep, I don’t do the grading and the service-related things I need to do, I don’t read, I don’t play my favorite Kindle game, I don’t cook, I don’t take long baths, I don’t play with makeup, I don’t read posts in my Google Reader – because I’m stuck on this article.
So from now until Tuesday, I’m resting. Feel free to tell me I’m making the right decision because I will not manage to rest if guilt over breaking the chain consumes me.
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