I highly recommend this interesting article outlining the battle between psychoanalysts and the corrupt, diagnose-peddling, pill-pushing psychiatrists at Washington University in St. Louis. The article is written by a very unprofessional, gushy journalist but the subject it discusses is very important. If you are wondering how pharmaceutical companies managed to carry out their agenda of feeding stupid, addictive, dangerous pills to all of us by the bucketful, here is a very straight-forward explanation.
Psychiatrists get huge amounts of money from pharmacological companies to destroy any method of treatment that could actually solve patients’ issues. We get inundated by endless messages about “brain chemistries” that just happen to be out of whack for no particular reason and require we take pills upon pills upon pills in perpetuity. Every shade of human personality is classified and listed by the psychiatrists in the employ of Pharma companies as “disorders” that need even more medication. Of course, all these drugs have enormous side effects and people are exhorted to take more drugs on top of the ones they are already taking to deal with the side effects.
This terrifying situation gets to the point where psychiatrists – who historically have eagerly collaborated with every inhuman dictatorship and every brutal regime – poison small children by labeling them with a host of completely meaningless diagnoses and medicating them to the state of complete zombification while their already medicated parents stand limply by. This makes a lot of sense because most people are very lazy and possess a consumer mentality. Who needs to make an effort and conduct a slow and complicated work of solving one’s issues through analysis when you can pop a pill instead and temporarily dull the symptoms? And when the symptoms come back, you can pop two pills, and so on.
These medicated populations who spend their entire lives destroying any shade of their personalities with medication are very easy to control and manipulate. Are you wondering why people sit there silently while the education system in this country is eroded, their pension accounts are raided, and their civil right are being stolen? That’s all because they are barely conscious after all the psychotropic medication they have consumed in the last 20 years.
Of course, the article isn’t very recent and I fear that things have become even worse since then. All that anybody can do at this point is educate people and create spaces that are free from the ideology of “chemical imbalances kept in check by pill popping”. These should be spaces where people can discuss more enlightened approaches to psychological health. My blog is one such space. If anybody can recommend any other spaces that share a similar goal, feel free to do so.
Clarissa's Blog 
One of the byproducts of Capitalism is unhealthy people. Unhealthy people consume more, so in the interest of capitalism it makes perfect sense to keep people hooked on something. 😦
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You are absolutely right, Clarissa. I keep hoping that the whole drug industry will turn out to be another bubble like the housing bubble. I suspect it will, eventually, but maybe not for decades.
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I hope it does.
Meanwhile, fascinating experience just now. I may be anti drug but I am a PTSD sufferer and there is a drug I keep around for bad days. This means I have yearly visits to psychiatrist.
This year the office is moved. It has very crowded waiting room with extremely loud television blaring a tacky game show with a live audience, and loud-talking patients, some homeless and rocking in chairs, others pretty darn high, others in family groups shouting. The tv gets turned up more, and I can start feeling my claustrophobia kick in. To not get panicky I go outside and watch the clock through the window. It is OK but would not be in greater heat than we have (it was below 90F today) or in rain.
Then I went in to see da man. Said to him look, that tv has to go, it is inappropriate for any professional atmosphere and that kind of jumpy noise is antithetical to the kind of practice this is supposed to be; it is detrimental to me and surely to others.
He understood-agreed, fortunately, but I did also tell him that blaring tv and other electronic noise in a small, crowded, confined space was one kind of psychological torture, designed by psychiatrists, they use in jail. He claimed not to know this so I assigned him some reading. It was all quite interesting and I must say weird.
I think he has hooked up with some mental hospital actually because so many of the people in the waiting room were so close to the cliff or already off it. It was kind of frightening to see what mental hospitals may be like.
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“He understood-agreed, fortunately, but I did also tell him that blaring tv and other electronic noise in a small, crowded, confined space was one kind of psychological torture, designed by psychiatrists, they use in jail. He claimed not to know this so I assigned him some reading. It was all quite interesting and I must say weird.”
– Some psychiatrist he is. Jeez.
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I’m sure that psychoanalysis of most varieties is much better for most people than taking pharmaceutical drugs. People really are consumers nowadays, and little else, but a relationship with another person would put them into a different role. I imagine most people aren’t comfortable with any other role than work drone or consumer. Being a consumer is compensation for being a work drone. You can get to bully other people, like school teachers, when you are not playing the role of worker yourself. You flip over and become the sadist, instead of the masochist. This is as complicated as many people can manage.
Anyway, very good article. Keep it up.
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One of your best posts, maybe the best!
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Oh, thank you, cher ami.
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The only problem is that your post is more interesting than the article. I don’t think that psychoanalysis is always so good but you’re right on about the Pharma-psychiatric mob scheme. Psychiatrists should be there for real psychiatric problems like schizophrenia, paedophilia (Pierre Mailloux, a popular psychiatrist in Québec who have ever said that USA-psychiatry is in a “third world mode”, especially for convicts, calls for voluntary physical castration of multi-convicted paedophiles and I support him in that) and bipolar disorder and to try to really solve other mental health issues, not to over-medicate children who are instructed by bad boring teachers nor to giving legal drugs to regular “depressive” people!
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I know that the article is of pretty low quality. But everything else that appears in mainstream media on the subject is even worse! I’m still traumatized by an article I read once about a 4-year-old boy who was diagnozed as a schizophrenic (at 4!!) because he liked to dress up as a Batman and pretend he was Batman. You see, children playing is considered psychotic nowadays. And do you think there was a word of condemnation of this child being treated with psychotropic drugs in that article. Not at all. To the contrary, the whole article was celebrating the wonderful doctors who caught the “disease” early on and are now bravely medicating the kid against his will.
Lazy irresponsible people can gulp all the medication in the world, for all that I care. But when they do that to kids, poisoning and zombifying them, that I cannot stand.
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“But when they do that to kids, poisoning and zombifying them, that I cannot stand.” Moreover, I can’t stand when they zombify adults using false medical pretenses…
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I know! So many people are diagnosed with invented “conditions” or “disorders.” Nowadays there are even pills against being shy! Like there is anything wrong with being shy. Ridiculous.
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Hi Clarissa, I find some of Brainblogger’s posts try to explore some of these issues, e.g. http://brainblogger.com/2012/06/23/is-schizophrenia-really-a-brain-disease/ which attracted quite a few comments
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“What I believe the recovery research suggests is that psychosis is actually perhaps best thought of as a very last resort strategy of a desperate psyche to survive in the face of what otherwise feels like intolerable conditions. In some cases, this is very evident, such as when someone experiences a psychotic break as the result of severe torture, isolation, or other abuse. In other cases, this intense turmoil is less clear to an outside observer, but when we make the effort to inquire into the sufferers’ inner world, we nearly always find that such turmoil is there prior to the development of psychosis.”
– This is a quote from the discussion and I like it a lot. Good author, good book. Thank you for quoting it here.
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This is interesting because Dambudzo Marechera was thought to have developed schizophrenia, by someone who knew him well, but with my understanding of African culture, I had the suspicion she was inadvertently censuring him for not being more European in his mind and attitude. There is a great deal in the African way of doing things that has the quality of being chaotic and unpredictable. I have a degree of that in myself, and there is no way I’m crazy. It’s a form of adaptation to uncertain and unpredictable circumstances. People who can tolerate a great deal of chaos are surprisingly resilient and don’t react with horror or despair to lots of very difficult circumstances. Rather, we view them with humor.
I’ve had a lot of people view my humor as horror and/or despair, especially, as you know, with regard to my memoir, so I think there is a lot of inability, on the part of Westerners, to really get in tune with African perspectives and ideas.
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so I think there is a lot of inability, on the part of Westerners, to really get in tune with African perspectives and ideas.(Muster)
Does the same hold true for you in regards to the perspectives and ideas of Westerners?
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Psychotherapy by and large is not good for you — most practitioners do not have enough education or life experience, or self awareness to be qualified to do what they are allegedly trying to do.
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I couldn’t agree more. I think if the therapy session was really open-ended, without any core dogma, people who really wanted to get answers concerning their lives would have the best possible scope for doing so. Even then, they may not succeed, but only move ahead incrementally. Regrettably, most therapists have a central dogma or moral ax to grind. Wilfred Bion had an excellent idea that the therapist has to enter a state of not knowing or state of infinite possibilities of knowledge, when confronting a client for the first time. This is good in theory, but we can’t really wash away our socially and culturally conditioned expectations. Very soon, even a good therapist would start to get agitated if the patient/client didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. If the client already has a basic theory of knowledge that differs from that of the therapist, he or she will not be easily inculcated into the therapist’s paradigm, which is likely to lead to charges of psychological resistance, when perhaps the resistance is rather more intellectually and ethically founded.
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One of the main differences between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is that an analyst works with supervision. A supervisor is another analyst whose job is to manage the counter-transference. This means that whenever the analyst starts to project his own problems, beliefs, ideas, etc on the patient, the supervisor stops him and works with that. If an analyst doesn’t work with a supervisor, then what musteryou describes is very likely to happen.
This is why nobody should start analysis without asking if the anlyst has a supervisor. If the answer is “no”, this isn’t an analyst you are talking to. It’s a hack.
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Good point.
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I’m very opposed to psychotherapy. I know people who have been doing it for over a decade with zero results. My psychoanalysis, on the other hand, started producing results after the first 4 sessions. Of course, I selected my analyst with great care. I read a lot to find out what to ask to find out if his qualifications were good, etc.
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Zero results would be great. I got fast results from it — I remember starting in April, not in response to a particular situation but because for years I had said I would do it when I could afford it, and now I finally could. So I was fine in April when I started, and quite destroyed by October of the same year. It was like going in for torture sessions. People said that was because I was “resisting” and that no pain no gain, and other stupidities like that.
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Gosh, I heard this so many times. “It has to be painful, very painful or it means you are not working hard enough.” Just note how similar this discourse is to the one surrounding research in academia.
But, of course, this is all crap. If either research or analysis are painful, it means they are not working.
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As a Massage Therapist I find the statement, “No pain, no gain” wrong. But and there is a but, when dealing with certain conditions and trying to help the individual rid themselves of these conditions there is definately a level of “discomfort” that can be produced. I would imagine the same is true for Psychotherapy or Psychoanalysis. Whenever we enter into healing of wounds it is rarely rosey and smooth sailing all the way through. 🙂
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You are right, there are moments of discomfort during the session. But it’s the analyst’s job to deal with that by the end of the session to ensure that you leave feeling happy and energetic. My analyst is amazing that way.
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“Does the same hold true for you in regards to the perspectives and ideas of Westerners?”
The thing is, it is “Western” culture that promotes itself as universal, natural, inevitable (depending on the century), and that has all this media dissemination. So Africans have more familiarity with the metropolitan countries than these do with Africa, by and large (unless you count the “Africa” we all know from Tarzan and so on, i.e. from Western texts).
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Thanks for that accurate assessment of the situation. I had missed the original query, but I would have taken it as sarcastic and a conversation stopper anyway.
Certainly, however, the ideas and perspectives of Westerners become less relevant for me as time wears on. You can see that public discourse in the major Anglo countries regarding important issues like the rights of women and the value of education does not have a higher tone of content than it does in much of Africa. In some ways, they are on a par, and in some ways the expectations of Africans (not regarding women but regarding education) are higher. So what it comes down to is there is nothing for me to learn from Western discourse. Most people are still struggling with some very basic issues right now.
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“Whenever we enter into healing of wounds it is rarely rosey and smooth sailing all the way through.”
What strikes me is that that is used to cover a multitude of sins (poor therapy, destructive therapy, etc.).
Sadistic is the term I would use to describe some therapies, and it is convenient to them to be able to say that is just the discomfort, etc.
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Mary Daly has a really good analysis of therapy as sadism. It’s part of the historical witchcraft continuum. Of course witches are uncomfortable when you prick them. That is why you must prick them all the more. Patriarchal logic is still deeply embedded within contemporary secular culture.
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I had forgotten about the Daly work, I have seen parts of it before. Good reminder, and it makes sense.
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Did a quick search and came up with this:
http://hagocrat.wordpress.com/tag/mary-daly/
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http://hagocrat.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/gynecology-chapter-seven-american-gynecology-gynocide-by-the-holy-ghosts-of-medicine-and-therapy/
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I cannot believe we are seriously discussing this religious fanatic, woman-hater and transphobe here. Daly was completely insane and spewing hatred all over the place. The vile thing discredited feminism for decades to come. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2010/01/07/sady-from-feministe-on-mary-dalys-death/
“The gynecological profession and the popularizing media have combined their efforts to make the poisoning of women appear acceptable. Just as popping The Pill is both “normal” and normative for younger women…” This is from Daly. Do you see what she is doing? She is against contraception because she wants women to breed and do nothing else but breed as punishment for having sex. The only legitimate way to escape the curse of constant breeding is to renounce sex. Typical Catholic.
Bleh, this woman-hater makes me want to vomit.
I can only repeat that I have not met a single male chauvinist pig or a macho jerk who would or could make me feel as degraded and worthless as the so-called “radical feminists” do. These are the greatest woman-haters in existence.
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Yeah, I do disagree with parts of her work, but I think she has it dead on in other areas. Intellectuals rarely consume other people’s ideas whole. Some is helpful or accurate, some isn’t. Maturity enables us to tell the difference.
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I don’t think that a religious woman-hater has “ideas.” I hate them all wholesale with a burning passion. Daly hated women, I hate Daly. I think it’s fair because she started it first.
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Ok. I’m sure I wouldn’t like her as a person, but some of her ideas resonate because they replicate my own conclusions.
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@Muster
Mary Daly, hmm, talk about conversation stopper. Why am I not surprised she resonates for you. 😦
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Because you have a stereotype that she corresponds with? Because the sky is blue? Because dogs and fleas tend not to please, except in the case of the sun and a breeze? I guess all of these reasons could be why you are not surprised. What are you normally surprised at? Do you like to be surprised or do you prefer simple predictability? Are you happy in your life?
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Yeah, I do disagree with parts of her work, but I think she has it dead on in other areas. (Muster)
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. As far as happiness goes, yes, I would say I am very content in my life. 🙂
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That’s good. Your portrait looks a bit grey…a bit white. Nothing much to tell from….except the random insults.
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Your portrait looks a bit grey…a bit white. Nothing much to tell from….except the random insults(Muster)
Well, I am getting older, hence the grey. Also, I think I do need to tan a little more. As far as the insults go, well, we have something in common afterall. 😉
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Yes, if you are insulted by your Icon, certainly.
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@Z
I think most people can distinguish between sadistic and discomfort. If they cant then I think they may be far past the benefits of any kind of therapy.
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I disagree — we, the kids, for instance, in my family and school had a lot of trouble convincing the adults that the pediatric dentist was a sadist, and that we were not simply unaccustomed to the discomfort of teeth cleaning. That is an overly simple example but I have been exhorted again and again about how I ought to enjoy punishment-style therapy and feel benefit from it. But I think it is probably better suited to the more self-entitled people, the type who could really use a smack-down.
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@Z
I understand, I think, what you are alluding to. You mean when someone has no choice, as in, children in regards to certain therapies or such. I was talking more about independent adults.
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I mean something more subtle than that. What I note, at least in my region which is very authoritarian, is that people who seek therapy are assumed to be at fault for something, i.e., deliberately hiding their real problem, to have created whatever situation they are in, etc. There is not a lot of empathy for them and it is more or less assumed they need to be told to get off their high horse … as though they had been caught committing a crime, or something.
I think that whole stop-it technique could be very good for some kinds of manipulators but I disagree with the assumption that all problems are problems one created oneself or are problems with one’s attitude, etc. Contra that I would say that there are actual states of mental illness or pain which are real, and also that people also have experiences detrimental to them that they did not bring upon themselves, deserve, etc. In other words, I would not say the role of a therapist should be a disciplinary one, but many people I know see them more or less as a kind of parole officer, and think that is normal.
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I think that these days the regional issue is non-existent. I live in a tiny ultra-conservative drug-popping village. Which is precisely why my analyst lives in Canada and we work through Skype. One can research the analyst as much as one wants online and discover all about the methods s/he uses, the supervision, etc well in advance. There is always a free introductory session, and if one doesn’t like what happens in it, there is absolutely no need to have the next session.
When I see people who stay in therapy for 15 years with no visible results, I’m sorry, but I can blame nobody but them. It is their choice to pay for temporary removal of anxiety which always comes back.
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@Clarissa, for this you have to be able to imagine the outside of a really authoritarian culture and have a certain amount of meta-knowledge. Notice the original article, the efforts which have been made to eradicate discussions of therapy that do not focus on “happiness” or “adjustment” but on (for example) freedom.
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I recently solved all my psychological issues in a snap by accepting that I was never going to “adapt”; that is was impossible for me to adapt ever, and especially now considering my maturity in life. Ever since then, I’ve had a much greater amount of energy to spend, I’m thoroughly relaxed within my skin, and I don’t over-think anything. I don’t have any sense of residual guilt about anything.
Sometimes pushing and pushing oneself doesn’t work out. There’s no point in it. You’ve got to do what you feel natural with; go in the directions that already feel natural.
As I glide away from previous position, which was an attempt to try to hold onto the peripheries of Western culture, to keep open any future access points for “fitting in”, I find my mental state is clearer, my goals easier to establish and fulfill. I can talk to people without risking offending them, since I am much more at ease with myself. Everything is working out much better, now that I’ve accepted I am African at root, and will never be Western and that I don’t have to try.
My original quest to be “Western” was not driven from deep inner needs in the first place, but from my father’s injunction that I ought to put on a false, happy face and endeavor to praise the Westerner in his existing circumstances in order to win approval and social acceptance. Given that this was never my project to begin with, but one borne out of duty, it is very easy to give it up.
I do have a natural ease with people who are simply enjoying life and I have never aspired to be anything other than myself, except when bound by duty, so I have everything to gain by simply enjoying life on its own terms. I enjoy it so much more this way that I have actually forgotten what my original dilemma was about. I know I was driven into it by financial concerns, since conformity equals financial prosperity. Apart from this skeletal knowledge, I no longer have access to my previous states. I just think the world has opened up and it is no longer necessary to be Western anymore. My job pleases me greatly since it involves work with another culture. Apart from that, I move around Australia and feel African thoughts; think African ideas. Nobody knows that I am doing so, and it seems to alleviate a lot of tension.
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In my first academic job, at a repressed place, I envied the calm of the few persons of color on staff. They knew what was going on and did not internalize it or just get confused by it, or wonder whether what was going on could really be going on, the way some of the rest of us did.
I’ve done something similar to what you describe now, and yes, it is much easier and more coherent.
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Thing is, I don’t feel like assimilating in the manner of the colored staff. I’ve also seen this — the mental distancing. But I don’t feel like doing it. Instead I go to the dojo and train for my next grading and do my casual job with people of another culture.
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I don’t mean assimilating, and I guess I wasn’t clear about staff — I am not talking about “colored staff” but faculty of color — although perhaps mental distancing is still a good term.
Re the psychiatry thing, I am less interested in finding practitioners and so on than I am in the exchange between the general culture and conservative therapy, they sort of feed into each other and reinforce each other, especially now that so many have therapists, therapy is discussed on tv, and so on. It’s this very pervasive lingo that among other things works to interdict a political analysis of anything, i.e. looking at any phenomenon as anything but a result of “craziness” or individual dysfunction, etc.
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Considering how disconnected we have become in modern society, I think that therapy has become the replacement model for good friends or mentors. We probably would all be a little better off if we scheduled more time with the latter. 🙂
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God, how do people manage not to get tired of repeating these meaningless trivialities that have been used and overused to death.
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Certainly, there is no need for someone who has figured out how reality, inclusive of societies, political programs and the like, is structured to require therapy. Even Freudian analysis, (or Jungian), which Clarissa seems to argue is devoid of a dogmatic agenda, relies on drawing one out on the basis of one’s internal construction of authority. A question never addressed by such therapy is what if one’s internal construction of authority happens to match the external structure of authority as it presently is? That is, one may fear a certain manifestation of authority because it creates a clear and present danger to one’s well-being.
If this kind of reality did indeed match one’s perceptions of it, there would be every reason to be emotionally distressed. However, psychoanalysis typically maintains that experiencing a distressing emotion means one is unable to grasp reality as it is — that is, in a demonstrably “non-hysterical” manner.
So the very question of authority and how it functions in terms of actual power relationships is effectively scuttled by psychoanalytical treatment.
It may be that one is is need of dealing with the aftermath of relationships that have long died, but psychoanalysis begs this question, rather than addressing it.
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Musteryou: imagine if in spite of never doing a minute of martial arts training, I kept explaining to you that it’s horrible crap on the basis of my own very strange fantasies about it.
“Look, I’ve been doing it for a while,” you’d say to me, “and what you say never happens during martial arts. Nobody ties you down and makes you eat shit during a training session. I promise that it isn’t that way at all.”
Yet I’d insist and insist and insist that I know better than you do what happens in your martial arts training.
Would you see my insistence as completely rational after a while?
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If you had studied martial arts as a core part of your PhD program, and then I said, “You are just babbling. You’re never even entered a program like I have! You don’t know how to do a front kick!”, well then….
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You think it’s enough to read books about front kicks to know how to do them?
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I would certainly trust an academic expert in Japanese martial arts to tell me a great deal about the martial arts of Japan, without accusing him of being a crazy nutter for expressing his considered views.
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You are not answering my question, though. You would be interested in a person who has never been near a single martial arts training session telling you what happens in your sessions? Yes or no?
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The question is irrelevant, since I never told you what happened in your sessions.
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That is precisely how the following sounds to me: “Even Freudian analysis, (or Jungian), which Clarissa seems to argue is devoid of a dogmatic agenda, relies on drawing one out on the basis of one’s internal construction of authority. A question never addressed by such therapy is what if one’s internal construction of authority happens to match the external structure of authority as it presently is? That is, one may fear a certain manifestation of authority because it creates a clear and present danger to one’s well-being.
If this kind of reality did indeed match one’s perceptions of it, there would be every reason to be emotionally distressed. However, psychoanalysis typically maintains that experiencing a distressing emotion means one is unable to grasp reality as it is — that is, in a demonstrably “non-hysterical” manner.”
Maybe you were trying to say something different, but to me this sounds insistently like, “Clarissa has no idea what happens in her own sessions because she has been duped by analysts, so let me tell you how things really stand.” If the idea you are trying to transmit is different, then I have to say I’m not seeing that.
I can only repeat that I see a country where people are dangerously over-medicated and not turning to a very legitimate (and pretty much only) alternative to taking psychotropic medication which is psychoanalysis. Analysis helps solve problems and achieve happiness. This is something I know from personal experience and try to share with people. Why is this simple idea causing so much drama, I have no idea. Is it better for any of us here if people keep popping pills? Because there is no other alternative right now to what I’m suggesting.
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@ muster. I don’t have a dog in this fight since I have never been to analysis/therapy. But you are not “hearing” what Clarissa is saying. Perhaps this is a better analogy. It seems that you, Clarissa and I all have advanced degrees in literary criticism. So let’s use that as a common language.
OK. Let’s say that we were talking to someone (let’s call him Bob) who was an expert in T.S. Eliot but had never taken a class in literature at the University level. So Bob keeps insisting to us that contemporary literary criticism is like the literary criticism that T.S. Eliot conducted: formalist and conservative. We keep telling Bob that literary criticism has actually grown quite a bit since the days of T.S. Eliot and we point out that in our professional experience, contemporary literary criticism is historically informed, feminist, and often quite radical. And instead of conceding that he is only familiar with the problematic literary criticism of the early 20th century, Bob stubbornly insists that because T.S. Eliot is conservative and formalist that our entire field is (and will always be) conservative and formalist.
I think all that Clarissa is suggesting is that you are basing you opinion on 21st century psychoanalysis on your knowledge of Freud’s early 20th century theories. And she is suggesting that contemporary psychoanalysis has morphed and changed beyond Freud’s original (problematic) theories. So someone quoting Freud to explain their problems with analysis makes as much sense as someone quoting Eliot to explain their problems with lit crit.
(Sorry if I put words in your mouth Clarissa!)
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No, you explained it perfectly, Evelina.
The pharmaceutical companies achieved their goal of making non-medical solutions to psychological problems unpalatable to most people brilliantly.
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As I have already stated. it may be the case that psychoanalysis has transcended the core ideas of its founder, which were patriarchal, but Clarissa did not address whether this was the case in any detailed terms. I, myself, struggle to see how core patriarchal ideas, which form the theory, can be transcended, without psychoanalysis becoming something else entirely. According to Clarissa, I am supposed to take it on trust that this is so, because if I had experienced it, I would say, “this is so!” Those who criticize or question psychoanalysis without experiencing it are to be considered by her merely to be raving. This is an argument on the basis of faith.
As for “dogs in this fight”, that is a horrible way to look at an intellectual discussion, but very typical of the way intellectual discourse has declined.
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“According to Clarissa, I am supposed to take it on trust that this is so, because if I had experienced it”
– All I’m asking you to do is to let me share my own extremely positive experiences of psychoanalysis with a very needy public on my own blog. I don’t believe you are part of this needy public, so whether you do or do not trust anything about psychoanalysis is none of my concern. Although on a personal level, I do find it offensive when people keep suggesting that I’m too stupid to see when I’m being brainwashed by patriarchal ideologues.
I can accept personal insults, though, as long as people don;t try to undermine the extremely important educational endeavor I;m engaged in here.
“As I have already stated. it may be the case that psychoanalysis has transcended the core ideas of its founder, which were patriarchal, but Clarissa did not address whether this was the case in any detailed terms.”
– I also didn’t address in any detailed terms that 2+2=4. I kind of assumed that this was self-evident.
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Nobody is stopping you addressing anything on your blog. If you intend to say I should not comment on this subject directly on your blog in the future, please say so directly.
In any case, if psychoanalysis is as simple as two plus two equaling four, I’m sure all people already get that, without you having to explain it to them.
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Well, I’d do analysis over superficial therapy and psychotropics any day, but my question really is about politics, oppression and its effects, etc. It might be a good time for me to reread Fanon.
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You think it’s enough to read books about front kicks to know how to do them?(Clarissa)
Actually yes, many peoples talent is in coaching without ever actually having to do the activity. Their skill is in watching the mechanics of the techniques. There is an old joke saying that goes like this. “Those who cant play, coach”
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“Actually yes, many peoples talent is in coaching without ever actually having to do the activity. Their skill is in watching the mechanics of the techniques.”
– The key word here being “watching.” Do we have any people in this thread who have actually observed a psychoanalytic session? I don’t think so.
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No, but you can watch people and be a great psychoanalyst. You just wouldnt have the fancy degree. 🙂
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“No, but you can watch people and be a great psychoanalyst.”
– No, you can’t. Please, people, let’s raise the level of discourse already. I don’t want this to turn into an Ignoramus-fest.
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Actually: one of those Ask Clarissa type posts that would be good would be a reading list on current psychoanalysis.
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