Add new comment

@critic
I think there's a lot more

I think there's a lot more truth in psychoanalysis than in current pop-psych, behaviourism and CBT. Psychoanalysis is a similar method to anthropology. Qualitative study of individual cases, based on particular signs of unconscious/dissociated content (dreams, parapraxes, free association, play, art, as well as symptoms themselves), which if done right, is related to one's own symbols and associations. There's big dangers in it of over-interpreting and basically forcing everything into the same categories, and some of the analytical schools are politically quite conservative. Others are more anarchist-friendly, particularly the ones with a libidinal liberation focus (such as Reich). Yeah it sounds funny cos there's a bunch of poop and breasts and phalluses and stuff. But did you ever wonder why all these body-related things are either hilarious, disgusting/offensive/degrading, or sexually arousing? And why they can carry all three of these contradictory significations at once?

I definitely think this is the direction we need to go in for anarchist self-therapies and mutual aid, rather than just crowdsourcing the current mainstream stuff. Like, we don't learn to cook by copying McDonald's, we've got our own ideas like permaculture and freeganism. Our version would probably merge Reich and his followers (Lowen, Theweleit...) with Situationism and with Guattari's schizoanalysis, while also looting Freud, Jung, Klein, Lacan and the rest, and things like existentialism and ecotherapy.

Klein's breast fixation is probably a counterbalance against Freud's penis fixation. The child's first experience of intense pleasure is probably breastfeeding or bottle-feeding and so the breast or bottle becomes the first object.

But ignore the breasts and penises if that's not helpful. We can say instead: as an infant you had an idea of a loving mother and father who were always there, and a distinct "bad" mother and father who were absent and/or abusive. You wished to protect, merge with, and stay forever with the former pair and to destroy the latter pair, maybe by biting, eating, stabbing, poisoning with your body. Back then, you think you can do this with your thoughts. But as you start to realise the two pairs are the same people, you become afraid that you've irreparably destroyed the good parents, and feel very guilty about this. At other times, you feel very threatened by the bad parents and this makes you feel terrified, enraged, or paranoid. But you start getting afraid and trying to restrain these emotional states because you might destroy the good parents. You've also brought images of both sets of parents inside you (one set by fusing, the other by eating/biting), and you start getting afraid of the bad parents inside yourself, or that the good parents inside you are dead. Abuse in childhood will cause or exacerbate the usual problems in relations to introjected parents and part-objects, because the introjected bad object (the fear that the abusive parent or their body-part is permanently inside you) is stronger and the introjected good object is weaker, so your inner life is in a state of conflict among different introjects.

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
t
8
L
^
c
!
)
^
Enter the code without spaces.