I lived in colonial Rhodesia and in 1980, when the regime changed from white, minority rule to black majority rule, in due course under the nominally “Marxist” dictator, Mugabe, many of my friends began to leave the country. We called it “taking the gap”.

My sense of things it that many Western readers, but above all those who embrace psychoanalysis or a very individualistic notion of being, cannot understand how suddenly I could have have fewer friends than before. Perhaps I was evil or had a personality change?

Three years later, my parents decided that we too ought to migrate, so we go onto a plane and left our country of origin forever. Of course after this my “personality” changed even more in that I could not longer relate to those things I was most used to. I was cast onto the turbulent seas of novelty and estrangement.

The only thing I can put it down to is the pathological danger of air travel at a tender age. It must have brought out the worst in me.

I do very much appreciate the discipline of psychohistory, which analyses psychological motivations behind historical events, but that is based on trauma theory, i.e. people are abused as children and re-enact their real childhood trauma by going to war. No crap about masochistic drives.

“the person suffering should change themselves, but they should do so in a way that doesn’t implicate others or avoidable historical circumstances in the process of change”

This is what led to the really unintentionally funny situation a few months ago where I told my doctor I was deeply depressed because I was working for minimum wage with unsteady hours, and my doctor first prescribed me Wellbutrin then said I had “treatment-resistant depression” when the pills did not make me happy.

But, I think, realistically, psychoanalysis is the dogma, or paradigm (if you prefer) that distress is caused by “psychical forces”.

What to do if someone has been tortured? Sympathise with them and treat the situation as if it were real.

One doesn’t need psychoanalytical theory to be able to do this. It is a natural human instinct — so long as our instincts are allowed to be natural.

What I would say about psychoanalysis & therapy is that they need to be able to take an educated, critical stance on culture and society — so many of the problems people have are about how they have been trained to think of things or who they have been allowed to be. Life really is embedded in this stuff and it is not a simple question of “adjusting.”

I have a huge problem with psychoanalysis making out that everything is in one’s head. I’m sure it fits in with notions of bourgeois morality and individual responsibility to make it seem as if women were not being singled out and persecuted for their sexuality during the middle ages — rather, they were willing victims, even if ‘unconsciously’.

Clearly, this is not the kind of mingling of psychoanalysis with history that is desirable. History has to critique psychoanalysis, not the other way around.

I have just made a video about historical forces, which are generally what psychoanalysis will not take into account.

I recently had a go at a guy in his late 20s who was pretty much a leader and role model for a largish group of people of 20-40 year olds. Over recent months the majority of his comments were becoming quite nasty personal attacks, but because of his status all he ever received in return were pats on the head. He was oblivious to his actions and his reasons for doing them and really resented having them pointed out (turns out a few others had noticed his increasing cruelty), but for me at least, it seemed obvious.

I was going to throw out a couple of other examples that also revolved around power relations (tantrums, desperation for approval). When you question some people about an action, they immediately point the finger at someone else because they are unaware of or unwilling to admit of an insecurity and consequent dependence that motivates their behaviour. It’s the job of the psych to unveil this motivator (even if it takes a while because they always seem to begin with immediate family and its history).

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Why do you ask????

Are you married????

What does it mean to you that you can eat without holding a job? Do you enjoy being jobless?

Read up on the Hindu deity Shiva. He is the corner of the Hindu Trinity that has no counterpart in the Christian Trinity.

I think people who can’t feel may therefore resort to stressing. If you feel, then every feeling itself is a lived act — a state of self-acknowledgement of what one is feeling. But if one cannot feel, then one only has the ability to intellectualize or to stress.

I’m starting to make sense of some of the discourses posted in commentary about American popular culture recently. I’m thinking of The Last Psychiatrist and a recent, similar article on Cracked, which advises people who are unhappy with their lives how to stop hating themselves. They hate themselves because they are passive. They’ve been told they are great just the way they are, but being great just for doing nothing doesn’t feel like anything. Consequently, the self-hatred. If they started to do something, they might acquire a real identity. Interestingly, both The Last Psychiatrist article and the associated one at Cracked go off track around this point, insisting that one must create a culturally male identity. In the first instance, one does that by eschewing the “narcissism” culturally associated with investing one’s time and money in the humanities. In the second instance, one must actively pursue social status, though making oneself socially useful, in order to attract “girls”. Both of these solutions seem to lead away from the narcissistic bubble one might seem to generate by seeming to “do nothing”, but their answer is to try to gain social approval in what is deemed to be a more substantive sense, by doing something that isn’t artsy or associated with one’s feelings.

It seems to me that so long as one is running away from what one actually feels, which is the ‘masculinist’ answer to the question of cultural narcissism, one is still doing nothing for oneself in any way that matters. You will still end up with a hollow core, despite all your busy activity in a realm of reality that necessitates a purely instrumental consciousness. Your narcissistic core remains because you haven’t attended to your true self, but have run away from it into being busy and occupying yourself with activity. In particular, your hatred for the humanities and for what they represent to you — “feeling” — will make you hollow.

But for a person who can feel what they feel, life is never hollow.

Recently, I was watching a documentary of war journalists and wondered whether I may have missed my vocation. I do understand this deeper level of pain, from experience, although it is in a way unspeakable, lending itself to repetitive nightmares, profound guilt and sorrow. The journalists of course, being writers, attempt to put these experiences into words, but I’m sure that unless you’ve had similar experiences you might assume they were merely writing for entertainment. The problem I see here is the cultural milieu, which holds that we all ought to be putting ourselves out there for personal gain and that there is a problem if we do not do so. It was as if, from the current cultural perspective, we are remaining in primary narcissism if we do not communicate — and therefore put ourselves out there — but if we do write, then that is considered to be instrumental narcissism. In either case, and no matter what you do, you are not able to escape the imputation of narcissism to enter genuine communication.

What puts up a barrier against genuine communication? I think it’s people lifestyle choices. Most people don’t experience much of anything and therefore can’t relate to whatever is beyond their experience. Also there is the issue of the fragility of ego. We are taught to see ourselves in competition with others, rather than in terms of a relationship. That’s not a personal problem, but a problem of the economic system and how it functions or fails to function.

I relate to the bad dreams and the war guilt (brought on by being spectators of war) that is professed by many of these journalists. They’re not exceptional people in the way that contemporary culture views “awesomeness”. I could relate in particular to one guy who said that as a child he was very shy and alone and being in a war zone was one place he found where he felt in control. There was also the sense that you never feel more alive than when you face the proximity of death.

Anyway — thanks for the author link. Looks like the sort of writing that appeals to me.

Somehow connected is this Mailer quotation I have run across, “Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment,” whose origin (in Mailer texts) I do not know. It leads me to think of the distinction between pain for entertainment and real pain. I think much psychotherapy is interested in the former *as a way to evade* the latter.

In modern times psychiatric ideology has to a large extent replaced theology as
custodian of society’s values. Clearly, the semantics of “good” and “evil” have
been replaced partially by “health” and “mental illness.” In our times, a woman
who is defined as unhealthy because she wants power over her own life can’t win
according to the rules of the psychiatrists’ games. As Szasz has shown, the
tortures are more subtle but the pattern is the same. Szasz’s analysis is a
development of an analogy between institutional psychiatry and the Inquisition
which was earlier made by Elizabeth Packard, a woman who was psychiatrically
imprisoned for “madness” in the nineteenth century by her husband, who
disagreed with her theological views. (32) Women, particularly, [65] although of
course not exclusively, are victimized by the barbarities of modern psychiatry,
especially psychosurgery. As a result of the efforts of Dr Peter Breggin’s
investigations, it is not well known that there has emerged a second wave of
psychosurgery, which, interestingly, is contemporaneous with the second wave
of feminism. This includes operations in which healthy brain tissue is mutilated
in order to change a person’s emotions and conduct. The current wave of
psychosurgery is aimed not only at state hospital patients, but especially at
relatively well-functioning “neurotics,” particularly women. On February 24,
1972, Dr Breggin’s article, “The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery,” was
read into the Congressional Record. Discussing the remarkably large proportion
of women who are being lobotomized, Dr Breggin explains that it is more
socially acceptable to lobotomize women because creativity, which the operation
totally destroys, is in this society “an expendable quality in women.” A famous
psychosurgeon (Freeman, the “dean of lobotomists”) is quoted as saying that
lobotomized women make good housekeepers. Concerning this phenomenon,
Dr Barbara Roberts, a feminist, observes that psychosocial conditioning is no
longer as effective as it once was in suppressing female anger:
But, ever resourceful, patriarchal class society is developing what could prove
to be the “final solution” to the “woman problem” (and for the “problems”
caused by all other oppressed groups). That weapon is psychosurgery. (33)
The weapons that modern technology is developing for social control of
deviants, particularly women, are more subtle than burning at the stake. They
merely destroy minds – the capacity for creativity, imagination, and rebellion –
while leaving hands and uteruses intact to perform the services of manual work
and breeding

You wanted me to comment on how women of America are punished today and brought into submission. I suggest you watch the news. My impression of the situation where you appear to be is that their health is being put at risk in a number of states due to right-wing ideologies. I’m sure you didn’t respond to my article on patriarchal witch-hunting to be told that. The witch hunting is psychological. I have covered this in all sorts of articles and I’m sorry if you do not understand what I am getting at. You would probably have to read a whole lot more of what I’ve written.

However, you are basically anonymous to me, and the tone of your inquiry doesn’t inspire me to want to engage more.