Category: therapy

Some updates

Things have been a little busy around these parts so posting has slowed down.  I am arguably keeping pace with my Kierkegaard reading schedule (almost finished his Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses) but have not had time or energy to post on them.

Though I have abandoned my sentence-a-day translation project I have picked up on another idea.  With some renewed interest in psychoanalysis I began exploring some of the resources from La Borde clinic in France which embraces an ‘experimental(?)’  approach to mental illness.  Its founder Jean Oury is part of the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis and worked alongside figures such as Felix Guattari.  Looking at Oury’s works I noticed that none have as yet been officially translated into English.  So I got the public library to bring a copy of his work Creation et Schizophrenie.  This collection reflects a series of seminars (1987-88) in which Oury seeks to transcend “the artificial distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’.”  I am little skeptical of this language as I still feel there was a ‘romantic’ period in the development of our understanding of mental illness.  It will, however, be interesting to see how Oury develops this notion as works such as Delueze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia deal more with a social construct as opposed to an individual pathology.  In any event I will post my translation over at writing in tongues and note updates here.  I have just completed and posted the Preface or Averstissement.

Fear-less . . . that’s just crazy talk

I have for some time, and mostly on the back-burner, tried to understand the 1960s-70s conversation about the social context of mental illness in light of contemporary experience.  The basic tension being whether the determinant role in mental illness can be fixed primarily on biological factors or social factors.  High school was my first encounter with mental illness when a good friend was diagnosed with depression.  I can still remember him talking about ‘chemical imbalances’ and as I recall this was also presented to us in a class.  The basic point of focusing on biology was so that individuals would not equate their experience with their identity or ability.  They could no more ‘create’ or ‘identify’ with their condition as could someone with a cold or flu.  This sort of conversation also placed hope in science as the messianic figure for those in bondage.

I find it unfortunate that the conversation continues to be reduced to the need for a bio-medical cure and that other forms of response are basically the bandage which keeps the individual from completely being bled out.  Now I want to be clear that I am not opposed to medications that respond to mental illness (though I remain supremely frustrated in how they get distributed and the ‘results’ they offer).  What I want to consider is simple.  Regardless of an illness’ origin and manifestation how would a person respond to their symptoms (apathy, melancholy, hallucinations, paranoia, etc.) if they lived in an environment that actively and rigorously rooted out expressions of fear or the factors which most commonly lead people to be afraid.

I don’t really care at the moment about whether or not this possible.  I just want to consider what it would be like for someone to experience symptoms of mental illness (assuming they are somehow of independent origin) without being afraid of them.  What if there was no fear of hearing voices only a need to process what they said.  What if there was no fear of apathy but a space to rest and act without the spectre of productivity.  These ‘services’ are already offered but they stand distinctly under the banner of ‘sick’ (dysfunctional, abnormal, absurd, etc.).  There is a lot of talk about dealing with the ‘stigma’ of mental illness but until we consider that the power to make it an ‘illness’ is held directly within the stigma I don’t see it being taken seriously.  The typical response of dismantling stigma is to handle a person with ‘kid-gloves’ that still perpetuates diminished status.  How then can we nourish lives that can withstand the fearful realities of life or must we ‘flee Babylon’ and created spaces (perhaps like L’Arche or La Borde) where another manner of life is possible?  And what of the church in all this?  I don’t see those addressing a mental illness flocking to my congregation.  And yet there are so many individuals and families struggling under this burden.

Getting what you ask for – Egypt Update

I am developing a basic framework for a ‘visitation team’ at my church.  This team will help connect with those in the congregation who are physically unable to regularly participate in church.  This morning I was looking through a few resources that I could use to help equip this team with some basic approaches to care and visiting.  A while back I bought a cheap copy of Carl Rogers’ classic On Becoming a Person in which he outlines his client-centered model which is based on the belief that each person has the inherent ability to change and that particular relationships can help facilitate that change.

I have strongly mixed feelings about this approach.  It is very easy to critique this book on its optimism about the possibility of becoming an ‘autonomous individual’.  However, I am respectful of the sort of posture Rogers wishes to nurture.  I am constantly bewildered expressions from those who reject an individualist approach to contemporary issues and those who want to address systemic issues.  It almost invariably seems as though the people wanting to address systemic issues must, must, heap scorn upon actual individuals (particularly if they do not agree with a particular view of systems).  In any event, as I was working through a few his very readable chapters what troubled me more than the dichotomy between systems and individuals is the notion of what positive change could look like.

Rogers cites a study which explores the implication of various parenting styles.  The best model in his estimation is the ‘acceptant-democratic’.  Here is his description the children,

Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes.  Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders (41-42).

I tried to imagine what these kids looked like and it was not hard.  These are the children of upper-middle class families who excel in school and have enough restraint and insight so as to manipulate passive-aggressive acts for the purpose and maintenance of social dominance.  I also expect that these are the families that nod assent to the value of church and social responsibility but don’t give a shit about making any significant change for those values because they have already arrived.  And they are also afraid of those who ‘unstable’, that is, not like them.

This is just a guess.  But if it is correct then Carl Rogers has unfortunately succeeded because there seems to be a whole glut of these families.

** Update – Perhaps it is with a Rogerian sort of unconditional acceptance that Senator Clinton has approached the Mubarak family.

Debt, time, [and the new] wealth

Here is an extended quote from Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work,

The postmodern domination of capitalism is founded on the refrain of wealth, understood as cumulative possession.  A specific idea of wealth took control of the collective mind which values accumulation and the consent of the postponing of pleasurable enjoyment.  But this idea of wealth (specific to the sad science of economics) transforms life into lack, need and dependence.  To this idea of wealth we need to oppose another idea: wealth as time – time to enjoy, to travel, learn and make love.

Economic submission, producing need and lack, makes our time dependent, transforming our life into a meaningless run towards nothing.  Indebtedness is the basis of this refrain.

In 2006, the book Generation Debt (subtitled: Why now is a terrible time to be young) was published in the United States.  The author, Anya Kamenetz considers a question that finally came to the forefront of our collective attention in 2007, but has been fundamental to capitalism for a long time: debt.

Anya Kamenttz’s analysis refers especially to young people taking out loans in order to study.  For them, debt functions like a symbolic chain whose effects are more powerful than the real metal chains formerly used in slavery.

This new model of subjugation goes through a cycle of capture, illusion, psychological submission, financial trap and finally pure and simple obligation to work.

. . .

Our young fellow signs the loan, goes to university and graduates: after that, his/her life belongs to the bank.  S/he will have to start work immediately after graduation, in order to pay back a never ending amount of money. . . . S/he will have to accept any condition of work, any exploitation, any humiliation, in order to pay the loan which follows her wherever s/he goes.

Debt is the creation of of obsessive refrains that are imposed on the collective mind.  Refrains impose psychological misery thanks to the ghost of wealth, destroying time in order to transform it into economic value.  The aesthetic therapy we need – an aesthetic therapy that will be the politics of the time to come – consists in the creation of dissipating refrains capable of giving light to another modality of wealth, understood as time for pleasure and enjoyment.

The crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has opened a new scene: the very idea of social relation as ‘debt’ is now crumbling apart.

The anti-capitalist movement of the future won’t be a movement of the poor, but of the wealthy.  The real wealthy of the future will be those who will succeed in creating forms of autonomous consumption, mental models of need reduction, habitat models for the sharing of indispensable resources.  This requires the creation of dissipative wealth refrains, or of frugal and ascetic wealth.

in the virtualized model of semiocapitalism, debt worked as a general frame of investment, but it also became a cage for desire, transforming desire into lack, need and dependency that is carried for life.

Finding a way out of such a dependency is a political task whose realization is not a task for politicians.  It’s a task for art, modulating and orienting desire, and mixing libidinal flows.  It is also a task for therapy, understood as a new focalization of attention, and a shifting of the investments of desiring energy.