Category: all things psycho

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.

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.

There is No Oedipal Triangle

I am slowly and awkwardly making my way through Anti-Oedipus.  The process reminds me a little of my first venture through The Brothers Karamazov.  At many points I had the Russian names all jumbled, I had put it down for weeks at a time and then picked up wherever it was that I left off not entirely sure of just what I was entering back into.  It was through that process I came to realize that some books simply needed to be read once so that a basic orientation could be laid for a second reading.  Perhaps this is a lousy and ineffective reading strategy but it has helped sustain my spirit while plodding through books I did not understand (only later to be greatly enlightened by them).  In any event Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is of a similar but also entirely different order.  I rarely know just what the hell is going on.  There have been, however, enough intersections of clarity that offer themselves as tiny beacons to start charting rough waters.  I recently read one such section.

There is no Oedipal Triangle:  Oedipus is always open in an open social field.  Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n).  A poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the flows of desire escape in the direction of other territories.  It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by the white man.  It is precisely this pairing of the parental figures with agents of another nature, their locking embrace similar to that of wrestlers, that keeps the triangle from closing up again, from being valid in itself, and from claiming to express or represent this different nature of the agents that are in question in the unconscious itself. . . . It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of colonization, of dire poverty, and so on, are unfavorable to the construction of the Oedipal apparatus – and that it is precisely because of this that these situations favor a psychotic development or explosion – but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere.  Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized subjects, the question of knowing what is actually invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is pushed still further into the background.

The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: “Oedipus? Never heard of it.”

Anti-Oedipus, 96.