#generalized conceptions of psychoanalysis

[art-of-mathematics]

Emergence of personality - this is my attempt to depict 'personality' as a sort of dynamical system, offering emergent properties...

What is a personality?

Personality is the 'form of self' - it is a collection of character attributes, to summarize it simply. Furtherly, the form of self is characterized by patterns in perception, thought and feeling.

The form of self goes hand-in-hand with the 'function of self': behavior.

[I think this perspective is similar to Jung's ideas on Triebe/drive. ]

Starting from here I try to translate these concepts into some sort of algorithms.

[Theoretical stuff: ]

[Practical stuff: ]

[monsteracademia]

monster theory reading list

this list is going to be some recommended reading when it relates to literary teratology or monster theory. some of these works predate 'monster theory' as a concept (which was coined in 1996 by jeffrey jerome cohen) but are foundational to that work regardless.

i'll try to include links to any readings that are freely available online and links to doi etc but if something isn't and you're really keen, hit me up and y'know we'll see what i can do.

monster theory: reading culture (1996) by jeffrey jerome cohen - the original and defining text on monster theory by the man himself. here is a link to a pdf of the first chapter, which i spoke about at length in another post.

the horror reader (2000) by ken gelder (editor) - an incredibly insightful collected edition about the horror genre as a whole, however gelder's introduction to part three, as well as marie-hélene huet's chapter introduction to monstrous imagination were incredibly helpful to my work personally. very generously, gelder has allowed free access to the entire work in pdf form!

the monster theory reader (2020) by jeffrey andrew weinstock - an amazing collected edition featuring cohen, creed, kristeva and a number of others that provides a really good foundational background knowledge of what contributed to the creation of monster theory as well as some fantastic takes on it post cohen.

classic readings on monster theory (2018) by asa simon mittman & marcus hensel - similar to weinstock, this collected edition features a number of classical foundational essays and some more modern ones surrounding monster theory. a very helpful starting point! here is a link to the introductory chapter by mittman and hensel in pdf form!

the monstrous feminine: film, feminism, psychoanalysis (1993) by barbara creed - creed's idea of the monstrous feminine is one of the foundational underpinnings of monster theory and is key in comprehending the 'other' as monstrous, particularly as it relates to women in a patriarchal society. highly recommend! here is the entire book in pdf form!

powers of horror: an essay on abjection (1982) by julia kristeva - kristeva's idea of abjection is a precursor to a lot of theoretical frameworks regarding the horror genre, in particular as a direct precursor to creed's work, then to cohen's work. here is the entire book in pdf form!

this is definitely not an all encompassing list of sources, but it is a good starting point for anyone interested in this particular niche field of literary theory. these are texts that were crucial for me in understanding the basics when i was starting work on my thesis.

[chigurhscemeterygirl]

Anton Chigurh Psychoanalysis and Diagnosis

Hello, friends. I recently purchased the DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual used in the United States) as I study psychology. But I decided it would be fun to do a little analysis of Anton Chigurh and his psyche. I’m also bipolar, I do not have a personality disorder. But I somewhat understand the ins and outs of this.

Anton is an adult. So he is qualifiable for a personality disorder diagnosis. You have to be at least eighteen years old and presenting symptoms for a significant amount of time to quality. I will first delve into the concept of him having Antisocial Personality Disorder.

First, we will rule out the possibility of antisocial behaviors in the context of a psychotic disorder (schizophrenia or bipolar disorder). Antisocial traits having specifiers but generally being traits that are socially unacceptable and destructive. There is no evidence that Anton’s behavior is because of a psychotic disorder (though he may have traits of these disorders). His behavior seems to be due to another factor, not hallucinations or delusions influencing him.

I don’t believe that conduct disorder has to be diagnosed during adolescence but there has to be evidence that such behaviors were present before eighteen years of age. With Anton, we have to assume as his childhood is not portrayed in No Country for Old Men. I won’t comment too much on this as we really cannot say for sure. But with the likelihood that Anton was living in a similar environment when he was a child would make me think he had symptoms of conduct disorder.

Now we get into actual traits of ASPD, of which Anton would have to present with three for multiple years to qualify for this disorder. I am going to give brief synopses of the traits instead of reading out the entire criteria.

The first criterion for ASPD that Anton portrays relates to committing behavior, repeatedly, that would be grounds for arrest (rejecting societal norms). I mean, Anton kills fourteen people within the span of two days as well as committing other severe crimes. Even if we ignore his major crime of murder, he commits theft and breaking and entering during the film. This is all repetitive, skilled behavior that has been going on for some time.

The second criterion for ASPD that Anton meets is lack of remorse or indifference for causing harm towards oneself or others. This is clear. Anton kills many people and doesn’t as much as regret it. He cares more about how clean he stays during the ordeal than the pain he causes people. A great example I can think of, for his lack of remorse and pain, is when he kills Carla Jean based on a promise because there was no empathy telling him to let her be.

Another criterion that he meets is deceitfulness for personal gain. Anton impersonates a police officer in the beginning of the film. That is a major form of deception that was certainly for personal gain. I wouldn’t say he’s a typical representative of this trait of ASPD though, he’s not a slick liar. But he also is manipulative. He acts as if the coin toss has some sort of meaning or choice. That is manipulation to make people feel like they have control.

It’s also debatable whether or not Anton displays recklessness. I would say he is, and impulsive (which is another part of this). He is incredibly careful and calculated, killing precisely and easily. He does partake in activity that may hurt him but it is not in typical reckless fashion. Still, he kills people at the drop of a hat and bases everything of a coin. While that’s not necessarily seen as an impulse in the film, it practically speaking is.

I wouldn’t say Anton is extremely irresponsible or impulsive, which are the last two criteria. But he is somewhat. He is not irresponsible as he quite literally takes care of business which is entirely the plot of No Country For Old Men. He has a framework that he follows (the coin, fate) and keeps promises. I also wouldn’t say impulsive as he has no impulses he acts on. He is the type to stay strictly by his word and not act on any feelings he may have (if he even has them).

Anton Chigurh’s functioning diagnosis would very likely be ASPD as he meets most of the criteria for the disorder. Also I imagine he would be seen in a prison setting which would make this even more likely as his behavior would only worsen and be more extensive in time. He does also have some traits of other disorders which I will get to.

While ASPD is a Cluster B personality disorder, I see Anton fitting in with some Cluster A and Cluster C traits too. Cluster A is described as odd and eccentric and C is nervous and fearful. These traits specifically do not fit Anton but some of the disorders within these categories do. Particularly I see Schizoid Personality Disorder from Cluster an and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder from Cluster C.

I’ll be brief here. SPD fits Anton because he truly is odd and eccentric. He doesn’t fit social norms, doesn’t follow the typical flow of a human being’s life. Look at his unusual hair, look at his unacceptable behavior, look at his cold, flat affect and lack of relationships. However, he is violent and dominant, not passive.

OCPD fits because he is rigid and obsessed with his moral code. However, OCPD implies some level of anxiety over a lack of control. Anton does not display anxiety EVER. I don’t think he fits enough to be diagnosed with these disorders. And his violence would likely mean ASPD would fit better as a diagnosis.

Briefly, I’ll comment more on other possibilities outside of personality disorders. Mood disorders, like bipolar disorder and MDD, can almost immediately be excluded due to Anton’s consistent, flat emotional state. The schizophrenia spectrum, too, because he is simply not psychotic (experiencing delusions or hallucinations). These can immediately be ruled out. Dissociative disorders may be a more real possibility that explain his behavior. Anton does seem disconnected from reality but there is no proof of gaps in his memory or the other negativities that would come with such a disorder.

Overall, Chigurh’s functioning diagnosis would likely be ASPD. Possibly, it would be specified that he has some SPD and OCPD traits as well.

[antirelation]

Let us put it simplistically. I think it is impossible to read Black Skin, White Masks without acknowledging that it is also—and not just by chance—the product of at least three inter-related but unfinished dialogues, to which Fanon kept returning throughout his life and work. First, there is Fanon’s dialogue with traditional French colonial psychiatry and within that, with psychoanalysis, Freud and the French Freudians. For, if this text is ‘where Lacan makes his interruption into colonial discourse theory’, as [Henry Louis] Gates asserts, it is also where Fanon ‘reads’ Lacan in the light of his own preoccupations. In the long footnote on the ‘mirror phase’, it is Fanon’s appropriation of Lacan which strikes us most vividly. First, the ‘Other’ in this transaction is raced: (‘…the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely’). It is difficult not to agree that he writes here as if ‘the real Other’ is indeed ‘a fixed phenomenological point’. Secondly, the split in the subject which the ‘mirror phase’ engenders, and which, for Lacan, is a general mechanism of misrecognition which provides the conditions of existence of all identification, is relocated by Fanon in the specificities of the colonial relation: ‘In the Antilles, perception always occurs at the level of the imaginary… for the Antillean the mirror hallucination is always neutral [i.e. colourless]’. This divergence is critical. On the one hand, it reminds us, as a startling discovery, how racially neutral, how strikingly un-raced, Lacan’s discourse is, and how rarely this unmarked whiteness of his language has received comment. On the other hand, it clearly marks Fanon’s distance from the logic of Lacan’s position. For Lacan, as [Homi K.] Bhabha remarks, ‘identity is never an a priori nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality.’ To this we might necessarily add that, for Lacan, identity also operates ‘at the level of the imaginary’. Fanon follows Lacan in substituting the psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification’ for the Hegelian concept of ‘recognition’. This is a procedure which marks their common lineage in the French reception of Hegel, via the highly influential post-Heideggerean reading of The Phenomenology provided by Kojève. But, for Fanon, the blockage which detotalises the Hegelian ‘recognition’ of the One by the Other in the exchange of the racialised look, arises from the historically specific, specular structure of racism, not from the general mechanism of self-identification. The political implications of this deviation are highly significant. For the whole thrust of Bhabha’s text—accepting a politics of subversion which lives with ambivalence, without trying to transcend or sublate it (aufhebung)—is the political consequence of a Lacanian theoretical position, where ambivalence is a necessary part of the script. Whereas Fanon’s theoretical position—that this radicalisation of the ‘mirror stage’ is a ‘pathological’ condition, forced on the black subject by colonialism—has the political question of how to end this alienation inscribed in it. Fanon cannot, politically, ‘live with this ambivalence’, since it is the ambivalence that is killing him!

Stuart Hall, from The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?, in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation

[apeironshiftingg]

Can you erase a memory while shifting (or in general)?

No, you cannot truly erase a memory from your consciousness if your subconscious or unconscious mind still retains it. At best, you can suppress it from your awareness, but erasure is not absolute, not in real-world neuroscience, not in shifting, not in consciousness theory. Let's break that down:

Memory is Layered and Nothing Is Truly Forgotten. According to real neuroscience and psychology: The conscious mind is what you're aware of right now, meaning thoughts, feelings, active memory, ect (go see my video about the different stage of the mind). The subconscious stores everything that isn't in active focus: past experiences, beliefs, suppressed emotions, sensory patterns. And the unconscious holds even deeper structures: instincts, trauma, programming from early life, even "forgotten" memories. Nothing is ever truly erased. Research from trauma studies, hypnosis, and psychoanalysis shows that even when people forget something (trauma, dreams, hypnotic suggestions, etc.), it is still active beneath awareness and can influence behavior, dreams, emotional reactions, or reappear under the right conditions.

This matches shifting. In shifting, even if you think you "erased" a memory in your DR (like forgetting you actually shifted in the first place, or forgetting a DR futur event), that memory still lives in your subconscious identity, because your consciousness went through it. So, you can't actually remove the imprint of the memory from your being. You can suppress your direct access to it, but it will still shape you underneath. The same way you sometimes remember a random memory from your childhood out of nowhere, even if you forgot its existence for decades. It never disappear. Nothing does. It the same for people who remember their “past lives” (it’s actually just shifting, like everything else).

2. "I Forgot I Shifted" or "I'll Be Told Later by someone in my DR" and Why It Doesn't Work: Saying "I'll forget I shifted and someone will come tell me later" doesn't work if your subconscious doesn't believe it or expect it. Why? Because your subconscious determine everything (if you don't grasp this concept, go give a look to my account). It follows internal logic and consistency from what it expects, It doesn't play along with contradictions unless you decided it (go see my previous video about the true poème of our subconscious). So unless you truly expect the memory return (and not just wish for it), your subconscious won't trigger the "reminder event". But the thing, is that: how can your subconscious expect you to "regain" a memory or expect someone to go tell you about it, if he can't even remember the fact that it's supposed to happen. Do pay attention on where you get your infos and the logic of what people tells you!!! That's how you know if the person in question knows what they are talking about or not!! (No, it's not because someone has shifted that they understand it (shifting) nor are qualified to talk about it).

3. Consciousness Is Continuity, and Continuity Means Memory: Consciousness is not just floating awareness, it is a continuous thread of experience, and memory is the stitching. If your consciousness experienced something in your CR, DR, or any reality), that experience is part of your structure. Erasing it would mean breaking the continuity of your identity, which is TECHNICALLY not possible without destroying the consciousness itself. So in pure consciousness terms: Every memory you experience is recorded into the structure of your being. Trying to erase it means trying to undo an experience that was already processed into who you are. Which can't happen. So Can You Seem to Forget? Yes, you can: Suppress awareness of a memory. Block access to it (through trauma, for instance (those "loss" or memories happen more often than we think). It create the illusion that it's gone. But those memories can: Resurface in dreams, Leak through emotions or behaviors, Return suddenly when the subconscious allows it, ect (go see my video about the level of consciousness). Even if you "forget" your CR in your DR, the memory remains in your system. It might feel gone, but it isn't.

4. In addition, all I just explained is still from the perspective of "loosing" the awareness of a memory by the cause of events or by being unaware you are forgetting it. Now how would or could you CONSCIOUSLY and VOLUNTARY "erase" a memory? TECHNICALLY, if your subconscious expect to "forget" that memory, it would. But the thing is that if you are thinking about forgetting something, HOW would you make your subconscious and unconscious forget you are currently thinking of, if you are thinking of it? It's like when you are trying to forget something you just saw, but are thinking about forgetting it. You can't forget something you are thinking about forgetting, because you are currently thinking about it. Let me give an example: you saw your parents making love, then you're trying really hard to forget the image but can't, because you are thinking of that image. See? This is where the concept has flaws.

Technically speaking, the idea of loosing awarness of a memory is possible, but the fact of consciously and voluntarily forgetting something is contradictory itself and shows big flaws in its concept. Final Answer: You cannot truly erase memories, not in real consciousness theory, not in shifting. You can only suppress them from your awareness, but your subconscious and

unconscious always retain them, and if they still exist there, they will continue to shape who you are, even if you're unaware of it. Now like explained, voluntary forgetting à memory or event is not technically possible, there's no script or intention that overrides this principle, because this is how conscious experience functions at its root.

-Apeiron

Link To The Masterlist Of My Blog!

[estrellasrojas]

"and when men don’t want to overcome their role as the child in the Oedipal situation, it usually has a different symbolic significance for them" this got me interested, can you elaborate on that? and what would it mean for the woman to seize the parental role?

When men want to remain the child in the Oedipal situation, it’s usually because they don’t want to separate from the mother for one reason or another. Usually the symbolic situation is that they don’t transfer the mother role from the mother of their childhood to a woman they want to make a mother by being a father. But this can look many different ways depending on their life situation, even married men can be like this. Feminists notice this when they say men don’t want a wife, they want a mother, but it’s more accurate to say that they think they can only possess the mother by continuing to be the child (tied to the symbolic significance of breastfeeding and the identification of the mother with the partial-object of the breast). In other words they never overcome their infantile narcissism and do not want to take on the social obligation of an adult role, which for men in a patriarchal society means to try to possess the phallus (become the paternal authority).

Traditionally, because psychoanalysis reified the patriarchal nuclear family situation, it also assumed that this situation could only lead men to being gay. In early psychoanalytic terms bottoms were interpreted as trying to become the mother to be possessed by the father, which is also why psychoanalysts and early sexologists tended to conflate gay men and transgender women. Tops were interpreted as misogynistically trying to deny the mother altogether and remain within a kind of fraternal sibling situation where the brother-partner is their own narcissistic ideal self-image. But the bourgeois nuclear family has declined, or rather been more fully subordinated to the flexibility of the workforce in the current regime of accumulation where the family wage and paternal couverture are far less common.

This leads to a situation where men feel like they can’t become the father, the father becomes more distant symbolically and is usually identified with the state or some vague sense of impersonal social power (what Lacan calls the Big Other). Then everything for these men becomes about getting the best out of the position of the child as possible and prolonging it to avoid the void of nothingness between them and the phallus. A lot of men feel discontented by this and describe themselves as feeling castrated and emasculated, and many of them they lay the blame on the mother. Usually this means both their personal mother and women in general, who they hate for desiring to be possessed by the Big Other aka the anonymous They of other men, while they wish that women would “breastfeed” them (sustain a completely and consciously dependent existence) and stroke their ego forever.

Sometimes they cover up this fantasy with a hyperbolic simulation of trying to be a father that doesn’t need a mother to possess or doesn’t take on the mutually reflective role of mother and father in a new Oedipal situation. This is where you get the Andrew Tate shit, where they try to deny their need for the mother entirely by either actually or imaginarily turning women into mute articles of commerce without any symbolic weight apart from their being means of exchange between self-autonomous men. This gets closer to the classic psychoanalytic concept of the misogynistic repressed homosexuality where it’s based on boyish infantile narcissism (being a “high value male”) and has to repress the symbol of the mother (which women in general represent for them) to avoid the problem of meaning that she poses for them.

In traditional psychoanalysis, for women to take on the parental role means to become mothers. The significance of mothering is in the context of penis envy. The concept has been criticized a lot, but like Juliet Mitchell shows, poorly understood. In Freud’s work it was meant to describe the perspective of women towards their role within patriarchal society, as a lack or a nothing to be inscribed by patriarchal authority. Freud reified this of course, because he saw civilization and patriarchy as identical and believed we had to just make piece with this. This colored his interpretation of mothering as more or less the only means for women to resolve the Oedipal competition with their mother. They would have to sublimate their wish for a phallus, for patriarchal authority and a masculine possessive selfhood, by giving birth to a child as the prolongation of themselves in the world. In other words, their ego becomes their relationship with their child, their maternal role.

But this maternal role itself has been contested and undermined in the current regime of labor. In East Asia, especially Japan and Korea, women have waged a collective political refusal of it. But they have not yet set forth to make themselves something new, they are still stuck in a form of the Oedipal conflict. Freud made a misogynistic analysis of this situation for the feminists of his day by saying they wished to themselves possess the phallus, that they were phallic women. Luce Irigaray extends this analysis to more feminist terms in Speculum of the Other Woman by analyzing how many feminists never overcome the inverted desire for recognition implied in constantly confronting the patriarchal authority and never being able to set out to develop a “specifically feminine subjectivity.” In other words, this is the dynamic of ressentiment analyzed by Nietzsche and Fanon, where those dependents deprived of a self by the social structure feel their impotence in trying to confront the social authority and so they release that rebellious energy on each other to attack whatever they think resembles the now symbolically demonized authority. Needless to say this happens all the time in East Asian radfem spaces and the online subcultures love to purity test each other and morally tear each other down.

Anyways all of this is covered pretty well in Nancy Chodorow’s work. She gives good critiques of classical psychoanalysis for reifying heterosexuality and mothering instead of analyzing how those roles have to be made, and can be just as neurotic as if not more than the forms of homosexuality that Freud and other early psychoanalysts focused on. This kind of critique is very important for a time when the norm is clearly no longer sustainable and the symbolic weight given to the patriarchal nuclear family is now in stark tension with the actual demands of the current labor regime. In a sense, it’s another aspect of how proletarians are aware that they are “emasculated” and rendered “feminine” by being rendered dependent articles of commerce. And so the proletarian men tend to compensate for this feeling of precariousness and impotence by reinforcing the fantasy that ownership of their own labor-power as a commodity makes them a capitalist paternal authority like any other

[glitter-stained]

A psychoanalytical reading of Lost Days and Under the Hood, because I hate myself and hate Freud even more

*bracing myself to talk shit* Okay, let's do this. Last warning to back off if you like psychoanalysis or even have a nuanced take on this. This is the graveyard where nuance comes to die.

First thing first, this is not intended to be an attack on Judd Winick: I do not know if he has actually read anything on psychoanalysis, and though it would make so much sense if it were intentional, it could totally be that Winick had passing knowledge of psychoanalysis from a source similar to one my short-form tumblr shitposts and other general pop culture information, thought "huh, neat, I always thought manipulative hot MILF Talia was a cool concept" and ran with it. Or that any other thought process went into it. I am extremely critical of the decisions he has made in his portrayal of mental illness and Talia specifically, but I'm not gonna criticise him on the assumption that it was psychoanalytical. I say this because the rest of this post is gonna sound like I think it was on purpose: I think it could, but I don't think I have enough knowledge about Judd Winick and enough clarity in the text to be crystal clear that this is what directed his writing (unless I missed one Easter egg in the back of an image, that would be very fun.) I'm also not gonna make fun of Winick for writing psychoanalysis fiction if he did do it on purpose, because so did I when I was a misguided highschooler, and many therapists have not gotten past that phase despite dedicating their life to it so there's no judgement on that part. With that being said, I think it's a super valid reading, so let's talk about this. Also, I'll talk a lot about Freud because he's the founding father of this shit, but there are many other psychoanalysts who came after him, all putting their own brick in the wall; all of them are wrong, but many are more moderate and do not have the extraordinary audacity of the first culprit.

[dominaexmachina]

Your “AI Art Lottery” Take Is Not Deep. It’s Just Lazy

I saw this comment in a thread and it genuinely made me laugh, because it reveals so much while thinking it reveals the opposite.

The “AI art is just a lottery” line always gives away the same thing: you haven’t really looked at how either art or AI actually works. You’ve just decided that whatever happens inside Photoshop hands is “creative process”, and whatever happens inside a model is “slot machine noise”.

Let’s start with the part people quietly erase: you can plan AI art. In ridiculous, obsessive detail. You can specify subject, pose, composition, color palette, lighting, texture, era, lens, mood, camera position, post-processing, and then iterate through prompt tweaks like a designer iterating wireframes. That’s not “hit generate and pray”. That’s art direction. If your entire concept of AI art is “I typed dragon in the sky once and it spat a thing”, that’s not a critique of the medium. That’s a confession about the depth of your own practice.

They talk about randomness as if it’s some alien parasite unique to models. Cute. Every painter knows accidental drips, weird edges, and “oh, I didn’t plan that but I kind of like it” moments. Happy accidents at the sketch stage, last-minute decorative filler slapped into an empty corner so the composition doesn’t fall apart, details that clearly arrived not from divine intention but from “this area looked dead, I threw in some stuff”. We’ve all seen those images where one element feels like it was bolted on in the last five minutes because the canvas had an awkward void. That’s not sacred intentionality. That’s exactly the kind of messy, emergent process people call “soul” when it’s attached to a hand.

The difference is just where the chaos lives. For a human painter with limited capacity, most of the randomness plays out early: in rough sketches, throwaway studies, and small compositional decisions that never leave the studio. With a model you can push that combinatorial explosion out into visible space: hundreds of candidates, tiny variations, weird latents. You see more of the chaos because the search space is wider, not because it magically stopped being art and turned into a casino.

And then there’s the funniest part of the comment: “The beauty of random model details isn’t apparent to the observer… it’s not interesting to most people. My eyes glaze over.” So what you’re actually saying is: “I personally don’t have a trained eye or an emotional stake in this medium, therefore there is nothing there.” That’s not an argument. That’s boredom with extra steps. People can’t reliably tell AI images from non-AI ones in blind tests, but somehow we’re supposed to accept forensic psychoanalysis on “planned brushstroke intention” versus “model lottery artifact”. You can’t reliably distinguish the outputs, but you can confidently diagnose the soul behind them? Adorable.

If you want to say “I’m tired of generic Midjourney pin-ups and overpolished fantasy scenes” — excellent, welcome to the club. But that’s a criticism of taste and usage, not a metaphysical boundary between “real art” and “lucky prompt roll”. When you label the entire medium a lottery, what you’re really doing is protecting a romantic hierarchy: the only valid desire is the desire to be called an artist, not the desire for a specific work to exist in the world.

Some people just want the damn image — the mood, the scene, the world — and they are willing to wrestle with a complex tool to get it. If your imagination of creativity can’t accommodate that because there’s no graphite dust on the floor, that’s not a defense of art. That’s nostalgia dressed up as critique.