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The first point is for the analyst to impose on himself a positive discipline of eschewing memory and desire. I do not mean that ‘forgetting’ is enough: what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.

Wilfred Bion

#holding space #psychoanlysis #wilfred bion

(Modern) science is not ontology; it neither pretends to make ontological claims nor, from a critical perspective on science, recognizes that it is nevertheless making them. Science does what it does and leaves to others to worry about the (ontological) presuppositions and the (ethical, political, etc.) consequences of what it is doing; it also leaves to others to put what it is doing to use.

A. Zupancic “Sexual Difference and Ontology”

#zupancic #science #ontology #modernity #gender essentialism #sexuation #psychoanlysis

Psychoanalysis Has Uncovered Some Dark Truths About the Human Mind.

Psychoanalysis has revealed that simply understanding psychological issues can lead to a dead end. Instead of finding solutions, we might just get stuck in our thoughts without making any real progress and this is one of the most important criticisms of overly intellectual models of liberation.

Psychoanalysis, especially after Sigmund Freud, gradually revealed that insight alone often does not dissolve psychological structures. A person may understand their mechanisms with extraordinary sophistication and still repeat the same patterns for decades. Someone may clearly see that they seek approval because of childhood deprivation, sabotage relationships because of fear of abandonment, overwork because of insecurity, or remain trapped in destructive attachments because familiar suffering feels safer than uncertainty. Yet the pattern continues.

This was deeply destabilizing for the Enlightenment fantasy that rational understanding naturally produces transformation.

In fact, psychoanalysis discovered something almost Spinozist but darker. The organism may not fundamentally want coherence or happiness. It may repeat patterns compulsively because repetition itself has become structurally embedded. Freud eventually moves toward ideas like repetition compulsion precisely because understanding kept failing to produce liberation. The patient says, “I know exactly why I do this,” and then does it again.

This is where many intellectual or spiritual systems become naïve. They assume the human organism behaves like a transparent reasoning machine. But humans are layered systems shaped by habit, affect, embodiment, attachment, trauma, survival conditioning, social structures, and unconscious reinforcement loops. Knowledge enters the system as only one force among many.

Sometimes insight genuinely reorganizes experience. Sometimes it changes almost nothing because stronger forces remain active underneath. A terrified nervous system does not simply obey philosophical clarity. A lonely organism does not stop craving attachment because it understands attachment theory.

And psychoanalysis also uncovered another proble. Self-analysis itself can become a symptom. The person becomes endlessly interpretive. Every emotion becomes material for explanation. Every reaction becomes narrative. One lives inside commentary rather than transformation. The psyche starts feeding on its own interpretation.

This is partly why some later thinkers became suspicious of endless introspection. Friedrich Nietzsche already warned that excessive self-dissection can weaken vitality. Later existential and phenomenological thinkers often tried to move back toward lived existence rather than infinite interpretation. Even contemporary psychology increasingly recognizes that behavioral patterns, bodily states, relationships, environment, sleep, stress, social structure, and material conditions often matter as much as cognitive insight. You can understand your depression perfectly and still remain depressed inside a life structure that continuously reproduces despair.

This does not make understanding useless. It changes its status. Insight is not a magic solvent. It is one causal factor among others. Sometimes crucial, sometimes insufficient, sometimes even paralyzing when it turns into endless recursive self-observation.

Many systems quietly overestimate consciousness and underestimate embodiment, social reality, biology, and repetition. They imagine that seeing clearly should dissolve suffering. But the organism often continues operating according to older and deeper patterns long after clarity arrives. The bitter irony is that humans can become lucid enough to diagnose their own machinery while remaining unable to stop it. Consciousness becomes witness more than ruler.

#shadow #consciousnes #freud #psychoanlysis #nietzsche

"The question is whether psychoanalysis and Marxism are capable or pertinent addresses for thinking the climate crisis. I would say like all good theories — and I would say this is the verification of their materialist character — Marxism and psychoanalysis are not closed, are not finished projects. They unfold in time. They are history, in a way. They can revitalize or renew themselves precisely through such emergencies of the Real. Or at least this is their test point or test moment. And there are ongoing debates about whether Marx had an environmentalist thought or whether there are conceptual conditions for a Marxist ecology, and there are convincing readings that go in this direction. I would say Marxist critique is compatible with environmental critique. I wouldn't see a contradiction in that, but one of course has to alter or expand the field of concepts. Psychoanalysis is a theory of enjoyment and enjoyment is what brought us into this mess in the first place! Or at least it forms an important part of what did. Especially if we take Lacan's thesis, that he developed in the immediate aftermath of May 68, that there is a homology between Marx's attempt to theorize the correct structural place of surplus value in the overall organization of production under capitalism, and Freud's attempt to think the intricacies of enjoyment in the way we are the toys of a compulsive force that demands augmentation of pleasure. In this respect, if Marxism and psychoanalysis meet on the terrain of the notion of surplus, then I think they are already meeting in the field that is central for diagnosing the present and determining the challenges that environmental thought has to face. And those challenges are the organized resistance of the entire capitalist system! That's why I'm so interested in Freud's notion of resistance because it's not about resistance against or to the system but the resistance of the system itself, which is both outside and inside of us. It is part of our mental apparatus and part of reality." -Samo Tomšič

#quotes #Marxism #Psychoanlysis #Freud #Lacan #Marx

The use of psychoanalysis as a kind of pampering to merely bourgeois tastes and self-delusions, to the lap-dog psychology of Americans whose only problem is to reduce and to save on income tax, is in itself a literary scandal.

Alfred Kazin, “Psychoanalysis and Literary Culture Today”

#kazin #essay #literature #literary criticism #psychoanlysis #bourgeois