Re: Psychoanalysis Re: "happiness is a transitory state"

[joanna bujes <jbujes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> Or, if you want to take it further, there's Judith Butler's argument
> - rooted in that silly doctrine called psychoanalysis - that subjects
> are formed in subjection (through deference to authority figures,
> like parents, and their successors, like language and law), and that
> attitude of deference to authority persists through life, for fear of
> the disintegration of the subject.

I don't think you need psychoanalysis to observe that human beings
(uniquely among animals) go through a long, long period of dependence.
This dependence, which interestingly is the more prolonged in more
technologically advanced societies, breeds certain emotional habits
chief among which are identification and compulsive ideation -- what
Psych. calls the construction of a conditioned "false ego."
Psychonalysis, in its more radical forms, helps the patient become aware
of this conditioning. Its goal (like that of Buddhism) is to enable the
subject to be fully present. This full presence is not something that is
achieved once and for all, but a practice of awareness that must be kept
up for an entire lifetime...because the present changes continually.

The neurotic (or in Buddhism, the man who is still "attached") is unable
to live in the present; he lives in a constant hurtling between the past
and the future. To such a man, becoming aware of conditioning as
conditioning seems tantamount to peeling away the layers of his identity
and discovering that at the center there is nothing. This is very
frightening. It is impossible to show, except through experience, that
there is a vast difference between the "no-thing" that is the "creative
void" and the nothing that most men waste a lifetime running away from.

Of course, psyhoanalysis as a normative "how to fit in" science, is a
doddle. And of course, the money and the academic honors, and the
learned journals are much more interested in normative psych, bad
mothers, etc. But that's not to say that this is all that psychoanalysis
is about.

Joanna