Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Terrific piece by Drew Johnson on O. Henry at the Rumpus. Much of interest re OH, but it's the drive-by shootings that cheer:

As a fake-memoir it can stand with anything our own era has produced but since the book is largely unconcerned with the inner life of Al Jennings, it’s considerably more bearable. Perhaps what gives Jennings and his book their bona fides is the nearly open sense of being on the make—contemporary memoirists take note.

[And who, you say, is Al Jennings? Exactly.]

But the Chekhov comparison strikes me a stretch no matter how generous I want to be to O. Henry. Much closer is another formerly famous now generally neglected 19th century short story master, Guy de Maupassant, a writer whom Chekhov has supplanted for us in many ways, and whose reputation advocates are always trying to revive. When they make their case, it’s often cast in the terms of how Maupassant was moving away from his summarizing plots and toward a more modernist, psychological approach. When NYRB books brought out Richard Howard’s translation of Alien Hearts, this was the tenor of the reviews, “Look not at what he was, what made him famous, but where he was headed.”
[not sure I entirely understand the conjunction of modernism and psychology, but since M, as far as I can make out, can be applied both to Pound's personae & to stream of consciousness, and Ψ, as far as I can make out, has very little to do with the stuff of introspection [as Barthes says, 'je' ne peux parler de 'moi'], what I take from this is precisely that various texts that have little in common apart from their nextness can look motivated in their nextness if one throws a couple of blankets over them which leave something that came before exposed to the air]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

Sunday, May 23, 2010

It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others.
Marina van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, ht Jenny Davidson

Saturday, May 22, 2010

I don’t think that living through an artificial self, which is what had got me into such an awful mess, is all that uncommon. The condition is difficult to recognise because it is concealed from the world, and from the subject, with ruthless ingenuity. It does not feature in the standard catalogue of neurotic symptoms such as hysteria, obsession, phobia, depression or impotence; and it is not inconsistent with worldly success or the formation of deep and lasting friendships. The disjointed components of the artificial self are not individually artificial.Link

What is it like to live in a state of dissociation? In a real sense, the subject is never corporeally present at all but goes about the world in a waking dream.
Wynne Godley, LRB 22-02-01

Thursday, April 8, 2010

ego glue

For many years I have worked with children and their families as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Before that however, I worked in the psychiatry of adulthood where the core disorder upon which the chronic hospital wards were established was schizophrenia. It was 'first philosophy* in psychiatry. Beneath its multifarious and often alarming presentations a central feature was though to inhere - a disturbance of the sense of self. Somehow, the self of the schizophrenic had become fragmented, porous and permeable to the selves of others, its secret thoughts available to the mind-reading abilities of the neighbours and its bony vault a useless barrier to the infestation of other people's thoughts. Indeed, the antipsychotic medications used in those days were rather scurrilously referred to as 'ego-glue* by some practitioners, insofar as they stuck the self together again or built up the boundary between oneself and another. Nowadays we are less vulgar with our terminology, but the self remains a critical venture for psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists



Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self
Declan Sheerin

at aaaarg, courtesy wood s lot (free registration required)

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Philosophers and Psychologists

I was once a Junior Lecturer in Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. One day the philosophy tutor, Kathy Wilkes, came back to lunch after a meeting at which philosophers and psychologists had tried to do business. Wilkes, maddened, explained the difference between a philosopher and a psychologist.

A philosopher, she said, will say: 'X is COMPLETELY WRONG! I disagree UTTERLY! ABSOLUTELY! CATEGORICALLY! X has failed to grasp the FUNDAMENTAL point at issue, which is . . . ' and will then proceed to restate the original position with some minor adjustment.

A psychologist, on the other hand, speaks as follows. 'I couldn't agree with X more. I think X has captured what all of us are thinking, X has made a vital contribution to the discussion, I really have nothing to add, I'd just like to enhance what X has said . . . ' and proceeds to set out a position diametrically opposite to that of X.

Wilkes died in 2003. (An obituary can be seen here.) I was thinking of her today when I contemplated the 22 posts in the Drafts Folder of this blog. The 25th is the third anniversary of my last suicide attempt; I've been trying to work out how to tackle the subject of suicide, which I wanted to have a blog of its own, Tender Only to One. I ran a search on Google for 'suicide' and the first 100 hits were sites that seemed to be run by persons of a psychologistical disposition.

Prolonged psychologist-exposure drives philosophers insane. The advice available online does not tell philosophers how to survive all the psychologists who agree with them on every particular. It does not point the philosopher in the direction of professions that are relatively psychologist-free. It encourages psychologists in their worst habits.

So there probably is a need for a blog for suicidal philosophers. It's important to know you're not alone. Among the throngs of people who are in perfect agreement with you and merely want to enhance what you say, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions who think you are WRONG, you've COMPLETELY missed the POINT, who disagree with you UTTERLY, ABSOLUTELY, CATEGORICALLY.