Visiting Bedlam
Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz eavesdrop on a gathering of the American Psychological Association:
The conference opened with workshops on “Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics,” “opposing institutional oppression,” and “loosening/abolishing gender assessment guidelines.” Later sessions covered “Doctoral Student Narratives of Stress, Resilience and Identity in the Trump Era,” “Fragments of a Queer Anarchist Psychoanalysis,” and “ ‘White’ Analysis: Race, Institution, and the Limits of Psychoanalysis.”
One session, “Feel the F— Fantasy (Redux): Drag, Desire, and Queer Theory at WERK in Psychoanalysis,” concluded with a drag performance.
Always a sign of mental wellbeing.
Ms Lewis’ tugging on the intersectional crack pipe has been touched on before.
As when telling us, quite emphatically and with occasional chuckling, that abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, is a corrective killing, a righteous “unmaking.” A means of “going on strike against gestational work.” Says she, “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins.”
Which sounds terribly convenient for those with sociopathic leanings.
Today’s words, since you ask, are ideological capture.
Or whether their licensed therapist is himself unhinged.
Well, I suppose the ostensible job, listening to the outpourings of unhappy people, is much less exciting than pretending that you’re radical and heroic, the star of the drama. Say, by denouncing the imprisonment of carjackers and gang bangers as “systemic racist inequality,” and deploying the word “white” as a go-to pejorative. That kind of thing.
Hence the APA electing as its next president Candice Hargons, who uses the term “womxn” entirely without embarrassment and rails against “systemic intersectional oppression.” And whose list of things to be righteously dismantled and entirely done away with includes attempts at verification and objectivity. Such details presumably being obstacles to her own monomaniacal politics.
Update, via the comments:
EmC quotes this,
And adds,
Well, you’d think that supposed experts in psychology might show some interest in the extent to which politicisation of this kind – making everything a vehicle for leftist posturing – is a self-flattering, self-exalting exercise. One in which the self-styled activist is conveniently foregrounded as some heroically radical being. A cosmically important creature.
But no. Seems not.
Consider this an open thread.
I’ve known a lot of “no nukes”, “peace now”, unilateral disarmament people in my life. One of my regrets is that I stuck to arguing the facts and didn’t subject them to the abusive, dehumanizing insults that they deserved.
Psychology is not yet scientifically very advanced. We have lots of studies of people, but individuals are different from each other, so group studies aren’t much use. Basically, psychology is mostly still in the alchemy stage of chemistry. That’s not to say all psychologists are useless, just that they are good despite their subject.
Like most people who turn to psychologists, my daughter had to burn through a dozen to find one that actually helped. In particular, they all kept trying to find some past trauma causing her issues, despite her insistence that she had none.
But psychoanalysis different. It is utter bullshit through and through. Freud just made up stuff to fit his neurotic clients. There isn’t an ounce of science in the whole thing. They’ve only just moved on from blaming frigid mothers for autism.
So the fact that the APA even have a psychoanalysis chapter shows how unserious they are.
I recall a psychologist saying that effective psychotherapy involves finding ways to change one’s dysfunctional behaviors, while searching for past traumas is useless when it isn’t actually harmful.