1. Many of the Lacan's patriarchal stupidities are also present in Freud. That said, I do believe in people getting better, it’s just that you can’t have patriarchal practitioners trying to guide you in the process.
What they’ll end up doing is projecting all the failed protests about injustice from millenia onto you and giving them a psychiatric diagnosis.
Why did Freud misunderstand the direction of projection, when it concerned women. Women are not projecting their desires onto men and thereby becoming hysterical because they can’t face the fact that they have desires. Freud’s society was patriarchal and ours are largely the same.
2. The manipulation of female perceptions that happens AS A RULE under patriarchy is to blame for the states of distress. It's not the other way around.
Any advances on Freud’s perspectives are very slow in coming, due to the domination of patriarchal ideas in broader culture. What should be very obvious — that people suffer from trauma when they are manipulated — has been turned into a dogma that people suffer because they are afraid of their own sex drives or in some other way “afraid to face reality”.
But, the origins of trauma are much more simple and straightforward. Freud is to some degree an antidote to patriarchal attitudes of sexual repression, but he also reproduces these attitudes because he could not see what was in front of him.
3. I think a lot can be gained from a kind of wilderness analysis of oneself, so long as patriarchal practitioners are not involved. But if they are, they will reinforce the necessity of the trauma, making it essential for participation in society.
This is not an ideological attack on Freudianism, but just pointing to its limitations. And, unless I have misunderstood, the underlying principles of psychoanalysis are to give people the fortitude to face reality. Only, (and this is where I am pointing out the source of the problem), reality happens to be patriarchal reality, most of the time.
So it works out like this: “Here are the resources you need to face patriarchal reality, which is true reality, the only reality. You need to embrace the necessity of your trauma. You need to lie to yourself as necessary in order to fit in. You must just accept things as they are, without trying to change them.”
I’m not saying that this is what psychoanalysts, or Freud himself, intended. But if patriarchal power itself does not come under scrutiny through psychoanalysis, then psychoanalysis is worse than useless.
4. The books I’ve read on psychoanalysis, even the most liberal ones, take very gingerly steps toward the possibility of patriarchal values being wrong. Dorpat, for instance, who speaks of “gaslighting” in therapy (i.e. telling the client that they haven’t really experienced what they have), still maintains that most therapists don’t intend to abuse their clients, but that such abuse is ubiquitous by virtue of the therapists making mistakes.
The mistake is, of course, that the therapists have internalized patriarchal values which depict women as “just silly” or “too sensitive’ or “making it up”.
What they’ll end up doing is projecting all the failed protests about injustice from millenia onto you and giving them a psychiatric diagnosis.
Why did Freud misunderstand the direction of projection, when it concerned women. Women are not projecting their desires onto men and thereby becoming hysterical because they can’t face the fact that they have desires. Freud’s society was patriarchal and ours are largely the same.
2. The manipulation of female perceptions that happens AS A RULE under patriarchy is to blame for the states of distress. It's not the other way around.
Any advances on Freud’s perspectives are very slow in coming, due to the domination of patriarchal ideas in broader culture. What should be very obvious — that people suffer from trauma when they are manipulated — has been turned into a dogma that people suffer because they are afraid of their own sex drives or in some other way “afraid to face reality”.
But, the origins of trauma are much more simple and straightforward. Freud is to some degree an antidote to patriarchal attitudes of sexual repression, but he also reproduces these attitudes because he could not see what was in front of him.
3. I think a lot can be gained from a kind of wilderness analysis of oneself, so long as patriarchal practitioners are not involved. But if they are, they will reinforce the necessity of the trauma, making it essential for participation in society.
This is not an ideological attack on Freudianism, but just pointing to its limitations. And, unless I have misunderstood, the underlying principles of psychoanalysis are to give people the fortitude to face reality. Only, (and this is where I am pointing out the source of the problem), reality happens to be patriarchal reality, most of the time.
So it works out like this: “Here are the resources you need to face patriarchal reality, which is true reality, the only reality. You need to embrace the necessity of your trauma. You need to lie to yourself as necessary in order to fit in. You must just accept things as they are, without trying to change them.”
I’m not saying that this is what psychoanalysts, or Freud himself, intended. But if patriarchal power itself does not come under scrutiny through psychoanalysis, then psychoanalysis is worse than useless.
4. The books I’ve read on psychoanalysis, even the most liberal ones, take very gingerly steps toward the possibility of patriarchal values being wrong. Dorpat, for instance, who speaks of “gaslighting” in therapy (i.e. telling the client that they haven’t really experienced what they have), still maintains that most therapists don’t intend to abuse their clients, but that such abuse is ubiquitous by virtue of the therapists making mistakes.
The mistake is, of course, that the therapists have internalized patriarchal values which depict women as “just silly” or “too sensitive’ or “making it up”.
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