Vlog CCLVI

Psychoanalysis traces a certain path of what it deems to be normative development.  My sense of it, however, is that there is written into the framework certain presuppositions which are ideological.  Freud, for instance, assumes normative development to follow a line that is patriarchal, in the Olde Jewish sense of the term.  That is to say, in effect, it would be considered normative if women took heed of their fathers or 'father figures' and deferred to their guidance.   In Lacanian theory, I detect the normalizing of the ideology of bourgeois competitiveness, for instance in the "mirror stage", where it is said the child sees himself whole for the first time, but also sees the reflection of himself in the mirror as a competitor and antagonist.  
The difference between psychoanalytic and shamanic theory is that shamanic theory is not at all afraid of the "death drive" or return to the womb, since all that happens when one faces death or "the womb" openly and honestly is that one experiences rebirth and a further stage of maturity.  Psychoanalysis is afraid of this cyclical version of life and insists only on a linear narrative about time.  In effect it has the angel of death barring a return to human paradise (the womb state and its associated sensations of ecstasy).   It puts in place of this cyciical version of events the stark reality of death and insists on a constant moral striving to overcome internal flaws.