June 12, 2006

• Penis
• I'm a Freud the author doesn't know much about Tibetan Buddhism.
• Sometimes a cigar is just something to think about.
• He said it was all a big mistake, but I don't believe that for a second. In other words, cock-up my arse! ...
• Dialectical behavioral therapy is currently being trialed in the UK, after some success in the US for the treatment of personality disorders. [Possibly limited to BPD]. These people are unusually difficult to deal with and CBT, assuming, as it does, that something needs fixing is thus invalidating. CBT also suffers from a lack of a framework for dealing with the manipulating nature of PD clients. These issues are addressed directly by DBT with some success for supposedly untreatable conditions. It's a personal view, but this new arsehole being ripped for Fraudian Freud is not quite large enough.. yet.
• I wonder what Tom Cruise would say about that.
• Truely don't spend a significant time indulging that project. Christ now I want to know.. what would TC say about it?
• WWTCS?
• You're being glib.
• Great word, glib. Looks great, sounds great, worth a fair amount of Scrabble points.
• No one has fully explained the great riddle of how flesh became thought, but it is now perfectly possible to piece together a working model of the mind from neuroscience and cognitive psychology that contains no oedipal conflict, no thanatos or eros, no pleasure principle, no ego and—decisively—no unconscious. We may be emotionally attached to some of these ideas but, scientifically speaking, we don't need them. Yet experientially I see these things every day, in myself and in others. Isn't that peculiar?
• Sure is.
• That is to say, I agree, sans irony.
• In 1980, in a dramatic move that sent shocks of both glee and horror through American psychiatry, the word "neurosis" was struck out of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—never to return. The American bible of psychiatric diagnosis had effectively declared that the key mental phenomenon on which Freud based his ideas did not exist. Cool, informative article HW. Thanks for this. Lots of stuff to dig through. e.g. the article by Crews mentioned by the author sounds like something worth reading....
• Dug a little more into this: Crews is an interesting dude. Excerpt: No one denies Freud's importance. The only question is has it been for good or ill...if you consult psychology faculties in top American universities, you will find almost no one now who believes in the Freudian system of thought.
• Yet literary and film critics cling to psychoanalysis (albeit in altered forms, such as those championed by Lacan and other guys). I wonder why this is? (Actually wondering, not snarking on literary theorists)
• Because there's something to psychoanalysis?
• I see your point, HawthorneWingo, but I always wonder if the frameworks set up by psychoanalysis actually exist, or if we have just bought into them, thereby making them exist? Do they describe what is, what could be, or what we want to be? I've never really settled this in my mind, but I have to admit that reading theory based on psychoanalysis makes me uncomfortable (primarily for it's embrace of traditional gender roles, I think).
• Condensation and displacement (the two most important posited symbolising mechanisms of the dream work) certainly exist outside of the psychoanalytic framework -- they can quite reasonably be equated with metaphor and metonymy, which themselves can describe two axes of speech; the first collapses one object into another, the second relies on a connection (spatial proximity, indexicality in the Piercean sense, etc.) between one object and another.
• Zo, Herr Dr. Wolof, is this an example of the condensation/metaphoric dream, with a little bit of displacement thrown in? My dearest friend died in 1990. It took a good 10 years for her to show up in a dream that I remember (typical of me.) In the dream, we were about the age we were when we were closest. We were taking part in some sort of crafts show, which took place in what appeared to the the ruins of an old church - courtyards enclosed by ruined arches. I had finished whatever I had been preparing, and went to her area to wait for her to do so. She was lying on her back under what may have once been a stone table, but was pretty trashed, reaching up to tap something with a hammer. We talked for a while about nothing important. Then I woke up. Don't need no explanation, just though I'd do a demo for those who stopped reading midway through.
• well I met a phor once I often wonder if anything exists beyond this monkey playground or if we have just imagined bananas growing in a world beyond the bounds of threads and FAQs and profile pages and dream we're somehow more than sleets of electrons spun across a chasm visible only to the mind's eye as we parade on something called a page that isn't paper where brief monkeys fling poo, nurse a flame or simply come to marvel with their fellows I know there are a myriad worlds each one of them is metaphor and nothing is more real than what we dream
• Lordy, bees! That is incredible. Somehow, I don't think the internet could make you up, though.
• Heh. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Or some such, as this other old boy I've probably misquoted once put it.
• Freud's Will to Power