Steven Reisner: Crazy Like a Fox – Evil is Not a Psychiatric Illness
Steven Reisner argues that Trump’s tactical strategies, including lying and bullying, have been such successful political strategies that they cannot be used as evidence of mental illness. I argue that the only delusion in such a successful manipulation of the truth for political advantage is our delusion that Trump is delusional. An analogy would be calling Kane delusional for believing there was a war in Cuba, in Citizen Kane: Kane: Read the cable [from the reporter in Havana]. Bernstein: “Girls delightful in Cuba. Stop. Could send you prose poems about scenery, but don’t feel right spending your money. Stop. There is no war in Cuba, signed Wheeler.” Any answer? Kane: Yes. “Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war.” Was Kan...Read More
Freud Out Loud: Civilization and its Discontents – A Marathon Reading
“The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” – SIGMUND FREUD, 1929 Why is the world so violent? Why can’t civilization contain it? Freud knows! Few thinkers understand human aggression as powerfully as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. His 1929 essay, “Civilizations and Its Discontents,” remains the definitive text on human destructiveness. As beheadings, school shootings, war, police brutality and sexual violence continue unabated contemporarily, its relevance is undeniable. “Men are not gentle creatures,” Freud wrote, “but … creatures whose instinct (is) aggressiveness.” Judson Memorial Church and New Books in Psychoanalysis will host a reading of Freud’s seminal essay to ring in 2015, organized by Tracy Morgan, Will Braun, ...Read More
Genevieve Morel: The Unsinkable Fantasy
“Because the symptom is a source of complaint, we speak about it in psychoanalysis, to get rid of it. To the contrary, fantasy is so enjoyable that there is no incentive to speak of it, as Freud had noticed. We would rather keep to ourselves this intimate and painless satisfaction. Yet, without addressing the fantasy, there is no hope for symptoms to give in, even though they appear to be altering. However, the fantasy cannot be deciphered, even as the symptoms it is built on are spoken of. What can be done then? With the use of clinical and literary examples, we will assess how Lacan theorized psychoanalysis as a staging of the fantasy, hence reversing the Freudian perspective. One possible outcome of analysis could therefore entail a loss of the fantasy’s substance, leading to a re...Read More
Simon Critchley: Infinitely Demanding
“It is at this intensely situational, indeed local level that the atomising, expropriating force of neo-liberal globalisation is to be met, contested and resisted. That is, resistance begins by occupying and controlling the terrain upon which one stands, where one lives, works, acts and thinks. This needn’t involve millions of people. It needn’t even involve thousands. It could involve just a few at first. Resistance can be intimate and can begin in small affinity groups. The art of politics consists in weaving such cells of resistance together into a common front, a shared political subjectivity. What is going to allow for the formation of such a political subjectivity – the hegemonic glue, if you will – is an appeal to universality, whether the demand for political repr...Read More
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