A friend sent me a newspaper clip from the Guardian, ‘Therapy Wars’, all about the battle between traditional Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy…
for the hearts and minds of the people.
The article emphasises their differences…
”At their core is a fundamental disagreement about human nature – about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope to find peace of mind.” O. Burkeman.
but there is a great similarity in the two schools of thought that binds them like blood brothers..
and makes them equally nasty.
They both think you are the author of your own misery.
You stupidly bought this all on yourself.
Its a myth that Psychoanalysis has you endlessly trawling through your childhood. You trawl endlessly through what you think is your childhood.
What you say can’t be true.
It’s a fantasy.
Likewise CBT, for less money and time to be sure, will flog you the same idea. You’re being irrational. What happened to you, or failed to happen to you, is irrelevant. Your belief systems are the problem.
You think wrong.
So there is a fundamental point of agreement behind all the sabre rattling.
The child you once were can’t be trusted.
What you say happened can’t be real.
And the reason these two factions are duking it out as front runners, despite their debasement of childhood and disregard for the unfolding soul of a person is because they mirror back to us our own prejudicial, narcissistic contempt for the innocent, for there being any meaning in life other than the treadmill of what car you drive, your next exotic location and that long unrealised bucket list threatening to choke of your windpipe.
”You can measure a society by the way it treats its weakest member.” M. Ghandi.
In our society the way we treat people who have been abused and neglected to the point of despair..
is not to believe them.
‘‘I was at last obliged to recognise these (abuses) had never taken place. They were only fantasies..’’ S. Freud.
and in the blue corner…
”People and things do not upset us, we upset ourselves by believing they upset us.” A. Ellis (father of CBT)
So if you have a problem with being abused/raped/neglected…..
that is your problem.
”We need to teach children how not to upset themselves.” ibid
The inner world of the child is no longer heeded. Of course, we say we are listening…
and we really are…
but we are not hearing.
And we have a good reason for not hearing.
It would interrupt the process of using children as repositories for all the foully perpertrated mank in our own lives….
that nobody heard..
or saw.
And so the imaginal space between adult and child becomes impoverished and tilled with alien seed.
An example will serve…
I spent weeks looking for an old fashioned bike pump for my boy. The shops don’t stock them anymore. Amazon won’t send you one unless you by something else with it. Eventually I ordered the nearest equivalent from a dealer over the phone.
Through wrapping that has you feeling it must be Christmas comes not a lowly bike pump but something Luke Skywalker might keep under his pillow, halfway between a dildo and an icepick.
With a little guagey bit because kids are too stupid to know when the job is done…
And a calisthenically approved, ergonomically designed, fold out handle that will break in a week,
but….
…specially for the young adolescent male (because girls don’t ride bikes) a name branded on the side to give everyone the impression that you are fleeing a horde of angry, cuckolded barbarians.
Double action valve!
Such things are what Lacan calls ‘part-objects’, a term he borrowed and modified from Melanie Klien to indicate something that has a purpose or significance over and above its function…
the attribution of something unconscious to a person or thing that cannot be allowed into a narcissistic self-construct.
”drive material that has become radically lost in the real” Lacan.
The pump is not for the bike.
It is to contain, compensate and symbolise all the adventures, all the imaginitive time, all the garden frolics and muddy lanes, wet dogs, warm eyes, windy days, and hot chocolate with marshmellows that never happened, that are still in some cosmic suspended animation whilst we perfect being slave to the machine of a depersonalised world in which children, and our own inner child, are seen and not heard.
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