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Psychoanalysis
The history of philosophy applied by an analyst to a particular person, an analysand. The technique was first launched by the pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and later developed in the most painstaking detail by Jacques Lacan, the main figure of modern psychoanalysis. If a psychotherapist strives for a patient’s successful inclusion in society, the psychoanalyst’s work aims to engender a critical questioning and truth-seeking in the analysand concerning the pitfalls of the ideological structure.
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(In »Everything is religion«)
Sigmund Freud, the great father of psychoanalysis, regarded religion as an “illusion”, a thought that he developed in the book An Illusion and Its Future from 1927. His ambition was to let psychoanalysis offer its contribution to the understanding of religion, which is part of the culture whose main task it is, through various instructions and coercive measures, to defend humans against frightening, and in many ways cruel and dangerous, Nature. These instructions are held aloft, above criticism and questioning, by dint of their being accorded a divine origin. “In this way”, writes Freud, “a treasure trove of concepts born of the need to make human helplessness bearable is gathered, based on a fabric of memories of childhood helplessness, one’s own helplessness and that of the human race.” Thus religion is born: an increasingly systematic wishful thinking about superior and threatening forces that are endowed with the features of the father figure precisely because of the experienced helplessness that is associated with the solitary child’s vulnerability. That this illusory construction then grows to be so strong is related to the strength of this wishful thinking. The relief that it offers is as substantial as it is welcome: the difficult questions about the genesis of the world and the soul’s relationship to the body are conveniently answered and the fear of many of life’s dangers is allayed through divine providence. The acute terror which is caused by helplessness is eased through a carefully crafted illusion that responds to our collective and personal yearning for the father.
God is just one of the infinite number of conceivable forms of revelation of the great Other throughout history. The primordial father, the chieftain, the feudal lord, the priest, the monarch, the saint, the president, the boss, the manager, even the subject’s own parents, are all examples of figures who, through history, people have fantasised about as being the great Other. And even if the most die-hard atheists actually succeed in eliminating all these figures from their fantasy worlds, there is still a great Other that they never succeed in fleeing from: the fantasy of themselves (the subject) as the object of their own submission. The phenomenon of the great Other is thus an integral and extremely important part of the experience of being a subject. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, takes this thesis to its ultimate conclusion. He argues that the ego, constantly in terror, experiences the superego as the great Other par excellence.
The reflection of the self in the world is, however, in no way harmonious, observes Lacan, but rather extremely frustrating for the subject, tending to breed aggression. In order to try to resolve the tension in its relationship with the chaotic environment, the subject starts to identify with the image in the mirror. This leads to an imaginary feeling of overview and control: the subject apprehends itself as the centre and master of existence. The result is that the subject deifies itself, in particular precisely that within itself that it cannot master, that which Lacan calls the other. And the other of psychoanalysis is of course just another name for theology’s God. Since syntheism is the doctrine of how and where we find a pedestal for the other within our own paradigm, it can be viewed as a Lacanian theology. The question is not whether we need a Lacanian theology for the Internet age – we will end up constructing such a theology subconsciously and thoughtlessly unless we have first done so consciously and carefully – but rather exactly which Lacanian theology is relevant and credible for the dynamic environment which frames and determines our current existence.
The human mind is the arena for a constant battle between the extremes Atheos (the absorbing subject) and Pantheos (the expanding cosmos), where Atheos represents the drive while Pantheos represents the desire within psychoanalysis. Atheos is the Universe as it apprehends itself, it is the subject’s experience of itself as a subject. In the same way that we must regard ourselves as voids where life seeks meaning through an always unsuccessful but nonetheless always repeated struggle to fill the void with content; in the same way Atheos is the idea of what the Universe sees when the Universe observes itself, from the inside. Pantheos is the Universe that we humans observe and to which we ascribe divinity; it is the Universe as object, observed by a subject (the believing dividual or the community). This means that syntheology emanates from a dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos, it is between these two concepts that we are moving – constantly, restlessly – they are our sacred extremes, midwinter and midsummer in the syntheist calendar, where Entheos is their common product, the fate that we unconditionally love: amor fati.
Deleuze’s metaphysics otherwise constitutes an excellent transition between Baradian relationalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Deleuze places the difference before the identity: according to him identity is generated out of the difference, rather than the other way around. Deleuze thereby precedes Barad’s relationalism. At the same time, Deleuze devotes considerable amounts of work to constructing a new concept of the subject in the wake of the Lacanian revolution within psychoanalysis. He seeks a kind of downright ecstatic but still immanent state which he calls transcendent rather than transcendental. This leads him to the invention of the dividual, the schizoid subject, which has since become the human ideal of the attentionalist netocracy in the Internet age (quite irrespective of whether it was Deleuze’s intention or not in the 1970s to create such a future instrument of power).
In this context it is extremely important to distinguish between psychotherapy’s utilitarian search for happiness in life and psychoanalysis’ existentialist search for the truth about existence. Psychotherapy is a product of psychology, which is a social science. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is a product of philosophy, which means that at its deepest level it is an art form. Psychotherapy is an anthropotechnical project – developed by the capitalist power structure and its nation states and large corporations – which is dedicated to defining patients, that is, deviants from the momentarily prevailing societal norm. The scientists supply these patients with functional diagnoses, filled with an expanding flora of pathologies, which must be treated in order to promote the societal body’s well-being. Historically speaking, and possibly with a measure of cynicism, we can regard the psychotherapist as the capitalist tamer of individuals – a professionalised and commercialised replacement for the shoved-aside, good-old, good friend – whose task it is to adapt the citizen to a closed life-cycle of work, consumption and sleep, by robbing her of all forms of authentic intimacy with other people.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, starts from the vantage point that all people are and must be fundamentally pathological creatures; the human being is, and has never been anything but, homo pathologicus. The very fact that the human being believes that she exists as a subject and that she will live and not die attests to a pathological foundation for consciousness that is as powerful as it is necessary. The pathological subject exists in a dialectical tension between the two contracting parties desire and drive. Western philosophy reflects this dialectic as the history of desire from Spinoza and onwards (materialism), pitted against the history of the drive from Hegel and onwards (idealism). The dialectic is essential for both of these forces to be able to survive. Desire is ultimately an attempt to flee from the drive, and the drive is viewed at the most profound level as an attempt to flee from desire.
Morality instead concerns a displayed attitude to the arbitrariness of a powerful external judge who might be, for example, God, the nation, the State, the leader, or the law per se, that is, the phantasmic figure that is called the great Other within psychoanalysis. The subject is forced to take a stand in the struggle between good (pleasing the judge) and evil (rebelling against the judge). Morality is thereby an externalised evaluation process. This is on the assumption that the subject who acts needs to be castigated, tamed and made subservient to the powers that be, rather than acting freely from a will of its own. Being moral thus primarily concerns following laws without questioning them. Moralising is attempting to impose one’s own values, in the form of laws or quasi-laws, on others, for example through laws or other regulations. This is in contrast to being ethical, which can best be described as intentions and actions following an inner conviction for the purpose of becoming one with this conviction, without taking account of, for example, prevailing social norms. The purpose of the ethical agent is not to placate any external judge, but to give oneself an ever-so-momentary existential substance, internally for oneself.
The dark underside explains why, on closer inspection, liberal democracy lacks incentives to defend the free and open Internet, and why if anything it is developing into netocracy’s most aggressive enemy. Because one of liberalism’s basic tenets is, in fact, that individual people – liberalism likes to call them individuals, and not without good reason – are so different from each other that every material form of mutual sympathy is precluded by definition. This is in spite of psychoanalysis teaching that the differences within the divided subject are greater than the differences between people. This has the consequence that if the mythology of liberalism is to be taken seriously, self-love is an impossibility. And without genuine self-love, there is no heroism either. Quite logically and consistently, syntheism’s monist and holistic dividual is therefore the radical opposite of liberalism’s dualist and divided individual.
Syntheism is radical and evolved atheism, a philosophical concept that captures the inexhaustible and unattainable in existence that philosophy and theology sooner or later must confront. Not least theology, since traditionally utopianism belongs in the world of theology rather than philosophy. More often than not it has been a matter of a longed-for reconstruction of a lost paradise. Syntheology thus takes theology back from its dull life among the traditional religions and gives it a renewed relevance historically. By leaving its traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance, theology instead gains the central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias. For it can no longer pretend to be occupied with silent and inaccessible gods that do not exist. But theology can aid in building longed-for and credible gods centred in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis and utopianism. Syntheology forces theology to give up its historical fondness for transcendence to instead give structure to the new and growing religious immanence. Classical theology shifts over to syntheology, and when all is said and done, syntheology is a utopology. The question of whether any particular god exists or not syntheologically speaking is completely irrelevant. Such a question of course assumes that we are intimately acquainted with some kind of god who does not exist anyway nor has ever existed, and beforehand at that. The correctly posed syntheological question is instead which god might come to exist, and the answer to this question is always synonymous with the core of the vision that is driving the paradigm in question. The syntheological response runs as follows: Tell me your utopia, and I will tell you what god you are seeking and following.
During the 20th century, academic philosophy is instead reduced to a stuffy, self-referencing loop. Like an old castrated monster, it behaves as though interactivity, the new physics and chemical liberation do not exist, nor can exist either. So why has philosophy got stuck in the suffocating grip of hermeneutics? How did it come to be impacted by postmodern paralysis? The answer can, once again, be found in the academic marginalisation of philosophy that occurred during the 20th century. From having been a dialogue between independent agents, between politically and artistically driven activists, philosophy was transformed during the 20th century into a politically controlled and socially castrated activity. Philosophy became a business exclusively practised at universities and on academic terms, and thereby creativity was weakened within the discipline, with some extremely rare but consequently also so much more important exceptions, for example psychoanalysis and pragmatism, which in principle also evolved precisely because they had access to their very own institutions.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58