ну что ж, приступим

«The analyst also should eschew conventional ways of expressing attentive­ness to what someone is recounting, such as saying "interesting" or "fascinat­ing," as these comments are hackneyed and often suggest a condescending and distant perspective. They also suggest that the analyst thinks she under­stands what the analysand has said. Instead, she should cultivate a wide range of "hmms" and ''huhs'' (not "uh-huhs," which have come to signify agreement, at least in American English) of various lengths, tones, and intensities, which can be used to encourage the analysand to go on with what he is saying, to further explain something, or simply to let the analysand know that she is following or at least awake and inviting him to continue. One of the advan­tages of such sounds is that their meaning is not easily identifiable and the analysand can thus project many different meanings onto any one particular sound.»

— Bruce Fink. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners

«It seems to me that we must, nevertheless, remain skeptical of the value of insight when we note that while a realization may seem very striking and true, it may still lead to little or no change in the analysand’s life; hence the complaint often heard from analysands after years of therapy: “I understand why I do things a lot better, but I still do them.” Perhaps insight thus functions as a lure for both analyst and analysand. Rather than announcing a prolonged opening up of the unconscious, a realization may instead announce to us that the analysand’s ego is about to recrystallize around a new view, theory, or bit of knowledge that will serve more to impede progress than to promote it. It is often not an insight itself that is of value to the patient who is ordinarily thought to be analyzable; instead it is the patient’s ability to turn that insight on its head, reverse it, and invert it time and again that leads to more fruitful work. Otherwise it is generally more of a hindrance than a help.»

— Bruce Fink. Against Understanding

«Whereas in neurosis we seek to decomplete the analysand’s view of himself and his world, in psychosis we seek to help him complete it by somehow supplementing it (not being able to go back and repair it directly).

How can the psychotic’s worldview be propped up or supplemented? It is curious to note that a useful prop is occasionally provided by a school psychologist or psychiatrist when labeling a psychotic child as having attention deficit disorder or bipolar disorder. I have treated and supervised cases where psychiatric labels have come to serve patients as an explanatory device, as something that explains everything in their universe: why they turned out the way they did, why things happened the way they did, and why they have a certain place in the world. Indeed, the label may even occasionally provide them with an existential project or mission in life: that of lobbying for benefits and privileges for people with the same diagnosis as themselves. (The medications that generally accompany these labels are, however, often debilitating and at times even life-threatening; see Whitaker, 2010).

Here, even though it was certainly not the psychiatrist’s or school psychologist’s intention to help the patient plug up a certain hole in his worldview, the signifying material provided by the mental health professional gets incorporated into the fabric of meaning the patient weaves and leads to a certain stability: a stable ideological system. When, as psychoanalysts, we encounter such patients, we are likely to be frustrated by such explanations, and are often convinced that we are, in fact, dealing with neurotics who have simply latched onto a label that they feel lets them off the hook or releases them from responsibility for what has gone on in their lives. While this is of course occasionally the case, we must be careful not to try to call this particular element of the patient’s worldview into question too quickly, as it may be the element that is covering over an abyss or gaping hole in the person’s history.»

— Bruce Fink. Against Understanding

«Lacanian-oriented work with neurotics—let me emphasize again that I am not talking here about work with psychotics (a different approach is, I believe, required with the latter; see Fink, 2007)—is not about providing meaning but, rather, about putting the unspeakable into words. It is about saying what has always seemed unsayable (see, for example, Lacan, 1971–72), unthinkable, unacceptable, and/or unimaginable to the analysand. It is about saying what the analysand has always preferred not to admit to herself; it is about saying all those thoughts and feelings that she wishes did not even exist.

Saying all those things is not the same as understanding them, whether for the analysand or the analyst. One has to say them, first and foremost. Understanding—if it ever comes at all—can wait. Analysis need not provide meaning: for meaning is something the ego recrystallizes around, the ego using meaning to construct a story about who one is and why one does what one does. In a word, meaning serves the purpose of rationalization, which keeps the unconscious at bay. An emphasis by the analyst on meaning and understanding often leads the analysand to become very adept at finding psychological explanations of her behavior but does little or nothing to foster change in the analysand, thoroughgoing change such that she is no longer even tempted to feel or act as she has in the past.

Part of the analyst’s job is to take meaning apart, to undermine understanding by showing that far from explaining everything, it is always partial, not total, and leaves many things out. Just as the Zen master’s work is premised on the notion that enlightenment does not stem from understanding but is, rather, a state of being, the psychoanalyst realizes that the analysand’s search for understanding is part and parcel of the modern scientific subject’s misguided search for mastery of nature and of himself through knowledge (see Lacan, 1988a, Chapter 1). The analytic project, by contrast, involves reminding analysands—although not explicitly—that they are not masters in their own homes and that part of psychic health is giving up the obsession with mastery.»

— Bruce Fink. Against Understanding

a literal banana 👍

«An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real

[…]

The rationalist community centered on LessWrong, which was an important influence on my thinking, often focused on cognitive biases, taking the work of Daniel Kahneman and even priming studies seriously as evidence for the structures of human reasoning. To their credit, these associations do not seem to have been edited out of their corpus since the replication crisis in social sciences began to demolish the automaticity literature. An important motivation of the rationalist movement, as I saw it, was that we were all very irrational beings, and had to struggle to become more rational. My argument in this essay is that we are actually very rational, but managed to convince ourselves, for a variety of (perfectly rational) reasons using a variety of tactics, that we were helpless idiots.»

https://carcinisation.com/2023/08/22/against-automaticity/

заодно вспомнил, от того же автора, горячо рекомендую

https://carcinisation.com/2020/01/27/ignorance-a-skilled-practice/

«Psychology also employs lots of fictions. Attitudes, norms, depression, the self, stereotypes, emotions, ideology, personality, creativity, morality, intelligence, stress—none of these things actually exist. They are abstract words we use to describe the things people do and the stuff that happens in their minds. It’s hard to talk about psychology without using them, so it’s easy to forget they’re just words.»

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss

надо бы нормальный конспект написать, но лень. пару цитат сохраню.

[08:00]
«Another element of the analytic cure for Freud is transcendence of narcissism in favor of object love. There's that famous quotation: “either we begin to love or must fall ill, and we must fall ill if we are unable to love”. This is from his 1914 paper on narcissism and here he had an opportunity to reconceptualize
psychoanalysis away from his main theme which is being saddled with drives and either having to repress them resulting in the disguised return of the repressed which is neurosis. That's mostly how he conceived the problem it's a psycho-biological model we're saddled with these biologically and somatically rooted drives that in their raw forms are antisocial we have to learn to defend ourselves against them. This is his drive defence model, but in 1914 he had an opportunity to develop a different model that the human problem is not a mind saddled to bodily based drives that it forever conflicts with, but rather to conceive the human problem as being encapsulated in our narcissism unable to get over ourselves in favor of love and a capacity for concern, for care, Caritas, towards the other. He expresses that but in 1914 but most of the time he tries not to speak this way because he hated religion and this idea of narcissism being the problem was just too close to the to the Abrahamic religions which view self regard the sin of pride as the problem and the cure as coming to be able to love, so Freud actually subscribes to this but tries not to say so very clearly.»

[44:00]

«[for Klein analytic cure] involves the loss of illusions, the loss of certain hopes, the loss of omnipotence. Another difference between PS [paranoid-schizoid position] and D [depressive position] is that in PS we have manic defences, we have omnipotence — a belief in our autonomy and our self-sufficiency and our omnipotence. As we move into the depressive reparative position we have to start accepting our dependency, our lack of omnipotence, we don't need to swing all the way over to the opposite - impotence - that's back in PS where everything is either-or: either I'm omnipotent or I'm impotent. But if we move into D we start recognizing the fact of our dependency and this involves mourning of our ideals of self-sufficiency: I am a rock, I am an island, I need no one, no one needs me — that's a paranoid schizoid fantasy of autarky, total self-sufficiency. In reality we need other people and we inevitably come to depend on them to a certain degree, and we have to be able to accept this dependency and that involves mourning this ridiculous idea of total independence. So mourning [the loss of this fantasy] is another way in which the cure is conceived in kleinian thought.»

«although Freud had that opportunity in 1914 to make the central problem of human nature narcissism, which would have put him in tune with the Abrahamic religions: they ate of the fruit of the tree, they acquire self-awareness, they knew that they were naked and covered themselves with fig leaves. Because shame and self-awareness, and freedom that's the problem. Freedom, and as Kierkegaard taught us, the anxiety that comes with freedom — all of this is the problem: anxiety, self-awareness. Okay, the Abrahamic religions get it right about the roots of human evil. Narcissism is at the core of this, and anxiety. […] I mean we live with the awareness from early on that we're dying, no animal lives with that awareness.

So Lacan resituates psychoanalysis on a judeo-christian basis, but not anything to do with the church or supernaturalism, or magical thinking. But nevertheless he conceives the cure as acceptance of castration, which means crucifixion: holes in the hand, and holes in the feet, a slash in the side — we all go to the cross. Which simply means dying. That there is inevitable suffering in human existence, we are all broken. Moving from PS to D means accepting and mourning the loss of our omnipotence, there is no wholeness, there is no perfection, we're broken, we're dying. Can we accept this? Can we successfully mourn the loss of our omnipotence? Can we traverse the fantasy?

That's another way that Lacan speaks about the cure — traversing the fantasy. And the fantasy is the fantasy of being whole, perfect, self-sufficient, omnipotent — in the lacanian theory this means transcending the ego, not Freud's ego of an id/ego/super-ego, but ego as the specular ego, the self image, and the self image conceived as an image of wholeness, I mean the baby, says Lacan, arrives feeling itself to be […] the body in bits and pieces. Because […] we are born premature, […] we are still fetuses when we are extruded from the womb, the fontanel's of the skull haven't even knitted together, we're the most helpless creature […] radical helplessness, radical dependence. The baby feels itself to be in bits and pieces — originary fragmentation — until it sees it’s image in the mirror: the literal mirror, the mirror of its mother's eyes, the mirror held up to us by society. And we glom on to this image of wholeness, and that is an illusion we are born into, this illusion of wholeness. And narcissists don't give it up, they will not accept the fundamental brokenness of the human condition, they insist on having themselves accepted, seeing themselves as whole, perfect. The cure is letting go of all of this, going to the cross, acceptance of castration, crucifixion. So this is a reorientation of psychoanalysis along lines of the Abrahamic religions which Freud hated of course. His father was always praying and not supporting the family and Freud never overcame his hatred of his father, for that reason wanted nothing to do with religion. Lacan repairs this.»

Самая сложная для меня часть работы психотерапевта — писать ерунду в интернете. Это шутка, но правда же. Как еще обозначать что я такой вот есть, занимаюсь психотерапией, приходите, платите мне деньги. Приходится что-то писать. Мне повезло, и почти шесть лет я проехал на трех, так сказать, текстах. (Кроме того меня рекомендовал Смирнов, я наговорил глупостей в паре подкастов, и вел канал в телеграме, который использовал просто как блокнот для цитат из книг и картинок по настроению. Больше я вообще ничего не делал. Каким-то удивительным для мне образом этого было достаточно, чтобы все это время ко мне приходили люди. При этом всегда была очередь, просто мечта начинающего терапевта.)

Так вот, три, значит, текста. Один из них — про свои личные страдания — я потом скрыл, потому что, во-первых, писать об этом надо не так, а во-вторых, может и вообще не стоит писать такое на публику. Потом я написал довольно глупую, но как мне кажется, смешную статью о том как работает психотерапия, с закосом под научность, с привлечением «эволюционной психологии» и объяснениями через мозг. А через полгода еще одну статью (в двух частях), более откровенно придурковатую, но где-то даже поэтическую, с намеками на майндфулнес, потому что модно. И все, после этого четыре года удавалось вообще ничего публично не писать. Но вот, похоже, снова надо бы снова что-то придумывать. В начале года я пробовал вместо “статей” начать писать посты на основном канале, но довольно быстро сдулся. Теперь пытаюсь вернутся, но так лень, что вместо того что бы просто начать/продолжить ищу обходные пути. Может быть попробую подумать вслух, расписаться, в этом канале, и полегче пойдет.