The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

|

Psychology: Flashers

Why do men (almost always men) expose themselves to strangers?

The redoubtable Diane Ackerman (A Natural History Of Love) suggests that what happens after the victim shrieks and runs reveals the motivations: “The flasher rarely runs away.  Flashing the woman fills only the smallest part of his need.  His real goal has many aspects, including the woman’s upset and disapproval; the humiliating arrest; the appearance in court; the embarrassment to his family; the risk of losing his job.  These are the critical elements of exposure for the flasher.  A flasher is nearly always someone with low self-esteem, a bankrupted version of his sexual worth, and a deep sense of failure as an individual.  In his own eyes, he is the unmanliest of men, a limp member of society, a worthless male.  By hauling out his penis in public and causing consternation, shock, chaos, he proves to himself how important his penis is after all, important enough to stop traffic, to make a woman faint, to get him arrested, to ruin his career.  That’s a mighty powerful penis; so he must be quite a man after all.”

Flashing allows the castrated to imagine himself a phallic god.

Psychology: Inventing psychology

The OED indicates that the first known use of the word “psychological” is from 1812, but de Grazia says that “Coleridge had been using the term in his lectures since 1800.”  He used it mainly to describe Shakespeare’s ability to characterize “habits of mind.”

Coleridge’s interest in psychological interpretation of Shakespeare was inspired in part by his reading of Kant.  Only after reading the first Critique did he come to see “Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy,” his “psychological genius.”

Kant to Coleridge, and then back to Germany, to Hegel.  Hamlet is an example of the third stage of the development of art toward absolute Geist since in Hamlet the conflict is entirely inward.  In contrast to Electra, with which Hamlet was often compared, Shakespeare’s play captured what for Hegel was the “true content of romantic art,” its “absolute inwardness,” its “beautiful inwardness.”  In the same vein Goethe described Hamlet as a beautiful soul too fragile to handle the hard demands of the outside world.

Psychology: Early Psychiatry

Charles Barber (Comfortably Numb) writes, “In 1916, Dr. Henry Cotton of Trenton State Hospital, believing that germs from tooth decay led to insanity, removed patients’ teeth and other body parts, such as the bowels, which he thought might by the causes of their madness.  In so doing, he killed almost half of his patients – more than one hundred people.  Cotton’s practices were covered up by the hospital board and the leading figure in American psychiatry of the day, Adolf Meyer, and Cotton was also allowed to continue practicing at the hospital for almost another twenty years.  At his eulogy in 1933, Meyer lauded Cotton’s ‘extraordinary record of achievement.”

Psychology: For Depression

Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos (foreseeing the craze for antidepressants): “Assume that you are quite right [to be depressed].  You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed.  No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth – and who are luckily exempt from depression – would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead.  You live in a deranged age – more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. . . . Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all.”

Psychology: Emotion and Responsibility

Solomon says that emotions are judgments that, like many judgments, are not necessarily deliberative, articulated, or reflective.  If so, why do we feel that emotions “come on” us?  Solomon explains that it’s because we focus “on the feelings and flushings that typically accompany our emotional upheavals in times of crisis.”  He calls this a “strategic confusion of cause and effect” that reduces to “a vehicle of irresponsibility, a way of absolving oneself from blame for those fits of sensitivity and foolishness that constitute the most important moments of our lives.”

In a footnote, he elaborates with a contrast between Nietzsche and Christianity, taking an uncharacteristic stand against the former: “for once, we must violently disagree with [Nietzsche] and defend an insight of Christian psychology that has too long been lost under the metaphysics of its theology,” the insight concerning the “voluntariness of the emotions” and that “a man is responsible not only for what he does but for what he ‘feels’ as well.”

Psychology: Emotion and Expression

Robert Solomon notes the familiar experience of emotions that intensify “as we express them,” adding that this requires explanation “since Freudian theory and most psychological theories since seem to think that emotions are ‘ventilated’ through expression and intensified through suppression.”

Is this perhaps another sign of the overwhelming impact of courtly notions of love on the Western soul?  Is psychology perhaps just a latter-day theory of courtly love, dressed in scientific garb?

Psychology: Multiple selves

In his 1969 book on self-deception, Herbert Fingarette pointed out that self-deception could only work if the self was divisible, and suggested that the self is not a unit but a community of “subselves.”   Fingarette traced this theme to Plato, and saw it intensified by the New Testament polarity of Flesh and Spirit.  The multiple self flourished in medieval morality drama, which exteriorized interiority with a collection of separate characters.

Psychology: Keeping in mind

Gadamer notes the ambiguity of “keeping something in mind.” We sometimes hold something in our mental “gaze” in order to knock into it head on. We watch it carefully until we can grab it. But keeping in mind can also be a form of forgetfulness. We might also keep something in mind so that we can skirt past it ever so tactfully.

Psychology: Lacan’s style again

Terry Eagleton puts it this way: “for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. We can certainly never articulate the truth in some ‘pure’ unmediated way: Lacan’s own notoriously sybilline style, a language of the unconscious all in itself, is meant to suggest that any attempt to convey a whole unblemished meaning in speech or script is a pre-Freudian illusion.”

Psychology: Lacan’s style

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works.

Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as a subject.”

Webster explains how the rhetoric works:

Continue reading…

Psychology: Mimetic desire in Lacan

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Developing Freud’s theorisation of sexuality, Lacan’s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan’s stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child’s attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire- directly- as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. . . .

Continue reading…

Psychology: Freud and Lacan

Louis Althusser offered this helpful description of Lacan’s structuralist revision of Freud: “In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams. . . , Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech, called in linguistics [respectively] metonymy and metaphor. Hence slips, failures, jokes and symptoms, like the elements of dreams themselves, become signifiers, inscribed in the chain of an unconscious discourse, doubling silently, i.e. deafeningly, in the misrecognition of ‘repression,’ the chain of the human subject’s verbal discourse. . . . Hence the most important acquisitions of de Saussure and of the linguistics that descends from him began to play a justified part in the understanding of the process of the unconscious as well as that of the verbal discourse of the subject and of their inter-relationship, i.e. of their identical relation and non-relation in other words, of their reduplication and dislocation (décalage).”

Psychology: Language of deficit

After listing 22 descriptive terms for the self (including stressed, self-alienated, paranoid, bulimic), Kenneth Gergen notes that “they are all terms of mental deficit. They discredit the individual, drawing attention to problems, shortcomings, or incapacities. To put it more broadly, the vocabulary of human deficit has undergone enormous expansion within the present century [he's writing in 1991]. We have countless ways of locating faults within ourselves and others that were unavailable to even our great-grandfathers.”

This inflation of the vocabulary of psychic deficit not only reflecting the “‘scientizing’ of human behaviour,” but, as the language spreads throughout the culture, helps to shape people’s self-conceptions, which in turn leads to dependence on professionals for curse. Gergen quotes an ad for a conference on addiction, which promises to cover addictions to exercise, religion, eating, work, and sex. Gergen sardonically comments: “A century ago people could engage in all these activities without questioning their mental and emotional stability. If immersions in exercise, religion, eating, work, and sex are questionable today, what will be left untouched tomorrow?” Concerns about addiction to the multiplication of addictions is sure to follow.

Psychology: Notes on Freud

Some notes on Freud, mainly as background for discussion of Ernest Jones psycho-analytic treatment of Hamlet, largely based on Merold Westphal’s summary in Suspicion & Faith.

FREUD AND SCIENCE
Freud is an Enlightenment man who subverted the Enlightenment, an advocate of scientism whose theories rendered scientism impossible. He appears not to understand what he was doing. His hostility toward religion was inspired by his recognition that religion’s truth-claims posed the greatest threat to the monopoly of truth claimed by science. Science, the word of “our God Logos,” is not illusory as religion is: “We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.” As Westphal says, Freud slips from “science gives us knowledge of reality” to “Nothing but science gives us knowledge of reality.”

Continue reading…

Psychology: Historicist Reduction of Freud

As Jones presents it, the logic of repression of sexual desires is as follows:

1) The desires are most likely to be repressed are those that are socially disapproved, disapproved by the “herd.”

2) We unconsciously push back those disapproved desire. The imagery is hydraulic: Repressing disapproved desires creates pressure, and the desire is squeezed out in neurotic behaviors.

3) Among the natural instincts to disapprove, “the herd unquestionably selects . . . the sexual one on which to lay its heaviest band.” This is confirmed beyond doubt by clinical experience.

Continue reading…

Psychology: What Psychology Taught Us

Ernest Jones notes an essential contribution of modern psychology: “We are beginning to see man not as the smooth, self-acting agent he pretends to be, but as he really is, a creature only dimly conscious of the various influences that mould his thought and action, and blindly resisting with all the means at his command the forces that are making for a higher and fuller consciousness.”

Psychology: Money and Sexuality

Bailey makes a perceptive comment at one point, drawing on the experience of a Jesuit psychologist of his acquaintance. This psychologist found that he could fairly quickly get his patients to talk openly about their sexual histories and sins, but that when he began to ask them about their finances, a wall was immediately thrown up. Bailey says, “The conclusion that my friend and other therapists have come to is that an individual’s money and how he or she spends it is embedded more deeply in the psyche of a person than is sexuality. Personal sexuality, it seems, can be discussed more easily than personal finance.”

Psychology: Suppressed Memories

Another review from the August 15 TLS summarizes the findings of Richard J. McNally’s Remembering Trauma, a study of the issue of suppressed memories. McNally’s research, by the reviewer’s account, is exhaustive and his conclusions devastating. Here are some excerpts:

McNally resists the conciliatory impulse to take a middle ground, perhaps along the lines of “recovered memories occur more often than some people think but less than others think.” Nonsense, he says. Some people think the world is round and others may say it is flat, but “neither science nor reason requires us to conclude that the world is therefore oblong.” There are no oblong compromises in Remembering Trauma, only the most scrupulous conclusions based on what the evidence shows, or fails to show. “The notion that the mind protects itsself by represssing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessibly to awareness,” McNally summarizes, “is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”

McNally’s goal is to explain and to persuade, which he does with a dazzling accumulation of evidence from a vast array of sources: laboratory research, physiological studies of the brain, clinical case studies and studies of survivors of war, torture, rape, incest, sniper attacks and other horrific experiences. The problem for survivors is not repressing their memories; it is that they have trouble forgetting them. People may not think about disturbing events or talk about them for long periods of time and then recall them later, but there is no reason, McNally observes, to “postulate a special mechanism of repression or dissocation” to explain this.

Especially damning for the claims of the trauma industry is that most survivors of trauma eventually overcome their emotional distress — particularly if they can avoid the well-meaning interventions of trauma counsellors. (A recent Cochrane report found that psychological counselling in the aftermath of trauma is useless at best and harmful at worst, prolonging or worsening the symptoms.) Of course, some survivors do continue to suffer extreme emotional symptoms years after a trauma, but the reasons seem to have less to do with the nature of the trauma itself than with their own genetic predispositions, brain anomalies and psychological resources.

If this is all true, it’s pretty devastating. One comment by the reviewer, however, leaves me somewhat skeptical about McNally’s conclusions. She draws a distinction between “scientists and clinicians in how they reason and the evidence they rely on to draw conclusions.” McNally, being a scientific type, cannot accept the vagueness of the terminology and judgments of the therapeutic community. But surely memory and the workings of the mind generally are not the kinds of things that can be reduced to sharply defined formulae. Its workings are just too complex, and perhaps the vagueness of the clinician gets at something that the precision of the scientist misses. This is not to state any particular support for the idea of repressed memory, only skepticism that these are the kinds of things that can be determined by “laboratory research and physiological studies of the brain.”

Augustine, one of the great psychologists of Western history, could have taught us that much.

|