Understanding mental illness

The biggest fallacy in understanding mental illness is ascribing its causes to one factor or locus. The psychological, the physiological and the social do not exist separately, that separation is a mental abstraction. Hence, any treatment should deal with all the aspects. Talking therapy + lifestyle changes + breathing techniques to re-balance your glandular system.

Is habitus actually Karma? Bourdieu through the Indic and psychoanalitical lenses

As quoth the poet:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

                                      Philip Larkin

This is, sans doute, a poetic account of habitus transfer on the subjectivity level. I imagine, Bourdieu would be nodding approvingly.

Social studies only observe and comment on that state of affairs, with no suggestions as per how social change would occur here (aka the trap of Post-Structuralism). The Indic and psychoanalytical traditions, however, take it that there is a way out of it and beyond it, it just takes the right kind of concentration, awareness and effort. Whether psychotherapy or yoga and mediation, ultimately it is about trying to stop that karmic buck or to shed the luggage of life scripts passed on generation after generation.

Or, as good wise Karl would say, a technological change in the material base (relations of production +  mode of production)  would cause a shift in the superstructure of values and ways of biding time until we die.

Would you go  into a yoga retreat/psychotherapy or rather wait until post-industrial society changes your lifestyle?

What is Lacan's mirror stage?

What is Lacan's mirror stage?

1. Many invited, few chosen
2. Borges and mirrors
3. Koans and duality
4. Empirical knowledge vs. intellectual knowledge

Briidging the irreconcilable in earthling studies

Bridging social and psychological studies is notoriously difficult. First of all, the two realities they explore are based in two fundamentally different planes of existence: social life is spread over time and space and subject to constant change, whereas the primary thinking process is timeless and spaceless. Caught up between the twain is the human being with their limited conscious mental capacity, to which the mechanisms of both the social and the psychological are mostly beyond comprehension.

As opaque and incompatible as the link between the two may appear, as long as skirting this most fundamental issue continues, no social sciences research can hope to offer any satisfactory results. 

That said, we need to be wary of attempts made to marry the two on a superficial level, like in uncritical sociology and behavioural psychology, where observable facts are taken for their face value. That way, we only end up with a deeply misguided, epistemologically shaky, analysis prone to gross ideological biases.

Endeavours to go deeper, which are fortunately, rather prolific, then run into methodological challenges: quantitative vs. qualitative and staged experiment vs. various varieties of participant observation. The former approach is theoretically linked to the quantitative approach: two traits are painstakingly isolated to be expressed as a dependent variable and independent variable, which would later allow to quantify that relationship. The hard to bear truth that all social as well as psychological phenomena are overdetermined (re. Freud and Althusser) and hence cannot be reduced to two variables is conveniently shoved under the carpet in the process of operationalising (turning concepts into numbers). The main motivation here appears is trying to come across as a "proper science" with "hard data" (i.e., numbers) -  the patently obsolete, if sadly persistent, positivist slant, that many people just can't seem to kiss goodbye.  

Participant observation that results mostly in qualitative research is hard to produce and as hard to consume. It requires time- and effort-consuming training in understanding complex issues by way of mastering abstract principles of analysis that are much harder to get under your belt than maths. It also brings in philosophical and epistemological concerns that cannot be decisively resolved, only accepted as paradoxes at the heart of human existence. That leap into uncertainty proves too much for most people, so they stick to tossing numbers and flashing PowerPoint presentations. 

Another leap, from analysis to synthesis, that Weber refered to as Verstehen, turns out beyond what many are prepared to deal with, too.

The simulachra of sex: the tyranny of media images in your bedroom

 


















"Body-perfect earthlings look for other earthlings looking exactly like themselves to fornicate with media-created images in their own heads." If that does not paint a mental picture  for you, then I don't know  what will.

Now for a bit of theory.

The earthling's social persona in the symbolic order of their mind, the perception of oneself as perceived by the Other, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: the méconnaisance of taking the Ego for one's Self, of which Lacan (1931) wrote. Amazing how many people only get the letter of the Mirror Stage, but not at all its  spirit.

The frame of reference for the building and maintenance of that social persona, both symbolic and material, is taken from the social environment: parents, family, peers, and, to an ever-increasing extent, the media. The dynamic here is two-fold. Firstly, the earthling learns of the available/possible choices for assembling its identity, consisting of multiple extensions on top of the Ego. Secondly, s/he looks into the society as if into a mirror, picking on and learning from the reactions/feedback towards his or her social persona. 

The physical re-enactment of mental pictures, often media-created, then becomes a major life pursuit. Mutual masturbation into each other, aroused subliminally by those mental pictures is the sex simulacra (Baudrillard 1981) that, unbeknownst to most earthlings, is supplanting human sexual interaction with its glossy vapidity.

* The present analysis is a result of a long-term multi-site fieldwork project undertaken by the author.

Related sources: Lacan's sexuation formulae. 

Photo by Mehmet Turgut