It is well known that the true university is books and that since the Renaissance modern thought was born avoiding the cloister of the medieval university. On this site, I have promoted philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who were writers rather than professors.
I would go further. It is impossible to be a ‘priest of the holy words’ based on a university degree. Not to have degrees but to have devoted oneself to thinking and studying the dissidents of the System is what, in a healthy world, should be valued.
_________
(*) The meaning of this Mexican idiom is that there are freeways where you have to pay to get to another town, “carretera de cuota”, and there are freeways with bumps where you don’t pay, “carretera libre” (free highway). So when you don’t have money you go “por la libre” (by the free one). Metaphorically it can be used when you do something without asking permission; in this case, to any academic Establishment.
4 replies on “Por la libre*”
That’s really what the last year and a half has been for me. Bar seeds & soil, gold and silver, and the occasional painting, I’ve devoted all my income to purchasing good books (and rare books) for my library, knowing they won’t always be available easily, if available at all. I’ve probably spent too much on book actually. There was a certain desperation to the relentless purchasing schedule. In an ideal world I could open an informal open library, lending out to interested members of the public, or the equivalent of a samizdat, where I copied some of the rarer out of print editions onto scanned paper and mass produced them for free. Unfortunately, I’m the only person out of my friend/acquaintance group who seems to read (and that observation’s been the same lifelong in the country). They occasionally, maybe once a year, start a book, if pressed, but they don’t seem to finish them. I’ve still got a few books lent out, primarily the Goodrich materials, although I don’t know if it’s in vain. I just hope they can be read, and read by those paying attention to them. An illiterate society no longer has any independent foundation for analysing what is true or important, and, made incredulous of new material, sets itself up to be more easily controlled by the authorities. Perhaps British people are just, on a whole, particularly brain-dead.
Hi Benjamin,
As I told you a couple of months ago by email, I made a mistake by buying so many books that at one point I realised I had miscalculated and had no money left for groceries!
Yesterday, for example, I saw this video and it made me want to buy The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. I have already read two books by Jeffrey Masson but this one, which precedes them, is essential. The late Lloyd deMause, an incorrigible Freud fan, made a huge mistake by never studying this book by Masson that shows that psychoanalysis began by betraying children (well, adult women who wanted to tell Freud, the famed clinician, that they had been sexually abused as children).
Now I have to settle for buying books only if I receive a juicy donation, which I haven’t received for months. Besides, the work to heal is not intellectual but emotional. Yesterday, for example, I reviewed the most painful pages of my entire trilogy (I am reviewing it to begin translating it next year). Without that painful operation of the soul there is no psychological healing. Pure cognitive knowledge doesn’t advance the healing process. It is necessary, as I have said in other discussion threads, to rescue the most painful memories and process them ad infinitum until we are cured.
No one that I know follows my path. That’s why they end up like Joseph Walsh. Or like my first cousin Octavio: who in 2018 strangled his daughter and then hanged himself.
Ah yes, I read The Assault on Truth a few months back. I have the HarperCollins edition with a slightly different title. I remember being taken aback at the prevalence of late 19th Century scholars devoted to their so-called ‘pseudologica phantastica’ and the lack of interest in fully investigating the children’s horrible true life testimonies. I remember reading on a particularly harrowing (and gratuitous) nose operation that Freud’s colleague performed on his patient, which repeatedly backfired in gruesome fashion, all the while the doctor claiming total success, and, as became common, that the patient was a fault for his malpractice.
I know that by 1896 Freud himself was, grotesquely, blaming these true testimonies on ‘excess of parental affection causing precocious sexual maturity and arousing the child’s disposition to neurotic illness’ such that ‘one of the clearest indications that a child will later become neurotic is to be seen in an insatiable demand for his parents affection’. It really filled in the gaps for me in understanding how long modern psychiatry has insisted on victim-blaming in its treatment model.
I also enjoyed reading Masson’s Against Therapy. I think all they offer in the UK is CBT, which itself does a great deal (through the ‘vulnerability-stress hypothesis’) to prevent patients talking about their early trauma in a meaningful way as well as comprehensively downplaying the impact of life experiences on emotional distress. Unfortunately, the NHS in the UK is enraptured with it. If you’re not just dosed up forever on toxic ‘meds’, you’ll be put on a two year waiting list for cognitive behavioural therapy, their only choice.
Finally, I notice there’s a related paper by Fowler et al. (2006) that seems to literally be trying to suggest that childhood sexual abuse may assert some of its harmful effects via a genetic or constitutional inability to contextually integrate information. As Mary Boyle suggests in Demedicalizing Misery that “It is perhaps only a matter of time before it is claimed that some ‘vulnerable’ people are over-sensitive to sexual abuse.” The whole abusive industry of is one of death and lies. I don’t understand how they could be practising academic psychologists and yet not be aware of each others’ work. I’m only a layman, and yet I’ve managed to pick up quite a large reference section of books on these topics.
Good luck with your writing!
I myself have written about Emma Eckstein, who was deformed by Wilhelm Fliess, Freud’s quack friend with that nasal operation—and Freud ‘psychoanalysed’ the poor woman, saying that this deformation was due to Emma’s ‘hysteria’! (With Google translator you can read what I wrote about this grotesque case in Spanish, here.)
And indeed: if the so-called mental health profession doesn’t drug you, it wants to brainwash you with crazy stuff like the Vienna quack’s ‘analysis’. It’s a win-win for the System: exonerating the parents and always blaming the disturbed child.
Almost no one knows that the entire profession is fraudulent: from biological psychiatry to clinical psychology, including psychoanalysis. Masson is a notable exception.