Unz

I fear these autist-types have kind of derailed your comments section (I am yet to decide how deliberate that is – and suspect it is deliberate all of a sudden, almost like a disgruntled tactic – much as I have lost all faith in getting a straight answer out of them on anything). The tone seems novel.

That ‘large bag of pick’n’mix’ from our usual suspect would hopefully sort the sheep from the goats. I wish a few new ones would turn up here; those more dogged arguers won over by those free assertions and appeals to the crowd. If I suggest “war” it doesn’t preclude conversation in small doses, just a more active acknowledgement of mutual thorough hostility in a real-world capacity (and for one, obviously I don’t live in Ukraine). I hope it’s realised that I mean ‘and all that think like that’. I’d be fascinated as to the realistic numbers, if all lined up. I simply propose factionalism. It really must be kept discrete. We just have nothing in common.

I see one or two people whose opinions are convictions (or at least masquerading as them, unbeknownst to them perhaps), but I do not see those convictions yet expressed adequately as what could only be cold, hard, objective facts, in a way that would, by that standard objectivity, be put, and thus please me too, (or I would not be arguing in good faith). If someone rushes, and misinterprets, and makes enough distorted poor judgements and mischaracterisations of another’s position, it makes me wonder what else they could be wrong about, all to themselves, or have missed.

Before that, there are still too many monocausalists on there, whose jaw-dropping coup de grace is at the level of spotting Freud was indeed a Jew, and such along those lines. I had to just block those out.

I for one enjoyed the article (book segment). I was hoping they could spiral off instead into discussing Psychiatry, which I think in spirit took the reins from Psychoanalysis, as opposed to the slightly mindless position of insisting they are fundamentally distinct on academic grounds, not ones of observation: what they have in common is tortured patients, and parents & the state over mentally sound yet vulnerable children (eventually one hopes those ‘patients’ might get a look in… they certainly do match the Old French etymology of that term, except their endurance is on account of having been silenced, forgotten, and ridden roughshod over by more and more armchair academics critical of the theory more than the practice).

As far as I know of what they know… my psychiatrist isn’t trained in any Psychology, at all, and wouldn’t pursue it in her own time either. I seem to remember sensing her having the barest bones overview of Freud’s teachings in her professional vocabulary at some instances, even if she does discard them totally when fulfilling her only real role: that of a jumped up NHS GP. All of them I’ve ever met are either power mad or ”social decency”/status-obsessed, or both. They have that in common with Freud qualitatively. The one I’m thinking of is one of the stupidest – durr… – most easily credulous people I’ve ever met (when it comes to Big Pharma promotional leaflets ‘training’). Literally all she can do is fill in prescriptions, and then briefly skim-check the book afterwards to see what it does, believing every single lying word.