[Rich]

Ah, you're a Jungian. That explains a lot.

While I'm a long time campaigner against the fetish of anti Nazism, Jung actually lived through the Nazis, a time and place where political obsession with the Nazis was actually sensible. And I have to say I find the perspicacity of his appraisal of the Nazis, deeply unimpressive. If you couldn't see through the Nazis bullshit, then I'm sorry but you really haven't got out of psychology 101. You could be a great physicist and be taken in by the Nazis, you can be a great general or a great proto - computer scientist and be taken in by the Nazis, but really if you couldn't take the measure of the Nazis, I fail to see how you could have anything worthy of study to say on psychology.

[Potemkin]

While I'm a long time campaigner against the fetish of anti Nazism, Jung actually lived through the Nazis, a time and place where political obsession with the Nazis was actually sensible. And I have to say I find the perspicacity of his appraisal of the Nazis, deeply unimpressive. If you couldn't see through the Nazis bullshit, then I'm sorry but you really haven't got out of psychology 101. You could be a great physicist and be taken in by the Nazis, you can be a great general or a great proto - computer scientist and be taken in by the Nazis, but really if you couldn't take the measure of the Nazis, I fail to see how you could have anything worthy of study to say on psychology.

The problem was that Jung was a bit of a Nazi himself. It's therefore not really surprising that he didn't see anything wrong with them. Lol.

[Wellsy]

Lacan's musings are very woolly, the least he could do is suggest a utility for positing that unconscious to be 'elsewhere', otherwise it just seems that he is introducing an unnecessary complexity for no apparent reason.

He tries to mollify this with "the psychic locality in question is not psychic, it is quite simply the symbolic dimension, which is of another order", but this doesn't look like a simplification to me - the introduction/invention of a new dimension that is external to the human mind and experience.

I’m trying to take ‘em on their terms which is difficult because it is an elaborate system. But the externality of the unconscious implied seems to be based on the emphasis of the social nature of language. Where there are effects of language which aren’t subject to the individuals psychology exactly as the unconscious is part of consciousness but is different from conscious awareness.

[jakell]

While I'm a long time campaigner against the fetish of anti Nazism, Jung actually lived through the Nazis, a time and place where political obsession with the Nazis was actually sensible. And I have to say I find the perspicacity of his appraisal of the Nazis, deeply unimpressive. If you couldn't see through the Nazis bullshit, then I'm sorry but you really haven't got out of psychology 101. You could be a great physicist and be taken in by the Nazis, you can be a great general or a great proto - computer scientist and be taken in by the Nazis, but really if you couldn't take the measure of the Nazis, I fail to see how you could have anything worthy of study to say on psychology.

Whilst I'm with you in that that this is a psychological disorder (although I would roll it onto more general social anxiety which tends to display itself as various moral panics), I usually lay the immediate blame for this on those who bring them to the conversation - and that seems to be you in this case.

Possibly you have an ongoing theme with Potemkin here, in which case it would have been an understandable slip.

[Wellsy]

I also like Lacans emphasis on humans entrance into language totally changing their sexuality such that it isn’t a strictly biological category.
https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandesire.html

GIVEN MAN'S RELIANCE ON LANGUAGE for entrance into the symbolic order (see the Lacan module on psychosexual development), it is not surprising that, according to Lacan, we are not even in control of our own desires since those desires are themselves as separated from our actual bodily needs as the phallus is separated from any biological penis. For this reason, Lacan suggests that, whereas the zero form of sexuality for animals is copulation, the zero form of sexuality for humans is masturbation. The act of sex for humans is so much caught up in our fantasies (our idealized images of both ourselves and our sexual partners) that it is ultimately narcissistic. As Lacan puts it, "That's what love is. It's one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level" (Freud's Papers 142). Because we are working on the level of fantasy construction, it is quite easy for love to turn into disgust, for example when a lover is confronted with his love-object's body in all its materiality (moles, pimples, excretions, etc.), the sorts of things that would have no effect on animal copulation. By entering into the symbolic order (with its laws, conventions, and images for perfection), the human subject effectively divorces him/herself from the materiality of his/her bodily drives, which Lacan tends to distinguish with the term "jouissance."Note

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/needs.htm

But even here, and it is most obvious in the case of the programmer, they do not labour directly with Nature, but rather with the products of others, likewise produced as alien products. The skills the programmer acquires amount to accommodating herself to the demands of MicroSoft and assimilating its methods into her own way of working; likewise, the baker learns the principles of cooking not by gouging out witchetty grubs and baking them in an open fire, but by manipulating the properties of the products of highly developed industry. This is less obvious in the case of the prostitute, but the fact is that the sexuality of her customers is produced by modern society, particularly its movies and advertising in combination with the general sexual mores of society and she must adapt herself to this sexuality if she is to labour successfully.

[late]

While I'm a long time campaigner against the fetish of anti Nazism...

My father and stepdad both served in WW2 in Europe. My stepfather was one of the soldiers that liberated a death camp.

My next door friend, Hershey, when I was a kid, his parents were Holocaust Survivors.

It took me a long time to admit this, but America is a lot more susceptible to fascism than a country like Germany. A lot more...

So you can call opposition to fascism anything you want, I'm glad it's there.

Fascism is one of the great evils.

I agree with you about Jung.

[Wellsy]

I wonder about the ontology of the unconscious as a real nothingness.
Seeing this arise in different thinkers. Where the absences in things is as much of an essential feature in determining the nature of a thing as is its physical form, the nothingness is part of the form and function.

“Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light.”
— Zhuangzi

[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/kojeve-hole-and-ring/[/url]

[Potemkin]

The sacred can only be experienced as a gap, a 'hole' in the continuum of the natural order of things. In the Torah, God can be heard but never seen; not even Moses could look upon the face of God. Yet it is this 'hole' in reality which gives that reality its structure and meaning and purpose, just as it is the 'holes' in our conscious behaviour (Freudian slips and the like) which reveal the presence of an unconscious mind which structures our consciousness. And what else is the experience of the divine but the voice of our unconscious 'calling' to us as God called to Samuel...?

[annatar1914]

The sacred can only be experienced as a gap, a 'hole' in the continuum of the natural order of things. In the Torah, God can be heard but never seen; not even Moses could look upon the face of God. Yet it is this 'hole' in reality which gives that reality its structure and meaning and purpose, just as it is the 'holes' in our conscious behaviour (Freudian slips and the like) which reveal the presence of an unconscious mind which structures our consciousness. And what else is the experience of the divine but the voice of our unconscious 'calling' to us as God called to Samuel...?

In Orthodox Christian mystical theology, there is the ''Nous'', the ''eyes of the heart'', which since the Fall is a semi-dormant part of ourself that is our connection to the Divine. We experience a ''hole'' because of the semi-dormant nature of the Nous clouded by the ''white noise'' interference of our disordered passions. But by recovering the use of the Nous, putting our passions and thus our external and internal reality in order, we can see and experience God within us, and see Him in His Creation.

[Wellsy]

The sacred can only be experienced as a gap, a 'hole' in the continuum of the natural order of things. In the Torah, God can be heard but never seen; not even Moses could look upon the face of God. Yet it is this 'hole' in reality which gives that reality its structure and meaning and purpose, just as it is the 'holes' in our conscious behaviour (Freudian slips and the like) which reveal the presence of an unconscious mind which structures our consciousness. And what else is the experience of the divine but the voice of our unconscious 'calling' to us as God called to Samuel...?

Then this gives me the impression of what I can only describe perhaps as a real illusion. Not an illusion that can be dispelled by that the experience of such somehow radically changes things but yet nothing is necessarily gained in the sense someone who purposely desires something exactly where there is nothing.
[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/mysticism/thomas-merton/zen/[/url]

“Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead. to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. Do you then approach the study of Zen with the idea that there is something to be gained by it? This question is not intended as an implicit accusation. But it is, nevertheless, a serious question. Where there is a lot fuss about ‘spirituality,’ ‘enlightenment’ or just ‘turning on,’ it is often because there are buzzards hovering around a corpse. This hovering. this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen – even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite.
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the ‘nothing,’ the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. lt was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.”

I suspect I’ll never undergo such an experience as I imagine there must be a kind of surrendering to such an experience and that is always a difficult thing to let go of attachments.

[MistyTiger]

I always find it creepy how often people are attracted to people who are like their parent of the gender they're attracted to.

I do too. But we do admire what we see in our parents. I do not usually like guys who look like my father, fortunately. They usually look very different from him. I do like men who are nerdy, that is a key trait of my father.

[Potemkin]

Then this gives me the impression of what I can only describe perhaps as a real illusion. Not an illusion that can be dispelled by that the experience of such somehow radically changes things but yet nothing is necessarily gained in the sense someone who purposely desires something exactly where there is nothing.
[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/mysticism/thomas-merton/zen/[/url]

I suspect I’ll never undergo such an experience as I imagine there must be a kind of surrendering to such an experience and that is always a difficult thing to let go of attachments.

The circling buzzards think they want to experience the divine, the numinous, but in fact they don't. They want to gain something - to 'gain' enlightenment or to 'gain' the odor of sanctity, so that other men might admire them. In fact, there is precisely nothing to be gained from the divine; to the circling buzzards it is therefore precisely nothing, a delusion of the 'losers' of this world. They eventually fly away in search of better prey, a more profitable feast. And I hope they find what they are searching for. Buzzards, after all, must eat. Lol.

[Wellsy]

The circling buzzards think they want to experience the divine, the numinous, but in fact they don't. They want to gain something - to 'gain' enlightenment or to 'gain' the odor of sanctity, so that other men might admire them. In fact, there is precisely nothing to be gained from the divine; to the circling buzzards it is therefore precisely nothing, a delusion of the 'losers' of this world. They eventually fly away in search of better prey, a more profitable feast. And I hope they find what they are searching for. Buzzards, after all, must eat. Lol.

Something else I see fitting this point of illusions from nothing but a projection/desire for something is a story from Lacan.

https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdf

More intriguingly yet, Hegel Hegel’s account of essence rejects all transcendence in favor of appearances. For Hegel there is not one thing, essence, and another thing, appearance such that essences are transcendent to beings like Plato’s forms, or are unchanging and invariant like Aristotle’s essences. Rather, it is appearance all the way down and there is no further fact “beyond” the appearances that is hidden and that must be discovered or uncovered. Hegel will say, “Essence must appear.”4 The real surprise is that the mediation of essence is a reference to another appreance, not a distinct ontological entity to be contrasted with existence. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that essence is relation. Thus, as Hyppolite recounts, “The great joke, Hegel wrote in a personal note, is that things are what they are. There is no reason to go beyond them.”5

This is a striking claim that immediately brings Lacan’s discussion of objet a in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis to mind. There Lacan recounts the story of two artists named Zeuxis and Pharrhosios, locked in competition with each other to see who is the better artist. Lacan remarks that,

"In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhosios, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not in the fact that the grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhosios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.6"

The lesson to be drawn from this little parable is that the cause of desire-- not the object desired - -is precisely this enigma of what is behind the veil or curtain. As Lacan will recount elsewhere in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we can be naked precisely because we wear clothing. “Doesn’t she know she’s naked under those clothes!” What we have here is the logic of the secret or crypt. Analysis comes to an end when object a falls away and the analysis and no longer attributes a secret knowledge to the analyst. Similarly, it can be said that metaphysics too needs to undergo analysis insofar as all too often it posits a true reality behind appearances in precisely the same way that Zeuxis believes there is something behind the veil painted on the wall.
...
The point here is that the very idea of the thing-in-itself contains an internal contradiction insofar as it calls us to think a thing without determination, yet the very nature of a thing is to contain determinations. In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows that the distinction between the unknowable thing-in-itself as conceived by Kant and appearance is itself a distinction of the understanding, and therefore a product of thought.8 It is nothing but the ego’s reflection of itself into an other.
That is, the thing-in-itself is identical to the ego, as a substrate divested of all concrete properties or qualities, a pure void as Hegel puts it, and therefore a phantasm of thought much like Zeuxis asking what is behind the veil.

This helps me understand how I once had a strong desire for knowledge and learning even while I knew I couldn’t know everything.

https://www.guidetopsychology.com/spirit.htm

Too many persons today, however, preoccupy themselves with knowledge, whether it be intellectual or carnal, and in doing so they sidestep the concept of understanding. Why? Because understanding involves “standing under something,” and that something is the “law”—not the local penal code, but the psychological law of lack and limitation that holds the agony of being itself as it stands on the brink of redemption through divine love. All the pages of knowledge flap uselessly in the swirling gusts that blow along that ridge.

This lack and limitation affects every child born into this world, because we are all born into a pre-existing social world of language, science, technology, art, literature, and so on that excludes us and mystifies us. But even more profound than the mystery of the sum total of all this factual information is the mystery of the child’s own body. The child finds itself literally at the mercy of biological processes—eating, vomiting, defecation, urination, bleeding, reproduction, and death—that it can neither control nor comprehend. Thus the child will feel excluded and will believe—rightly so—that the world “knows” something that he or she does not know. Right from the beginning, then, the child is located in a profound emotional space of “not knowing” and feeling “left out.”

Moreover, when children are criticized and humiliated by others, they can develop the belief that others are deliberately withholding knowledge from them, and this belief can cause the children to burn with anger at their parents in particular and the world in general. Such children can develop an intense desperation to want to figure out everything in advance, before risking doing anything, so as to avoid further feelings of humiliation.



Knowing—that is, anticipating—what might happen next is a characteristic defensive desire of children in dysfunctional families. After all, if they can guess an irrational parent’s next move, they might be able to avoid an ugly family scene.

To such children, then, it’s a loathsome thing to admit, “I don’t know.”

This explains why, if you offer some piece of information to a person who grew up in a dysfunctional family, his or her response will likely not be a simple “Thank you” but will be a quickly retorted “I know!”

It’s an awkward, uncomfortable, and frustrating place to be—and so we all devote considerable energy to overcoming the feeling of “not knowing.”

• We might seek out intellectual knowledge through formal education.

• We might engage in scientific research.

• We might join country clubs, gangs, cults, cliques, or any other social organization that purports to offer some secret “knowledge.”

• We might search through myriads of pornographic images hoping for the special privilege of seeing what is usually kept hidden.

• We might seek out “carnal knowledge” through the body of another person and attempt to locate the psychological agony of our bodily mystery in the pleasure—or pain—of the other.

• We might create our own fantasy worlds—with thoughts and images of eroticism, heroism, revenge, or destruction—in which we can “figure it out” on our own so as to possess the power and recognition we so desperately crave.

It’s a strange kind of state that I imagine it to be. More of an acceptance of reality finally, a new perspective rather than something gained exactly. Not a magical transformation but sort of surrendering. But I am not sure what to. Weakness, vulnerability and ones inherent limitations, that one cannot master and control everything?

[Potemkin]

Something else I see fitting this point of illusions from nothing but a projection/desire for something is a story from Lacan.

https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdf

I am reminded here of the incident which occurred following Pompey the Great’s capture of Jerusalem, when he violated the Holy of Holies in the Temple, to see what ‘secret knowledge’ the Jews were ‘hiding’ from the world. He drew aside the curtain and found… an empty room. There is no secret knowledge behind the veil of appearances, which we can ‘extract’ like squeezing the juice out of an orange, in order to gain something. It is precisely the emptiness of the Holy of Holies which constitutes the presence of the Divine.

This helps me understand how I once had a strong desire for knowledge and learning even while I knew I couldn’t know everything.

https://www.guidetopsychology.com/spirit.htm


It’s a strange kind of state that I imagine it to be. More of an acceptance of reality finally, a new perspective rather than something gained exactly. Not a magical transformation but sort of surrendering. But I am not sure what to. Weakness, vulnerability and ones inherent limitations, that one cannot master and control everything?

Knowledge avails us nothing. As Lacan pointed out, analysis ends (is ‘successful’) precisely when the analysand finally recognises that the analyst does not possess any secret knowledge they are withholding from the analysand - that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances. Only then, when the compulsive search for knowledge has ended, can true understanding begin.

[noemon]

Knowledge avails us nothing. As Lacan pointed out, analysis ends (is ‘successful’) precisely when the analysand finally recognises that the analyst does not possess any secret knowledge they are withholding from the analysand - that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances. Only then, when the compulsive search for knowledge has ended, can true understanding begin.

Agreed.

Knowledge(gnosis) should not be confused with reasoning(noesis) or understanding(hypo-stasis, underlying-position)

Knowledge .ie gnosis is the pursuit for informational data. Acquiring information as in storing it in a memory hard-drive(un-conscious) & RAM([sub]-conscious cache for easy access).

Reasoning .ie noesis is navigation/understanding and is more aking to the CPU of the nous(mind).

Gnosis is the base and corrupt form of noesis where true understanding happens when the mind self-identifies its own self and is thus not being used for something but just is.

When the mind is in use [for external data] the activity corrupts into gnosis.

[ingliz]

Everyone seems to be climbing up their arses in this thread and losing themselves in meaningless shite - empty rooms, divinity, holes in walls, gnosis, and noesis.

Sex is just sex, a biological imperative.

and

People (minds) fall into madness without an outside world (information) to interpret.

[Tainari88]

Actually, Freud and Lacan, along with most other psychoanalysts, believe that dreams are structured verbally rather than visually. As Lacan put it, "the unconscious is structured like a language". The unconscious mind is not the 'oldest' part of the mind; in fact, all the evidence indicates that it post-dates the appearance of language, and arose simultaneously with consciousness. You should not underestimate the role of language in structuring the human mind.

Aha! This is where sex in the psyche lives! In the human mind.

You should not underestimate the role of FANTASY coupled with Language in structuring sex in the human mind.

Good morning @Potemkin it is just before dawn here. I went to bed super early and woke up very early and everyone else is still snoring.

The psyche of the mind this early in the morning is a fog of fantasy....¿verdad que sí?

[Wellsy]

I am reminded here of the incident which occurred following Pompey the Great’s capture of Jerusalem, when he violated the Holy of Holies in the Temple, to see what ‘secret knowledge’ the Jews were ‘hiding’ from the world. He drew aside the curtain and found… an empty room. There is no secret knowledge behind the veil of appearances, which we can ‘extract’ like squeezing the juice out of an orange, in order to gain something. It is precisely the emptiness of the Holy of Holies which constitutes the presence of the Divine.

Or for pop culture, I often think of Zizek’s mention of Kung Fu Panda how the scroll that is covered as having knowledge to become the ultimate martial artist warrior is blank and the Panda realizes from his father that it is kind of “special because you believe it’s special”, and he finally accepts himself. XD

Knowledge avails us nothing. As Lacan pointed out, analysis ends (is ‘successful’) precisely when the analysand finally recognises that the analyst does not possess any secret knowledge they are withholding from the analysand - that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances. Only then, when the compulsive search for knowledge has ended, can true understanding begin.

It’s the sort of anticlimatic outcome like finding out that no adults really understand the world in some grand sense and are just as stumbling as myself. It changes everything, yet also somehow nothing has changed but one stops presuming that secret knowledge is held by others.

I keep finding in discussions of this sort that desire is an illusion with Buddhism, and how Christian sin is about resisting narcissism and giving into true love. They seem to intersect possibly in some kind of grief of accepting one’s pains and being able to accept others, even the cruel in their blindness and attachments to illusions.
A sort of love your brother although he is a sinner. But such work is painful because reality hurts and not to be controlled.

I sense in my own self a kind of difficulty between what I imagine is a kind of modernist affinity for mastering the world through rational understanding, that everything can be articulated and made sense of and a point of irrationalism, mystics, and the idea that there is an unspeakable gap between the Real and the Symbolic of language.

https://www.guidetopsychology.com/ucs.htm

As humans, we cannot communicate directly mind-to-mind or soul-to-soul. We have to rely on symbolic communication. Consequently, the Realm of the Symbolic is the realm of language. Language, however, cannot express the fullness of reality, and so much of our experience goes unspoken. No matter how much we say, and no matter how eloquently we may say it, some aspect of our reality fails to get communicated. Therefore, although it might seem, on the surface, that our lives are structured simply by conscious thought and speech, we are actually more influenced by that gap between the real and the symbolic—or, in other words, by what is “missing” from our lives simply because we must filter all our raw experience (the Realm of the Real) through our social dependence on the imperfection of language (the Realm of the Symbolic).

Therefore, the unconscious is a side-effect, so to speak, of our separation from raw reality because our use of language fails to adequately express our reality. Lacan saw clearly that, because separation and lack lead to desire, the unconscious is primarily governed by “the desire of the Other”—that is, by the social world (the “Other”) around us that is lost in its incomplete expression of reality. Consequently, desire can be described as the unspoken—and hidden—aspect of our speaking lives.

Now, as I said earlier, “How in the world can we talk about something hidden and unknown?” Well, what is missing—or hidden in desire—can be “mapped out,” so to speak, through a keen analysis of how a person speaks about his or her life and problems.

When, under the guidance of someone trained to interpret the unconscious, you learn to voice your pain openly and honestly in language, you enter into a psychotherapeutic aspect of the Realm of the Symbolic, and horror can be given containment. Learning to speak about pain and terror provides a sense of safety through a compassionate acceptance and “taming,” as it were, of your “wild” unspoken—and secret—thoughts and feelings.

Thus it truly becomes possible to draw wisdom from pain and tragedy. For example, as a result of talking about dreams, or of exploring mental associations of one thing to another, an image can be formed of the hidden desires that may be motivating your self-defeating behavior.

A struggle with my own desires for control and then oscillating to a partial acceptance and lack of desire.

When I am in a mindset of not being so attached I am compassionate and understanding of others, but under stress, I lose all semblance and revert back to old defenses due to dee attatchments and desires. Such work is hard because it is terrifying and hard to articulate, guess its cause for a psychoanalysis.

[Potemkin]

Everyone seems to be climbing up their arses in this thread and losing themselves in meaningless shite - empty rooms, divinity, holes in walls, gnosis, and noesis.

Sex is just sex, a biological imperative.

and

People (minds) fall into madness without an outside world (information) to interpret.

“Right on, maaaan! Just, like, do what comes naturally….”