When I was in Reeducation, I had Alarm Bells ringing all the time. They said that what I was doing was dangerous, and that if I continued, I would meet my certain demise. I discussed this with my Reeducators, who said it was mere Panic. There was nothing to worry about, really, except the possibility that if I gave free rein to Panic, my concerns might become Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, which could sabotage my Reeducation.
I was thus assigned Drugs for Panic. These quieted the Alarm Bells somewhat, and also dulled my intellect and perceptions. They had the effect, if not the intent of keeping me in Reeducation. Later someone explained to me that the Alarm Bells had not in fact been Panic Buttons, but signals of legitimate and reasonable Fear. Panic is about what is unreal, but Fear is about what is real, and Fear was what I was feeling. Rather than drugging it, I might have paid attention to its message.
All of this is very interesting since Reeducation kept saying I must learn to “feel my feelings” and “come out of denial.” I was not, however, to feel feelings which might challenge Reeducation, and I was to construct a strong wall of denial about any problems which might inhere in Reeducation.
“Panic” in this case was Fear mixed with denial of danger. It was Fear jumping up and down, pointing to itself, and saying “Look at me! Listen to me! Believe what I am telling you!” This, again, is very interesting since my Reeducators were convinced that many of my activities – going out at night, flying to foreign countries alone, and so on – involved denial of danger and warranted worrisome diagnoses.
Perhaps the Reeducators themselves felt Panic. A characteristic of theirs I never trusted was that, if anyone asked even the most innocent question about what they meant or what was going on, their response was to reel off the introductory speech for Reeducation. Nobody could get a word in edgewise to say, “Yes, we know that, but our more specific question is this.” Any question was assumed to be a question of the most elementary nature, and all questions were assumed to be uninformed.
At the time, I thought this was intended as some sort of advanced pedagogical technique. I thought of those Zen masters who are famous for refusing to answer questions, or for giving absurd answers. I think now that in this, I gave the Reeducators too much credit. I think they were merely asserting authority in the manner of poor teachers.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sorry P-Zero, I been busy . . . I got a lot to catch up on concerning your blog . . .so bear with me . . .
I think you should really start to stitch this all together. Or maybe, it could be collaborative because I have wanted to stitch my own experience back together.
I have been thinking more about my introduction to “theory”, my experience of theory, what my experience should have been prescribed by theory, my graduate experience and the “theory itself” as somehow forming some double helix sort of narrative.
Again, I was totally ostracized because I would not swallow the blue pill. My resistance was thought of as immaturity because I was only 21-years-old. I am starting to visualize your “Reeducators” as the “Insect People”. Every professor and graduate student at Infamous University seemed to look at me with 500 retinas and lick and examine me with 6 appendages as I talked. . . but . . .
Anyway . . . enough about me . . .
I am just waking up from a two 7-week graduate courses in education to the dearth that my personal intellectual production has become. I got to get the factory running again.
But, if I have not said it before, I will say it again . . . I think your experience should be brought to the GREATER light! Open up the windows and confess to the entire village what happened to you in that lonely tower, and make it with beautiful language.
Hi Unbeached and welcome back – and THANKS !!!
Stitch together and bring to greater light – actually that is the idea. Right now I have taken here most of the notes I want to take. I’m letting them sit for a while, and the idea is to start stitching sometime like next summer (maybe before, but by then anyway).
I am *fascinated* by the parallel to acquiring theory and I could say some things about that too. !Sigamos hablando!
I think that giving others too much intellectual credit comes about from being in an optimistic place in life — due to youth, a religious upbringing, having been protected to some degree from violence, and so on.
I’ve certainly been there, and when I found some of those of the white african diaspora, I really didn’t experience all of their crude racist and misogynist jokes as being anything other than high jinks or ways of talking that evaded the dull, bureaucratic norm. When the blinkers came off — and experience facilitated by some of them bullying me — I realised that I had before me some pretty crude people who really thought very simply and believed in an ideology that was entirely untenable. No more illusions.
And there is something good about wanting to believe the best, although it can of course leave you vulnerable.
I was really eager to have it work, for one thing … and in a less secure place than I realized, for another.
The other point about it was, this guy did have a couple of really astute observations at the beginning, and he came recommended by someone I trusted. So I dropped guard too soon … a classic way to get into a bad relationship!
Yeah. I think I have a much more sophisticated view now. It involves realising how much of reality is of my own making, but also how much more of reality (than I had anticipated by any means) is basis on a priori conceptions — stereotypes.
So, whilst on the one hand I am still prepared to play by giving others the benefit of the doubt in a way that extends up to all sorts of wide margins, I’ve also lowered my expectations of people in general. A lot of the time I expect conventional (co-opted) thinking, unless I see evidence to the contrary. At other times, I do not pay as much mind to this consideration and try to extend the creative boundaries of a situation by being myself.
YES! (You were writing this comment while I kept revising mine, trying to simplify my thoughts.) This is really smart – I love the dialectic in your first paragraph! (And the second is pretty good too, low expectations but high freedom.) Realizing how much of reality is based on a priori conceptions is key – and/but really being oneself always works.
A lot of the way I got into this, I think, had to do with being untenured faculty and therefore having to defer a lot at work, and also be discreet, and also doing this in what was then a fairly foreign culture, so that I was feeling my way along in a lot of areas, as one does during a dance class or an immersion course in a foreign language, you go with the flow until you get the hang of it and start injecting your own style. A good learning strategy for a skill or for acclimatizing yourself to a culture or a particular job. Not a good learning strategy, however, if it means letting someone hold up a false mirror and accepting what it shows as you would accept, say, that Sanskrit really is structured however it is structured.
It is interesting, though, because so much of what I say now about not believing “Reeducation” sounds a lot like what people who really do need therapy say against it. I don’t mean to be arguing for *that* kind of rigidity.
***
Hmm, now I am rambling (and procrastinating on my paper) so I will not develop this. But one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is how much insightful advice for life existed before psychoanalysis and its current offshoots. A friend of mine – a man with a very traditional upbringing of that masculine, hide-your-feelings type, has gone to a lot of seminars on (essentially) how to discover and then handle feelings – which were apparently meditation techniques and things like that, not therapy. And I am always amazed at the insight of much older thinkers on the nature of the passions and so on. I wonder suddenly whether the psychic surgery of “therapy” really is necessary, most times.
Yes, well in terms of older systems of knowledge, there is martial arts. One of the things that it has taught me as a matter of necessity (in terms of going further) is that it is essential to dampen one’s ego.
You probably will know that the issue of ego is an important one for women — we are taught to have so little of it, so that one of the means to liberation is developing enough ego power to say ‘no’ to unconscionable situations. Yet, the flipside of this is that it is possible to have too much ego, to the point where it no longer simply serves one to say no, but makes one vulnerable (again) to various social mechanisms which would co-opt you on the basis of a desire to be shown up as good, or competent, or whatever.
In any case, my point was that as you go up through the ranks in martial arts, you do not have the psychic (soul) energy it takes to maintain a lot of ego. Ego takes energy, and you just don’t have it. You are doing rounds (exhausting in themselves) wherein you are likely to encounter many sparring partners who are better than you, and some who are worse. You never know what will happen in sparring, so utilising ego to set up a barrier between yourself and the other person (kind of like a sci-fi pressure-field) extracts an ongoing cost in mental and emotional energy. So much so that eventually you just give it up. At such a point, you develop some kind of maturity, which has resonances with Bataille, perhaps, in the descent into immanence (down from a point of egotisic transcendence of your immediate situation and others). The loss of ego (in my reading of Bataille this is the acceptance of a certain provisional impotence) is actually ultimately freeing — because it gives you back your energy that had been directed into maintaining the ego. You are freed up from a sense of criticism mattering too much. You are more efficient at doing whatever it is you are doing, without dividing your attention between what you are doing and what others think about it. You are more truly yourself.
So, this is something that I had to learn through practical application, although I believe that there is an occult school which takes the “strong ego” approach (building up ego to the point that you can realise that you no longer need it.)
Martial arts = good, I think, although I have never done them. Eastern non-ego based meditations in general = good. And I am not sure mass / commercialized psychotherapy has any idea of these, or is designed for people who do.
The entire culture of the eastern part of the U.S., where I live now, seems to me a lot more ego-driven and narrowly occidental than anywhere else I’ve lived. I think a lot of what “Reeducation” didn’t get was this less ego-driven attitude I had picked up somehow … I am not a great yogi or meditator (I would not have thought) but think I was far better and more involved with those things than that than I realized. Reeducation involved giving that up and worrying a lot more about ego (as opposed, maybe, to connecting with the self, who knows).
[And that is funny, really, since I cannot stand these uptight Easterners, who live saying “What can I get? What is in this for me? What can I get for free? Why can’t you be more nervous? Are we there yet? When are you going to pay attention to me? This is mine!” The idea that “getting healthy” should mean coming to resemble them more is rather amusing. But enough of my anti-Eastern rant.]
Vaguely related to martial arts is that Reeducation believed, or seemed to want me to believe, that I was not safe and the world was not safe. I did not understand this and up to now I thought it was just prejudice (not that it was not also): I was not afraid of going to the cinema alone, going to hear music alone, driving to New York alone, flying to foreign countries alone, walking along the sidewalk with Black people next to me, etc., and Reeducation thought all of these things were “risky behaviors.” AT A DEEPER level, though, it may not have been those “behaviors” Reeducation was worried about – perhaps it just did not know how to say it did not understand an attitude less driven by ego-based fears.
***
And I have realization re your comment earlier, on stereotypes. I have complained before about formulae and the “must be” attitude of Reeducation (“if you have a relative with X characteristic, you must have all of A, B, and C characteristics, and if you do not believe that, you are in denial”). It occurs to me that some of the characteristics it seemed to want me to have, and it thought were “normal” (and I thought it meant they would be “healthy,”), were just stereotypes about people that it could not believe I was not also invested in.
So the things Reeducation wanted me to believe about myself, or thought I “must” believe, were a hodgepodge of (a) things Al-Anon believes about the relatives of alcoholics, (b) things the therapist believed about anyone who sought therapy, (c) things the therapist thought about all women, (d) things abusers think about their victims, (e) generally grabby, ego-driven “Western” things.
Realizing that more of them were just stereotypes is freeing. And part of the reason I stayed engaged with this person, I think, was that I was on a mission to get him to see beyond stereotypes, couldn’t believe he wouldn’t / couldn’t … and I had dealt with various authorities like that in the past, and hadn’t figured it out either, when really the answer was, puff, they’re just thinking in stereotypes.
***
Anyway the model of the world and of [me] Reeducation seemed to have (and I should expand this to a post, or refine some upcoming posts with these additions), was:
1. The world is not safe and you are not safe; people are out to get you; you need to realize this, come out of denial about it, feel fear and vulnerability, and move more into a shell.
2. There is something wrong with you and it was not your fault originally but it is your responsibility now and you do not see it. You need to see it and then adjust your life accordingly – live like the disabled person you really are.
3. You need to be angry and sad about the imperfections of the world and of you. You must criticize and lament. You may not just accept things as simply unfinished so far.
It may not have actually been that he thought these and other things were “health” – although it seemed to me at the time that he did at some level. It may have been that he could not see beyond his stereotype of the therapy client, and did not know what to do with someone who did not fit the mold.
Taking things easy in a psychological sense as I was at the time – having the idea that the world was all right (mine was, I was not being persecuted or anything) and that I was all right (I was), and that things were also moving along and improving, was perhaps not unacceptable as it was unrecognizable.
***
Another huge part of the stereotype is “denial.” It is assumed that one says things are fine when they are not. But when I say they are not fine, they really are not fine, and this is one of the non-connections I had with Reeducation. At the same time, I make greater assumptions about things being all right than Reeducation did – not in the sense of “denying” problems, but in assuming things will go well unless or until I get evidence to the contrary. After all, if it is a question of remaining safe from imminent danger, which was something Reeducation was very concerned about, one wants to make *accurate* assessments of the actual danger and of one’s actual powers, not make inaccurate estimates either way or disable oneself with fear.
Very interesting, all of this. I have this impression I am learning, or rememebering light-years’ worth of Stuff. C’est fun, J! 🙂
***
P.S. A quotation I saw today on Pistolette’s blog is: “If you try to deal with your fears one by one, you will never come to the central issue, which is to learn to live with fear.” – Krishnamurti
Very apt. It is what I would have said, actually did say, to my Reeducator. He thought it was weird / “denial” / etc. Said that was not “feeling” enough. I still think it was just not catastrophic enough for him.
P.S. also:
Having faith that things would be all right, or feeling that they already were, was what El Shrinko thought was “denial.”
At the same time, realizing when things were not and thinking it was time to do something about that, was considered to be “anxiety.”
180 degrees off, every time!
But when I say they are not fine, they really are not fine,
Good that you are figuring things out. I want to talk about the statement above. You should understand that I am not defining myself as nonwestern, least of all eastern, so much as pointing out that my roots are african. So, I have some characteristics that have become a part of who I am. They are hard to shake, even though I suspect they put me greatly at odds with much of the culture around me.
It’s like what you said about people getting it 180 degrees wrong. My thought patterns are not culturally normal. For instance, the stoicism. I do not particularly enjoy such things as: crying in public, emotional manipulation, begging for help in an undignified way, showing fear, gushing, expressing communitarian emotions.
–Those aspects of my personality put me at odds with what is considered to be female in this culture.
Secondly, because I have an aversion to all of the above, if I do express a strong emotion about something, you had better believe that I do mean it, and that I mean it to the infinite degree, and that the people concerned had better stand up and take note, because I will pursue my goal in attempting to rectify what I see as wrong to the ultimate degree.
–This propensity for action is rarely, if ever expected. Females, in particular in this culture, but also just about anyone who is proletarian, is expected to lack will power.
There are other differences, too. My morality, for instance, is not a categorical imperative by any means, but is based upon a feeling of reciprocation — good for good and bad for bad.
Also, I have a preference for what Bataille calls “sovereign communication” rather than too direct communication. I would like nothing better than subtlety and hinting rather than someone spelling things out for me, and acting like their words are written in stone. I don’t like that at all.
So, there are so many avenues for misunderstanding. Actually another one is that I find innocent amusement in things that I am not supposed to, because it is considered immoral to amuse myself with others missing the point, or whatever. But, although this aspect of humour is attributed to my supposed white elitism, it is actually an aspect that I had picked up from black african culture, which is irreverent rather than mean-spirited. (Interesting how the whites always read their own mean-spiritedness and other qualities into me.)