Reflecting back over the past, the problem with my functioning within a different [N. Ed.: or in my vocabulary, alien] culture has been specifically: trying to use a lot of mental power to treat what I consider to be peripheral issues seriously, whilst treating the very serious issues in my mind as if they were on the periphery.
It is as if I was required to perceive, out of the corners of my eyes, some very fine embroidery, and to make out the design in it, which I really did not see. Thus I would feel like I was turning into a ghost before my own eyes, wandering around like the walking dead, whilst feeling that what I really perceived we could not really talk about (since nobody was interested in it), but feeling, nonetheless that I was socially obliged to treat all other people’s trivialities as if they were monumentally real. . . . It was as if I had to oblige to take on the role of masochist, denying my own perceptions and realities whilst magnifying those of others in order to appease them. Yet the appeasements had no connection to what I really felt and thought. They were socially and ideologically necessary in terms of the structure of the system and what it required of me, but meant nothing subjectively to me.
See the original post. “If you want to sing,” writes one of my friends, “you must forget the souls which governed your childhood.” But in Reeducation these souls were the only reality, and one was required to transfer their suffocation onto all present activities. That is how Reeducation stifled voice and prevented singing, and that is why I am against Reeducation.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
What you are describing as the imperative of reeduction sounds like the Oedipus complex as the categorical imperative (see journal article by Michael Mack called ‘Turning the tables on Kant’.)
A healthy condition of being, according to Freud in this article, is NOT a state of being in the thrall of one’s elders and parents.
That, precisely, is the Oedipus complex, and it is a state of psychological petrification. (A healthy adult is perhaps one who has learned to deal with society’s demands gradually –ie no SUDDEN descent of the Oedipus complex. A healthy adult is also one who goes beyond obedience to the rules of the elders, who can modify their feeling for these rules on the basis of adult practicalities.)
How do you stop seeing the world through the lens of the things you learned before you were consciously critical? This is not to say that children can’t be critical, but how to turn off those old voices that repeat the age old refrains?
J – yes: but Reeducation got that 180 degrees wrong, in part because it was – abusive.
S – good question. I’m only fully realizing now, and I am almost 50, the degree to which the suicidal depression my mother was in the first years of my life (I am the oldest) influenced me. More than it did the rest of the family, as I was with her all day long and she described the world to me and so on. Once I got to go to school and so on I discovered that the rest of the world was not like that.
My shrink and Al-Anon (shrink + Al-Anon = Reeducation), however, had the beliefs about the world my mother did, and called them healthy. That was how I got so confused: it was bad news, and I didn’t want to believe it, but at the time all the magazines, my academic friends, etc., believed in shrinks, Al-Anon groups, beating one’s breast and saying “I’m dysfunctional, I’m dysfunctional.” (Note: all this took place in N.O., but the shrink was a gay guy from Abbeville I decided to trust because I truly trusted a woman colleague of his in Baton Rouge.)
ANYWAY. How you get those early voices to stop yammering at you: well, I tend to let them yammer without realizing it. I don’t hear the words, I just start to feel bad. The antidote is to listen to the words, ask “what weird recipe am I following?” and once you figure it out, take another attitude or look at things from a different point of view.
I am not a good person to ask, though, as I am just beginning. I was much better at this in my teens, twenties, and thirties, because Reeducation was worse than the problem it was supposed to cure.
Yeah it did get it wrong. The proper role of let’s say psychoanalysis is to alleviate the strain of the Oedipus complex through allowing you to speak that which you have been afraid to speak. (Proper therapy is kind of like the relationship that Lyotard thought postmodernism had in relation Modernism — which probably says a great deal about Lyotard’s own psychological state more than anything.)
Heh. But I like the Nietzschean more radical therapy — to actively train your conscience to feel contempt for all inner conformity. And this is possible, too.
Yes. This was what I expected. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t what I was getting. The result is that I like more radical (Nietzchean) therapy, too.
It takes a lot of insight to perceive that social conformity is not, ultimately in the very best interests of society. Rather, a higher society requires things other than social conformity. So you are very lucky if you encounter someone who has reached this level of insight. It really seems to require a lot of effort.
…and Nietzschean therapy is often required just because the opposition to such awareness described above is so obdurate. You need to bring a strong amount of repulsive force against an attack that is so strong.
Yes. The other thing is, as I realized far too late, therapy as currently conceived is for people who are really having trouble in life, not functioning, or misbehaving badly, or something – or in massive pain. I didn’t start out in massive pain. It was something I had always wanted to do, because I had questions, and I didn’t go because of a crisis. This really confused them.
Well that aspect of degree is probably also related to the average socioeconomic status of most people in the zone you lived in, as we have earlier said. If you were in New York…….
Yes – in New York. It’s not even a question of socioeconomic status, but of general sophistication.
I must have said this at some point before but earlier, I’d had a chance to try therapy, in Brazil. It was cheap there for me because of the exchange rates. I didn’t like the woman’s approach – too classically Freudian (although I could now work with that, take it metaphorically) – so I quit.
In a broad sense she was all right because her ultimate goals were to help people work toward autonomy and freedom. She said the main work of therapy was to get people to be self-aware and reflective in the first place, but I already was, which meant I’d probably get to autonomy and freedom on my own, although if I found a practitioner whose approach I liked, it could help …but wasn’t really essential. I should have really listened to that then, but I am listening now.
twelvestepping=poison. I guess there are people for whom it works. I find it dangerous. The question as you note is whether the cure is not worse than the disease.
Freudians: I always think of that quote in “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” where he says that the point of analysis is to change neurotic suffering to ordinary misery. This is, of course, where people who criticize therapy stand, on the ground that all misery is ordinary. I can’t accept that the choices are misery or obliviousness (caused by drugs, or ideology), that one cannot live in the world as it is and be happy. (NB-this does not mean having to be happy about everything in the world, but rather simply living in a state of awareness about the world and one’s place in it that does not cause constant, grinding depression).
B/c of the voices I hear, I see the salvation somehow lying in work. I have misunderstood my calling. But?
Heavens. I’d forgotten that sentence of Freud’s. Reeducation wanted to turn *happiness* into ordinary misery.
The voices of *my* childhood are anti-work. But I *do* see salvation as lying in work.
Contra Freud:
Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans”—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? “I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,” sighs modern man.
This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of the heart, which “forgives” all because it “understands” all, is sirocco for us. Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!
We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—the abundance, the tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, “resignation.” In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.
I need to re-study this anti-Freud passage and comprehend exactly how and why it is anti-Freud. I need to read Nietzche in general. I’ve promised the Paper Chaser to read Zarathustra but this is the Antichrist and the writing is beautiful.
Meanwhile I’ve realized that another good description of Reeducation is entry into and internalization of the Foucauldian panopticon. I thought of this due to Jennifer’s discussion of the panopticon on her blog and elsewhere.
Nietzsche is suggesting that there is genuine happiness to be found in denying the strictures of modernism in oneself and in embracing one’s own absolutes. This is different from accepting society’s norms as a reality principle — which can only produce a mediocre happiness. That mediocre happiness that Nietzsche condemns, I am suggesting, is Freud’s “ordinary misery”.
Sorry — typo correction–
embracing one’s own absolutes
I had already seen and fixed it! 🙂 –Z
OK, I get it – actually could probably have figured it out if I were not cracking my brains on how to make instructions for third year students on the explication of certain texts, so that I had to borrow your brain.
I like your idea that that mediocre happiness is Freud’s ordinary misery. And of course it fits Reeducation, since the goal there was to become all muted somehow.
This blog post has a video of the Hyperborean setting. You have to look at the whole thing, because the wind picks up in the second half and it is quite good.
http://my-developed-web-presence.blogspot.com/2007/10/hyperboreans-wanted-enquire-within.html
I liked that video a lot. Very eerie.
By the way I’m trying to account for the eerie quality in Marechera’s work.
Thanks for your comment. I am looking forward to the arrival of the Vallejo book to see what he and Marechera have in common.
Here’s something that clarifies my own experiences wrt the Panopticon.