Happy Solstice! The solstice I am experiencing is the summer solstice. The southern hemisphere permits me to experience two things I like — my birthday and summer — all at once, which is very nice.
An academic topic: I do not know whether my commenter Mark is a troll, or is on someone’s payroll even, or whether he is just an oddity. I don’t publish all of his comments; some are all right, though.
One I did not publish said the “best teachers” were “part-timers” and that faculty should not publish. It said universities should not hire any faculty full time. It implied there were two classes of faculty: “tenured” and “part-time.”
Mark says he teaches English composition as an adjunct, but I find this hard to believe since he knows so little about the higher education system. What do you think? Should I be nicer, or meaner to Mark, or stay the same?
A Reeducation topic: This 1975 book How to Meditate I have been reading is very intelligent and shows me even more clearly how Reeducation’s path to clarity is terribly wrong. Two points.
One: I realize yet more fully how negative Reeducation taught me to be (something I resisted and questioned initially, and which it was really hard to do, but which I succeeded in at last to my detriment). In Reeducation “negativity” is having an analytical mind or a critical point of view on society, but in real life negativity is self-destruction and this book says so — so there.
Two: This book says you should strengthen your ego. Reeducation wanted it destroyed and replaced with extra emphasis on the id and a greatly expanded superego, as Jennifer divined a few months ago. I myself had also heard one should not have an ego. All of that, I now see, is superficial and misguided. I was quite ignorant and I clearly should have taken Psychology 1A, because even Freud says what one needs is ego strengthening. At least I know now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Happy Birthday!
Just ban him. Who has time for that mess?
And happy birthday! I am glad you are warm. It is 20 degrees here and for some reason my apartment is quite chilly today. But I went to a sporting goods store and bought $110 worth of warm feet, so there’s that.
But yay for summer!
Gracias y’all and congratulations on warm feet!
Banning Mark, due to time constraints, quite right.
Mark has at least two identities, unless there is more than one Mark posting here.
Interesting about ego — it can be a good idea to expand one’s ego if it is weak. It all depends on what is happening, so there is no consistent formula. Lacan, for instance, thought that the real self was in the unconscious, so that expanding the ego was like expanding empty consciousness, formula over spontaneity. As I say, it all just depends on who you are and what you are trying to do with your ego. Shamans will want a weaker ego sometimes, but then a stronger one at times when they need to interpret their shamanistic experiences. Imagine that you are a SCUBA diver, wearing a bouyancy control device (air vest). So to go downwards into the unconscious, you let air out of the vest. But you don’t want to stay down there, in the unconscious. As you start to come to the surface of the water again, the limited amount of air in your vest starts to expand. This very expansion (metaphorically, of ego) itself assists you to rise to the surface. Once at the surface you inflate your BCD to keep you there. You don’t want to sink deeply into the unconscious again, without a conscious choice to do so.
This author (saying he gets this from Freud) wants people to train bodies, breathing, ego, etc., so they have fit structures and tools they can use (or not, as they see fit). He seems to think that having a strong ego (in a healthy sense) means not needing neurotic defenses, and having easier access to the deeper layers of self. (I really should take a basic psychology course and get all these models right.)
Freudianism employs the shamanistic paradigm at a more superficial level than it might. But it is the same paradigm. Basically, it is dialectical. One has to sink to the depths of the unconscious in order to gain the knowledge that would unite the conscious mind (ego) with the unconscious. In Freudianism, it is not the subject/client himself who sinks into the unconscious, so much as it is the therapist who encourages some of the unconscious to come to the surface, and then interprets it. So, in a way it is a safer version of shamanism, although in another way it barely touches the surface of shamanistic consciousness and knowledge.
However, what is in common is a certain recognition of the psychological structure of shamanism. A well adjusted ego will be one that has become aware of more of the contents of the unconscious, so that it will have processed this material and become one with it. This is, in Freudian terms, a “strong” ego.
However, one has to be very careful with terminology here. The Freudian strong ego is the RESULT of an actual process. One should beware of confusing the result with the process itself.
The process of shamanism requires the ability to relax and let go of ego control — just as in Freudianism, the process of lying on the couch and freely associating causes one to let go of the control of ego. This is the only way to access the unconscious, through temporarily making the ego small.
So it is that in shamanism there is the confrontation of death through the diminishment of ego. But it is only temporary. The SCUBA diver sinks to the depths for a while, and looks around. Then, it is necessary to rise to the surface again.
The result of such “voyaging” is that one discovers new material about one’s identity. At this point a strong ego is needed again, at least strong enough to assimilate this new material in order to make itself more robust. A failure to assimilate the material because one doesn’t like what one sees is actually a failure of ego to come to terms with harsh aspects of reality. Only a strong ego can digest the more negative aspects of life.
But this is to describe the PROCESS whereby ego becomes strong, through sinking and rising again. It does not describe the overall desired OUTCOME.
I see — so it is why this therapist, a Freudian, the first one I tried seeing, said what she said.
It was in Brazil, in S. Paulo. I’d always said I’d go to therapy and it was my first chance since at the time you could see someone really good for $10/hr.
She was good but too Freudian and culturally Brazilian for me, so I decided she wasn’t the right person for me. When I told her this she said well, she thought it was fine I quit therapy since I wasn’t in a crisis and didn’t need it in a strict sense, although she thought I did have issues and would benefit from therapy if I found the right therapist. However, she said, and this is the point, it didn’t really matter whether I found the right therapist and did therapy, because I already did my own therapy, which was actually all therapists had to teach one.
My interpretation at this time: if you’re your own therapist, that’s shamanistic since you’re your own authority.
My comment is awaiting moderation — but has something to do with the terminology of desired outcome versus the terminology of process.
Freud: you come out well adjusted or something … shamanism: you come out shamanistic?
Social hierarchy is built into the Freudian system — it is only via your therapist and his priestly mediation that you can eventually become well. It employs an understanding of the shamanistic structure of psychology but only in a superfical way, so as not to disrupt the status quo. True shamanism permits the subject to go much more deeply into the unconscious, and without the hierarchically based mediation of a judeao-christian priestly figure. Without such mediation (which is in actual fact a fence around the consciousness, guarding against too much experience and knowledge) one is much more likely to become radicalised, in all sorts of ways, through shamanistic experience.
P.S. Which are the two identities of Mark? I think he dresses himself up with antiwar and pro literature talk, so he can come in as a kind of Trojan horse with his supposedly pro adjunct and definitely anti research rants.
He seems all over the place. I think there is a Mark in there who presents himself as a colleague, a professor, and then there is the university drop-out Mark, who resents academia because he didn’t have the stuff to make it.
I think they’re facets of the same (real or fictional) person. Mark the dropout was ABD and became an exploited adjunct. So he has this pap about how research is silly, because he didn’t finish his dissertation. Yet he has an education and interest in the field, and in his good moments he’s showing that and being collegial.
What I don’t know is whether the good Mark is just there to try to get the comments of the bad Mark in, or whether Mark is just moody.
Yes, It is hard to know these things on the internet, which is why I take a positivistic approach (if that is the right term). What I mean is that one need not go to the point of positing an actual identity behind the appearance of Mark on the Internet. What I learned in kickboxing is never to anticipate what your opponent will do next, but to keep an open mind about it. Treat each event as it happens, in the moment. If he makes enough errors, he will fail or end up looking increasingly silly. If somebody comes into my range of attack, it is because they moved in that direction. A skilled fighter can hold back against a weaker opponent, and still beat them in the end. It’s all about control. If somebody is overly intimate with me, and condescending, they are inviting me to be overly intimate and condescending back. They have walked into range of attack, not because I made them do it, but because they chose to do so. Each action (not the hypothesized person behind the action) must be taken on its merits.
If he is intent upon defeating himself here, he will.