Is Psychoanalysis Elitist?
August 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | People & Society
Was digging around the unblogged writing archives, and found this half-formed thought from July 22, 2003.
A comment has been raised that psychoanalysis is the most narcissistic and elitist of pursuits. I'm beginning to wonder if "elitist" is like "affirmative action" – defined on the fly to suit and argument or perspective.
Sure, rich people do analysis. And so do poor people. And smart people and undereducated people. I'm not sure what the label adds to the discussion.
Is self-discovery and self-knowledge ONLY narcissistic? Is self-awareness ONLY elitist? Should poor people not have access to the advantages of self-knowledge? Should we, as a species, abandon psychoanalysis and by extension formal inquiry and introspection because only some people can afford it?
No, much better that in many places analysis is on the rise. An increase in therapists will drive prices down, just as in Berkeley massage is so cheap as to have created a barter economy. Most therapists are not rich – some are, but plenty are doing it for the love of soul and as a way to increase the evolution of consciousness. This process takes eons, and simplistic labels simply enforce the status quo.
As regards narcism – it may be culture, it may be our place in our collective evolutionary path, but we are a narcissistic people. (cf fashion, makeup, designer eyeglasses, rolex watches, and blogs). What analysands find, however, is that by having an outlet for narcissism they bring LESS of that into their other relationships. You can't will narcissism away – you have to pay attention to it, listen to it, and nurture its healing.
It is likely that a root cause of narcissism is a lack of parental attention in childhood (unproven generalization alert). If this is so, we might want to consider if the two-income, high-materialist lifestyle is the best approach to parenting. It might be better to ditch one income, live a little less large, and spend more time with family and community. Or, perhaps, take a deep look at why one might want to raise children in the first place. Is it because you want a dependent, someone you can control, someone to grow in your image, someone to listen to every word you say as if it comes from God herself? If so, try analysis – it's much cheaper than children.
So. Everyone can afford children but cannot afford a few hundred dollars a month (full boat, no insurance, no reduced rates) for analysis? There's something here other than elitism.
Comments
Oh, boy, I could rant in any number of directions from this base, but it seems that a number of things are tangled together here and a rant would be like yanking on tangled string -- likely to tighten the knots. So let me try to separate some things.
1) If someone has an attention need, it would be efficient to find a low-cost way to have that attended to directly.
2) Any kind of psychoanalysis that involves the subject in the analyzing may train that subject to consciously second-guess their actions. This may be useful for people who totally lack introspection, but it appeals to people who do a lot already. Too much introspection gets in the way of unconscious action -- witness tennis players who become obsessed with their strokes and are no longer alive to the game. Setting up an attention-dependency relationship with someone whose income is dependent on you introspecting can be an expensive solution to an attention need.
A teacher who can demonstrate and convey the ability to recognize a problem pattern, dip into it just enough to change the parameters and get back out without training you to pick at it could be valuable for anyone who needed to learn that skill.
3) If you know you need to know something, and you have reason to believe someone can help you learn it in exchange for money, and you can afford to pay, what does it matter what someone else calls it?
4) If someone wanted to make a personal comment about you, MJ, (in 2003) and disguised it as a general comment about psychoanalysis, or if someone made a generalization about their experience which you took personally, it might be best to deal with the actual case (if that's still possible) and not - what do you call it? - generalize upward on this one.
Posted by: Doug at August 22, 2006 05:47 PM
As usual, really great comments.
I especially resonate with #2, as I've seen it close-up, and have, to a certain degree, experienced it. It also led me back to NLP, for the pattern-recognition and correction aspects you mention.
My rant was mostly around the issues of your #3.
As for #4, you have the correct insight, though at the time I didn't recognize it as a personal comment, so I "abstracted up" to this rant....
And with #1, my experience is that attending to attention needs directly increases the pull of their undertow. So I'm not sure if I know of an efficient approach to this one, though it is too bad that MDMA went Schedule 1 – from my pov that was a valuable tool under professional guidance (ref Shulgin's work).
Posted by: Michael J. at August 23, 2006 06:50 AM
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