My psychoanalyst tells me that familiarity breeds contempt.
What are your opinions?
Familiarity can breed contempt. Sometimes it breeds love and respect.
I would disagree. However, it can get boring.
“Variety is the spice of life.” - La Fontaine
Familiarity allows me to drive my car without killing everyone on the road.
Familiarity results in some beneficial habits and some not so beneficial habits.
I think my psychoanalyst is unhappy in his marriage.
I think my psychoanalyst is being too extreme.
I am going to ask him about the times people feel intense negative emotion towards a companion.
I do think we have unreal expectations about marriage and love(whatever that is}.
I think it needs to put into context, to make sense.
Context please!
yes hex-----my psycho guy says most marriages fail once the people know each other. Instead of coming to terms they fight and split.
Well, uhmmm, eeeh, hmmmmm!
I can largely agree with your shrink, but that’s just observing, but not defining the behaviour. I belive it’s due to our selfish and narcissistic behaviour, where we put outselves in center of our lifes, where we do not tolerate nor will suffer any compromitation, only those who have compromizes and understanding in their mentallity, will have a higher chance of a lasting marrige.
He might find this relevant.
It can. But it can also breed love.
When we really understand another we cannot help but accept and love them. Love is this sense of deep understanding and acceptance, of being in and with another’s being, occupying the same “space” as it were; drawing them into your own subjectivity, and being drawn into theirs. Of course we humans require novelty, and also much of that which sustains our surface attraction to and respect for others is often only illusions and false images/wishes which are then eradicated when we come to greater “familiarity” with them; so in these senses, yes it can breed contempt. But this “comtempt” is really only contempt at ourselves, because we are experiencing the falseness and self-deceptive quality of our habitual self-experiences… we are becoming more honest with ourselves when we progressively eradicate these lies we hold about others, these false wishes and ideal illusions. Truth is often painful. But it has its own precious rewards.
There is a lot going on here, we cannot just say “this thing is that thing”, “this leads to that”. That is a typically simplistic, psychoanalytic notion. I recommend you read Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, for a good understanding of the true nature of “psychoanalysis”… as an example, try printing all this out that I just wrote above, and showing it to your shrink. See what he/she says. It may be an illuminating experience for you, I think.
But little reptile, are you paying him to worry about his marriage or to concentrate on your own relationships, especially and including the one which you have with yourself?
TTG and ARC-------very good posts.
I will get back to you.
It has the quality of wisdom you might get from a fortune cookie; it’s vague and unhelpful.
Good points.
TTG-----thanks for the good post. What do you find from reading Anti-Oedipus? The reality of psychoanalysis has many different natures. At present it is being smashed. But I find it to be very helpful in shedding some of the illusions you write about.
I really don’t think I could do a good job summarizing the ideas in the book, and if I tried I think I would butcher it; the book is not an easy read, at first, which you will see I think if you pick it up. I will, however, copy some fragments from wikipedia that do a decent job of outlining some of the main points of the ideas of the book.
But above all, read it for yourself if you want, and don’t let these or other’s interpretations of the book do your thinking for you… the experience of reading this book can and should be a very individualized and personal one.
In a preface written for the English-language edition, Michel Foucault describes Anti-Oedipus as a contribution towards the fight against fascism—he suggests that it may be called “an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.”[33] The book attempts to track down “all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”[34] Thus, it is concerned “not only [with] historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini,” he stresses, “but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploit us.”[35]
Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” is a militant social and political analysis that responds to the reactionary tendencies of psychoanalysis.[7] It proposes a functional evaluation of the direct investments of desire—whether revolutionary or reactionary—in a field that is social, biological, historical, and geographical.[8]
Deleuze and Guattari develop four theses of schizoanalysis:
1.Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field.
2.Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest.
3.Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments.
4.Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.[9]
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors; for “the truth is,” Deleuze and Guattari explain, "sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. […] Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused."[10] In the terms of classical Marxism, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural “base” of society, they argue, not an ideological, subjective “superstructure.”[11]
Schizoanalysis seeks to show how “in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression—whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere.”[14] Desire produces “even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction.”[15]
The “anti-” part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model’s articulation of society based on the family triangle of father, mother and child.[page needed] Criticizing psychoanalysis “familialism”, they want to show that the oedipal model of the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of society. Instead of conceiving the “family” as a sphere contained by a larger “social” sphere, and giving a logical preeminence to the family triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be opened onto the social, as in Bergson’s conception of the Open, and that underneath the pseudo-opposition between family (composed of personal subjects) and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production.
Furthermore, they argue that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself and capitalism keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. It must be noted, however, that they oppose a non-clinical concept of “schizophrenia” as deterritorialization to the clinical end-result “schizophrenic” (i.e. they do not intend to romanticize “mental disorders”; instead, they show, as Foucault, that “psychiatric disorders” are always second to something else).
The traditional understanding of desire assumes an exclusive distinction between “production” and “acquisition.”[16] This line of thought—which has dominated Western philosophy throughout its history and stretches from Plato to Freud and Lacan—understands desire through the concept of acquisition, insofar as desire seeks to acquire something that it lacks. This dominant conception, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a form of philosophical idealism; the importance that it gives to the notion of “lack,” Foucualt explains, places desire under the category of the Negative.[17] Alternative conceptions, which treat desire as a positive, productive force, have received far less attention; the ideas of the small number of philosophers who have developed them, however, are of crucial importance to Deleuze and Guattari’s project: principally Nietzsche’s will to power and Spinoza’s conatus.[18]
Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality.[19] On the basis of three “passive syntheses” (partly modelled on Kant’s syntheses of apperception from his Critique of Pure Reason), desire engineers “partial objects, flows, and bodies” in the service of the autopoiesis of the unconscious.[20] In this model, desire does not “lack” its object; instead, desire “is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.”[19] On this basis, Deleuze and Guattari develop their notion of desiring-production.[21] Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations, is “purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions.”[15]
Like their contemporary, R. D. Laing, and like Wilhelm Reich before them, Deleuze and Guattari make a connection between psychological repression and social oppression. By means of their concept of desiring-production, however, their manner of doing so is radically different. They describe a universe composed of desiring-machines, all of which are connected to one another: “There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.”[22] When they insist that a social field may be invested by desire directly, they oppose Freud’s concept of sublimation, which posits an inherent dualism between desiring-machines and social production. This dualism, they argue, limited and trapped the revolutionary potential of the theories of Laing and Reich. Anti-Oedipus develops a critique of Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and Freudo-Marxism (with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social).[23]
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of sexuality is not limited to the interaction of male and female gender roles, but instead posits a multiplicity of flows that a “hundred thousand” desiring-machines create within their connected universe; Deleuze and Guattari contrast this “non-human, molecular sexuality” to “molar” binary sexuality: “making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand,” they write, adding that “we always make love with worlds.”[24]
You can see it is pretty focused on the traditional psychoanalysis that is Freud-based; so in some senses their critique is only indirectly targeted at modern psychoanalysis, however the ideas are still accurate. Basically, they want us to get away from a psychoanalysis and psychology that seeks to impose forced conformirty, repression, social sublimation, and artificial and limited categories of family or society upon the individual subject. They also want us to take a new look at desire, what it is and how it naturally operates, what it means to the subject itself, and what its relation is to socially acquired desired and “needs”. They also look at sexuality in a new way, under this new open model that does not seek to repress or constrict, but wants to open up and liberate…
They basically see the essence of fascism within how the individual relates to himself and to the world at large; the mode of self-relation at present, in our capitalist world, is fascist. They want to expose and correct this harmful and limiting error. In this way, the neurotic person, the average repressed individual who works his mind-numbing job every day and who spends his time with (a slave to) family and society (familial and social objects and object-desires) is the real problem, the real mistake; the schizophrenic, the psychotic, these people are those who resist this capitalist fascism of the subject, the repression and slavery of the individual in our modern era that is sees as so “normal”, they are unable to conform and so via psychoanalysis and psychology must be made to conform, one way or another… admittedly, the old models are getting better with time (I work in this field, so I see these first hand). But there is still a large degree of forced conformity, repression, forced or coerced over-medicating, sublimiation, guilt. Deleuze and Guattari want to get beyond all these things; they want us to see ourselves in a natural, truthful and beautiful light, to break free from the artificial harmful confines of modern capitalist fascist society-culture (this includes the typical family unit). They do not propose that we eliminate these elements, which would be impossible, but rather that we come into a more genuine relation to them, that we sublimate them to our own subjectivity, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, I hope that helped. I would enjoy discussing these ideas more, feel free to PM me if you’d like.
A couple more good quotes I just saw:
If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence — desire, not left-wing holidays! — and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.[44]
The family under capitalism as an agent of repression. The family is the agent to which capitalist production delgates the psychological repression of the desires of the child.[45] Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression insofar as it works unconsciously.[46] Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child’s sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.[page needed]
It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism.[47] A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.[48] The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression,[48] as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring "the very thing that dominates and exploit us."
TTG—I was really wanting to know your evaluation of the ideas in Anti-Oedipus.
Well, I find many of them very good ideas, both useful and truthful. Good theoretical framework, as well as having much possibility for practical application. I read this book a while ago and was blown away, it was part of a series of encounters that together started a process of really big change within me, for the better… if you are interested in psychological application of philosophy, and philosophical implications of psychology, or if you just want a new perspective on the whole psychoanalysis thing, I definitely recommend reading the book.
Hope that helps.
well arc you did it again. i give him 5 minutes. if he drifts off i dont give him any time.
you are absolutely right on about the relationship with yourself. that is the fundamental spot.