Carrol Cox wrote:
>BklynMagus wrote:
>
>
>>
>>What doesn't make sense is treating a
>>concrete act like a symbol. Life is not a text that needs to be analyzed and
>>critiqued like some poem in a graduate seminar, ferreting out secret meanings.
>>
>>
>
>But that is exactly what psychoanalysis does, which is why it is so
>popular among literary critics and so ignored by people actually engaged
>in trying to help people with mental illness.
>
No it isn't. Interpretation and ferreting out secret meanings is the
most insignificant part of psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis is more about
making people conscious of the multitutde of ways they avoid being in
the present. Most of these strategies, of course, have to do with
relating to the present as if it were nothing other than a symbolic
sediment of the past.
Joanna