[lbo-talk] Re: Ends and Odds

joanna bujes jbujes at covad.net
Wed Jul 14 21:28:35 PDT 2004


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



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