It seems to me, however, the adjectives "true" and "rational" are misleading here. If the sphere of exchange is "a very Eden of the innate rights of man," where "alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham" (at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm>), and individuals perceive it as such, it is not because their perceptions are "untrue" or "irrational" or both. Nor will their capacity for self-determination necessarily increase if they can perceive it any differently.
>There are good reasons, by the way, to expect that competent
>psychoanalysis will be hard to come by. Training analyses must of
>necessity be inadequate and the inadequacies tend to snowball as
>inadequately analyzed analysts themselves become training analysts.
>This is as true of "Kleinian" psychoanalysis as of any other kind.
>It explains cases of "psychoanalysts" such as Masud Kahn
>(<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n04/godl01_.html>
><http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/kerm01_.html>} and the fragmentation
>of the field into classical Freudians, Kleinians, Lacanians,
>self-psychologists, etc. etc.
The ability to listen to others sympathetically may not be the result of any professional training in any kind of psychoanalysis.
BTW, in Art Spiegelman's _Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began_ (NY: Pantheon Books, 1991), there is an illuminating exchange between Art and his psychoanalyst Pavel, who is a Czech Jew and a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz. Art visits Pavel because his father (who is also a Holocaust survivor, whose story Art has been rendering in a graphic novel _Maus_) Vladek's "ghost still hangs over" him (43):
***** Pavel: So, do you admire your father for surviving [the Holocaust]?
Art: Well . . . sure, I know there was a lot of luck involved, but he was amazingly present-minded and resourceful. . . .
Pavel: Then you think it's admirable to survive. Does that mean it's NOT admirable to NOT survive?
Art: Whoosh. I -- I think I see what you mean. It's as if life equals winning, so death equals losing.
Pavel: Yes. Life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn't the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RANDOM!
(Spiegelman, 45) *****
Pavel's philosophy is preferable to John Locke's: "whenever he [a slave] finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on himself the death he desires" ("Of Slavery," _Second Treatise of Civil Government_, <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch04.htm>).
>>At 20, John Stuart Mill, the foremost philosopher of individual
>>liberty, also suffered from a breakdown:
>><http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Mill.html>.
<snip>
>I perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the doctrine of
>Cause and Effect applied to human action, carried with it a
>misleading association; and that this association was the operative
>force in the depressing and paralysing influence which I had
>experienced: I saw that though our character is formed by
>circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those
>circumstances; and that what is really inspiriting and ennobling in
>the doctrine of free-will, is the conviction that we have real power
>over the formation of our own character; that our will, by
>influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits
>or capabilities of willing. All this was entirely consistent with
>the doctrine of circumstances, or rather, was that doctrine itself,
>properly understood.
<snip>
><http://www.bartleby.com/25/1/5.html#2>
Or, "These agents can only be agents if they are subjects" (Louis Althusser, "Remark on the Category: 'Process without a Subject or Goal(s)'" [1 May 1973], _Essays in Self-Criticism_, trans. Grahame Lock, 1976, pp. 95-99, <http://www.marx2mao.org/Other/ESC76i.html>) .
Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu, Wed Mar 17 07:51:06 PST 2004:
>On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Persons whose politics and philosophy are different from yours =
>>"pathological" individuals? What are the implications of such an
>>equation for liberty?
>>Yoshie
>
>Dr. Szasz, paging Dr. Szasz to the LBO ward... (Maybe an inside
>joke, but google if you don't get it.)
Those who are philosophically attached to the very Eden of innate rights of man are not necessarily fighters for liberty -- to the contrary, those who question it may be best placed to fight for it. That's a Foucauldian paradox. -- Yoshie
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