When Descartes counts to three contd ...
As the applause fades... Freud, Winnicott, Klein, Jung, Hillman, Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura, Beck, Rogers, the whole bangshoot - they shuffle onto the stage. We see that there are enough chairs.
Camille Paglia, a radical revisionist feminist dressed in leathers, chairs the discussion. She snaps her fingers and they suddenly seem to notice the chairs. A man [The Administrator] whom we all recognise as the president of the local psychological association makes a belated appearance, stumbles around the coffee table, and apologetically takes his seat. Jacoby, the critical theorist, prefers to move around..
Paglia: Evening. Patriarchs, scholars, gentlemen: straight to the questions... One: What kind of trance does psychology create with its credos, its settings, its languages, its institutions, its professional categories, its symbols, its memberships, its economics, its gender politics? Two: Could it create any other kind of trance? Three: What would psychologists awake to, should they snap out of this trance?
Dr. Administrator: Well, if you attend conferences - you get 50 continuing education points for our one, you know -
Paglia: [Flicking her riding crop at him.] Ground rule number one: no commercial plugs. Ground rule two: answer the question we're not talking about how to deepen the trance here, counting points like a hypnotist counting steps into hypnosis. Incidentally, Prof. Jacoby, would you please refrain from assaulting Dr. Administrator with that copy of Das Kapital. Prof. Pavlov, the tissues are over there...
Skinner: [Blurting out.] There is no trance! The questions are disingenuous. It's a matter of empirical realities, method, consensus - and nothing more. If the metaphor of 'trance' refers to anything, it is that psychology seeks to banish ignorance through force of reason. To do so we study reality using common sense, properly structured by the scientific method. We don't need to concern ourselves with anything inaccessible - like the alleged 'soul'. Hmph - gobbledegook, stuff and nonsense, the middle ages come back to haunt us. In fact, we have no option but to treat the 'psyche' as a black box, if we want to be scientific. I don't know how to recover 'soul', but I do know that science is the best antidote to witchcraft. [Smirks.]
Jacoby: How quaint - how Ivy League, BF. Only a pity that it doesn't 'banish ignorance' it reinforces class enslavement through the propagation of an ideology which legitimates exploitation the social trance could not be deeper, nor less metaphorical. Critical psychology, as opposed to your nasty behaviourism, tries to awaken us to the obscure and overwhelming reality of how 'knowledge' serves power, by identifying and questioning the premises on which we base our views. Ass.
Freud: Maybe so but in any case, the basis of trance is the distortion of reality through defences. It is true that the psyche sees only what it can allow itself to see without being flooded by anxiety. 'Waking up' is simply waking up to the undistorted realities of life, by reducing the ego's need to distort them in self-defence. And the wake-up mechanism is psychoanalysis. Elementary, my dear Skinner.
Jung: I contest your epistemology and your ontology, Sigmund. As I always have. The deeper reality is the unfolding of the individual soul in the matrix of the collective, a psychic fantasia beyond the exclusive, inflated domain of your heroic ego consciousness, which is a very limited epistemological point of reference.
Mainstream chorus [All the shrinks together, chanting]
Call the ambulance
Call the coated men
Get the phenothiazines
And slaughter him with your pen...
[Jung leaves, a gentle smile playing on his face.]
Paglia: Shush, you fools... Ah, Monsieur Derrida. What a pleasant surprise.
Derrida: Ah yes. I was eavesdropping on the Twentieth Century, and overheard this conversation. It is obvious that all ideas of 'trance' assume that there is some state that is not trance. But postmodernism has shown us that there is no realm of human experience which is not the function of a narrative context in terms of which it is framed, in exactly the way in which 'trance' is a function of its hypnotic context. It's all bloody..., uh, well, er, it's all hypnosis. Psychology will never be able to study the things it engineered out of perception because the mere concept of them violated its fundamental scientific materialistic precepts. These 'things', these possibilities, they have ceased to exist in the psychological trance. So, shrinkies, choose your trance, awake to the fact that in your fields of reason graze your invisible sacred cows of folly. Now, how about dinner, Camille?
Paglia: [Winks at Derrida.] Ladies and gentlemen. The answers appear to be, first, that psychology is a particularly rational, dualistic kind of hysteria, the proponents of which can only agree that it is rational and not what it should be rational about. Second, it appears that psychology cannot easily conceive of anything but a trance of reductionistic materialism, for it would cease to exist in its current form if it could. And third, if there were to be any awakening, the maps of psychology don't extend to this 'territory of enlightenment', in the main. And I would add that the institutions of psychology appear to have a vested interest in reducing the human possibility, to support the professional food-chain. My own view is that 'official' psychology is a tool of Apollo the god of the sun, the god of transcendental light and rationality used to crush reality into dimensions small enough to be accommodated by the heroic ego. The flight of spirit will always end there, killed by abstraction, principle, and conclusions, the way Icarus was killed when he flew too close to the sun. Spirituality lives in the valleys of the psyche, in the moon goddess's country, in the world of metaphor, ambiguity, shadow, and epiphany, in moments of para-rational revelation.
[The audience clap and cheer wildly, and she bows repeatedly.]
It is also clear that psychology can offer no wake up solution for it is itself a trance phenomenon, just like the invisible coffee table.
[Paglia and Derrida link arms and exit.]
[Fade to black. The audience sits in silence, rapt now. What does the show hold? Then, a nasal voice wafts through the darkness, speaking with an Indian accent:
'Wake up! You have slept enough now. Wake up!'
From the stage, we hear much cursing, and the sound of stumbling, falling psychologists...]
New Therapist
Indispensable survival guide for the thinking therapist