So Palamedes, psych major to psych major, have you started diagnosing your roommates yet?
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For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really?
I’m increasingly seeing this in my work as a therapist in New York City. So are my colleagues. One said to me recently that he was tired of listening to his patients talk about the impossible advice inhaled on Instagram and TikTok — to say nothing of the self-help industry. “Doesn’t anyone come asking to be more free?” he exclaimed. “They don’t,” I said pessimistically. “Everyone wants to make the right decisions.” The problem is it’s very hard to tell someone that pursuing the abstract question of “right and wrong” ways to live will lead you into a cul-de-sac. It avoids the deeper question of desire, and desire is a compass.
The promised image of goodness skirts pleasures that — for obscure reasons — you aren’t sure you can want. I see patients grow fearful when they can’t tell if what they desire is compulsive — just another rote, maybe addictive, behavior, or a real attempt to test the boundaries they live under. How do you locate free will in a world this compulsory? Unsettling desires challenge our perception of who we are and what life might look like. ...
My patients have spent time on the couch struggling with the joys and pains that come with their wish to take drugs, not to expand consciousness but just because; quit their job, not to re-evaluate life but simply to stop working (along with the bonus pleasure of thumbing their nose at their employers); or give in to an irksome captivation with the wrong person at the absolutely wrong time. ...
These pursuits certainly aren’t what you ought to do — much less post about — and yet I find that it’s when we dwell on our secret enjoyments that we learn the most about ourselves. Sexual and aggressive feelings, veering self-destructive, are finally confronted without the veneer of rationalization.
--Jamieson Webster, "I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You."
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Remedios Varo (1908-1963) ~ Mujer saliendo de psicoanalista (Podría ser Juliana), 1960. Oil on canvas | src MAMM
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“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
— Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”
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A very paranoid patient I worked with for a long time, whose sanity was often at risk, had an uncanny feel for my emotional state. She would read it accurately, but then attach to her perception of it the primitive preoccupation she had about her own essential goodness or badness, as in "You look irritated. It must be because you think I'm a bad mother." Or "You look bored. I must have offended you last week by leaving the session 5 minutes early." It took her years to feel safe enough to tell me that was how she was interpreting my expressions, and several more years to transform the conviction "Evil people are going to kill me because they hate my lifestyle" into "I feel guilty about some aspects of my life."
Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis
One of the lessons I have taken away from McWilliams is her observation that mentally ill people are often correct in their/our observations of other people's distress, however, their attribution of WHY that person is distressed is often skewed.
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Carl Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930
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