Yes, it’s another visit with UD’s guru (who desperately doesn’t want to be anyone’s guru, and is very insulting toward anyone pathetic enough to want a guru), British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. He has an awful lot in common with UD’s other guru, Richard Rorty.
Hint: It’s about pragmatism.
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The thing I’m most wary of is one’s wish to be controlled. I’m interested in how ingenious people are at finding ways of being controlled, either by people or ideas, or whatever.
Wanting a guru is wanting to be controlled, says Phillips; but I think the observation also gets us back to the academic story of the day (of the month? It keeps going.), Jason Arday. Tyler Austin Harper is describing Bates (and Cambridge) professors absolutely controlled by, suffocatingly in the grip of, a maniac’s understanding of white supremacy. This understanding makes them a joke. It makes them hire Jason Arday.
They have given themselves over to a turgid universalism, to Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. They bow before it the way Pyongyang robots bow to Kim Jong Un. They seek dehumanizing and debraining control by a viselike idea.
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The thing I least like is people having inner superiority. That’s the death of sociability, really. In psychoanalysis, I want to free people to lose interest in themselves—not entirely, but enough to be able to be absorbed in other people and things in the world.
So this is why rabid social justice warriors seem – ironically – narcissistic: Much more than improving the world (this is Harper’s point about the Bates people’s lack of interest in actual progressive activism, like militating for campus unions), they are about feeling superior to you, and displaying that superiority in more and more melodramatic ways. The death of sociality here means everyone retreating in disgust, fear, and incredulity from the Self-Regarding Robot show.
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I’m really uninterested in self-knowledge. This is not the sort of thing I should be saying as a psychoanalyst, but I’ve never found self-knowledge very interesting or engaging. It doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about myself, but I don’t find it fascinating. I don’t find it very useful. Self-knowledge is very useful if you want to vote, but it’s not really useful if you want to fall in love or write a poem. So it’s really a question of what you want to do. Self-knowledge is a decoy. The thing is to have experiences, and the risk is that knowing oneself becomes a way of preempting experience. I think it’s the wrong project.