Ecstasy and Rationality

Psychoanalysis/psychotherapy is generating something, but what?

“Fuck Lacan and Also Freud. There’s a finger pointed at your hole. If you’re lucky you can get control. Fuck Lacan and also Freud.” -Svenson

Deep within my soul, I agree with the sentiment that anyone who posits that they know anything about mental health is not to be trusted. Only in the most ruthless, egoistic way do I think it is possible to disagree. What are the therapists generating if not simply idiocy, prejudice and negative self-reflection?

Psychoanalysis is double negative in the classical sense: a negative initial experience (negative in that it is not reflected upon), a negative, vulgar universality (negative in that it is only a reflection of an experience) then suddenly, the positive particularity. Somehow, subjective rationality begins to serve rather than destroy the person. Their creations become something they can reflect on and actually enjoy, rather than something that disturbs them.

I have a thesis which I will repeat at the end, but I will give it to you here at the beginning as well: If one objectively desires a certain experience, and a structure is in place for that experience to occur which is a good enough structure in terms of stability and ability to produce the experience, then a synthesis of desire and rationality has taken place. “Objectively desires,” meaning a desire which does not waver, a desire for a certain experience which is bolstered by sense and rationality.

The synthetic content of existence is negative in the clinical setting insofar as you are reflecting on it, positing yourself as external to it. It was already questionably positive in the first place, and highly negative, highly anti-rational. Immediate, sense-certain, blind to itself. But once in the clinic, you are absolutely outside of it. There is no longer a question of your externality.

This externality allows for a second negative to arrive, the negative of the initial reaction to the reaction, which also has a highly anti-rational character, which is to say against one’s stated logic and purpose if it too is a reaction to a reaction. This is not to say it isn’t logical, or does not rationalize, or have a process which occurs outside of its immediate view.

Ultimately something begins to arrive in the clinic, something which also exists outside of it. For if it didn’t already exist in the world, it could hardly be worth anything if only generated in the dusty offices of psychoanalysts. So what is the thing psychoanalysts are generating which is already in the world, and already worth while?

The shine of positive particularity begins to bring itself forward phenomenologically. Particularity, a particularity within which lies the universals desired by the patient. The desire is not simply an immediate desire, but rather the oceanic feeling within the rational. A “depth” is experienced, the depth generated by the that’s it feeling, sustained by the rational.

Freud calls the religious experience the oceanic feeling a possible vessel for illusion. This can only be the case, as the limit of one’s intellect to understand the world creates the logical limit for the synthesis of the rational with the oceanic.

A Side Note: Objective and Subjective Rationality

If there is an irrationality, this irrationality or bad logic returns as the repressed, but this is less of the subject of this essay. If you create a building which is aesthetically pleasing but has a leaky roof, you can enjoy it until the roof leaks. Then you either fix the roof, or live with the leak. Which is to say, if you have created a positive particularity which contains irrational leaps of logic which seemed rational due to the best effort of one’s initial intellect, it has to adjust or then the process of repression begins to take place.

So there are two rationalities here: an objective rationality and a subjective rationality. Both have a role in psychoanalysis, as objective rationalities contain the third positive particularity’s quality of phenomenological shine.

If one objectively desires a certain experience, and a structure is in place for that experience to occur which is a good enough structure in terms of stability and ability to produce the experience, then a synthesis of desire and rationality has taken place. “Objectively desires,” meaning a desire which does not waver, a desire for a certain feeling which is bolstered by sense and rationality.

Here, a synthesis of objective rationality and subjective rationality occurs. Absolute Rationality is struck through by the objective/subjective divide, but it looks like a creation which can fail like a roof, which has taste like a designed house.

The goal of a house is not the house, but rather a second thing. A house is made, but why? Shelter, but also it is in a city, is it not? It is in a neighborhood in that city, it has closeness, nearness to things, to people. No one chooses all these things, but it is affected by these things. They do choose some. Objective rationality, struck through by the fact it has to account for subjective tastes, movements, the subjectively rational which has objective rationality done to it. The anti-vaxxer, the subjectively rational, and the objective consequences or possible lack of consequences to their own bodies of their belief, the objectively rational.

Would an anti-vaxxer would be in ecstasy in a city with no vaccination requirements and no lockdowns? Maybe, or maybe objective rationality would return with a vengence, or maybe it would not. But what is an anti-vaxxer, but a human? What do humans truly desire?

This is what the analyst’s couch is for, the positive, particularity, what one truly desires. Perhaps one desires a loving partner, perhaps one can not sustain the space for a loving partner because they are concerned with the amount of 5G in the air and always wincing at the possibility that his brain is being affected while on dates.

The glint of the anti-5G couple comes up from under the ice to scare you, but not to worry, for the force of the world beats them enough, you don’t have to think about them. You can think of better things. Like this blog post. Like pre-ordering my book: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/ego-its-hyperstate

There is a danger of subjective rationality being too detached from the objectively true, it means creations may come back to eat the creator in a way that the creator might find unacceptable.

Subjective rationality should work with the objectively rational. It does this by creating structures, not metaphysical, but Actual in that they produce a certain experience on themselves and others. Only when creation serves its creator do ecstasy and rationality finally meet.