Re: Where art thou, Nutrino?
Date: February 22, 2008 03:18AM
Actually I have come to a more nuanced conclusion, one that I would never have a year or two ago.
This is: the anti-cultist and the cultist can be equal but opposite neurotics. Not that they are. Not every participant in LGAT is, ipso faco, a neurotic, not is every one who speaks contra the cult phenomenon a "counter-neurotic"....
Strange too, that the culture at large has pretty much disposed of the idea of neurotocism as a category of persons. We now speak in terms of need for Seroquel or Abilify... yet the arena of unconscious fantasy, or phantasy remains rich and unexplored.
Contemporary psychoanalysis speaks of the four (sometimes more) psychologies of psychoanalysis, especially Dr Pine, who has addressed the quadruple of Ego , Object Relations , Self, and Drive Psychologies.
My current assessment is that the cult phenomenon, as well as the resistance to the cult phenomenon, have deep structures in the Primal Scene, the Family Romance, and the Castration fantasy triad (see Knafo and Feiner for more on this)...
The realtion of trainer to trainee has a great potential charge of Primal Scene reactivation, the embrace or absorbtion phase into the cult/LGAT an enmeshement into the complexities of the Family Romance, and of course the ritual abnegations and diespowerments strongly resonate with the Castration Fantasy... in sum, the cult/lgat phenomenon (to borrow a phrase) IS psychoanalysis in reverse in an almost literal form...
The Trainer or Higher Being On Stage is almost the perfect negative form of the Phychoanalyst, where Freud's "evenly suspended listening" is replaced with incessant diatribe and belief stuffing.
But then, so is 98% of talk radio which is, weirdly and disturbingly often like the free association of the Schizotypal personality. Alright, now comes the most significant question for the abstinent perceiver of all this. How is it that the deep levels of our collective psyche feel a profound need to engage in reverse psychoanalysis ? Whey do we hunger, unconsciously, to revisit the Primal Scene, the regress to the Family Romance, and to expose ourselves to the Castration dynamic ? What lower planes of our minds have been activated, and how, that exerts such felt pull into these scenarios ?
Then the reversed question. Why are we here ? What unconscious drives make it necessary or compelling to "work off the background scene" of the cult, the the LGAT, the narcissistic Guru, the syndromatic radio personality ? it's kind of like asking why America has a deep unspoken, and unspeakable fascination with the Sociopathic personality (always made acceptable by an appeal to higher motives.....) ?
I think we should ask ourselves, in the most uncomfortable ways, what are our own psychodynamics that makes this topic irresistable ? Do we, could we, in all of our concern and righteousness, our indignations, have a powerful unconscious identification with power, with control, and perhaps most unsettlingly, with castration, or the need to castrate, or to participate in castration ritual ? Are we actually motivated to be here to Castrate the Castrator ? Do we seek to use the libidinized charge of their power against them to magnify our own sense of power ? In some psychological sense ?
Well, you know what was said of Freud, and why Freudian insight will ever be unpopular, is that he dove deeper, stayed down longer, and came up dirtier than enyone else. Psychoanalysis unpeels some pretty distasteful stuff. And it makes some who present themselves as strong as corrupt, weak, and pathetic.
Anyway, at this juncture I must conclude that until the Unconscious Fantasy structure of cult power relations is understood, communicated, grasped, and really processed on multiple levels of understanding the neurotic game will be an unending psychodrama, with the cultoids unconsciously needing their critics so they may more fully cathect their Family Romance fantasies... because, you know, it makes them worthy of external effort to be attacked.
To be well analysed in Psychoanalytic terms might be another story. But to measure ourselves in Psychoanalytic terms would be another story too.
Very well, over and out for possibly another year. There isn't much else to say. One Minor God will be knocked off of his pedestal only to be replaced with another Minor God. The outraged will always be the outraged. Fools will forever be fools. Freud didn't live in vain and only a tiny minority will ever listen. And round and round we go.
Until the culture at large can handle the idea of unconscious fantasy we will perpetually be driven by unconscious fantasy, whether it motivates us to live lives of the blandest conformity, the most inexplicably extreme affiliation with sociopaths and saviors, or makes us finger wagging critics who feel it is our place in life to neutralize them, we are the children of our childhoods and our parent's childhoods and their parent's childhoods.
These are surprising tough molds to break out of, regardless of whether we define our selves as the "truly free ones"... no doubt they define themselves as the "truly free ones" as well...
Good luck.