ShrinkWrapped

Repression and Denial

Neurotics suffer from Reminiscences.

Freud made this the basis of his first theory of psychopathology. In essence, he believed that his patients had been traumatized during childhood (usually by being abused) and had repressed the traumatic memories; the memories constantly pressed to return to consciousness and the person, in order to protect themselves from re-experiencing the traumatic memories, had to exert continual psychic energy to maintain the repression. Nonetheless, the traumatic memories would find their way to the surface via dreams or "acting out" behavior or neurotic symptoms.  All allowed the expression of derivatives of the repressed experiences while maintaining the memories out of awareness. Later Freud was to alter and refine his understanding of the mind and its workings but much of psychotherapy today involves the task of uncovering hidden (repressed, unconscious) connections, especially the repression involved in transference relationships and helping the individual recognize the links and rework them in a new setting. I bring up the danger of repressed (or "forgotten") memories now because an analogous repression and its attendant distortion of current reality, is rampant in our culture and threatens Western Civilization.

Yesterday's post on History was striking because only someone who has no understanding of history can confuse George Bush, who may be criticized on many fronts, with Hitler, the man who engineered, as a state policy, the systematic murder of millions. The discussion of the post was illuminating. 

Robert Godwin brought in the concept of the "toilet breast" which Melanie Klien has written about as one aspect of the most primitive part of splitting (follow the link for a fuller discussion of splitting)which I have described elsewhere as a sine qua non of certain types of Narcissistic Character Disorders.  There is another defense, closely related to splitting, which Shengold refers to as Defensive anality.  In this defense, all ideas are essentially homogenized and made into an undifferentiated mass of (intellectual) excrement.  Just as the child in the anal phase is pre-occupied with questions of differentiating self and other, so is the Narcissist pre-occupied with differentiating his own overvalued intellectual products from all other products.  This leads to an intolerance of any data that threaten to disturb their assumption of virtuous ownership of the Truth.

History Repeats

In 1967, I was a High School Sophomore and attended my first anti-war rally in New York.  I was one of a handful of politically active and aware students in my suburban New York HS and we were often looked upon unfavorably by faculty and students alike. 

Because I had some facility with the language even then, debates in class were often interesting and entertaining experiences.  However, what really made things interesting was that I could quote information from alternate media sources that baffled my classmates.  I had started listening to WBAI, Pacifica radio station in New York, and they routinely broadcast Agence France Presse and BBC stories that ran counter to the MSM reports on the Vietnam war.  It was their ability to break through the stranglehold that the New York Times and the nightly news cast were laboring under that lead to my first questions about the war, and ultimately left me feeling that our government was lying to us about the progress of the war. 

In retrospect, I would have to admit that though I maintained some skepticism about reports emanating from the North Vietnamese (via AFP & BBC), in my naivety I had not considered that the French and British press might have their own agenda in play.  I now think the war was unwinnable with the restraints we put upon our military at the time (restraints which were in place to avoid escalation into a "nuclear exchange", in the parlance of the day) but regret that we abandoned the South Vietnamese to the gentle mercies of the Communists without really giving them the chance to defend themselves.  (For those who forget history, the South lost only after we cut off all military aid and funding; prior to that, for two years they were holding their own.) 

On a personal level, it was a somewhat intoxicating experience being in such a small minority, often with information that seemed to be more accurate than the body counts the MSM were daily reporting.  To an adolescent, rebellion against convention always had, and still has, a certain appeal, and the sense of having access to information that others didn't know was subversively liberating.

Fast forward to 2005, Senior year in a suburban New York High School: 

Dramatis personnae: My 16 year old son and his classmates in AP English Lit.

Watcher of Weasels

Dymphna thought well enough of my post on The Roberts Hearings: The Virtue of Modesty to nominate it for this week's Watcher of Weasels voting. 

Take a look at the Watcher's site; there are some excellent bloggers represented among the nominees and all are worth reading.

Science Mis-Reporting

Long ago I learned to ignore most of what is printed in the New York Times, the paper I read cover to cover everyday for 40 years but canceled two years ago when the internet offered alternative sources of information and the Times agenda journalism became too much to bear.  I still check out the front page on line and occasionally check out an article.  Until recently I naively thought that there might be areas in which the Times played it straight with the news.  Their misreporting of an issue with which I am quite familiar should disabuse me of that notion for good (but probably won't.)

Here is the title of an article in today's science Times:  Little Difference Found in Schizophrenia Drugs

The title contains a misstatement (if one is charitable) or a lie (if one is not) as will be seen in a moment.  The article purports to report on a study published in the September 19, 2005 New England Journal of Medicine on the Effectiveness of Antipsychotic Drugs in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia.  Some highlights from the Times article include:

A landmark government-financed study that compared drugs used to treat schizophrenia has confirmed what many psychiatrists long suspected: newer drugs that are highly promoted and widely prescribed offer few - if any - benefits over older medicines that sell for a fraction of the cost.

In the entire article, the only place in which any support for the newer drugs appears is in the third paragraph:

One of the newer drugs, Zyprexa, from Eli Lilly, helped more patients control symptoms for significantly longer than the other drugs. But Zyprexa also had a higher risk of serious side effects - like weight gain - that increase the risk of diabetes.

Toward the end of the piece, the article quotes a number of Doctors for the Drug companies suggesting that the study offered some support for their contention that they are safe and effective.  The last paragraph quotes one of the study lead authors:

"The message is the glass is half full," Dr. Lieberman said. "The drugs work but they are not satisfactory to many patients, and three-quarters of the people in our study voted with their feet and discontinued the drugs."

Echo Chambers at the New York Times

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere about the business model the New York Times is following in order to generate more income with its new TimesSelect service.  John Hinderaker at Powerline comments:

It's not just that we won't be reading Krugman and the rest of the Times' menagerie any more. Neither will anyone else. So, while I'll miss the fun of dissecting Krugman's efforts, there isn't much point in tearing apart something that our readers didn't see in the first place.

I think he is correct but misses a salient point.  The Times is the journalistic apotheosis of the narcissism that epitomizes the left in this country.  If you have read my series on Narcissism, or any of the other excellent depictions of the character trait and its development, you will understand that the Narcissist requires adulation from its audience in order to maintain his image of himself as superior to the ordinary person.  The obvious corollary is that the Narcissist is intolerant of criticism because it injures his self-esteem. 

The Times, by hiding its columnists behind a wall, hopes that its supporters and acolytes will pay a nominal fee ($50 a year is "not material" to the limousine liberals who love the Times and believe it to be gospel) to continue reading the likes of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, but even more important, the Time imagines that by hiding they can thereby avoid much of the criticism that has stung and wounded them so badly since the advent of the blogosphere.

In the future the Times will never find themselves challenged and will orate from their soapbox and hear the echoes of their own brilliance without the discomfort of dissenting voices... and the echo chamber will slowly shrink until finally, like a gravitational black hole, no further information will  escape from it.

Hurricane Katrina: Maintaining Perspective II

Dr.  Rusty Shackleford from the Jawa Report, , went down to the Gulf area to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  He remarks on the extent of the damage, which none of the LMSM spent much time describing in the middle of their exhibitionistic excitement over the victims trapped in New Orleans.  From Report from Hurricane Zone: The Unavoidable Tragedy:

The biggest bullshit coming from partisans on the Left, trying to blame the federal government, and partisans on the Right, trying to blame local governments, is that the response was somehow too slow. Let me briefly explain.

Nearly a hundred miles inland I began to see downed trees. By the time we approached about the sixty mile mark from the coast (we were driving from Jackson, Mississipi, towards the coast--so, say 20 miles outside of Hattiesburg) it became worse. Much worse.

Downed trees lined the road. I presume that the majority of them were blown across the highway during the hurricane. They had been roughly cut and then dragged to the side of the road, . Hundreds of them. No, thousands of them.

Each tree had to be moved just to let traffic flow. Every. Single. One. For mile upon mile upon mile. For hundreds of miles. In every direction. This takes time.

And as lanes were cleared and highways opened, trucks and supplies had to move into the zone at the same time as hundreds of thousands of people were trying to move out.

If getting people out of the zone of destruction was a logistical nightmare, getting relief in was an equally daunting task.

Now imagine that same task, and add on severe flooding. Also, you don't know how deep the water is between point A and point B. Difficult under any circumstances, nearly impossible when such a large area was affected.

Some natural disasters are so overpowering that our efforts to fend off their effects are simply inconsequential.  The Utopian fantasy of an all powerful, maternal nurturing government that will watch out for us and make everything all right, is just that: a fantasy.  Anyone who lives their life as if their fantasies are reality is worse than a fool; in anything approaching a state of nature, they are likely to be dead fools.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

Children are famous for becoming furious and going on the attack when they are caught red-handed in a transgression.  The combination of displacement (changing the subject), turning passive into active (from being accused to accusing), and  using anger to deny guilt is hard to resist for a child caught with their proverbial hand in the proverbial  cookie jar.

Our ex-president Clinton, charming rogue that he might be, has always been recognized as having a childlike inability to restrain himself in almost every sphere and it occurred to me that along with the prosaic explanation for his unprecedented attack on his successor on the weekend talk shows offered by John Hinderaker at Powerline, there may be something more interesting at work.  From Powerline we have this, Uncharted Territory, Once Again:

In recent years, the Democrats have violated many of the tacit conventions of civility that have enabled our political system to work for more than two centuries. Yesterday another barrier fell, and once again, we entered uncharted waters: former President Bill Clinton launched a vicious attack on President Bush on ABC's "This Week" program.

This has never happened before. Until now, both parties have recognized a patriotism that, at some level, supersedes partisanship. Consistent with that belief, former Presidents of both parties have stayed out of politics and have avoided criticizing their successors. Until now. The Democrats appear bent on destroying every element of the fabric that has united us as Americans.

Clinton's vicious attack is even worse in the context of his wife's Presidential bid: it is fair to assume that he was motivated not only by partisanship, but by his own desire to re-occupy the White House, and, most likely, wield once more the levers of power.

Then there is this, from Captain Ed, Able Danger: Closed Hearings?:

Language Matters

Dafydd ab Hugh has begun blogging as Big Lizard and has a post up today on Why I Don’t Write “Islamofascist”.  He makes some excellent points:

But the more important point is that the word "fascism" has a magical power: it overwhelms every other word you connect it to. In the real world, "Islamofascism" transsubstantiates into (islamo)-FASCISM! Kaboom!

The danger we face is Islamism and the willingness to murder hundreds of thousands in the name of jihad. What matters is the religion itself and the militancy by which it's spread -- not some putative connection to Mussolini or Hitler. To understand the jihadi, we need to confront the true source of the danger: the death cult that animates the slayer-of-thousands.

I agree with him that the danger we face stems from the religion of Islam and not from any particular economic view they hold.  However, I disagree with him on the implications of his technical parsing of fascism.  I posted a comment on his blog:

I have some concerns about militant Islamist as a replacement for Islamofascist. As a Psychoanalyst, I agree that words matter crucially. The problem for me is two fold.

Gaza & New Orleans

In the last few weeks we have seen the break down of authority in Gaza and in New Orleans.  It may be instructive to look at what may be similar to both areas and may have contributed to the kind of anarchic violence and looting that took place in both venues.

It is an incontrovertible fact that most people in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, rich and poor, Black, Hispanic, and White handled themselves well.  Some communities banded together to protect their property and lives; they pooled their resources and helped each other manage until assistance arrived.  The notable exception was New Orleans.  There, gangs of armed marauders stole, threatened, probably murdered and raped (I do not recall seeing confirmation of some of the most lurid charges.)  They showed a marked resemblance to the gangs of armed marauders who brought anarchy and looting to the Gaza Strip once the Israelis vacated.   

One area of similarity between the poor community of New Orleans and the Palestinians in Gaza is that both are "Dependency Communities".  The poor in New Orleans were afflicted with most of the usual stigmata of impoverishment in this country.  They tended to have single parent families and had a high percentage receiving government assistance.  On the other hand, the Palestinians have been dependent on assistance since their inception. 

The Culture of Dependency does not foster self-reliance.  It also lends itself to attributing all sustenance as necessarily coming from  outside forces, which logically leads to the wide spread tendency to ascribe all untoward outcomes to malevalent, outside forces.  This fuels the paranoia that is so prevalent among Palestinians and some segments of the American black community.

Self Esteem in Education

Thomas Sowell wrote an article two days ago, Smart 'Problems', in which he decried the inability of our schools to maximize our nation's intellectual capital by putting more effort and resources into teaching Gifted children.  Sowell commented that part of the problem is our current emphasis on "self-esteem" at the expense of education:

High potential will remain only potential unless it is developed. But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea.

It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students.

He further commented:

If developing the high potential of some students wounds the "self-esteem" of other students, one obvious answer is for them to go their separate ways in different classrooms or different schools.

....

Lack of [teacher's] competence is only part of the problem. Too often there is not only a lack of appreciation of outstanding intellectual development but a hostility towards it by teachers who are preoccupied with the "self-esteem" of mediocre students, who may remind them of what they were once like as students.