Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
“In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops. […] In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something aimless and moth eaten about them.”
– George Orwell (1936), Bookshop Memories
Rosner (2012) looks fun indeed. Here’s how it starts:
“1961 and 1962 were momentous years for Aaron T. Beck. They were the years he made a decisive break with his psychoanalytic past. He closed down his large psychoanalytic research project on depression, put to rest his application for membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association that had been rejected twice, and turned his back on the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious. He took a sabbatical from the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania following a destructive department-wide battle over the future of psychoanalysis in psychiatry.
But then… here’s a letter Beck wrote to John Bowlby in 1981:
“It might be a point of curiosity therefore for you to know that my psychiatric training was completely and exclusively psychoanalytic… I would consider my theoretical work as derivative from ego psychology rather than from cognitive psychology or learning theory. At the present time in fact I am trying to reformulate many of the basic psychoanalytic concepts into cognitive terms (Beck, A. T., personal collection, July 29, 1981).”
Rosner, R. I. (2012). Aaron T. Beck’s drawings and the psychoanalytic origins story of cognitive therapy. History of Psychology, 15, 1-18.
“Psychoanalysis is very different [from psychology], and very peculiar. One might even suggest […] that the structure of psychoanalytic history is much more like the history of a religious sect […]. Like a religion, there was a founding father who had a revelation (the existence of the subconscious); he struggled to have the truth of this revelation recognised by a hostile world, and gradually gathered around him a group of followers. […] A canon of set (scared) texts emerged, mostly penned by (or attributed to) the founder and studied continuously down the generations.”
— Stephen Frosh (2012, pp. 16–17), A brief introduction to psychoanalytic theory
Something hilarious happening on a mailing list.
“Can’t they be about… sorry… we… er… eh… no no no no… it’s just so obvious I can’t be bothered…
“You don’t have to want to return to a barter system in the stoneage to complain about the way the financial crisis affected large numbers of people in the world, do you? Even if you’re having a cup of coffee and you’ve got a tent!”
— Ian Hislop responding to Louise Mensch on Have I Got News For You, 23/10/2011
From Whittle (1999, p. 240; I’m remaining silent on my opinion here—I just found the paragraph made me grin.)
The British are notoriously distrustful of theory. Newton was even, famously, distrustful of “hypotheses.” Theory is continental. We think of it as Germanic, and heavy. We think of Hegel and Heidegger. Brits who get entangled in it, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or R. D. Laing, become incoherent substance abusers with marital problems. Psychoanalysis is full of theory. It has to be, because it is so distrustful of the surface. It could still choose to use the minimum necessary, but it does the opposite. It effervesces with theory, so infectiously that books of theory now bombard us from Paris, New Haven, Indiana, it sometimes seems from everywhere where there is a feminist modern-language academic. This weight of theory is a major reason why experimental psychologists, who are the most deeply British-Empiricist culture that there is, cannot get on with psychoanalysis. How could they possibly? How could people whose habit of mind is to ask of every statement that might have empirical content whether (1) it is statistically significant, and (2), more interestingly, whether there might not be another simpler explanation, possibly stomach these outpourings of prose, of sentence upon sentence of uncertain epistemological status?
Reference
Whittle, P. (1999). Experimental Psychology and Psychoanalysis: What We Can Learn from a Century of Misunderstanding. Neuropsychoanalysis, 1, 233-245.
(Spotted here.)
“… in what respect does the philosopher, who pursues science in order that he may pass life pleasantly to himself, differ from that drunkard there, who only seeks the immediate gratification that gin affords him? The philosopher has, past all question, chosen his enjoyment more wisely, since it affords him a pleasure far deeper and more lasting than that of the toper. But that is all! Both one and the other have the same selfish end in view, personal gratification.”
(From An Appeal to the Young by Pyotr Kropotkin)
“Newcomers and innocent bystanders are encouraged – no, bullied – into taking part. The young are particularly welcome, because they cannot pace their drinking, not that it would matter much if they could, for they know absolutely fuck-all about anything, especially as the quiz is set by the regulars, none of whom is ever going to see 45 again, and whose frame of reference reflects this.”
“The real point of the quiz, as far as I can see, is not to win, but for everyone to shout at each other.”
(Well, a particular pub quiz, but I think it’s a general phenomena.)
