AT ONE TIME, MAN'S INSTINCTS WERE DIRECTED OUTWARDS.
Before there was psychology, there was ritual. This is the realm which animals inhabit, and also the primeval peoples. You can find traces of the ritual in the Japanese language, and Japanese culture.
The pressures of society prohibit the expression of some instincts, driving them inward. Thus, the soul was inflated, in a parallel universe. That said, each body is a social structure comprising many souls. The Sovereign Individual is the one who can tame this ball of snakes.
According to Baudrillard, birth is as traumatic as death... it is an intrusion into the natural order which must be exchanged, and returned to death. As Baudrillard says, the Symbolic is the exchange which puts to an end the division between the Imaginary and the Real (for example, life is real, and death is imaginary). In the Symbolic, separated terms are reunited.
Jacques Lacan was not so much a philosopher as an anti-philosopher. For Lacan, there is no individual, only a dividual. In some ways he is something of a Buddhist! Slavoj Žižek considered Lacan to be part of the triad of western thought, along with Plato and Kant.
We have Eros and Thantos, in equal measure.
Freud claimed that libido was the driving energy behind human behaviour. Baudrillard contended in Symbolic Exchange and Death that there was no need for libido; unmet social obligations account for the unconscious.
According to Baudrillard, the Law of Value has been circumscribed by psychoanalysis on to the individual, leading to a fear of castration.
Anxiety Depression Lacan
Pharmacology vs Psychology
AS FAR BACK AS I can remember, I have been fascinated by alternate states of consciousness. Even as a high school student, reading books by Isaac Asimov, I awaited eagerly a future in which folk popped pills to evoke a certain mood, or enhance their mental capabilities. In my early adulthood my worldview became more ascetic, intuitive, and I embraced New Age Spirituality. You can see the universe if you take LSD. That said, I don't believe that consciousness is created by pharmacology, merely altered. A will can get drunk, but it is still the same will.
Autism
I went on to the Internet and found out my boss does in fact fit with the criteria for autism (which doesn't mean shit I guess
in some way, because according to the official criteria I should be an alcoholic, along with most of my friends.) But I have got a feeling in my bones that my boss/landlord is indeed autistic, and I ought to write an autism blog about this guy's
behavior, and my methods of dealing with him. For all those out there who need guidance or are just curious, about this small subset of the human family.
According to one definition of the disease: "Autistic people have social impairments and often lack intuition about others that many people take for granted. Noted autistic Temple Grandin described her inability to understand the social communication of neurotypicals as leaving her feeling "like an anthropologist on Mars".[20]"
Lack of intuition: for example my boss/landlord thinking that I am a potential future leader for his religion Soka Gakkai, when I am probably destined more to a life or petty crime and "breaking the law, breaking the law!", as that old number goes. I thought my spell in Japanese lockup might shatter some of his illusions, but he still
thinks I am leadership material for his inane and aggressive creed. But just like my episode of pyschosomatic stomach pain 6 weeks after my release from jail, and in fact just like the whole lockup experience, this presence in my life -- this relationship is trying to tell me something. I have to live this experience unconditionally and release it,
tossed aside into the electronic void of the Internet. And in the meantime, I can create a resource for autism sufferers.
According to the School of Cognitive Neuropyschology: "autistic individuals can systematize -- that is, they can develop internal rules of operation to handle internal events -- but are less effective at empathizing by handling events generated by other agents. It extends the extreme male brain theory, which hypothesizes that autism is an extreme case of the male brain, defined psychometrically as individuals in whom systemizing is better than empathizing. This in turn is related to the earlier theory of mind, which hypothesizes that autistic behavior arises because autistic people cannot easily think about thinking."
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