The following was presentation at the Lacan Circle of Australia’s Cartel Presentation Day on 13/11/21. The theme of the cartel was Lacan’s Seminar XXIV.
Lacanian Dialectice and the Poetics of Interpretation
11
CBT is Aristotle with Facebook brain – A note on paranoia as an epistemic ideal
In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) discourse is reduced to data, and this data is further submitted to the Aristotlesque requirement of non-contradiction, albeit, without any Aristotelian depth of intellect.
Consequently, cognitivism and CBT affirm the existence of an unconscious, but this unconscious is entirely continuous with the conscious. It’s more of the same, more or less. Contrast this with the Freudo-Lacanian unconscious, which is disruptive, punctual, discontinuous, and structurally incapable of completion.
It’s no coincidence that CBT first arose when cognitivism was displacing the increasingly-discredited behaviourism from the laboratory (though not yet the clinic, in the Anglosphere at least). This was the age of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, in which, like good Aristotelians, the subject abhors contradiction. Since contemporary CBT reaffirms a data-based, continuous unconscious, Festinger’s ideas fester still. Show the subject that his suffering arises from the faulty conviction that he always bungles his relationships/work/studies – show him the contrary evidence, the errors in his logic – and he will be obliged, by way of contradiction, to renounce his conviction, and thereby eliminate his suffering.
It was not until the era of neoliberalism that these Aristotelian outtakes reigned supreme over the clinic, for reasons that I have attempted to explicate elsewhere, but which are largely economic and biopolitical in character.
At the heart of the adventures of Freud and Lacan is the proposition that, in at least a thousand different ways, human subjects, divided as they are, exist in permanent, structural contradiction. There are so many examples of this in the centuries that preceded them that I would say that Freud and Lacan merely articulated and formalised, rather than discovered this fact. My experience is that it is common knowledge amongst the uneducated, and that perhaps the educated have some catching-up to do.
The clinical work of psychoanalysis cannot, on this basis, be oriented toward either completeness or consistency, if one means by this the overcoming of contradiction. Repression, disavowal, denial, foreclosure, the law of the exception, the law of the not-all are but some of the psychoanalytically-articulated responses to contradiction. After Gödel,he who trades consistency for completeness deserves neither.
But let us suppose that the psychoanalytic premises are wrong, and that the cognitivists are really as evidence-based as they say. In principle, the latter would be able to work with a subject to produce an image of perfect consistency, with the offending data eliminated. The outcome would resemble nothing so much as the most brittle paranoid delusion. The subject attains an image of coherence with all that is unassimilated sent packing, much line a refugee ship at Australia’s borders. This is the best case scenario for treatment by CBT principles, and we need only look at the outcome of excessive Facebook consumption to see what befalls those who cannot live in contradiction.
Narcissism – Sublimation – Cynicism
The following was presented at a study day of the Lacan Circle of Australia on 16/3/19.
Urgency, History & the Totalitarian Vocation
The following is taken from a presentation at a conference by the Lacan Circle of Australia in Melbourne, 16/2/19. The conference was organised in response to this edition of The Lacanian Review, featuring a new translation of Lacan’s Preface to Seminar XI, and Jacques-Alain Miller’s extensive commentary thereof.
Review of CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami, by Farhad Dalal
Back in 2014, I posted a series of essays critiquing cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in terms of its philosophical and ethical problems. The idea that I had at the time was to provide a rebuttal of CBT that was not from within the parameters of its own assumptions, but which examined CBT from first principles, and also in terms of its political positions. The data may supposedly be in support of CBT, I reasoned, but such data was largely irrelevant if it pertained to incoherent theories and concepts, and was used to prop up a series of coercive and unethical practices. There were many critiques of my articles, on Reddit, for instance (here is an example), though practically none of them attempted to defend the theory of CBT. Few people seem to seriously uphold CBT concepts, even among advocates of this approach. Rather, the main objection to an a priori critique of CBT was ‘evidence’, which clearly proves CBT to be the ‘industry gold standard’, at least for now. Since CBT ‘works’, principles – first, or otherwise – simply do not matter. Continue reading
Hystory in Lacan’s later work
The latest edition of the Lacanian Review features an updated translation of Lacan’s preface to the English edition of Seminar XI. What follows if a brief reflection on the preface, initially presented at a study day for the Lacan Circle of Australia on October 20th, 2018.
Science’s man does not exist: Psychoanalysis, scientism, and the structuralist project.
Here is my latest, from the journal Psychoanalysis Lacan, to be found here.
Other Jouissance and Modern Mysticism
On the logical use of the Sinthome, or, Joyce with Freud
The following was presented as an introduction to the first chapter of Lacan’s Seminar 23 at the Lacan Circle of Melbourne, 18/2/2017: Continue reading
Archives of a Divided Subject 