Archive for July 9th, 2007
i too dream of a Marxist therapy
Go read the whole thing at k-punk:
The opposite of social confidence and its attendant sense of entitlement, its urbane at- homeness-in-the-world, is a sense of inferiority, a constant worry about whether one should occupy certain spaces, the quietly panicky conviction that ‘surely they can see that I don’t belong here’. A sense of inferiority is so much a part of the background noise of my existence that until really quite recently I had tended to assume that it is a universal feature of human experience. That sense of – inherent, ontological – inferiority wasn’t something that I railed against; rather, it was so naturalized that it was barely noticed, but constantly felt, distorting all my encounters with people and the world. (But of course, under capitalism, there is no social interaction that isn’t distorted by class position, no neutral social field that exists beyond social antagonism). I suppose I had my first conscious tastes of inferiority when, in the school holidays, I went with my mother, who worked as a cleaner, to the houses of the well-to-do. Feeling lesser simply wasn’t an issue; it was experienced as a non-contestable fact. At least now – and this is partly thanks to CBT – I am aware both of the way in which that the sense of ontological inferiority colours my experience – sometimes I can practically sense it as an entity, a grey vampire squatting on my shoulders, heavy and draining; and I have learned to reduce its power, if not to eliminate it. One of the other tensions that constantly came up with my therapist was over the cause of this feeling of inferiority: for me, it was clearly a class issue, and I dream of a Marxist therapy that could address the pyschic wounds of class society.
I’ve not, for a long time, been very sympathetic to the notion or practice of therapy (whether k-punk’s imagined Marxist variety or just plain on talking cure type stuff), nor have I had much time for therapy’s instantiation in the business of literary study. Lately, though, due to the fact that I’ve had some first hand experience of the thing for the first time in my life, I think I’m headed back in the other direction on the issue. Maybe one day I’ll post more about it. We’ll see.
But I will say that class-issues do seem very hard to get at in these situations. One goes in because one is frustrated with one’s work – perhaps because one is in fact the American technocratic version of the Brit “ruling class” that k-punk describes – and the therapist only wants to talk about sex. Sex is really important, don’t get me wrong. But it is possible, or even probable, that it’s my job, the expectations that I was endowed with as a young kid, the fact that I do extremely well by almost any standard but it just seems like worthless shit constantly, forever and ever, and will continue to do so, or so it looks, until the day that I die…
Blogging is a strange symptom of this problem as well, in case that wasn’t readily clear already.