June 2010

Camille Paglia from the Apollonian Control to the Dionysian Delirium

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2010.6:53pm · 0 comments

I used to follow Camille religiously. Alas she is stuck, she have been saying the same things more or less for the past 20 years. My advise to her is to stop hanging around the morons in the Philadelphia ”art” school. But her language is still very unique. Paglia writes in the NYT - No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class:

“In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.”

The dress thingy is interesting. It has to do the casual suburban life, the influence of the black culture and the sports where tight basketball shorts have been replaced by the “loose shorts”. The lack of the urban social events that are not concerts or “walks for hunger”. The lack of the proper dress decorum in the restaurants. I was surprised that in the suburban San Fransisco the dress was proper even in 1968.

Monkey, Businessman, Rabbi, Whore, Priest and the Caravaggio Fortune

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2010.5:02pm · 0 comments

Nassim Taleb Tweeted: “no monkey is as good-looking that the ugliest of humans, no businessman worthier than the worst of the poets.” But where are the poets? I see only the monkeys and the businessman.

Aaron Haspel observes: “the contemporary businessman cares only for art, and the contemporary artist only for money.” I will expand that into “the contemporary businessman thinks only about God, and the contemporary Rabbi thinks only about money” or “the contemporary whore dreams only about love and the contemporary priest dreams only about sex”. Heck it doesn’t need to be a “contemporary”.

Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller c. 1596. Musei Capitolini, Rome

These two paintings are by the great Caravaggio. The paintings represent a pivotal reversal in art. The say that Caravaggio wanted to prove a point with the paintings. Even in the early Renaissance the art was derivative, the figures and the heros on a canvas represented a composite image, as a rule imitating and perfecting the earlier masters. Caravaggio said that he does need the references, he can go directly to life and picked a Gypsy girl from the crowd to model for his Fortune Teller. Likely this is just a legend, especially because clearly there are different faces in both almost identical paintings. But what is beyond doubt is that Caravaggio indeed took his subjects from the real people, the life around him. The famous scandal with the Pope when Caravaggio actually used a prostitute to model Madonna in one of his paintings (Caravaggio had a McLuhanian epiphany). This was in a way the beginning of the modern art in sense that an artist comes in raw contact with the experience around him and reflects on the “now”.The opposite happened with religion. Religious poetry and prose was an experiential mediation but it then became derivative and quotational. It was no longer an “art”. And now both art and religion meet at the full circle point of the dead derivatives. The only people who are still in-touch with the real world non contextually are the businessmen and the whores.

Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller 1596-97. Musée du Louvre, Paris

In both painting the Fortune Teller is actually removing a ring from the gentleman’s finger with a sly smile (perhaps this is why the legend involves a Gypsy girl). In the first painting Caravaggio’s subject is the flirtatious eye contact. But the is no eye contact in the second painting (above). A more feminine looking boy with the roundly symmetrical head doesn’t see the Fortune Teller or cares about her stealing the ring. He is consumed by a dream.

Narration and Fallacy

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2010.8:58am · 0 comments

Galen Strawson argues against the default to experiencing life or constructing our own life as a story. He writes in Against Narrativity:

“It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative. I think the [Narrativity theses] hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and are potentially destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts.”

This fits into the Nassim Taleb’s “narrative fallacy” thesis or our tendency to find a story or an explanation for a past event to fit into a story. But Galen Strawson’s argument raises the questions about Daniel Kahneman’s tlak at Ted. Is our tendency to narrate and to “remember” an innate or a culturally acquired skill? I would like to belive it’s that latter. (via mindhacks)

Tossing the Taleb Quote Salad

by Ben Atlas on 06.29.2010.6:57am · 0 comments

I am in the mood for something healthy, how about some Nassim Taleb’s tweet salad:

“If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.” - Nice symmetry to this one. And the second part is so true. Humans have a tendency to brush off events and their consequences as a temporary condition. Taleb describes in his book like his Lebanese neighbors went to the hotels in Crete to wait out the war when it started, as it surely was going to last just few weeks. And the three decades later there is still a war there. Same on a personal level. Only after some time you begin to realize how grievous was the wound.

“The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.” – A thinking person has the ownership of his own ideas so there is no fear in getting rid of the old property. A person who lives off the intellectual welfare, i.e. an idealogical compartment assigned to him by the “thinking authorities” is indeed afraid of the illusion of the self contradiction.

“In the past most were ignorant except for 1 in 1,000 refined enough to talk to. Today, thx to progress, literacy,& media only 1 in 100,000.” – I have no idea how was it in the past but I am rather certain that the “1 in 100,000″ ratio is too high.

“Don’t talk abt ” progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before looking at zoo animals compared to those in the wildrnss.” – Need to watch James Mossman film about this one.

“We now face the choice betw those who write clearly about a subject they don’t know,& those who write poorly about a subject they don’t know” and “2010, 600,000 books in English with few memorable quotes; c. 0 AD, a handful of books with loads of quotes. Information rich dark ages” and “They spend their lives writing and writing and manage to avoid producing a single quotable sentence.”- often it seems that meaning is unreachable under the layers of dust. Occasionally there are people with the authentic feeling, but they are extremely rare.

America in 1968

by Ben Atlas on 06.28.2010.9:53pm · 4 comments

Adam Curtis posted this BBC film on his blog. It’s a documentary filmed in the Bay Area in 1968 by James Mossman. Nothing is staged yet it’s amazing how much one can observe in the regular conversations. Something deeply unsettling about this film. There is the calm, the polite dialogue but under it all is the rage, the bleak slavery of the modern man. America - Democracy on Trial (bottom post there).

P.S. The amount of content and observations I shared on this blog without getting anything in return is unreal. I think people who come here every day as passive consumers are rude apes. Broken souls, transfixed by the TV thinking. Hopeless and unimaginative drones.

Horizontal Discipline

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2010.6:11pm · 1 comment

A healthy part of the spring cleaning is to get rid of all the vertical relationships in your life.

I don’t ask anyone to follow me on the social networks but I wouldn’t follow anyone who is not following me back. I am interested in the horizontal interaction only not the vertical worship.
People who have a daddy problem or a mammy problem and seek the vertical transference should stay the heck away. Seek equality.
The religious obsessions along the vertical axis should be shunned, especially people fixated on hierarchies. Same goes for the gods.
People who generally define spiritually or knowledge in terms of ups and downs.
People who have the vertical inferiority complex born of sports analogies and visualize winners and losers.

Seek the horizontal metaphors and people who speak to you not at you.

P.S. The vast number of people I know never changed their ideas for the past 10-20-30 years. They don’t read books containing the new ideas (they don’t read period). All they do is consume information that supports the nonsense they decided to accept 10-20-30 years ago. And so they will go from the virtually dead to the dead for real.

Adam Curtis on the Negatively Defined Ideas

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2010.3:27pm · 0 comments

Adam Curtis is a master. This must be his most biased series. His omissions are grotesques and glaring. Yet you always learn from his presentations, by making you look from a different perspective on the familiar events he changes your view forever. “This film explores the origins of the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today. The Power of Nightmares (2005) in three parts.

The Concentric Trash Talking Circles of Friends

by Ben Atlas on 06.27.2010.7:38am · 0 comments

Quint Buchholz, Fenster bei Nacht

David Brooks wrote a column about the downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal , Brooks construes how the social and professional gangs routinely heap some smack on the outsiders. In the siamese symbiosis between the media and the sports, the reporters often leak the deliberate or unintended trash and the opposing teams or the athletes eagerly recycle the verbiage as a motivational bulletin board material. Alas not all trash talk created equal, it’s as they say a “domain specific”. So generally there are a three concentric variables in the friendship to trash ratio:

In the outer circumference are the social groups that define themselves and the boundaries by talking trash about the outsiders. This empty at the core identity formation is relatively safe behind the “circle the wagons” protection of your own gang family.
Next is the small but trusted inner circle of friends where you talk trash about the insiders or even the leaders of your own gang. This is getting dangerous. If betrayed, you are completely exposed to the cruelest form of justice – the “just us” rage that comes from “your own” (both elements of 1 and 2 found in the Gen. Stanley McChrystal incident).
But at the center of the circle are one or two friends with whom you are straightforward and outright enough to get into the self-deprecating or self-critical mode. You start talking some mean smack about yourself or moan about the injustice inflicted upon you. And here lurks the greatest peril and the cruelest of betrayals. Nassim Taleb tweeted recently: “don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you, you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies”. In other words you expose your proven weakness and then the unimaginative imaginary friends will use the information to hurt you.

Perhaps this is why modern people are prone to real honesty only with the shrinks. The “mental professionals” are no better listeners and not even as smart as your foolishly trusted friends but the fee you pay for the service and the laws guarding your privacy, protect you against the toxic trash being lovingly lathered to stir the mortal wounds.

Illustration by Quint Buchholz

Dr. Wilhelm Stekel on the Psychoanalysis of a Rabbi (Rashab?)

by Ben Atlas on 06.25.2010.9:24am · 5 comments

Dr. Wilhelm Stekel (c. 1920s)

“The patient found boundless relief in being able at last to communicate his secret thoughts unconstrainedly. He did not know a soul to whom he could speak about these things. His glance was freer, his manner unconstrained. The art of psycho-therapy consists not only in releasing repressions but also in revealing how human it all is.” – Dr. Wilhelm Stekel

The Wilhelm Stekel’s case of a Rabbi described in the paper published by Maya Balakirsky Katz who identified the Rabbi as Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (שלום דובער שניאורסאהן‎), AKA the Rashab‎. This synopsis of the psychoanalytic sessions is documented by Dr. Wilhelm Stekel’s in his book Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and their Treatment. The book was originally published by Urban and Schwarzenberg in 1908. Dr. Wilhelm Stekel wrote in his autobiography that the memorable client was referred to him by Dr. Sigmund Freud. The case is described in the second part of this book The Phobias, in the chapter Vocational Neurosis (ten tightly printed pages starting from page 211 in the Routledge edition):

This is the full text of the chapter Vocational Neurosis in pdf, please read before you skip to the comments here.

The age of marriage is 18 while the Rashab married when he was 14. The ten pages about the Rabbi is a shorthand, multiple visits condensed. As Wilhelm Stekel wrote: “Let me be spared the description of the toilsome roundabout ways by which I arrived at my results. The conversations at our sittings would fill volumes“. Why distract the reader with the freakish Jewish customs? It might require an unnecessary for the flow of the anonymous case, explanation, perhaps even apologetics, it will make the Rabbi appear as a barbarian to the enlightened German speaking audience. Especially in the atmosphere when Stekel was clearly cognizant of the antisemitism, etc. All he wanted to say was that his patient married young, 18 will do. It’s interesting that the “Rabbi’s chapter” is titled Vocational Neurosis and the chapter immediately following it is Neurosis of a Priest (same in the original German?).
The comment at the end about the Rabbi sending his “daughter” five years after the case (that would be 1908 when the book was published). As I already wrote, while in Vienna the Rashab cared for two orphans as he would care for his own daughters. The Rayatz describes there that his father married them off to a perfect strangers, literally found on the street. If two orphaned sisters are married to perfect strangers shouldn’t you expect that in exactly five years at least one would be in need of some therapy or have a crisis? Perhaps Rashab sent the woman to Dr. Stekel writing she is “like a daughter to me” and that became I was “treating his daughter” remark, especially because the Rashab likely paid for the treatment.
Who could it be besides the Rashab? Let ‘s see the Rabbi was misbonnen be shem havaya, we now eliminated all the snags who never think about God, just about his alleged laws. Actually we can stop right here, but if you insist… There might be some Chernobeler-Cherkasser-Schneerson mutt like the Uncle Professor Psychiatrist Dr. Fishel Schneerson or some rouge Twersky like Nochum Shpikover. But who would have the sophisticated idea to see a shrink in 1903!!? Whomever this Rabbi was he didn’t go to some general practitioner in Berdichev, he sought out the top, experimental at the time, specialist before even the doctors heard of the psychoanalysis, in fact as Stekel wrote it was one of the first seminal cases. The geographically close Ruzhiner einiklach are just too materialistically remote to see a psychiatrist. The Galizinaner Rebbes, even the Tzanzer dynasty are your garden variety Neanderthals, who else, the Romanian savages? Even Freud himself wouldn’t be able to handle the perversions of that bunch. In other words please come up with another Chassidic Rebbe with a documented trip to Vienna in 1903 (or before 1908 when the book was published), who was exactly 42 years old then, who was involved in the known to his chassidim quarrel with his older brother about the books and who used to mediate about the symbolic meaning (yihudim) of God’s name, gleamed from his grandfather’s manuscript. Moreover find a Rebbe who did as Stekel writes “a great deal of mental work” and “all kinds of people used to come to him from far and wide to ask his counsel in difficult matters”.
Even I know that the Rashab traveled widely, could this itinerary mentioned by Dr. Stekel be confirmed: “He sought in vain a remedy for his affliction in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. He went to Scheveningen [the resort town next to Hague], Homburg, Wiesbaden, Gainfarn, etc. He had stayed some months in Worishofen.”

Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, The Rashab. Rostov, 1920

There is something else that I find interesting, unlike the contemporary vile sensationalist headline seekers, the molestation is downplayed or at least described similarly to other “sexual experiences”. Holding a girls hand left as much impression on the Rabbi as being molested by an older man as a child (btw, I read in Stekel’s autobiography that he considered every human a bisexual by nature).

Noteworthy that the cathartic part of the psychoanalysis was not the revelation about the molestation or the fantasies but the untangling of the associations and images in the shem havaya: “He halted always at the “Adonai,” because this word reminded him not only of his sinful desires but of his inhibitions. For the God of the Jews is a stern, merciless, punishing God.”

Finally the psychoanalysis was in 1903 and just in three years later was the creative eruption known as the Samech Vov. There is no doubt that Dr. Wilhelm Stekel unknowingly released the creative imagination.

The Great Unstuck

by Ben Atlas on 06.24.2010.8:47am · 2 comments

Over the years some people told me that I influenced them but from where I stand people didn’t follow. They live stuck in the stale assumptions they made 30 -20-10 years ago. Lazy to move on, lazy to think, lazy to read. Now that the round trip is complete I ask myself why no one is at the station, I was hoping some of you will come for a ride. But you people disappoint me. You still cling to your sweaty comfort zones. You are are all a poor excuse for a human being, and you know it.

illustration by gapingvoid

Wilhelm Stekel and the Rashab’s “daughter”

by Ben Atlas on 06.23.2010.2:40pm · 1 comment

I am yet to receive the book so I very much would like to see what exactly Stekel writes about treating the Rabbiner’s “daughter”, obviously Rashab had none. But there is the most mystical story that Rayatz describes how Rasahab was in a complete trans and then suddenly went to Pressburg to find two orphan girls – here. Rayatz wrote some fairy tale bits there, who knows what was really going on. But what Rayatz records is that Rashab went out of his way while in Vienna and inexplicably cared for the two orphan girls like one would care for his own children, i.e. arranged shiduchim for the girls, spent big money on them. It’s conceivable that he brought one of the girls to Dr. Wilhel Stekel and doctor wrote about the girl as a Rashab’s “daughter”.

“Somewhat later a delivery man came with a package. He asked whether Schneersohn lived here, and I answered yes. He said he had a delivery for him and was instructed to bring it to the hotel. During the course of the next few hours, several more packages came from other shops. The RaYaTZ was surprised, for he saw that there were lady’s garments. He surmised that his father had bought gifts for his wife and daughters.”

I guess that would be Rayatz’s own “daughters”? Rayatz continues how Rashab descibed the grils “as his relatives” (that is in the town where everyone knew the girls and for sure he could have called them “daughters” in Vienna). More from the Rayatz:

“The RaSHaB visited the widow and her daughters a number of times. Once he went himself. When they asked who he was, he replied that he was a distant relative. When the girls asked him whether he knew their father, he answered that the issue was not important.

The conversations skirted around various subjects until the Rebbe spoke to the woman about arranging marriages (shiduchim) for her two unmarried daughters. The widow moaned about her desperate plight, especially now that her husband had passed away. She had little money and didn’t think she could get appropriate matches. Clothes and other things were very expensive, and she didn’t have the means to continue with the shiduchim that had already been proposed. The RaSHaB comforted her and made suggestions. For the eldest daughter, Chayaleh Gela (in Hungarian: Katalin), he recommended the student with whom he had got into a very long, involved talmudic discussion. For the second daughter, Faiga (in Hungarian: Foge), he recommended the young man whom he had scolded in the street. As for clothes (trousseaus), he said the widow shouldn’t worry, because he had already bought with him two sets of bridal clothes, as well as anything else that the orphans needed. All of this cost a few hundred rubles, which was a very large sum in those days.”

So even for the Rayatz there were two memorable girls that his father treated as his own “daughters”.

Wilhelm Stekel on the Breakup with Freud (and Freud’s with Jung)

by Ben Atlas on 06.23.2010.2:10pm · 0 comments

The one impression I get from reading Wilhelm Stekel is that Freud cared a great deal about psychoanalysis as movement, a cult if you wish. This is no news for anyone who knows how the movement conquered America. But as always in a rigid, cultish party there are zealots and apparatchiks on a lookout for the infidels. Wilhelm Stekel would have none of that, he was an independent man and he even refused to accept the term “neurosis”, as it had noting to do with the “nerves”, instead he used his own term “parapath” or “parapathy” in all his books.

During a congress in Weimar, Freud proposed that Carl Jung should be a life-time President of International Analytical Society. Wilhelm Stekel was opposed to this, especially to giving Jung editorial powers over publications. He writes on page 128 of his autobiography:

“After the exciting first session was finished, I invited my Viennese colleagues to a secret meeting. Nearly twenty came, and I lost no time in addressing them. Psychoanalysis, I said, had been founded in Vienna; for a long time we had been the only ones to fight for Freud. It would be preposterous if Vienna were deprived of the leadership. We had to stand for the independence of the new science. Were we to be dependent upon the mercy of Zurich?

Never, they answered. At this moment the door opened; we looked around and saw it was Freud. He was greatly excited, and tried to persuade us to accept Ferenczi’s motion [to appoint Jung]; he predicted hard times and a strong opposition by official science. He grasped his coat and cried, “They begrudge me the coat I am wearing; I don’t know whether in the future I will earn my daily bread.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “An official psychiatrist and a Gentile must be the leader of the movement.” He foresaw a growing anti-Semitism.

We tried to persuade him that his misgivings were exaggerated. There was a long argument pro and con. Finally he proposed a compromise. We should elect a president to serve for two years, and every two years there should be a new election. We also agreed that there would be no censorship.

We accepted the compromise advocated by our adored master. As a result, at the next session Jung was elected president to serve for two years; but Freud was surprised when I announced that Adler and I were going to found an independent monthly journal devoted to psychoanalysis. The proposed publication was to be known as Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse. The fight with Jung was on.”

In other words Freud was afraid that the psychoanalysis will be labeled a “Jewish shtick from Vienna” and was desperate to place a german goy from a legitimate Swiss clinic as the head of the movement. But Stekel’s breakup with Freud was now inevitable. He writes on page 142:

“At one session my honor was personally attacked by Victor Tausk. He insinuated that my cases were invented. (If I had invented my cases I should undoubtedly be a greater poet than Shakespeare.) During this speech by Tausk, I wrote to Freud on a scrap of paper, “If you will not rebuke these personal attacks, this is the last time that I shall have been a member of this circle.” In a mild manner Freud asked Tausk to avoid personal remarks.

The next stroke was more serious. I had dedicated my best gifts to our journal. I had been very careful to review all papers and books without prejudice. (Prejudice is the hangman of Truth.) I read and studied, and I wrote many reviews. But one day Freud suggested that all analytical papers should be reviewed in our journal by Tausk. I reminded Freud of our agreement and said that I had the right of veto, but he remained adamant. I gave up my membership in the group. At this time I was president.

I paid my last visit to Freud, and he mentioned again how he had to protect me against the insinuations of Jung. “Dear Master,” I said, “I am afraid that in a short time you will see you have sacrificed your most faithful collaborator for an ungrateful one. Jung will not remain a Freudian long.”

“Let’s hope you are mistaken,” answered Freud, sighing.

I was correct as far as Jung was concerned. After a spirited discussion at the next International Congress, Jung separated from Freud and became the founder of his own school (Analytical Psychology). Jung may have been offended because of his jealousy of the success of Freud’s fascinating book, “Totem and Taboo”, a field in which Jung had done considerable research. Freud described brilliantly the customs of primitives and found in them the confirmation of some of his basic views regarding mental disorders. Whatever the reason, Jung established his own school and won over many pupils and admirers.”

Stekel adds this on page 249:

“Freud was a great thinker and theoretician; I am a practical man. While Freud asks himself what a case offers to science, I ask myself what science can offer to the case. My success results from my lack of bias. I concede that every case may throw overboard all my previously held theories. The thrill of discovery from this unprejudiced approach has been a source of gratification to me.”

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