#Neo-Freudian

[str82theheartpls]

Therapy is for Understanding not Healing

Some of my friends refuse to go to therapy. I’ll admit, it’s a small subset of my huuuuuge group of friends (lol) but they exist! My post- or currently in- therapy friends and I, who have been therapized, therapize each other, read Freud and Jung, and psychoanalyze other friends when they’re not in the room with analyses so in-depth so scathing you’d think we get paid for our time, can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to go to therapy. 

Up until recently, I thought it was because they were scared of introspection. Now, I think it has to do with the POINT of therapy. The why behind it. The whole reason we’re there.

Around 1890, as Freud was writing his work, Studies on Hysteria, he wrote that the end goal of therapy was to turn the patient’s “hysterical misery into uncommon happiness.” In other words, Freud just wants your brain to function at a normal level, so that you too can join in the suffering that is the human experience!😊

But today, therapists, influencers who claim to be therapists, characters in movies, tv shows, and books, and normal IRL people will have you believe that therapy is THE panacea. Dr. Nicole LePera (@the.holistic.psychologist), a clinical psychologist with 6 million Instagram followers, writes in her Instagram bio for all to see, “I teach you to heal + consciously create a new version of yourself.”

👁️👄👁️To heal AND to create a completely new version of myself?!?! Seems like a lofty goal to me. But go off I guess!

Freud in his writings, was constantly doubting his techniques, questioning the efficacy of psychoanalysis and other therapies, and even questioning himself. So he was a #humble king.

But I’ve noticed that now, through societal expectations and online culture, therapy promises prospective clients a lot. There’s a lot of talk about “healing generational trauma,” “breaking old patterns,” and “self-actualization.” (To be clear, I don’t really blame professionals and the field of Psychology and Therapy for this, I mostly blame TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.)

But if the one and only Father of Psychology (or as I like to call him, the Daddy of Psychology) believes that therapy isn’t about fixing and is instead about understanding, then how did we get here? And is having this lofty expectation of complete and utter healing keeping people from going to therapy?

The way I understand Freud’s above quote is this: The ultimate goal of therapy is not to really improve or cure the person but to get them to make their unconscious ideas, wishes, fears, and desires conscious. If we don’t believe in unconscious/conscious thoughts, then we can say that Freud believed the ultimate goal of therapy was to help the client understand their actions, mistakes, desires, wishes, fears, etc. 

And once someone truly understands themselves, digs deep, and confronts the fears and desires that they try so hard to bury in their subconscious, then we come to another problem: they are suddenly deeply unhappy, because they’re able to now judge themselves for these things that were once hidden. 

And maybe that’s the most difficult part of therapy: uncovering beliefs and thoughts that you’ve held deep inside for so long and having to reckon with what truly makes you human. I feel like that’s what makes introspection so difficult. We really want to like ourselves, and if we know too much, we might not like ourselves!😨

So that’s one reason why my friends might be avoiding therapy. Okay fine. That’s somewhat, maybe understandable! 

BUT WHAT IF…. They’re avoiding therapy not because they’re scared of their true selves, but because they’re scared to start therapy thinking that they’ll never reach this lofty goal of self-actualization and complete healing that is promised to us TODAY but that Freud doesn’t actually believe in?

This seems closer to the truth for me. Today, we have a big emphasis on HEALING which shouldn’t be the actual goal of therapy. The goal of therapy I think is to truly understand our actions, motives, and desires so that we can then gain control of these things. 

I think capitalism and the internet have created this belief that therapy should completely heal us. Because if it doesn’t completely “heal” us why are we paying for it? Capitalism has existed for so long, but mix capitalism with social media and constant ideas and phenomena being turned into fodder for influencers, and you get the societal belief that therapy needs a PRODUCT in order for it to be worth it under capitalism. What makes therapy worth it? The complete eradication of all your problematic behaviors, urges that stem from past experiences, toxic traits, etc.

So moving forward, I hope we can use Freud’s goal of therapy rather than Instagram’s. If not for us, then let’s do it for my friends. They really need it. 😉

[scramble-crossing]

[echoland]

I'm tired of pretending like this doesn't eat

[charmikarma]

in my head jade's character arc is like

plot-mandated infallible character > no longer plot-mandated, but still wholeheartedly believes she has done no wrong and will do no wrong > does some things wrong, is aware of this fact on some level, refuses to acknowledge it (repression) > externalizes the unconscious cognitive dissonance about whether or not she is a good person by judging others' wrongdoing > full on self loathing > actively hiding her flaws from others > self-acceptance and reconcilition

[skateboardtotheheart]

i'm currently taking a theories of personality psychology course and for my last paper i'm being asked to pick a fictional character and apply three major concepts from the class to said character

and let me tell ya,, i IMMEDIATELY decided to write about wille. not a second of hesitation in this decision

[bredforloyalty]

guys i am being so serious right now. what movie or show should i write (part of) the oedipus complex assignment about.. help me out here help me decide does anyone have any thoughts

[writingoneout]

Untilted Katamari Reflections

Preamble:

Content considerations for the following include:

Parental abuse

Bigotry

Worldly anxiety

You're welcome back another day if that's too much right now.

I.

It’s fall of 2015.

You and your virgin college friends drink shitty cocktails called the “Slutty Will Rodgers.” They’re just Pepsi rawdogged with indeterminate amounts of grenadine and Captain Morgan. When you bought the mixers a Wal-Mart stocker yodeled “OOOOoOoooOH, maKIN sOMe DRINKS?!?!” and you knew it was time to leave.

We Love Katamari is on the Telly. It’s a sweet, trippy game you first bought to cope with high school. On Dark Fridays at 1am, when your inbox was barren and your balls were full, you’d drive to the empty gym downtown and sprint six miles. Then you’d come home and replay the firefly level until you fell asleep with your pug.

Your college friends are bad at the game, so they pass the controller. You’re playing the underwater stage. A spaceman falls in the pond of people gunk and stacked crabs. It’s going really well if you’re honest. You point to the screen and say “this’ll be Florida if Trump wins.” See Fig. 1.

Figure 1: Rick Desantis has big plans for Disney.

Your friends don’t reply because they soon won’t be virgins and their tongues battle each other’s. It’s a different game they play, one with fuzzier rules, but greater industry respect. You wish the campus gym was open 24/7.

. . .

Your skills as the prince are not inherent. You first meet him in 2005, when your dyspraxic hands can barely tie a shoe. Your parents catch you lose shit for the Toonami review of Me and My Katamari. They buy it for Christmas, hoping to steady your nerves while your father’s in therapy.

Dr. Flam is a Neo-Freudian hitched to your mom’s guy, Dr. Flim. She’s deep in your dad’s dream journal and makes him watch movies like Cool Hand Luke to really reign in his ego. He gets the DVDs from the Netflix site, then through the mail. As a family you watch your dad’s therapy films and reruns of Inyuasha.

In the waiting room you barely navigate the sticky ball through Namco Bandai’s Satoshi Kon parade. See Fig. 2. You’ve only seen adults express anger verbally, so when you mess up you grunt a lot and let out those Leopold Butters Stotch swears like “crap,” “shoot,” and “gosh darn.” You’re not particularly self-aware, so you probably just say “god fucking damn it” a few times and don’t remember. Years later you realize there was probably a secretary behind the glass watching you do all this.

Figure 2: Bwahbwahwabhbawahbwaaaaah.

Sometimes there’s a girl in the room with you, just around your age. She’s stuck while Dr. Flim teaches her mom about what dream snakes mean for her fear of male puberty. That's what he did for your mom, anyway.

You think the waiting-room stranger is cute, but you won’t admit you like girls yet, especially not to yourself. To cope with the cognitive dissonance, you do your weird shit louder while refusing to make eye contact with her. If you get real stressed you crank up the main menu track and yell “ahhhhh that’s so relaxing” while the “nah nah nah nahs” play through your headphones.

At one point the girl stands against a wall and stares at you with her arms crossed. You bet she thinks you’re cool, but she’s probably just annoyed and hopes you’ll notice, or maybe just ask if she’s OK. It’s probably good you don’t talk with her. You might ask something stupid, like if she's seen the roach corpse in the stairwell. It’s been there for a year straight, isn’t that crazy?

For better and worse, you power through your little game alone. Every time you lose the King of All Cosmos beats, shoots, and belittles you. See Fig. 3. It reminds you of when your own dad shattered your Harry Potter wand over the kitchen counter because you dropped a mini pizza.

Figure 3: The King of All Cosmos offers little constructive advice, all things considered.

You fail quite frequently. Eventually you drop the game because it’s getting stressful and you have the power to relieve yourself of the situation—not the Freudian lobby, just your fake dad.

II.

It’s 2012. PlayStation Network uploads The Prince’s primeval outing: Katamari Damacy. Within, Padre Cosmotic flaps his gums over too much hooch then slams his dump truck ass through the better part of our solar system. He dislodges every recognized constellation and even the moon itself.

Cosmos sends Prince to Earth—the last brick left in the shitstorm—to make slop of our planet and bodies. With the slop space itself will be made anew. The Good Son does as he's told, and every living entity experiences euphoric ego death within the bulbous heaven of the Katamari.

As a Real Gamer Teen you lose a lot less in this one. You really go in and fix Fake Dad’s mistakes, no problem at all. This is why a year ago you hailed “gaming journalism” as your calling. You write clean and play tight; should keep the lights on. It’s the most concrete idea you’ve had since 7th grade when you outlined a YA novel called Tooth Pocket. Even you didn’t think Scholastic would buy that one, though. It was just too hot for the book fair.

One day you’re cranking through FFVI and your real dad swings by, mad you're young. He grills your ass and says “I bet you can’t even tell me the biggest thing happening right now.” It’s some real “What’s a gallon of milk cost?” shit, he could mean anything.

 Surprisingly, you can’t think of a good answer. You and your friends are actually pretty informed because John Stewart is still at the desk and y’all chime in every day. See Fig. 4. You also spend hours each week tearing through MSN slideshows in your Graphic Design class because the Photoshop takes five minutes. You’ve seen a staggering amount of the Syrian civil war.

Figure 4: Sometimes in Snapchat you draw glasses on your cat to make him look like Mitch McConnel. You wouldn't do that without this guy.

Still, you’re a little stumped. It’s the middle of a phenomenon native to moralist presidencies known as "a slow news week.” You actually ran out of war shit the other day and clicked through some slides about Pakistani wrestlers. The seniors who offered you Jack Daniels in the Whataburger lot saw it and laughed. They thought you were peeping dong in class. You really weren’t, but they didn’t believe you. They graduate certain you were bricked up in the Dell Lab over big guys in spandex.

“I don’t know,” you tell your dad.

He throws his hands behind his head, hard, like an orangutan chucking logs at a poacher.

“It’s the fucking carbon tax,” he yells. This comes as a surprise, you think, because that shit is last month’s news. It really didn’t go anywhere.

“Do you not pay attention because you don’t give a shit, or are you just a nihilist and think you can’t do anything?” You can tell in his eyes he thinks there’s a real answer. “Seriously, which is it?

You don’t remember what you said. You probably just stammered until he walked off.

A month later he picks you up from marching band. Your phone is dead, so he had to wait twenty minutes longer than anticipated while you found his car. He punches the rearview mirror until the windshield cracks then screams of how your birth kept him from New England.

III.

It’s 2016. A rockin’ MILF in the Psych department gets you really into Hamilton. See Fig. 5. Every day you wake up on the grind and blast “You Aaron Burr, sir?” through your shitty 7-11 cans. While cramming foreign language Quizlets and McGraw Hill Online you do this thing called “Hafilton.” It’s where rock up to “Nonstop” and quit listening just before Hamilton decides what he will stop is being a good husband.

Figure 5: Like Kojima, you know "MILF" is a mindset, not a factual inquiry.

It’s 2018. Your grades are notably better and you’ve snuck into the honors program. Like Hamilton himself, you really flourished at 19 and thought about running for office. You immediately abandoned this idea after remembering your allergy to recordings of your image or voice.

You cohabit with the Psych MILF, and she offers some advice: she’s really had her boots on the ground with this whole “clinical psych thing” and honestly, respectfully, she loves you, but dear God it might not be your scene. It’s taken a real toll on her and the friends, and she can’t imagine you going through that shit.

At 1am in your living room you boot up DOOM (2016) and listen through some Hamilton. Angelica is thirsty on main when you remember that you, yourself, could be a lawyer. You don’t have to run for Congress to fight the establishment. There’s just the common law, and it’s right there. You can just get your grubby little hands in that shit and work your magic.

. . .

It’s the last semester of undergrad. Your Western Thought professor says Hamilton wasn’t really a huge deal and really James Madison shat out the big parts of our faction-proof empire. Yes, there was, in fact, a civil war, but the caplock rifle worked it out. After the Federalist papers he has you read the Bill of Rights but no Supreme Court cases. There’s a lot of talk on negative liberties.

Just before finals, the learned doctor says your generation only has two things to worry about: the climate and the poverty. Yeah they’re big, he says, but they’re just two things. You’re crafty kids, smart as the framers, even.

. . .

The state decides law school is your jam and lets you come inside.

There’s the negative liberties but you actually read Supreme Court opinions when the big boys aren’t shaking fists for Valley Forge. They have you listen to Hamilton for context. You feel dirty. An LRW professor puts on the “I’m Just a Bill” video and your sectionmate with Ivy degrees gets really, really mad.

. . .

The Federalist Society has a comfy presence at your law school. Along with Big Oil they sling out free pizza to every Little Scalia with a rumbly tum tum.

On your way to class you hear what the pizza boys feel. They hate Europeans, those social democrats with the rotten armories and clumpy cash. The Euros, they think, give too much wiggle room for the mentally ill, and by that they mean they mean gay people and probably just women overall.

There are more than two things to fix, you think.

. . .

The pandemic hits. You and some pals start a Google Doc to stay afloat. It barely works. In the Zoom review for the property final your professor catches multiple people crying. "You don't have to be here," he tells them, “there are other jobs.”

. . .

A year passes. You’re in a niche public interest class you do all right with. The professor looks you and thirty-five others dead in the eye and says how sorry he is that law school is traumatic. You shed a single tear in your little window. You're pretty in the shit and haven’t worn pants to class in months.

Then public interest prof takes a big, big drag from his long, fat spliff. He spins his desk chair and baseball cap at the same time, never letting go of the joint.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s not your fault, really, but the world is fucked. It’s time to fix what your parents did.”

The next week he gives a practice exam where the best solution is to sell an old lady’s house to Nestlé.

IV.

It’s 2022. After throwing your whole gooch at it, you fail the bar exam.

You fall back hard into exercise. When you’re not slamming Barbri you’re at the gym binging curls and cranking the Chainsaw Man soundtrack. One night on the way to squats you finally hear “Black Parade.” Just like you, Mr. Gerry Wayland is stuck between global disrepair and the desire to write Funny Little Books.

You just started an FLB yourself, actually. It’s spin on a Story Break episode you love. In your version there’s a fucked up civil war horse that moves like a spider and is covered in bugs. Rich people kill the planet then the horse gets lost in space. It’s compelling, you promise. There’s body horror and pirates dressed like Gorton’s Fisherman. See Fig. 6 It’s about the horrors of the contemporary world state. It’ll be fun.

Figure 6: An untapped horror icon. Imagine blood contrasting that yellow.

Big problem, though: you remember rich people love hiking. There’s no grass on Mars, not that good shit anyway. Would they really fuck all of it?

You edit. In the last few years, the real breathless ones, the oligarchs cash their tab. A cartel, they think, could really muscle those stragglers, the tragically common. There’s one city left with both breathable air and refugees. They level it. The few survivors are spread amongst the stars, so their loves and languages may die.

. . .

It’s the middle of Bar Prep Round 2. You and the patient MILF see Hadestown in the Big City.

There’s a juke joint on stage flanked by devil trombones. A sad little guy slinks in from the janitor’s closet. His name is Orpheus and, just like you, he’s a sad, short writer who likes a lady so much it comes out weird. He has a vision, he says, for a little ditty. It’s compelling, he promises, and shit’s gonna change. His love is functional and realized, worth the investment of a hardened woman displaced by capital’s torture. She believes him.

You cry because you know where this goes.

It’s just a single tear.

Don’t worry.

Nobody sees.

. . .

There’s this game you like, by some corporate anarchists who hate themselves. They’re Scandinavian, from the spot in Tallin where you stopped for a cruise. Every gift shop there had swastikas and gas masks leftover from the bloody years.

In the game is a liberal yacht MILF. She thinks you’re stupid but someone’s helping with your gun, so you’ve got that on her. And yet, she pins you, re your whole writing thing. See Fig. 7.

Figure 7: She sucked, but it still hurt when she left.

Your favorite Supreme Court podcast says the ocean’s last hope is other countries. But those countries’ people cry to the Disco game, and their ministers also bought The End of History. You meet them on the subreddit. You're all geeked out, waiting for the tide.

. . .

It’s the era of desert cradles. God thinks you’re disgusting, so he sends his better kids with a memo: the flood was too much work on his end, it’s time for something different.

“Just keep walking,” he says.

Your skin bares his figure. So do the corpses. You little birds among billions, gassed out and screaming, move to clean.

V.

It’s 2023.

We Love Katamari is up on the PlayStation store. You sit with the cats and mow down some crabs. You don’t need it so much these days, but it’s nice.

There’s a Bar card in your wallet, just below your gym tag. There are two interviews in your Google Calendar. Good stuff might happen, hopefully soon. You crawl into bed and wrap an arm around your wife’s rib cage.

Everything matters and nothing is safe.

You are loved enough to sleep.

[cloudy-em]

The Deal - Lip Gallagher x Fem!Reader

To be honest, I don’t know why it started. I made a deal with Y/N that if she pretended to be my girlfriend so I could avoid Andrea, then I’d do whatever she wanted for a day. It was stupid. I didn’t even like Andrea. We had sex at a party one time and suddenly she was following me everywhere. Of all the people I could’ve asked to fake date me, I don’t know why I asked Y/N. Some neo-freudians can claim that it was my subconscious trying to manifest my hidden urges into real life, or a neuroscientist can claim that I’m not a genius and that I’m actually stupid. I’d definitely agree with both perspectives. 

At first I was shocked that Y/N even agreed. We’re close friends, sure, but it was definitely a higher-stakes ask. When she said yes, I felt a bubbling excitement, but I wrote it off as excitement that I could finally get Andrea to leave me the fuck alone. 

It started slow. We’d hold hands at school, skip class to smoke together. Nothing out of the ordinary for us. Usually, I’d hold her hand in the busy hallways to ensure she wouldn’t get pushed around, and we always shared our cigarette and weed stashes with each other. That was phase one. 

Phase two consisted of being seen alone together in public. I’d saved up some money from doing other kids’ homework, so I’d start taking Y/N out on dates. Not under the L or to the Alibi where we could get free beer, but actual dates where people would see us. Little diners nearby, nothing to expensive. We’d go after school most Fridays and get fries or milkshakes to share. Pretty soon, rumors were spreading that Lip Gallagher was no longer available for a quick fuck because he was dating Y/N L/N. 

Phase three was the phase I figured would keep Andrea away for sure. Y/N and I would leave classes and pretend to fuck in janitor’s closets and bathrooms, locking ourselves in and fake moaning, trying not to laugh at each other over how stupid it all seemed. She’d started sleeping over in my room as a “just in case”, and it worked out for both of us. If Andrea was ever walking by the house, she’d see us walking in or out together or in the windows. It worked for her because she got to avoid her home life. We’d share cigarettes curled up in the top bunk together, laughing over how we’d gotten $50 each from one kid’s tutoring session. Andrea didn’t stand down. 

Phase four was the last and final phase that Carl, Ian, and I had planned to keep Andrea away. Y/N and I would go to a party, drink a lot, get a little handsy, and head back home together. Andrea was a party girl for sure, and there’s no way she’d miss one, which made it easy for Y/N and I to execute the finale of the operation. Ryan Bodero was hosting a big party, and Y/N and I thought it would be a good one to finalize our mission. We arrived fashionably late (we smoked a joint together to help us get through the evening) and the party was in full swing. Drunk students everywhere, clouds of smoke, loud music, and enough alcohol to be a full-service bar. I squeezed Y/N’s hand, guiding her through the crowd. She let go of my hand to hold onto my bicep as she stood on her tip-toes to whisper in my ear. 

“Andrea’s over there, by the bar, you wanna get a drink?” she pulled away and smirked. I nodded at her before rejoining are hands and heading over to the “bar”. We stood right next to Andrea. Perfect. 

“Alright, baby, what do you want? I’ll make it for you,” I was playing the role of good boyfriend probably louder than I needed to, but whatever it took. Y/N giggled, twirling her hair and pretending to think. “Hmm, what about a vodka cranberry?” she requested. Of course, after being friends for years, I knew that’s what she wanted. I nodded and kissed her forehead before moving over down the counter to mix her drink. I’d never kissed her forehead before. The only PDA we exhibited were hugs and handholding, but it felt natural to place a kiss there, like I was keeping her safe while I was away. After everything she’s been through, it’s what she deserves. I’m supposed to be her loving boyfriend, afterall. 

I finish her drink and bring it over to her, a beer in my other hand for me. She takes her drink and takes a sip, knowing before she even tasted it I made it how she likes it. She smiled at me, wrapping one arm around my neck in a brief hug and pulling away. It was too soon. “Thanks, honey! I’m gonna go talk to Laila real quick and then I’ll be back!” I watched her walk away, smiling even after she left and leaned up against the counter, looking around the room. When I turned to my right, Andrea was suddenly there. 

“So, you and Y/N, huh?” she asked. Thank god, she’s finally accepting that I don’t like her, and she’ll move on. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Best thing that ever happened to me!” I laughed. “Ha, well, I don’t think you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to her,” Andrea says. I’m confused, and she can see it on my face, so she grabs my chin and turns my face to where she’s looking. Y/N and Ryan Bodero are talking, a bit too close for comfort, and his hands are on her hips. Only, she doesn’t seem to want them there. I feel my blood boil, ripping my face from Andrea’s grip. 

“Hey, asshole!” I say, walking towards Ryan. “That’s my girl, didn’t you know?” Ryan rolls his eyes and laughs, “No, but I don’t think she cares.” He pulls her closer for emphasis, but she tries to pull away, an uncomfortable look on her face. “Let me go,” she says to him before looking at me, practically begging me to do something. 

“Alright look, Ryan, I get that you have no respect for women, but let me teach you something. When a lady says no, you respect her,” I tell him, smashing my beer bottle on the side of his head. He lets her go and stumbles backwards, but comes back for me. We throw a few punches back and forth. My knuckles are hot, but I barely notice the pain. He can’t treat Y/N like that. I won’t allow it. He gets me in the eye, and I’m sent backwards. I go to lurch forward again, but Y/N touches my bicep. 

“Lip, you’re hurt, let’s go please,” she says. I nod at her, seeing her concern, but I turn to Ryan. “This isn’t over.” Ryan turns back to his friends as Y/N and I walk away. I hear her mutter, “yes, it is over.”

It’s a short walk back to my place, Y/N still clung to my arm, quiet but worried. When we walk inside, she tells me to go sit in the kitchen. I do. She grabs ice and some towels to clean up the blood and put ice on my eye to keep the swelling down. I’m sitting in the chair, and she’s standing in front of me, one of the few times she’s ever taller than me. I can’t help but stare up at her, but she doesn’t meet my gaze, too focused on cleaning the blood from my lip and nose. 

“Lip,” she starts. “You can’t just start fights like that. Someone could call the cops or maybe he’ll press charges! You can’t afford to go to jail.” 

“I know, baby,” the nickname rolling off my tongue like second nature and I barely notice her shoulders tense. “But he wasn’t respecting you, and he needed to be taught a lesson.” 

“No, he didn’t-” she starts to argue. “Dammit, you’re my girlfriend and I love you! Let me look out for you, please!” I’m slightly exasperated, not even realizing my confession. She’s shocked, lips parted like she wants to say something but can’t. I sigh, slouching in the chair, defeated. 

“Look, I know that wasn’t the deal. You didn’t sign up for a real relationship. But we’ve been friends for years and I’ve had a crush on you but I kept trying to get over it because I didn’t wanna fuck things up and here I am fucking things up but the more we fake dated, the more it felt real and I know in reality you’re single and you can do what you want but seeing my girlfriend being harassed by some asshole just made me so mad and I just lost it. I’m sorry.” I don’t usually talk about my feelings. I don’t even remember the last time I talked about my feelings. But I needed her to know that it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, that I wasn’t just lonely. That I really cared for her. I closed my eyes, preparing for the worst. 

I feel her run her fingers through my hair, her rings gently tugging on the strands. 

“You’re right, baby,” she says softly. I look up at her, and we make eye contact for the first time since we walked through the door. “You’re my boyfriend. I should let you look out for me, just like you should let me look out for you. We’re in this together, right?” I nod, at a loss for words, still processing. I wrap my arms around her, my head hitting just below her breasts as I hold her tightly, her fingers still moving through my hair. 

“What do you say we forget this whole deal and we just date like we’re supposed to?” 

We both liked that idea.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

thank you so much for reading!!

requests are open, so send me a message if you have any ideas or if you'd like to join one of my taglists!

[moderndayamymarch]

i’m not sure where this idea that dumbledore is the reason tom riddle became wizard hitler came from but i don’t buy it. i know the cool kid thing to do is blame dumbledore for every bad thing that happens in those books, but dumbledore isn’t the reason riddle was like that™️.

by the time dumbledore first meets riddle- he’s already traumatized those two kids in the cave so badly that they’ll never recover, killed some girl’s rabbit and hanged it from the rafters, and is a klepto. the kid literally meets the all childhood behavior indicators of a serial killer.

dumbledore in the meeting with riddle only displays concern for riddle and the other childrens’ well-being. he offers to help riddle and tells riddle that stealing/intimidating other students isn’t permitted at hogwarts. and he’s valid for pointing that out!! riddle admits to intimidating/stealing from the other kids. that’s something dumbledore kinda can’t let slide.

ppl cite dumbledore making a snide comment to harry about riddle wanting to be special as evidence he was out to get tom. current dumbledore made that comment as the result of knowing who tom riddle became. past dumbledore only vows to keep a close eye on him. present dumbledore even says he had no idea he’d just met wizard hitler. and past dumbledore’s not wrong for keeping an eye on riddle. also that’s common practice in the education system. when a child is noted to have behavioral issues (esp when those behaviors concern other students), admin will have a school counselor keep an eye on them or assign them a para. dumbledore also obv didn’t turn anyone against tom. everyone else loved him! so dumbledore’s watchful eye obv didn’t impact riddle’s school career really at all. all of the teachers believed he was a good role model student and he was even named head boy.

also even if, a teacher not liking or trusting you does not mean you get to become a neo-nazi. harry put up with snape’s bs and it didn’t lead to him declaring himself a “lord” and splitting his soul into pieces.

it was also the 1940s/30s and muggles did not have the psychological abilities/knowledge that we do today. wizards 1000% didn’t. if he’d been sent to a psychiatrist then, they just would’ve said some freudian bs about his mother and not actually helped with his problem of lack of empathy/guilt

the reason that riddle’s like that™️ is actually pretty understandable and makes sense psychologically. we know now (and actually by the 50s) that children who are starved of physical contact/emotional connection/and stability in early childhood can struggle to develop empathy, feel guilt, form connections, and that can lead to deviant immoral behavior. riddle grew up in an orphanage in the 40s during wwii with no familial connection. having abilities would make him feel “special” and better than the other orphans bc his abilities are the only thing he has going for him. add that to the above issues, and you’ve got someone that would abuse their powers for their own gain, especially to feel “special”. like tbh riddle’s prob not that different psychologically to like charles manson or jim jones (which is peak irony that a therapist in the muggle world could actually easily be able to explain his psyche while the wizarding world struggles)

my final point is this: dumbledore, while extremely flawed, isn’t the reason tom riddle became voldemort. if anything, slughorn and the old headmaster drove him to that end through their enabling far more than dumbledore did by keeping an eye on him. we even saw in riddle’s diary that “keeping an eye on him” consisted of dumbledore basically asking tom “you good?” when seeing him in the corridor. a behavior that reminds harry of dumbledore’s own interactions with him. and yeah eventually dumbledore called riddle out and was like “i heard you’re a fascist now” but that was after riddle had killed his own father, set a giant snake loose in the school, started calling himself “lord voldemort”, and started the wizard hitler youth

[sirenesublime]

Went through the library’s inventory today at work. Some really cool, really old, really expensive books. A page from Initiation à la composition décorative.

After that, I went to the park to read. I’ve been so in my head lately it’s terrible. I’ve been suffering the worst paranoia as well, ever since I was scrolling through YouTube one night and saw the most horrible thumbnail of monkey pox!!! Now all the time I have to check my skin to make sure I have none there. I’m having a tough time sleeping because I’m scared I have it. I realised that I need to spend some time in nature and that’s what I’ve done today. I know I’m so paranoid and on edge because of a very difficult medical treatment I’m undergoing, and I’m hoping my condition will improve before the start of the semester.

Currently reading Sula by Toni Morrison. It’s very short so I’m almost done. Despite the short length, in terms of content the book is impenetrable. In Morrison fashion, the characters are these incredibly fleshed out Freudian figures that manage to both be reflections of their environment and era as well as transcend both these things.

On the way back I passed by Église Saint-Germain. I wondered about the architecture, it’s clearly neo-classic, but I was curious about the female figure (which I assume to be the Virgin) in the middle. If it is the Virgin Mary, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Her depicted this way — I wonder about the stylistic choice. Would anyone know?

[skoolnites]

𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙜𝙪𝙚: Live Laugh Ethos

previous chapter | Masterlist | next chapter

-> 𝙒𝘾: 1k

->𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙮: turns out making sure your thesis is ethical is actually pretty difficult

->𝙒𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: Swearing and talking about food

->𝙉𝙤𝙩𝙚: i think its been a year since i've published a piece of fanfiction so thats cool i guess. Go easy on me please! (there are probably grammatical errors as it's been a long day) Also every thing that is italicized and pink means that it is part of Y/ns final paper

 “It is basic human nature to want to find love. Psychologists throughout the centuries have studied this fact. Maslow even tells us that it is part of our basic needs. If we are so dependent on love then why is it so damn difficult to find that someone. While Plato’s original theory on the so-called soulmate myth has been disproved time and time again it’s in our nature to want our ‘perfect’ match, but what if you could make someone your perfect match. I believe that with our knowledge of how attraction works it is possible to use these ideas to your own benefit. For my experiment I will be testing 1 (one) of these theories of attraction on Subject A every three days for 60 (sixty) days. I will keep track of my findings through notes I take as well as a collection of text messages and other forms of media from consenting parties.”

“Alright class,” Professor Yamasaki announced clapping her hands together, “For your final you will be creating a thesis then constructing and conducting an experiment on whatever module you get assigned,” She explained picking up a black cloth bag, “In this bag I have papers numbered nine through eighty which corresponds to one of the modules we studied throughout this year. When I get to your seat please pick out a slip and tell me your number,” 

Y/n started jittering in anticipation as Professor Yamasaki was calling out topics that were no longer up for grabs. As each number was being called out, Y/n had her fingers crossed hoping to get lucky. Her head perked up as Module twenty four was called out. Mildly upset she wouldn’t get to run an experiment on dreams. Then 26 (classical conditioning) was gone, 56 was gone so no study on neo-freudians, when 21 was given to Osamu Miya Y/n was a little butt hurt because pain was always a fun topic. Before she could realize it, Professor Yamasaki was in front of her desk. Y/n sucked in a breath and reached her hand into the bag. She could feel all the slips of paper, each folded in half. When Y/n finally pulled her hand out she found a yellowish slip of paper. Unfolding it quickly Y/n was overjoyed to see the number 79 on the paper.

Attraction.

The cold metal bleachers of the university volleyball gym was the last place y/n wanted to be as she was antsy to get started on her project. Y/n’s mind was going a mile a minute at all of the possibilities for her experiment, she could pick a random person to befriend or…

“Did you see that!” Shoyo Hinata yelled as he had just slammed down an amazing spike, although the spiker was not who Y/n’s attention was towards.

“What can I say, I’m good at what I do,” Atsumu Miya shrugged.

“Me next! Me next!” Kotaro Bokuto shouts

“Will you guys quiet down,” Kei Tsukishima groans from a corner where he stretches out his arms

“Buzzkill,” Tetsuro Kuroo laughs while throwing another ball to Atsumu

In the corner Rintaro Suna could be found hiding his chuckles

“Alright boys go get water while Yachi and I pick up the volleyballs,” Their team captain Shugo Meian shouts.

Attraction.

The place where Y/n spends most of her life, the volleyball gym. Any of these boys would be perfect subjects for her study, she was well acquainted with all of them, nothing would seem suspicious if she hung out with them more, and she had access to friends to get extra information. The next issue at hand was a cognitive bias, who to pick and would her own heart interfere. Y/n knew she would have to pull one at random, reaching into her pocket and taking her cellphone.

“Hey Siri, pick a number one through thirty?”  Y/n asked the device

“It’s thirteen,” Just like that fate was decided, Atsumu Miya would be Subject A, perfect for 

Attraction. 

The word of the hour, attraction. Where Y/n had found great intrigue with the topic she fell into an iffy spot with ethics. Hypothetically she could use these tactics and studies to get Atsumu to fall in love with someone, of course she would have to deal with consent while keeping him unaware. There was also the issue of who would he fall in love with, she would be the easiest choice but would her own heart be an interference. 

“The ethics of this experiment becomes a bit difficult because how could you possibly manipulate someone’s heart ethically but if you look at the ethical guidelines my experiment fits perfectly. Beneficence and Nonmaleficence, Love is not a bad thing and my subject would not be hurt by experiencing feelings for someone because it could be equally reciprocated. Of course love is a long lasting product of this experiment but it is not a negative one. Fidelity and Responsibility, is ingrained in the classes curriculum and while conducting many experiments throughout my studies I have been held to these ethical guidelines. Integrity, I will be using a bit of deception under the front that I am tutoring someone. I have received Subject A’s verbal and written consent that our sessions will be recorded as well as consent to the fact that I will be using some psychological tricks during our sessions. Justice, subject A was a random choice from a random number generator meaning I have no biases towards the subject. Subject A has access to health services and I will ask them throughout multiple sessions if they would like for me to stop my psychological research. Finally Respect for Rights and Dignity, In order to respect Subject A’s privacy they shall only be referred to as Subject A and no physical descriptions will be provided in my research. Nothing not related to my hypothesis will be disclosed in my paper including but not limited to age, gender, psychical traits, personal details that might be disclosed and other details that might give away who Subject A is.

tags: @milkteeboba

[grandhotelabyss]

The substack on "seperating the art from the artist" was interesting. But one detail lead me to a question - childrens books.

I know it was mostly used to mock people who don't want to engadge with anything "icky" as the demographic probably likes to say, but still.

So the question is, should books for kids be squeaky clean, be these gardens of eden were no evil shows its head, till they grow into the maturity which will let them confront the barbarity of literature vis a vis reality?

One could already use this as a segway to argue the opposite - that with the amount of adults not being able to deal with literature going against their provincal pseudo-morals, children should be "trained" from young age to not be like that - the point of childhood is paradoxically to grow out of it, even if many dont want to.

But on the other hand, and this may reveal myself to be the object of the previous high-nosed snot shower:

I kinda do feel "icky" when I think about all these kids books that try to be "hehe, I'm gonna show kids the real world!"

Like that Matilda author, forgot his name, I remember a year ago there was some fake drama about censorship which ofcourse was stupid but still

I do feel some kind of spite, that irony, that want to be subversive that goes against the idealised view of childhood.

Or maybe my realistic view - with all the cruelty and unavoidable misery - but that wants me to say, "why expose them to more of it?"

Because intuition tells me that those "edgy" childrens book have a simmilar ethos as a teenaged kid trying to teach a todler swear words, or to do a roman salute or whatever, this corrupting of the innocent for the sake of it.

But maybe this whole ramble is just the result of a Lacanian wish to crawl back into the vomb, my lile of Preussler's books just a want to become the little ghost who just can fly around in his eternal castle never growing up.

Still ofcourse I get that it is absurd to rant against Matilda with all the childrens media going way further in many ways and the fact that even I as a young child easily acceseed stuff I wasnt supossed to.

So maybe I answerred my own question - maybe there shouldnt even be childrens books in the first place, just books that are more and less apropriate for younger and yet younger kids.

(Also they should burn all those obviously on porpuse braindead picture books, you know the type lol)

Yes, as I discussed here, I didn't really read children's books unless made to and don't find it to be all that appealing a category. People thought comic books were like children's books, so I was happily reading Grant Morrison's occult phantasmagoria, Frank Miller's post-apocalyptic reactionary satire, and Alan Moore's Freudian traumatology of the archetypes at the age of five and six—and I wouldn't have it any other way. Anyway, the writers who shifted children's books out of their moralizing paradigm and into neo-modernist aesthetic integrity in the late 19th century tended to be either quasi-pedophiles like Carroll and Barrie or figures like Potter rather deliberately trying to expose children to the tooth-and-claw realities polite society otherwise evaded. Children's primordial innocence was a useful historical construct, the slowly evolving joint work of Christianity and the Enlightenment, and we are rightly suspicious of those who would tamper too much with it today; but it was a historical construct, it has produced its own return-of-the-repressed shadow (it's likely generated as much pedophilia as it's ever discouraged by inventing the taboo to be profaned), and it has been carried to unconscionable extremes of life-aversion and anti-intellectualism in our time (e.g., the "brain" doesn't "finish" till age 25 or whatever other ridiculous scientific myth of permanent incapacity we're supposed to believe based on the latest spate of fake "studies" these days). People are probably just people at any age from the onset of consciousness forward—I am aware of no great shift in the core of my identity since about the age of five and never thought of myself as a child—and, because there is alas no protecting everyone from everything in the end, they should at least be armed with knowledge and cultivation at the earliest possible moment.

[haggishlyhagging]

It is an interesting but limited exercise to show that psychologists and psychiatrists embrace these sexist norms of our culture, that they do not see beyond the most superficial and stultifying media conceptions of female nature, and that their ideas of female nature serve industry and commerce so well. Just because it's good for business doesn't mean it's wrong. What I will show is that it is wrong; that there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence that these fantasies of servitude and childish dependence have anything to do with women's true potential; that the idea of the nature of human possibility which rests on the accidents of individual development of genitalia, on what is possible today because of what happened yesterday, on the fundamentalist myth of sex organ causality, has strangled and deflected psychology so that it is relatively useless in describing, explaining or predicting humans and their behavior. It then goes without saying that present psychology is less than worthless in contributing to a vision which could truly liberate—men as well as women.

The central argument of my paper, then, is this. Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know. I want to stress that this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology which has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand, in the first place, why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.

The kind of psychology which has addressed itself to these questions divides into two professional areas: academic personality research, and clinical psychology and psychiatry. The basic reason for failure is the same in both these areas: the central assumption for most psychologists of human personality has been that human behavior rests on an individual and inner dynamic, perhaps fixed in infancy, perhaps fixed by genitalia, perhaps simply arranged in a rather immovable cognitive network. But this assumption is rapidly losing ground as personality psychologists fail again and again to get consistency in the assumed personalities of their subjects (Block, 1968). Meanwhile, the evidence is collecting that what a person does and who she believes herself to be, will in general be a function of what people around her expect her to be, and what the overall situation in which she is acting implies that she is. Compared to the influence of the social context within which a person lives, his or her history and 'traits', as well as biological make-up, may simply be random variations, 'noise' superimposed on the true signal which can predict behavior.

Some academic personality psychologists are at least looking at the counter evidence and questioning their theories; no such corrective is occurring in clinical psychology and psychiatry: Freudians and neo-Freudians, Nudic-marathonists and Touchy-feelies, classicists and swingers, clinicians and psychiatrists, simply refuse to look at the evidence against their theory and practice. And they supply their theory and practice with stuff so transparently biased as to have absolutely no standing as empirical evidence.

To summarize: the first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act is that psychology has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context; the second reason for psychology's failure is that the theoreticians of personality have generally been clinicians and psychiatrists, and they have never considered it necessary to have evidence in support of their theories.

-Naomi Weisstein, ‘Psychology Constructs the Female’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[zizekianrevolution]

On the "masculine" side of the diagram, Lacan wrote a formula generally read as "All men are subjected to the phallic function." On the "feminine" side, he wrote a formula generally read as: "Not all of a woman is subject to the phallic function." The difference is that whereas men can be discussed as a class, there is no set of "all women." Lacan believed that while women were a part of the phallic or symbolic order, they were not in it "all together." Thus, he would describe woman as pas tout [not all]. We know that women historically have been kept out of the symbolic order. We could also say that there is something about woman that resists it. The lower half of the sexuation diagram shows the "feminine" side having access to two libidinal positions, while the "masculine" side has access to one only. Thus any given "woman" can choose to associate with the phallic function, or with the "signifier of the barred Other"- a way of describing the jouissance that is beyond the phallus. Again, if these distinctions appear outrageously subtle and abstract, they at least have the virtue of not trapping us into neo- Confucian paradigms according to which man is rational; woman, emotional- paradigms surface endlessly in popular psychology. Lacan also made it clear in explicating the diagram of sexuation that he was not simply placing biological males on one side and biological females on the other. As he explained, referring to the "feminine" side: "Any speaking being whatsoever, as is expressly formulated in Freudian theory, whether provided with the attributes of masculinity -attributes that remain to be determined- or not, is allowed to inscribe itself in this part" (S XX, p.80). How do the two sides relate to each other? How does desire move within and across the divide of sexuation? Ellie Ragland has suggested beautifully: "Heterosexual or homosexual, we are drawn to each other sexually because we are not whole and because we are not the same."

Deborah Luepnitz

[yentling]

Always weird to see ppl discuss the SCUM Manifesto without acknowledging that it’s quasi-satire (I’m not sure if it can really qualify as true satire given she really did believe a good portion of it) but especially weird to see radfems treat it as a serious text. Like do u really think a text calling for men to announce their submission by making a speech that starts with “I am a turd” is your feminist holy book? Honestly I think the manifesto was more cathartic than anything…a somewhat humorous response to 60s neo-Freudian misogyny. Which is not to say it’s not horrifically bioessentialist and transphobic, but like. Why would you treat it as an actual manifesto lmao. I think it’s interesting but like in the same way someone’s old diary entry is interesting.