Pornosophy: What Happens When You Fall in Love With Yourself?

“Narcissus” by Caravaggio

Have you ever looked in the mirror and got turned on by the sight of yourself naked? Come on. You can be honest. We’re only as sick as our secrets. But the fact is if your answer is yes then you need help. You’re a real sickie. It’s nice to be aware that the sight of your body may turn others on and it’s part of the reality principle when you realize that it’s time to turn down the lights, when the veins, little rolls of cellulite and wrinkles start to impinge on your once youthful frame. But if you move from the stage where you look at yourself feeling “that's not bad" to the point where you actually find yourself jerking off to the thought of your own naked body, then you have to see a therapist. In The Art of Loving Erich Fromm pointed out that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. But he wasn’t talking about physical love. When you get the hots for yourself then it’s time to get help--since it’s going to make it hard to get interested in others. Self-involvement is probably not listed as a disorder in the DSM-5 and there probably are not enough people who display this physicalized form of self-interest for the syndrome to be recognized as a recognized pathology, whose treatment would be covered by insurance. Still it’s not something that should be left untreated since lusting after the self, as has been noted in the case of Narcissus, can lead to extreme behavior. Remember? The famous mythological character drowned when he fell for his own image in a pond.

Kim Jong-un’s Social Anxiety Disorder

A recent Times editorial (“North Korea’s Horrors,” 5/18/15) points out two recent incidences where hyperbole has fueled accounts of the horrors of current regime in the DPRK, led by its brash young leader and film critic, Kim Jong-un (“Kim Jong-un and the Auteur School,” The Screaming Pope, 12/22/14). The first rumor, according to the Times had Kim Jong-un feeding his uncle Jang Sung-taek “to a pack of dogs.” A story in The Guardian made a similar point, “Story about Kim Jong-un’s uncle fed to dogs originates with satirist," 1/6/14. This is almost as comforting as finding out that the latest accusation which, according to the Times, involved having “the minister of the armed forces blasted to pieces with an antiaircraft gun, purportedly, among other things, for dozing off while Mr. Kim spoke,” was also apocryphal. For instance the Times editorial points out that “South Korea is now saying that Gen. Hyon Yong-choi was purged, not probably killed.” The point of the Times piece is that even if prominent officials are simply being executed by firing squad, it’s not a good thing and goes on to speculate about Kim Jong-un that “one explanation is that he is unstable and threatened, and needs to fuel the terror that his power rests on.” Fair enough, but let’s cut the Supreme Leader a little slack. How many times have you been snubbed at a cocktail party and fantasized about feeding a dismissive person to dogs? How many times have you contemplated turning an antiaircraft gun or worse on someone who hasn’t returned your Email inquiry or phone call? When we feel small and powerless in the face of an unfriendly superpower or person, we all engage in these kinds of fantasies. The DSM-5 lists such symptoms under the category of social anxiety disorder. And if we were to be armchair psychoanalysts we might even wager that these anxieties might derive from having to live up to the reputations of his powerful father Kim Jong-il (who kidnapped the South Korean film star Shin Sang-ok) and grandfather Kim Il-sung whose founding of the dynasty might be where all his problems started in the first place.

Bipolar Disorder, ADHD and Man’s Soul

Bruno Bettleheim

One of the lagniappes of psychoanalysis is the philosophical attitude it takes towards mental illness. There is no cure for life. In fact in Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Syndechoche, New York (2008) that is precisely the mysterious illness that afflicts the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The DSM-5 offers a smorgasbord of diagnoses that offer the illusion or delusion that there is some sort of cure for mental states which is achieved by 1)naming them 2)medicating them and 3)making them insurable. This is not to say that there aren’t severely ill patients who don’t benefit greatly from medication. But these days every other person you talk to is either bipolar, ADHD or if their behavior is more over the top, borderline. And having received one of these diagnosis a buffet of medications awaits these sufferers. It’s not surprising that the Times recently ran a front page piece about the abuse of  attention deficit disorder diagnoses, emphasizing the beneficial effect the diagnoses are having on the profits of the drug companies (“The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,” NYT, 12/14/13). What’s most disturbing is that much of the medicating is being done willy-nilly by the worst kind of practitioners, those suffering from the arrogance of not knowing how little they know. Moliere would have had fun writing a parody of these Tartuffe’s of psychiatry. Perhaps he might have called it “Le docteur imaginaire.” When Bruno Bettleheim wrote Freud and Man’s Soul :An Important Reinterpretation of Freudian Theory back in l982, he was dealing with the American psychoanalytic  establishment’s need to use language as way of making psychoanalysis more scientific sounding. The fact is that while analysis may be quite helpful to the small number of patients who have the time and money to afford it, it’s hardly what one would classify as a scientific discipline. And that’s probably the good part. Psychoanalysis might not be the cure for ADHD or bipolar disorder, but it offers a broad view of human existence that attends to the one part of the human being that you can’t locate on an MRI or FMRI for that matter--the soul.