The Case of Tashfeen M.

portrait of Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt

Human beings are maladaptively adaptive which is another way of saying they'll put up with almost anything. The only question really is, how far can you go before you either break their spirits entirely and turn them into zombies--or they drift to the dark side where the Shavian life force becomes a juggernaut of destruction as we’ve seen in the viral proliferation of terrorist movements? Sonderkommandos, concentration camp inmates, who survived by clearing the gas chambers and contributing the piles of glasses, gold teeth, and hair you’ve seen in famous pictures taken by liberators of the camps are examples of this perverse survival capacity. On the dark side, you have Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook, who forswore survival, in place of what they obviously considered a form of transcendence. We look at them as murderers, but they have supporters all over the world who regard them as heroes, if not saints. During the second world war allied intelligence created psychohistories of their enemies. If they were able to understand the character of the Goebbels or Heydrich then they would be able to defeat them. There's no doubt that military pressure has to be exerted on Raqaa and other ISIS strongholds, but if the Islamic state is more of a state of mind then a bona fide political entity than what must be first understood is the nature of the beast. You can’t fight effectively unless you know what you're up against and the coalition might take a cue from martial artists who don’t seek to overpower their opponents as to use their adversaries' own force against them.

Chantix Dreams

Chantix is a drug that is advertised on television to help people stop smoking. However, in addition to suicidal thoughts, one of the commercials warns  “common side effects include... unusual dreams.” Caveat Emptor! One wonders what these dreams might be and more importantly what they mean.  Freud famously saw dreaming as  “the royal road to the unconscious” while more contemporary researchers like Alan Hobson reject the idea of dreams harboring mysteries and secrets of the mind. In the bible Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fatted and lean cows. That’s an example of a prophetic dream. Then there is the kind of dream you used to have in high school, where the prom queen magically appears in your bedroom, pulls up her gown and says “I want you to fuck me now!” This last is an example of what is commonly known as a wet dream. Some people might regard such a dream as good, but others could consider it as so out of the ordinary as to be delusional. Moreover it leaves its own after effect which is one of despair (due to the disparity between the wish contained in the dream and reality). Then there are those dreams in which graduation is coming up and you haven’t done your work. It’s hard to know if this is something the Chantix people would consider an unusual dream since it relates so clearly to the anxieties which most people feel. If this is a dream that doesn’t qualify as unusual then it is probably not related to Chantix. It’s one thing when Chantix does what it says its going to do which is to help you stop smoking and then cause some weird dreams in the process and another when Chantix simply produces any old dream. Remember the dreams you’ve had about finding yourself standing in a public place in your underwear. That’s an example of the kind of dream you might have on Chantix, along with those dreams of your hand going limp when you try to punch an authority figure, but such dreams are not the stuff of which Chantix is made. On the other hand if you are a Chantix user and dream that you are Monica Lewinsky and that Bill Clinton has left Hillary for you and that you are the new first lady, then you can wake up and say, “It’s a strange dream, but I can fully understand it (and don’t need any psychoanalytic interpretations). I must have had the dream because I've been taking Chantix.

Some Thoughts From the Heart

In an article entitled “The Way of Lust,” (NYT, 12/1/13), the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom describes how he and a team of researchers used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits in an experiment published in the The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The shots in Greenfield-Sanders’s book, which pictured porn stars clothed and naked were a perfect template to determine whether nudity resulted in objectification. Never mind that the results of the experiment seemed inconclusive. “Consistent with the objectification view, naked people were thought of as having less agency, “ Bloom reports. “But contrary to this view, they were also thought of as being enhanced experiencers, capable of stronger feelings and greater emotional responses.” However, Bloom makes the following even more telling remark earlier in the piece, “the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Leslie Green have pointed out, being treated as an object isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine that you are sitting outside on a sunny day, and you move behind someone so that she blocs the sun from your eyes. You have used her as an object, but it’s hard to see that you’ve done something wrong.” This utilitarian view of the body seems to fly in he face of psychology (though Freud reputedly said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”), yet the implicit reticence to pathologize may shed light on how pornography can work as an agent of disinhibition. Sure pornography is rooted in misogyny and misandristy (the female equivalent of misogyny) and it can be both addictive and monotonously predictable. But if we look at an Oedipus or Electra complex as being the equivalent of the burning sun, then pornography might be seen as shielding the viewer from its effects by exorcising them. On this day devoted to the ideals of romantic love, some couples  may seek out less exalted images, as they seek to open their hearts to each other.

Jokes and the Conscious

Freud wrote a tome call The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconcious. Here’s a joke which talks about humor’s relation to what is perfectly conscious. The husband asks his wife if she wants to have sex. She says no she has a gynecologist’s appointment the next day. Do you have a dental appointment too? is the husband’s rejoinder. It’s really a simple joke and not particularly dirty by today’s standards, nor is it complicated enough or linguistically interesting enough to have been the work of great transgressive pundits like the late George Carlin. But the joke does epitomize a number of things about both sex and the invention or lack of invention that goes into the creation of excuses. From the point of view of sex it’s an anecdotally sociological comment on the lack of reciprocity that's characteristic of most domesticized sexuality. Sex when it becomes a part of the routine of every life is no longer about desire. It’s a power play having to do with who's going to get his way. The husband in the joke might just as easily have asked if his wife wanted to eat franks and beans for dinner, though then too she might have begged off with the excuse that she had a gynecologist’s appointment and didn’t want to risk being gaseous when she was in stirrups. However the joke is even more interesting when it comes to excuses. There's really no rationale for not having sex before a gynecologist’s appointment. In fact, one would think that it made sense to have sex so that if anything untoward occurred during the sex act, it could be reported to the gynecologist. And the rejoinder about the dental appointment is equally irrational when you come down to it. The husband is plainly arguing for oral sex as a surrogate due to the fact that it’s unlikely the wife will also have a dental appointment on the same day she has a gynecologist’s appointment. Playing the devil’s advocate, one could take the position that if avoiding seeing a dentist and a gynecologist the same day is the game plan, then oral sex, which could easily dislodge a filling, is not what the doctor ordered.

The Neo-Oedipus Complex

Oedipus  explains the riddle of the Sphinx by Ingres

Thanks to Freud and ultimately Shakespeare we think of the Oedipus myth as being about patricide and matriphilia. But when you really consider at the details of the narrative, it’s really about misperception. Fearing a prophecy that he will be murdered by his son, Laius abandons Oedipus, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Oedipus reacting to a similar prophecy--what we’d call gossip today--runs away from his adoptive parents and ends up killing his real father, in an emblematic confrontation on a highway. OK we all know that the Oedipus complex makes some sense, but merely as a fantasy. It is estimated that patricides in the U.S. only account for around 2% of homicides per year. A far greater percentage of the population suffers from loss aversion, a psychological condition in which people undertake defensive or evasive behavior to prevent anticipated disasters, with many of these behaviors turning out to be counterproductive and maladaptive in and of themselves. Like Oedipus they end up running from anticipated danger only to confront the very problem they were trying to escape. It’s often said that men figuratively marry the same woman they have just divorced. Fear of climate and environmental catastrophes often blind us from thinking clearly. We run from the greatly feared tsunami and end up being buried in volcanic ash. Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed about the downfall of major civilizations and one wonders if the downfall of some civilizations was not exacerbated by what we might call a neo-Oedipus complex, a kind of mass phobia in which whole segments of the population run away from things they had no need to fear.