I just recently finished watching this video from the Institute of Art and Ideas. If you’re interested in intellectual conversations, it could be up your alley.
Sneaky technical secret for watching if you want to watch the full video:
When I watched on my phone, there wasn’t a subscription paywall, but there is one on my computer? If you hit a subscription paywall, and don’t want to subscribe (thought I’m thinking of this myself) then consider watching on your phone
I really enjoyed it! At the end of the discussion Barbara Tversky remarks how beneficial it would be if there was a Buddhist also on the panel. So more intellectual diversity would be a plus. But I still think there was enough diversity of opinion and backgrounds for a lively and illuminating discussion.
This is my first review for an iai.tv video, but I’ve been peeking at a few of them. They remind me of the promise of ted talks, but with a much more public interest than private interest focus.
Freud is someone I read and regret admiring when I was a teenager, and a college student. I had an influential (British, so his words were minted into my brain perhaps in a weirdly more proper way than otherwise) college teacher who was extremely into Freud, regarding him as, alongside Marx, one of the top two modern “thinkers” to ever have existed. I’ve since read Freud: The Making of An Illusion by Frederick Crews, which is an incredibly damaging biography, though most Freudians don’t seem willing to address its accuracy / facticity and their defenses all seem a bit desperate and gross once you’ve read it. Thinking of his patients’ perspectives, especially Fritz and Eckstein even though Dora is the questionable case history most psychoanalysts will want to discuss, makes it clear in my opinion you should be glad not to have been a patient of Freud’s. I find it unfortunate that Freud so deeply attached his name to the concept of psychoanalysis, as there are psychoanalysts such as Josh Cohen on this panel who I find to be intelligent in their views — many of them contrary to Freud’s.
Eduard Harcourt’s cogent speaking on the subject reminds me that Wittgenstein continues to be a thinker whose work it might interest me to read more or study in depth. Though, what might be called a well-documented verbal abusiveness in his personality (at least as a school teacher) suggests that perhaps none of these twentieth century Great Men were the gods they may been in icon hungry imaginations. (Or is it that men who’ve tried to mean a lot about meaning often end up a bit mean?)
Overall, though it feels funny saying about a video less than a hour in length, I feel liberated.
As a misdiagnosed person, maybe I’ve been trying rather hard in the background to develop a “correct” view of what “the unconscious” is and whether or not it really exists. Maybe I’ve wanted to shout at certain “providers” some of the observations elegantly observed by the speakers on the stage, or even those declared “self-evident”. What toll does it take on a soul to have those purporting to help them with their psychological processing routinely deny that which is self-evident? And then to have your concept of self brought into question, with all its insufficiency resting solely on you?
Seeing how the speakers handle each other’s discourses, it feels in a way inspiring, and in a way that might be more of an embodied kind of inspiration than what I would feel if I read them discussing these views through text. The civility and the curiosity, the alighted expressions, the kindness and humility. While this is a subject I’ve thought about before, and read about, and talked with therapists about, I found watching this video didn’t exactly grind away my misconceptions as much as increase my confidence in the subject area — and that confidence includes knowing how even top experts recognize its intangible nature.
Misdiagnosed Anonymous 