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I have experienced first hand the way dreaeming can approach repressed events in a disguised manner. The dream work makes the repressed material more acceptable by leaving clues rather than directly confronting the repressed material. See Marie Cardinal's book ' les mots pour le dire' ( the words to say it ) in which the shameful repressed event is represented in symbolic form ( of an halllucinated eye). The physical effects of the shameful event are drastic in her case, and I don't know if her understanding and release of repression actually cured them.

Just to add something there to the question of the prevention of the trauma: Nachträglichkeitsprinzip. As Freud already discovered, traumas can gain their effect AFTER YEARS. Since you cannot control the future and what happens, you cannot know what experience will fall into that previous experience and actualisa a latent trauma, that might otherwise never have come about. This is why not all war veterans have traumas, it really depends on their personal history.

excitedly awaiting part 3 :) thanks leon

Really fabulous. And the questions were so useful in helping to consolidate my understanding. So happy to have found this particular topic.

Simply wonderful, stimulating much thought for me

🎯 Key points for quick navigation: 00:06 *🎉 Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist who will be discussing his book "The Hidden Spring" and the hard problem of consciousness.* 00:24 *📝 The talk will cover the hard problem of consciousness, which is why there is something it is like to be an organism, and how this can be solved.* 01:07 *👨‍🎓 Mark Solms trained in London but returned to South Africa to set up training in psychoanalysis.* 02:15 *💡 The hard problem of consciousness was formulated by David Chalmers, who asked why there is something it is like to be an organism.* 03:23 *📊 Mark Solms will use a series of cases to explore how we might begin to solve this problem, starting with his own personal experience with his brother's brain injury.* 05:27 *🔍 The hard problem of consciousness arises because we have been focusing on the cortex as the seat of consciousness, but this may not be correct.* 08:02 *👀 The cortex can process information without being conscious, so what does consciousness add?* 11:10 *💔 Mark Solms believes that consciousness is not bound up fundamentally with cortex but rather with the functioning of the brain stem.* 14:51 *🔬 Case two involves a patient named Mr. W who has no prefrontal lobes due to natural disease. Despite this, he reports being consciously aware and able to have mental imagery.* 28:39 *🤖 Patients with prefrontal cortical damage, like Mark Solms' own brother, are highly emotional and exhibit disinhibited behavior, challenging the idea that the prefrontal cortex generates emotions.* 29:37 *💡 The mainstream view in cognitive neuroscience is that consciousness arises from the cortex, specifically the insula, but this theory is challenged by cases where patients have no cortex or insula.* 31:37 *🔓 Consciousness is not bound up with higher cognitive functions; instead, it arises from more basic structures like the brain stem.* 34:08 *📊 The theory that consciousness is generated in the cortex has been disproven by cases where patients have no cortex but still exhibit conscious behavior.* 38:12 *💡 Consciousness arises from the brain stem and is affective in nature; it's not fundamentally a cognitive process.* 40:52 *🔍 The discovery of unconscious processes by Sigmund Freud highlights the importance of considering affectivity as a fundamental aspect of consciousness.* 51:13 *🌟 We should be looking at brain stem affectivity to understand consciousness, rather than cortical cognition.* 00:56 *🤖 Feeling enables us to navigate uncertainty and make choices, which is essential for survival.* 01:02 *💡 The function of consciousness is the function of feeling, and feeling enables us to feel our way through life's problems.* 01:05 *🔍 The localization of consciousness in the brain does not explain why we experience things; it only explains how we process information.* 01:10 *📊 The term "unconscious" refers to mental processes that are not conscious, but still influence behavior. This is different from the term "subconscious," which implies a lack of awareness.* 01:15 *💭 Consciousness plays a crucial role in making choices and solving problems, which is essential for mental health and well-being.* 01:20 *🔮 The essence of experience may exist at the brainstem level, but qualia (the subjective nature of experience) may be different in patients with brain damage or disorders.* 01:25 *🤝 Pain experiences can be generated by unresolved traumas and psychological factors, rather than just physical stimuli.* 01:24 *📝 The cognitive type of consciousness is contingent upon the affective type, and the affective type is foundational in understanding consciousness.* 01:25 *💡 Consciousness can exist without cortical cognition, as seen in individuals with no cortex or in brainstem activation.* 01:26 *🔍 To understand the essence of consciousness, it's necessary to reduce it to its basic form, rather than starting with complex forms like human reflective cognition.* 01:27 *💭 Pain is an affective experience that comes from within, rather than solely being a bottom-up sensory processing phenomenon.* 01:28 *🤯 Defense mechanisms are top-down processes that involve cortical and cognitive gymnastics to avoid unpleasant feelings.* Made with HARPA AI

I am confused. I followed Lacanian leftists for a long time now but more and more I'm starting to doubt the knowledge or wisdom or [insert word you'd be more comfortable with]; and I'm thinking, yeah there's probably a very large chance I am simply not understanding what is being argued for, so I'll just "attack" the version of Lacanian leftist analysis I am afraid I *might* be hearing, and then people can correct my misunderstandings as they read along or whatever. So yeah, here we go. I'm getting more and more concerned that a lot of Lacanian thinkers are unconsciously smuggling in pro status-quo types of thought. Let me start with how they define Capitalism here; as a thing that continuously tries to sell you phallic solutions to your fundamental lack (which you experience as obstacles or disturbances of who you are, but really is what you actually are), and here, for me, the problems start. Is the claim that capitalism tries to sell you solutions to your lack in a false way, ei. it sells you solutions it KNOWS won't work, so you keep coming back for more? Or is the claim that capitalism promises solutions to your lack at all? I say this because I am afraid that often "lack" is seen as so fundamental and so wide, essentially ALL forms of trying to overcome suffering, unhappiness, not being who you really ought to be, whatever, are ALL eyed with suspicion or just straight up rejected at first sight. Because it seems to me that then the thinking becomes: "dumb Leftists think that to be a leftist, you have to fight and work for a better world, but REAL leftists understand that nothing actually can ever be qualitatively improved, that anyone promising a better world is just delusional and we all should just accept accept our suffering and unhappiness" - and I hope it's clear for everyone why this thinking is a problem. You say you are against Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is a correct stance, but then you say that the problem with CBT is that it tries to "fix" something; implying that your beef with CBT is that you simply don't think anything can ever be fixed, and I wonder how deep that belief goes. Is it a categorical rejection of the whole existence of "fixing" "making better" "curing" "improving" etc.? If so, please come forward and say this is your stance, so we can deal with that appropriately. Because my reason for hating CBT is not that it is just another version of capitalism's false promise that we live in a reality where things can be fixed or improved. My reason for hating CBT is that it doesn't actually try to cure you or help you in any way, it's just there as a quick, cost efficient way for "clients" to quickly return to their status as productive worker drones at the behest of capitalism. Real therapy in contrast would allow for (and I think, often lead to) realizing that your way of life (as a capitalist subject) is causing you harm, and that you should quit that life. Like when Franz Fanon tells about a French patient he had, that tortured colonialist subjects, looking for ways to no longer be depressed or distressed so he could do his job better, rather than doing the obvious thing and stop being a torturer. The reason why therapy under capitalism is so shit is that only seeks to fix you as a worker, not as a person; and also because it only wants to give you therapy in such a watered down way that it never accidentally leads to people becoming conscious of what is actually fucking up their life; the state of the world. I think that, if you either give or are going through therapy, there's obviously the expectation baked in to the very activity of therapy itself, that you are there to try and fix or improve someone. If I go to a therapist because I am suicidally depressed, I go to therapy to eventually no longer be suicidally depressed. It it very wrong and unfair for the therapist to then go "ah, but what actually constitutes a "cure"? aren't we just thinking too much in result orientated ways if we want to actually "fix" anything?", right? Can we agree on that? I'm open to the idea that lack will be with us forever and that we need to confront our fundamental lack rather than trying to desperately fix it IF AND ONLY IF it isn't used to rhetorically relativize away any goal or result that therapy is supposed to accomplish. I speak from personal experience, I've been suicidally repressed for I think at least 20 years now, and now, after 12 years of therapy (never psycho-analysis), I decided to pull the plug, after my last therapist decided to use that type of reason on my after I tried to bring up I was unsatisfied with the fact that we were making no progress and I've seen no improvement in my mental state over those last 12 years. This was when he announced he was going to retire, and he was all ready to congratulate himself on the progress we supposedly made, which made me rather mad, because there has been barely any progress these last 12 years. And then he started to become all relativist in response, "philosophically" (more so sophistically) questioning there can be such a thing as "progress" or "getting better" or "cured" at all. I've seen this trend among a lot of caregivers increasing over the past decade too, by the way. By that I mean, the attempts made my them to sell you "doing nothing about the problem" as the solution to the problem. I've been having chronic pain in my back and shoulder area for years and years, and the last professional help I went to see, they - I shit you not - told me, what if you just accept that there is pain? And then that way, it's no longer a problem, and then, we;ll have fixed the problem. Which, maybe I should accept that pain, maybe I shouldn't. But that isn't their fucking job. Their job is to look for ways to make the pain go away, either totally or partially, and for them to suggest doing the literal opposite of that, while trying to sophistically bullshit me into accepting that them explicitly not doing their job is them doing their job, is outrageous. So my question is this: can we salvage Lacanian thought and protect it against the type of though that goes "nothing can fundamentally change, and anyone that says otherwise just wants a phallus" or is that just so fundamental to Lacanian thought we should split with Lacan and just be Marxists?

🎯 Key points for quick navigation: [00:06] 🎧 Sigmund Freud was the first scientist to support the popular notion that dreams are meaningful. [01:48] 📝 Freud's method of studying dreams involved listening to reports of remembered dreams and asking dreamers to associate each element of the dream with other thoughts and feelings. [03:30] 🤔 Freud believed that dreams are a way for our unconscious mind to communicate with our conscious mind, and that they often represent repressed desires or unresolved conflicts. [05:09] 👀 During sleep, Freud believed that our pre-conscious ego (the part of our mind that filters out unacceptable thoughts and impulses) goes to sleep, allowing our unconscious mind to freely express itself through dreams. [06:03] 💤 To prevent us from acting on our unconscious desires during sleep, Freud believed that our brain creates a "virtual reality" in which we can act out these desires in a safe and controlled environment. [08:00] 🔥 Karl Popper criticized Freud's theory as pseudoscience because it is not falsifiable - it cannot be proven or disproven through experimentation or observation. [10:02] 🔬 Popper argued that a scientific theory must be able to make predictions that can be tested and confirmed or disconfirmed through experimentation. [12:07] 💡 The discovery of REM sleep by Jouvet in the 1950s led to a new understanding of dreaming as a natural process driven by brain activity rather than psychological factors. [14:26] 🔍 Hobson's activation-synthesis theory proposes that dreaming is caused by random neural activity in the brain during REM sleep, which is then synthesized into a coherent narrative by the cortex. [16:52] 👀 Hobson's theory suggests that dreams have no inherent meaning or motivation - they are simply a product of random brain activity. 29:42 *🤔 The brain mechanisms that generate dreams are different from those that generate REM sleep.* 30:37 *🔍 Damage to a specific area of the brain leads to a loss of dreaming, which is not obvious why.* 31:00 *💡 The area of damage is where psychosurgeons used to deliberately produce damage in patients with schizophrenia and other psychoses.* 35:14 *🔑 A specific circuit in the brain, called the mesolimbic mesocortical dopamine system, is crucial for dreaming.* 38:05 *💥 Giving patients dopamine increases their dreams, while blocking dopamine decreases their dreams.* 40:08 *📊 The most activated part of the brain during dreaming is the seeking system, also known as the wanting system or reward system.* 46:10 *🔬 A direct test of Freud's theory can be done using modern methods and techniques.* 49:12 *👀 Patients with damage to the perceptual cortex who cannot dream will have worse sleep quality due to motivational surges during sleep.* 56:51 *📊 The study found that non-dreamers have 48.5 arousals per hour, while dreamers have 18.9 arousals per hour, indicating a significant difference in physiological measures.* 57:21 *💡 The study confirmed each of the predictions made, including the difference in microarousals between dreamers and non-dreamers.* 58:15 *🔓 The study confirms Freud's hypothesis that dreams protect sleep by providing a biological function for dreams.* 59:00 *🤔 The implications for practicing psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are that listening to dreams gives renewed confidence in their meaningfulness and motivational processes.* 01:02:00 *💡 Understanding emotional motivational systems can help therapists understand psychopathology better.* 01:04:04 *🔬 Sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep and can be influenced by different drugs, including dopamine agonists and anticholinergics.* 01:14:11 *💊 Dopamine agonists increase dreaming, while anticholinergics lead to more vivid dreams during waking life.* 01:16:29 *🤔 The speaker is discussing the importance of REM sleep and dreaming, and how it's not just a matter of censorship, but rather a complex topic.* 01:24:09 *💡 The speaker is explaining their research on stroke patients and how they're controlling for working memory deficits. They're using various methods to wake patients up during REM sleep to collect dream reports.* 01:25:04 *📊 The speaker is comparing the two groups of patients with stroke, one that dreams and one that doesn't, on episodic memory and narrative accounts of their experiences. They find that both groups have similar performance on these tasks.* 01:26:01 *🔍 The speaker is discussing EEG activity in patients who do or don't dream. They find more alpha waves (indicating no visual information processing) in non-dreamers.* 01:28:10 *💫 Jennifer is sharing her personal experience with lucid dreaming as an escape mechanism from her abusive childhood. She's wondering if this technique could be used in therapy for traumatically abused children or adults.* 01:29:08 *🤔 Jennifer is asking if it's possible that the REM stage is like a "swim to the surface" from dreaming, where our body/mind says "enough" and pauses the dream for a little bit.* 01:30:44 *🔬 Mark Solms answers Jennifer's questions about REM sleep and dreaming. He explains that while there's a statistical correlation between REM sleep and dreaming, they're not the same thing. He also discusses lucid dreaming and how it involves activation of the frontal cortex during sleep.* Made with HARPA AI

Thank you Mark. Very good.

Excellent class Leon, as always.

What did he say was the drive associated with the gays?

Fascinating!!! Thank you

The neurodiversity paradigm is all organized around language and splitting and offers means to approach neurodivergence which are very compatible with psychoanalytical and humanistic concepts and theories. To go from the more general “neurodivergence” framing back to “autism”, which the psychoanalytic tradition describes as different things at different times, is nothing but a regression and unnecessary splitting. To reduce the subject to autism is an act of splitting committed by the big other. Castration needs to be the key theme in autism from the Lacanian perspective, as it focused on symbolic and pre-symbolic experience, where a significant portion of experience is not symbolized and will remain as such and needs to be / is contained as such, outside the realm of the symbolic language.

Down bad for this little man I’m afraid

I am far from an intellectual or academic and have often struggled to understand when professionals discuss or write about Lacan and psychoanalysis. But something here resonates. When I was 17 I experienced a catastrophic conversion to Christianity in a charismatic “Word of Faith” (Rhema) church in South Africa. You know the story: God meets all your needs. Health and wealth - and if you don’t have your needs met the fault is your own because you have insufficient faith. I an 60 now, left this church within a year of my conversion, have over many years moved to progressive Christianity and finally in latter years deconstructed my Christianity to the point where I no longer “believe” … I stumbled upon Peter Rollins’ Lacanian-informed theothanatology. BUT: that first “cut” seems indelibly imprinted inside me: no longer believing in God, Yet I continue to imagine God as the Divine Father who is ABLE to give all good things and yet WITHOLDS all good things. I still have a desire/belief that “God” miraculously intervene, though at the same time I don’t believe in an interventionist God (if ANY god). The passage in Matthew where Jesus purportedly says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” seems like the Capitalist promise which turns out to be a lie. Well this is just something I observe, and I experience it as a great disappoint and lie and betrayal, that both the church and the scriptures perpetuate the idea that wholeness and material and physical and spiritual blessings are possible and if we do not achieve them WE are at fault. But it also seems that the promise of the kingdom of God being manifest here and now is a parallel somehow to capitalism’s promise of solutions here and now.

Really good discussion!! Thanks

As a corollary to your remarks in the introduction of the book circa Aquinas, the quotations form Soler and Lolli, and the duty to know, I wish to share: "Necesse est habere aliquam virtutem per quam bonum rationis conservetur contra tristitiam, ne scilicet ratio tristitiae succumbat. Hoc autem facit patientia" (Summa theologiae, II Ilae, q. 136, a.) [A virtue is needed in order to preserve the good of the mind as against sadness, so that it would not capitulate to this. This is indeed what patience does.] Of course "patience" being a virtue, it is not simply the bearing of suffering, it is the strenght ("virtus") needed for the bearing. And it may well be read as the contemplation of sorrow due to the void inherent to earthly life.

Thank you so much for this. Since my young adulthood I’ve been all but drowning in melancholia, and so many of the things you’re talking about here resonate with me. The connection between melancholia, the preoccupation with “already being dead,” and psychotic subjective structures like foreclosure is very clear. (When I was a freshman in college, Into the Wild was my favorite movie…if that says anything about my situation haha)

Thank you, it's very interesting. Maybe you could tell us about the drawings of people with autism from the point of view of psychoanalysis? Hello from Russia 😊

THERE’S A PART 2??? OMG 💙💙💙

This was honestly astounding to listen to. Over the past few years I’ve been living out a series of patterns that, structurally, pretty much EXACTLY match the Freudian schema of a psychotic break. It’s absolutely fascinating how closely every one of the details match. I love Brenner’s criticism of the traditional psychiatric stance on psychosis. In my own attempt to seek medical help, I picked up on how the “symptomatic” disposition towards psychosis tries to artificially bypass the delusional mechanisms the subject establishes for itself by “diluting” their experience (I briefly tested some antipsychotic medication and felt like a zombie). I always felt that it was impossible to communicate with other people seriously about my symptoms, because while I superficially understood that I was in some sort of delusional state, I was very earnestly trying to “interpret my way out of it,” so to speak; and nobody seemed to understand. These efforts carried all the weight in the world to me, as I had gone through the experience of the “world coming to an end”-it did, quite literally, feel that way-and I felt that the help I needed had to substantively contend with the content of my experience, not simply circumvent it. And regarding the dream question, I can anecdotally confirm that your dream landscape ABSOLUTELY changes. Mine has taken on a pretty interesting array of idiosyncratic qualities, and my dreams often have very strange affective aftertastes. Thanks for this lesson, Leon <3

20:29 Idk, I doubt that Freud actor would beat *you* in the “dashing” department, Dr. Brenner! In all seriousness, what a fantastic lecture, and one I really needed right now. Thank you so much 💙

Bravo 👏🏾👏🏼!

wonderful and insightful.

😊😊😊😊😊🎉

🔥🔥🔥

1:04:54 *A [mine]field of prejudice* “[C]linicians also should take into account that very point-if we make generalizations like: psychotics are like this, and neurotics are like that, and people with addiction are still a little bit different. So maybe we are entering then a field of a certain kind of identity politics from which we want to stay away, because we know from our clinical practices that this is exactly what people are suffering from. That they are suffering from the things that have been said about them-‘you’re a man and therefore you’re the following…’, ‘you’re a black person and therefore you’re as such…’ and then people [suffer] from those claims that have been made about them. And so if we as clinicians would add additional claims with our very specific jargon, then I think it’s dangerous and therefore we should be very wary of discussing work with an individual in those terms.”

I thought autism was about how the brain is wired and so has nothing to do with any of this navel gazing stuff? (I commented this previously but my comment seems to have gone)

Freud was right! Popper did not understand Freud. Hobson was partially correct - there is verifiable content in dreams that is NOT meaningless.. I have 50 year old recorded dreams that verify Freud's dream hypotheses. One is of an infant recalling an experience she had as an infant! I am that infant!. The details of that dream precisely conform to what happened to me as an infant. At the time I wrote that dream down, I was an Analysand in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in the 1970s was primitive, not able to cure their patients. 40 years later I began my 2nd analysis and discovered what happened to me as an infant. Other dreams in this notebook further verify Freud's dream theories. Since the world economy is based on supply and demand, I will sell this 5 x 7" notebook to the highest bidder 🤣😆😅😂🙃😶‍🌫😏 I might make an exception for Mark, but he would need to pick it up at the Seattle Airport. ☺ I live 50 minutes from Sea-TAC airport. I've never met anyone who has successfully completed (resolved) an analysis. (Hopefully Mark will bring his wife and they can arrange further time at the SPSI.) My analytic work and other significant dreams can be verified in two different states, one in a University Medical School

Thank you so much for sharing. Grad student here, program isn't teaching much in terms of psychoanalytic theory. This is helpful!!!

He did not say Autism Researchers should go back to Leo Kanner and his awful theory about Refrigerator Parents (specifically refrigerator mothers).

Hi, I was wondering if you might be open to help someone connect with a recent guest? I'd tried their site but I wonder about a direct email or if someone's open to connecting me

You really have the gift of words to explain things. Thank you.

The way you explain could not be better. Thank you for this channel.

The only explanation that schizophrenia and/or psychosis could be hereditary, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is that of the repetition in the way the Edipus is conducted. The tendency of rejection and foreclosure becomes a habit from one generation to another.

Paranoia, as someone being near you, is the remembrance of the father doing rounds near the baby and mother attempting the introduction of the Edipus.

Rejection is the same as ignoring, in this case. The attempt of the father, if there’s any attempt at all, to establish the Edipus is rejected by both baby and mother, so the baby starts developing his own certainty of life. That same certainty of his mother, the only one he/she knows.

Such a great conversation and thank you for the powerful insights

Who wrote the mind of the apartheid?

Thank you to Leon. I have many autistic traits, and I find these discussions very interesting. I have found that through self awareness I have been able to engage with the world in a less alientated way.

next talk on the 28th September Thursday, September 28 Leon Brenner - Against Reality in Psychoanalysis - Part 2 One of the most common misuses of Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” confuses it with the adaptation of the patient to reality. In doing so, many psychoanalysts and therapists take it on themselves to be the harbingers of an objective reality to which the patient must succumb. However, Freud had never formulated this naïve conception of the reality principle as representing a single objective reality that gives shape to our thoughts. In contrast, Freud postulates that the reality principle solely enables the subject to delay immediate satisfaction in the aim of future satisfaction. This conception accompanied Freud’s teaching from the very moment that he abandoned his seduction theory. mailchi.mp/5504d31398a3/leon-brenner-against-realty-part-2

next talk on the 28th September Thursday, September 28 Leon Brenner - Against Reality in Psychoanalysis - Part 2 One of the most common misuses of Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” confuses it with the adaptation of the patient to reality. In doing so, many psychoanalysts and therapists take it on themselves to be the harbingers of an objective reality to which the patient must succumb. However, Freud had never formulated this naïve conception of the reality principle as representing a single objective reality that gives shape to our thoughts. In contrast, Freud postulates that the reality principle solely enables the subject to delay immediate satisfaction in the aim of future satisfaction. This conception accompanied Freud’s teaching from the very moment that he abandoned his seduction theory. mailchi.mp/5504d31398a3/leon-brenner-against-realty-part-2

next talk on the 28th September Thursday, September 28 Leon Brenner - Against Reality in Psychoanalysis - Part 2 One of the most common misuses of Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” confuses it with the adaptation of the patient to reality. In doing so, many psychoanalysts and therapists take it on themselves to be the harbingers of an objective reality to which the patient must succumb. However, Freud had never formulated this naïve conception of the reality principle as representing a single objective reality that gives shape to our thoughts. In contrast, Freud postulates that the reality principle solely enables the subject to delay immediate satisfaction in the aim of future satisfaction. This conception accompanied Freud’s teaching from the very moment that he abandoned his seduction theory. mailchi.mp/5504d31398a3/leon-brenner-against-realty-part-2

next talk on the 28th September Thursday, September 28 Leon Brenner - Against Reality in Psychoanalysis - Part 2 Leon Brenner - Against Reality in Psychoanalysis - Part 2 One of the most common misuses of Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” confuses it with the adaptation of the patient to reality. In doing so, many psychoanalysts and therapists take it on themselves to be the harbingers of an objective reality to which the patient must succumb. However, Freud had never formulated this naïve conception of the reality principle as representing a single objective reality that gives shape to our thoughts. In contrast, Freud postulates that the reality principle solely enables the subject to delay immediate satisfaction in the aim of future satisfaction. This conception accompanied Freud’s teaching from the very moment that he abandoned his seduction theory. mailchi.mp/5504d31398a3/leon-brenner-against-realty-part-2

What an amazing discussion. Thank you Stijn, Leon and the whole group.

Superb.

nice. yeah i wonder what insightful texts lacan and baudrillard would have written in the age of social media / isolation. they certainly predicted it, but having their minds in the actual context would have been helpful

I've always seen language as an incredible responsibility and was chronically selectively mute throughout childhood and even in spurts to this day. i used to speak very idiosyncratic, which matched more of what i read and wrote than what anyone attempted to teach me, and since my reading level was collegiate by the time of 4th grade (but i couldn't read books due to stimulation and eye tracking), my idiosyncratic language was also stilted and i couldn't understand less verbose more "collapsed"/loaded speech very well and still struggle with that. i actually went extremely mute for about a year after high school, in order to then only speak (and think) in less verbose speak. it was incredibly traumatizing but i can express myself to more kinds of ppl now, but it also always feels like a second language. luckily, this only amounted to assimilation, and i ditched the associated masking after i got used to talking differently. when ppl try to complete my sentences (say, if i seem to be struggling to find a word) with colloquial turns of phrase, it didn't help except maybe to provoke my brain to translate a little faster back into my idiosyncratic speech

Lacan was a horrible person.

What if there are no mirrors available for the child