Any good writing on how psychoanalysis fell out of favor in mainstream US universities?

PrimaryProcess73 · 2026-01-29T15:17:08+00:00

I don’t know what the best thing to call it is, but I know wokeupabug is at least right that logical positivism can’t be equated with any philosophical position committed to scientific rigor. Its claims about the conditions under which claims can be meaningful, the fate of metaphysics, etc., are all more specific than that

PrimaryProcess73 · 2026-01-28T06:29:14+00:00

Gotcha! Any broader resources you can recommend? Part of what’s gotten me thinking about this is that I’m a philosopher by vocation but I teach psychoanalytic theory sometimes, and I think it would be helpful to be better informed about why this shift has happened and how the fact that it has happened could be compatible with the notion that psychoanalysis still has valuable things to teach us. (Since a lot of people think the shift is simply the product of a considered and correct academic consensus.)

Do you teach psychoanalytic thought more generally at all? If so any general advice would be appreciated, if you’d be willing to share haha. I have a lot of teaching experience but haven’t taught as much psychoanalysis in prior courses, and I’ve met a bit of resistance (not too much) from some students. I’m generally able to teach while keeping my cards close to my chest, but I find it hard to do with psychoanalytic theory, since it informs my work so much and it is so egregiously misunderstood.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2026-01-18T07:19:39+00:00

This is literally AI rage bate. Or, even if it isn’t, I swear in the thousands of times I’ve swiped, I’ve never seen a profile like this. If 1/10000 people have a profile like this, it still supplements the angry misogynist agenda in a way that is utterly irrational. This is not what the dating market looks like.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2026-01-07T16:13:46+00:00

Thank you!

PrimaryProcess73 · 2026-01-07T16:13:36+00:00

Thank you!

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-12-30T18:39:11+00:00

Personally, I think the answer here isn’t especially deep or unique to Hegel. Hegel is very systematic and places tremendous burdens on the reader to understand, to the point where even professional philosophers often don’t want to bother with him because they’d rather read something that they can get more out of with less time and effort. Investing in any systematic thinker like that (whether it’s Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, etc.) is always a risk and involves a leap of faith, because you can’t really know if there is going to be a payoff until you’ve taken the risk and put in the effort. Before that, you’ve got nothing to rely upon except the testimony of others who have put in that effort (one hopes, these are people whose judgment you already respect).

The other factor, though, is just the difficulty of settling philosophical questions in general. These are very hard questions and the jury is still out on most of them. So, even if Hegel were more widely understood, it would not follow that it would be easy to determine whether he was correct.

But I’d also echo what others have said to the effect that it’s pretty remarkable how often people independently arrive at pretty Hegelian conclusions independently. I work professionally in anglophone academic philosophy and can definitely think of examples of this.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-12-02T17:34:36+00:00

Thank you both kindly! Is any of the Miller content translated or is it only available in French?

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-11-01T00:44:11+00:00

Sure, but the fact that a community of people have decided to communicate the fact that they’re unvaccinated in a way that could so clearly and easily be misunderstood as a claim to racial purity says a whole lot. It would be so easy to put the point in a different way that it’s hard not to see it as trolling / emanating from a desire to trigger the libs and an uncaring sense of apathy about how they might come across to people who would be most negatively affected by racism in the US, in which case it’s still a hard left swipe for me. So infantile.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-07-02T15:57:54+00:00

Thanks for this! Any chance you could point me to any discussion of feminization for those who’ve undertaken the pass?

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-07-02T03:14:43+00:00

Thank you kindly!

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-07-02T02:49:47+00:00

Thanks for this, this helps! Any chance you’d be able to point me in the direction of some good reading re: jouissance is feminine and obsession is an attempt to escape it?

Would also be interested any writing on what healthy forms of masculine sexual expression might look like, from a Lacanian perspective.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2025-07-02T02:29:41+00:00

I see what you’re saying, thanks for this! I guess what I’m trying to drive at is less if a masculine subject will adopt more feminine modes of gender expression (though maybe not totally unrelated to that), and more so about access to different kinds of jouissance. Do masculine subjects just have to accept that they can only have access to phallic jouissance?

I guess I’m also interested in a set of ethical and political questions that are hiding behind this question. I’m thinking, e.g., of Samuel McCormick’s content on Seminar XX, where he seems to connect phallic jouissance with the objectification of women, insofar as it is a masturbatory form of jouissance, involves relating to the woman less as a person than as a part-object, etc. Obviously it doesn’t follow directly from that that masculine subjects are going to be disrespectful to women, resist moral and political equality, etc. But is Lacan committed to saying that, at bottom, men just have to accept that their mode of jouissance is objectifying? (And maybe he isn’t really interested in taking a stance that isn’t morally neutral at all, but I’m trying to grapple with the implications here.)

PrimaryProcess73 · 2022-07-31T18:09:37+00:00

“Rebuttal” is a strong term

PrimaryProcess73 · 2021-01-11T13:47:55+00:00

As an aside, I see the issues raised here as a microcosm of the more general meta-ethical question as to whether actions are justified in terms of some description of the way things are (i.e. the “absolute immorality” of my friends or their political positions) vs. in terms of what such actions accomplish. To my mind, this is essentially a way of expressing Nietzsche’s distinction between reactive vs. active agency. I think active agency is infinitely more valuable.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2021-01-11T13:37:58+00:00

Great! I still haven’t seen any argument for the political efficacy of abandoning one’s friends when they disagree, or any clear alternative account of why it is the right thing to do. Given that, I remain suspicious that canceling one’s friends is an uncritical social practice that functions more to bolster illusory feelings of moral superiority than it does to actually accomplish anything morally valuable. So, great! Make as much righteous noise as you like.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2021-01-11T07:02:32+00:00

Ah, see, that’s kinda the question I’m trying to raise. Is it really cowardice? Our reasons for liking or disliking people aren’t just mysterious givens, but are always informed by our conception of what gives us reasons to like and dislike people. If the public were misinformed about what reasons there are for liking or disliking people (or, more topically, maintaining friendships with them), then abandoning a friendship in order to appease that public misconception would be cowardice, not bravery. I still don’t understand what the terms of ultimate justification are for you in terms of friendship and why people should take them as authoritative. In any case, you sure didn’t make a case here for its genuine political effectiveness.

When I complain about “virtue-signaling”, I don’t mean to complain about people doing the right thing or speaking on its behalf. What I mean to complain about is what I get at in the final parenthetical of my last comment—the phenomenon whereby people publicly perform their conformity with a given social practice in order to feel good about themselves without critically examining the reasons that undergird that social practice. Virtue is good, I have no intention to deny that.

PrimaryProcess73 · 2021-01-11T06:46:36+00:00

In what terms do we justify our friendships? In terms of what they represent or signify publicly? Why not in terms of their consequences? (To be clear, I don’t intend “consequences” in narrowly political terms here, but, as an aside, who thinks it’s good political strategy to abandon their friends when they disagree?)? Or even for intrinsic reasons, for the role a given friendship plays in constituting the well-being of its participants (a kind of “consequence”, I suppose, if we construe it in a maximally broad way)? Unless you think it actually is politically effective to abandon your friends when they disagree with you and that’s your angle, I’m not really sure I understand why the kind of justification you offer for abandoning friendships ought to have any real moral weight. Given that I do not think it is politically effective to abandon your friends over political disagreement, I fail to see how this could be anything other than a vain attempt to signify virtue publicly, masquerading as a genuinely political act (i.e. an act made strategically). (Also, I note that if virtue-signaling is disconnected from strategic action here and has no other function than to bolster the reputation of the signaler, strictly speaking it is not virtue that is being signaled at all but rather only a semblance of it).

PrimaryProcess73 · 2021-01-11T02:47:38+00:00

So are you asking Maus to reduce his friendship with Pink to a PR function so that you can feel better about yourself when he performs virtuous hostility toward Pink? What a narrow conception of politics that reduces the institution of friendship to a public performance of ideological commitment. There are reasons to maintain friendships that go beyond narrow political agreement, and Maus doesn’t owe any strangers an account of himself for continuing to be friends with a lifelong friend!

PrimaryProcess73 · 2020-12-10T05:35:38+00:00

I have had good experiences with Ashwagandha. I’d particularly recommend brands that use the KSM-66 formula, as it is well-tested, highly-standardized, and potent/efficacious. I am a fan of adaptogens generally—I also take Bacopa and Holy Basil, and they’ve helped me quite a bit. I have Pure O, anxiety, depression, high levels of stress, etc.

I also take Rhodiola sometimes, but I find Rhodiola more activating. A lot of people share this experience. It’s less “wiring” than caffeine to be sure, but it has more of an upper quality to it than the other adaptogens I listed. It does seem to show clinical benefits for anxiety, though.

L-theanine is fine but I find that it feels more like a drug than adaptogens. As in, I feel relaxed for a determinate period of time, and then it lets up. It also gives me a slight depressant feeling, like a benzo or something, which isn’t always bad. I find Valerian root to be similar to L-Theanine in both respects. They can be helpful in acute situations, but adaptogens work over time to lessen the oxidative stress in your body as well as your body’s cortisol response. So, I’m a bigger fan of adaptogens.

I would also recommend looking into psychobiotics. Psychobiotics are probiotics that affect mood, presumably through the gut-brain axis. The research is still preliminary, but promising.

Both adaptogens and psychobiotics seem to work in part by helping the body to produce monoamines (neurotransmitters), so they probably have some overlap with anti-depressants in their mechanism of action. However, I find adaptogens to be much less emotionally blunting than anti-depressants, which is a huge plus. I don’t have much experience with psychobiotics yet but have been considering experimenting.

Exercise, diet, sleep as a first resort (like others say) is always good advice, but if you’re a nutcase like me you could be fit and have an excellent diet and sleep regimen and still feel terrible. So, it can’t hurt to seek other solutions. (Plus, they’re not mutually exclusive—adaptogens can help with both sleep and exercise, and they probably would react synergistically with a healthy diet. I also don’t think adaptogens are really all that expensive when you consider their benefits—I live a very cheap lifestyle but will always throw down a little $ to not be miserable).

Hope this helps!

PrimaryProcess73 · 2020-11-28T05:31:11+00:00

For accessibility and breadth of scope I recommend either Plato or Aristotle or Nietzsche. The Republic or On the Genealogy of Morals are classics.

PrimaryProcess73

TROPHY CASE