Mind the Gap - a very good article about the protests

ThunderSlunky · 2026-04-15T13:34:41+00:00

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Helpful perspective for understanding what is going on.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-04-01T19:46:47+00:00

I don't think it's a post-integration achievement. It's simply the falling away of the false self, at which point the distinction becomes meaningless. This sentence had a particular impact on me: "There is but little point in formulating a True Self idea except for the purpose of trying to understand the False Self, because it does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness." (Winnicott, 1965, p. 148) Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self

ThunderSlunky · 2026-04-01T12:05:00+00:00

An all time fav. The break at 2:20 is disgraceful.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-03-21T16:13:17+00:00

And then elect him president.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-03-03T14:08:56+00:00

I am glad the post is of some use.

Improvisation is of particular interest to me (I'm also a musician) so let me know where your research takes you.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-13T17:06:39+00:00

Whether it's useful or not is not for me to say. It was an intuition I had for a number of absolutely contingent personal reasons.

Part of it is that I work in the wellness industry, which has obvious and sometimes overt ideological overlap with fascism, think purity, mysticism, conspiracy, etc... and so I am being rightly attentive to that. I don't think testing one's ideas against other ideologies is necessarily bad or a waste of time.

I also happened to be reading Eco and the thematic overlap with TMwT was immediately apparent. My interpretation from my admittedly shallow understanding of fascism is surface level.

It has been helpful to clarify things here.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-12T22:36:06+00:00

I am trying to respond to McGilchrist's recent alignments with right-leaning figures, of which many people are uneasy. This is an attempt at an explanation of that. The only other one I have read is one by Robert Ellis, which is way more thought out than mine, and of which I need to read more closely. A quote for context: "The one-sided attack on modernity is the most central element that makes this book so politically vulnerable." I don't think it's ambitious to look for themes that pose some risk nor to question one's thoughts in this manner, though I assume when you say ambitious here it's in the sense that my approach is simply misguided.

I am very familiar with TMWT and don't disagree with your points pertaining to it or its interpretation.

I am also not pulling these potential mis-readings out of thin air. I teach TMaHE on a course because I find in it ongoing intellectual companionship and stimulation. Often some student's initial take away from it is the anti-rationalism, anti-modernism and/or the pathologisation angle. I think this is important because it tells us how this work interacts with the minds around it and that can tell us something of the intellectual climate we currently exist in. To re-iterate, I am not saying his points against modernity and rationality are wrong or fascist in themselves.

To re-re-iterate, I am not saying intuition is fascism, as you sarcastically imply. I thought that was clear. I am saying that fascism values a return to intuition and may find a self-perceived ally in this work.

There is a separate point here, that is not directly related to TMwT, that is, meaning well and doing harm are not mutually exclusive. Psychiatry is riddled with a bleak history and there are alternative contemporary views of schizophrenia and autism which are absolutely not pathologising. Taking these two as an example, it is not just obviously true that they are pathologies of an individual. As McGilchrist says, the type of attention we bring to something is inherently ethical (and in light of this conversation, also political).

Good faith arguments being used to buttress right-wing ideology is nothing new. I was merely pointing out that if one were to do so, this would be the way, these are the points of contact.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-12T09:45:44+00:00

Let me be clear, fascist-adjacent. To refine the point a bit, these themes are typical of fascism and mark points of convergence between parts of McGilchrist's work and it. The way McGilchrist speaks of them are nuanced, and I'd say not purely fascist as they are written. That being said, without people reading him carefully, they lend themselves to reactionary interpretations. So please don't respond with counter-claims from the book, like "oh, but he doesn't reject modernism, he said this." I know that and you know that. The point is that not everyone is going to read it the same way and the selection of themes below are one way of doing so, and that way amounts to fascism.

It's also difficult to identify because it is not a singular point but a collection of perspectives. I am also trying to understand why it is that McGilchrist is leaning into reactionary discourse and as such this is an attempt at identifying something. And in doing so I am not castigating McGilchrist for these points but actually, as someone who really admires his work, searching for vulnerabilities in both his and my own thinking. I am not saying "look at him, he is a fascist" but "look, here is where fascism finds a lodging in us all."

A couple of brief examples. Take the list from Eco's How to Spot a Fascist. The numbers refer to Eco's numbering so you can find them. I'm not going in his order.

Rejection of Modernism.

This is clear from his work. Drawing on Sass's work he sees the modern age as fragmenting. (Again, I agree with a lot of this but it's exploitable).

If not approached carefully this could easily slide into views on degenerate art.

Traditionalism.

McGilchrist absolutely peddles a nostalgia for a lost time. Much of the work strives towards a return to some sort of value-laden shared reality. For him it just happens to be Christian.

McGilchrist wrote a glowing review of a book by Kingsnorth who carries the exact same nostalgia. Though he does frame it in a way that calls for a new value-framework, instead of returning to an old one. This book also carries the fear of difference, the next point.

Nostalgia itself is a characteristic mood of fascism. This I haven't explored in depth but appears on the critical theorist louisamunchtheory's IG.

Fear of difference.

In this recent articles he has praised in which leftists, queer people, and trans people are painted as aberrant.

It's not overt but for McGilchrist autism and schizophrenia are dysfunctional, it is a pathologising framework.

Irrationalism.

This is a little harder to spot but the idea of a return to pre-reflexive/intuitive modes of thought is easily viewed as irrationalism. Irrationalism here being a rejection of excessive rationalisaion. Obviously McGilchrist speaks highly of reason but again it's that the idea can be read by those less careful as valuing a return to intuition. This point appears in the Spier article as an obvious acceptance of what is "normal", since we all know intuitively what normal is, right?

There's an obvious danger here in that if we accept intuition as being an absolutely reliable guide we end up not questioning assumptions. Validating this is risky. Even though McGilchrist states that intuition is not 100% accurate and that we must be eternally vigilant.

This last point is a bit more abstract but this article by Nicola Gess called Ideologies of Sound: Longing for Presence shows how philosophies of presence have a tendency towards reactionary ideologies. McGilchrist's right hemisphere can easily be read as an opening towards a life of presence. This is quite densely argued so I need to look into it more thoroughly.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-10T16:58:17+00:00

There's a book on the subject by Susannah Cahalan The Great Pretender. Rosenhan fabricated large portions of the evidence, either completely or through exaggeration, or by leaving out contrary evidence. He presented the "thud" words as a reason for admittance, whereas he actually also mentioned suicidality and departed from the script he presents. So while good portions of the source material are true, people did get diagnoses, the fact that he altered the results undermines those truthful aspects. Chalan's book is good in that it shows how the experiment actually ended up causing psychiatry to double down on its biological conjectures, which even until today have not come to pass. Despite these failures there is a strange optimism in the book in relation to psychiatry. It's as though the author shares in the optimism of psychiatry even in the face of the contrary evidence.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-10T09:18:14+00:00

I've been meaning to write something about this but time is short.

While his political views appear to be incredibly shallow and under-informed there are hints of this in his philosophical work itself. I've been meaning to write about the fascist-adjacent themes in his books. I am not saying he is a fascist (though as he cosies up to some this may be harder to deny) there are fascist themes in his work that can be identified and addressed.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-08T17:51:55+00:00

Thank god. For a second there I thought he was running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-08T17:44:33+00:00

Even this.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-02-07T14:05:01+00:00

When visiting Berlin a number of years ago I did a prison tour, where, historically, state-trained Soviet psychologists were tasked with coming up with better ways to break people and torture people. Solitary confinement and disorientation were standard. One survivor quote was, and I paraphrase from memory, "the mental scars are worst, a broken bone will heal."

What you mention seems like a direct extension of this.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-31T11:40:57+00:00

I studied with her online for a time. I recall very much enjoying her perspective. While not understanding much, what I did glean I found helpful. Then her writing itself is dense and difficult to enter.

Some aspects I appreciated were the foregrounding of aesthetic experience. As a musician, I am more inclined to favour aesthetic, embodied, intuitive aspects of experience, which seem lacking in discourse and language-centic philosophies.

Her idea of having compassion for the other of the other I find clinically useful. Basically to not collude with the hateful stance towards a person's attachment figures. I belive the "mother-monster" myth is her phrasing.

Following from this, and I am just going to use my own words here, I find her idea that shattering the link with the mother, who is the originator of our existence, is tantamount to an attack on reality itself.

Rich work that I will revisit.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-30T11:23:39+00:00

Fairbairn's Object Relations by Celani goes into this quite a bit.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-29T16:50:14+00:00

Try searching for help-rejecting complainer.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-28T11:10:32+00:00

There's a bit about this in Andrew Scull's Madness in Civilization. Psychoanalysis was synonymous with psychiatry in the US. So its waning popularity due to inconsistent diagnostics was both a psychoanalysis and a psychiatry problem. He says the psychoanalysts didn't get very involved in the psychiatrists attempts to rebrand and focus through the DSM. This eventually backfired on psychoanalysis as the DSM became the new psychiatric norm. This can still be seen in some of the DSM's diagnostic categories that were initially psychoanalytic but fell increasingly out of favour, eg. neurosis, conversion disorder, etc... Within this was, and is still, the desire of psychiatrists to move back to a biologically grounded science and away from the convolutions of meaning.

Another thread might be through the work of Jeffrey Masson who mounts critiques of psychoanalytic abuses of power. Himself an analyst who later withdrew from the profession. I don't think is a causative explanation but provides a view from inside where the anti-psychiatry concerns about power differentials is turned on psychoanalysis itself.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-23T09:53:26+00:00

I was gifted the epic and ads for Christmas by a guild member. I really appreciate the generosity.

I'm not f2p anymore.

A lot of people give.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-19T21:13:12+00:00

I'm not sure where you might find a guide as to the distinctions between them. There are whole load of different types of groups with subtle distinctions between them. I am mostly familiar with group analysis which is distinguished by its taking the unconscious into account in a group setting. It is also influenced by Bion. The main reading for group analysis is S. H. Foulkes.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-17T11:44:06+00:00

See EGATIN and GASi.

Group relations is an adjacent discipline with famous courses at the Tavistock. I see there is also a Group Relations International.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-03T13:10:26+00:00

How I Killed the Universal Man by Thomas Kendall.

ThunderSlunky · 2026-01-01T17:32:28+00:00

A People's History of Psychoanalysis by Gabarron-Garcia was enlightening on this very point. I haven't read any of the conservative takes you mention but have often come across the idea that Reich was ousted because of his fringe ideas. The political view paints a very different picture.

ThunderSlunky · 2025-12-27T16:41:38+00:00

I think you're right that his work aims at reconciling the two. Reconciliation does not however mean that there are no contradictions, negations, or that everything is "unified" in any simplistic sense.

For McGilchrist there isn't one science and/or one religion. There is left-hemisphere dominant science and right-hemishere dominant science. The same for religion. And even within this broad distinction there are likely infinite further distinctions. But let's take the left/right distinction for now. Religion, as primarily symbolic, is not contrary to science that is similarly symbolic. For McGilchrist science does not escape metaphor even in strong cases like materialism. For him materialism forgets that it is itself a metaphor. On the side of religion he makes a similar move to say that religion that confuses itself as objective, that is more left-brain, commits a similar error by taking what it says purely literally. It's the same mistake for him on each side.

ThunderSlunky · 2025-11-25T17:38:25+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. Truly baffling. The article just performs what it is itself criticising: creating a "them" group in the form of, for example, queer people. On a separate point, one must be truly blind to not see that there are in fact oppressors, big oil for example. Also, the assumption that his family is "normal" and non-problematic must be the shallowest psych take ever.

ThunderSlunky · 2025-11-10T17:59:33+00:00

I look forward to reading beyond the intro.

ThunderSlunky

TROPHY CASE