Fatigue and the mind-body relation: A Lacanian exploration, Diserholt, 2020 (PhD thesis)

I haven't tried to dig into this to try to work out whether it says something of value or not.

Via: Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks


Source: Edinburgh Napier University
Date: November 2020
URL:
https://www.napier.ac.uk/research-a...the-mind-body-relation-a-lacanian-exploration

https://www.napier.ac.uk/~/media/wo...mind-body-relation-a-lacanian-exploration.pdf

 

I hope you have on your pasture boots while reading this mess.

 

Looks like standard "can't cope with modern life" horse shit. Clueless drivel.

 

Is that Lacan'tian?

 

Neurotic irrelevance.

Hurts me to read her nonsense about pain, for as much as I love wading through French psychoanalysts.

 

I read some of it. There are many accusations against society and patients for not believing in weird ideas with zero evidence behind them which illustrates well why patients want nothing to do with this kind of psychiatry (which is one of the accusations).

Another reason is that these idas simply do not work and are often easily recognized (by patients) as misconceptions (rather than grand insights their proponents believe them to be).

 

The way those two references were used does not inspire confidence.

 

The illness model proposed is one of mind-body divide, where patients negate their true desire to work less, and so that desire manifests in fatigue that forces patients to work less. Or something like that.

 

Yes, I enjoyed my life before I got ill. And now that I'm ill, the inability to do meaningful work in life is felt as large loss. So much for negating my true desires.

I'm guessing the author confused the early signs of illness in patients, which made work hard and frustrating, with an subconscious desire to work less.

What these psychological theories reveal is something about the author. Maybe he or she should work less. Or learn some humility and stop seeing patients as people who always get it totally wrong about their own illness. There are good reasons patients do what they do and believe what they believe. They can be difficult to understand for those who have never been in the same situation.

 

From the same author (emphases mine):

Extraordinary that she can be awarded a PhD for her work on a condition of which she evinces no fundamental understanding whatsoever.

 

A possibly not useful thought but one way to counteract this type of very silly propaganda would be to open a section here on S4ME for people to specifically tell their story of life before ME if they'd like to.

 

Wkikpedia has a section on Lacan's 'legacy and criticism' which basically suggests that any legacy will be drivel in academic backwaters of no interest:

In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian David Maceydescribes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud".[2] His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.[117]

In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are not even wrong.[118] However, they note that they do not want to enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work.[119]

Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. François Roustang [fr] called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan".[120] The former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans (who published a dictionary of Lacanian terms in 1996) eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ".[121] Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan".[122] Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell"[123][124] and listing the many associates—from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors—left damaged in his wake. Roger Scrutonincluded Lacan in his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.[125]

His type of charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with.[126] His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources,[127] Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others.[128] Thus his "return to Freud" was called by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him".[129] Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.[130]

Many feminist thinkers have criticised Lacan's thought. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.[131] Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentricmastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine.[132] The result—Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.[133]

Their difficulties were only reinforced by what Didier Anzieu described as a kind of teasing lure in Lacan's discourse; "fundamental truths to be revealed . . . but always at some further point".[134] This was perhaps an aspect of the sadistic narcissism that feminists especially accused Lacan of.[135] Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fueled when his wife Sylvia Lacan refers to her late husband as a "domestic tyrant," during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt. [136]

In a 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged, Noam Chomsky said: "quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential."[137]

 

I can see how a therapist could do a lot of damage to patients by convincing them that the cause of their illness was that they were negating their true desires... with the therapist then explaing what these true desires were.

 

The rhetoric against dualism and biological reductionism also rings hollow when what they practice is psycho-reductionism.

 

Angers me that ME/CFS 'fatigue' is a sitting duck for this exploitation of the disabled.

Is there not some statute forbidding the spread of misinformation about the disabled. Do they possess rights to protect themselves from this drivel?

Oh, it's French drivel. Speaking of drivel: structuralism, deconstruction, to hell with the lot of it. The only person of any import from all that is Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist.

I'm glad it's only a thesis but I do think the author and her faculty advisor merit a letter of protest.

God forbid this work is later referred to in research, though I assume it would not.

 

I first misunderstood and thought "yep, that's bad, glad we've moved on!". Then I saw the date!

This idea - I mean the author's & those with similar ideas not @strategist - should be called out for what it is: taunting the patient.

This goes far beyond making sweeping statements about huge numbers of people who are all individuals whether they are a race, those who practice a religion or those with a specific illness. There is no doubt that is prejudice and results in discrimination.

This, however, is taunting. It is no better than the individual who pokes a sharo stick in the side on some poor creature in a cage.

It goes beyond mocking the afflicted and actually attempts to weaponize the disability against them, in the same way you might park someone in a wheelchair with zero use of their legs in front of the loo door and taunt them for not being able to get up and go to the loo themselves because they're too lazy.