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

The thing I'm finding most frustrating about this is that I honestly think that twenty years ago I might have written it myself.

My views have changed obviously and I desperately want to critique it and expose the misconceptions from the point of view of someone who would have previously thought like this but it would take so much time and energy that I can't afford it, and that's really annoying me.

 

Next time you hear a Scotsman say that Edinburgh was one of the centres of the enlightenment, as they are sometimes wont to do, remember this and smile to yourself.

Otherwise you are left thinking, "what the Foucault!"

 

I'm interested in understanding how they think.

 

Actually it is in the category '801-1000' i.e.nobody can be bothered to rank the bottom 200 'universities'. They are all bottom.

 

she would not clean your bathroom but she would write a lengthy article about your lack of motivation being some kind of rebellion against capitalism .

 

Peut-être qu'elle est piégée. I can't speak for her institution or department, but I know from experience that during the 1970/80s a few university departments in France and in Central Canada were dominated by structuralists, marxists, semioticists, and lacanists--whole departments. I recall a couple of professors wearing Lenin caps, with the red star in the front. Believe this or not. (Lacan did not identify as Marxist but he was claimed by them early on, and even by the Right) And if a student did not somehow imbibe those methodologies it was hard to survive. If she is in this kind of environment, then she has little choice: either recite the babble and get the degree or leave without the degree. I was often nauseated by the authoritarianism in these humanitarian halls. I was thrilled when Courtois published The Black book of Communism because that bomb shut up some of them for a bit.

From the little I listened to in that interview (it was so tedious and so passe) she is just repeating a variation of the Lacan mantra. "Human beings are adapted," the famous line from Lacan. A human being in a capitalist society has to fit in, has to be adapted to that system, which means he has to be 'usable' or 'exploitable' by that system. So, folks, if anyone gets ME, they have not been able to adapt to the system and the fatigue is a way of rebelling against the system (capitalist).

This kind of stuff is 45 years old.....or more...what drivel

 

So this is where the maladaptive behaviour came from....just joking.

 

There is a post on here explaining how forming a Facebook Group for X will attract people who have X and those who think they have X. The post even explains how unscrupulous doctors can take advantage of people in Facebook Group X. The post explains how using Facebook isn't a good scientific tool. It returned to my mind as I read about Facebook in her thesis. There is an ME charity based in Edinburgh with some egg on their face. I bet they wish they had listened to the free advice.

 

Oddly enough, one of the places where this kind of coursework took hold in the United States was in university film studies programs.

Prior to 1977, you could count the number of degreed film programs in the U.S. on one hand. Then, Star Wars was released and George Lucas' attendance at USC's tiny Department of Film and Television suddenly made getting a film degree fashionable. [Steven Spielberg's application to USC was rejected, so he studied film at Cal State Long Beach.]

Film programs had always seemed somewhat frivolous compared to most other university disciplines and they were sometimes regarded as little more than trade schools. Then, with the influx of students (and money) that came in a post-Star Wars world, film studies programs sprung up like weeds across the country.

The new departments were ripe for the promise of gaining respectability among their peers and, filling the void, here came disciplines offering the tortured analysis of signs, symbols and meaning in cinema by way of semiotics, structuralism, politics and psychology.

Film critic Roger Ebert called it “a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in."

Below is a fairly hilarious article written in 2003 by a film industry professional who discovered that his daughter was being taught this kind of film analysis at the University of Santa Barbara:


Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology

 

Hi Forbin, What a good read! Boy, I sure time travelled. Thank you. In Canada this stuff was also in the film schools, but primarily in literary studies. In France it was also in literary studies. And what always amazed me was these profs would promote their own books, which were boring as old he.. and they thought themselves superior to the actual literary writers they were discussing! I had/have a passion for history, and when Hayden White was brought into the mix, it was just hard to take, particularly as I was interested in the history of genocide. Thanks again. Stay well.

 

This suggests strong participation-bias of the 7 participants in her interview, and this limits the generalisability of the findings.

Despite this, information from two interviewees was subsequently ignored (of a total of 9):

Confirmation bias in action:

 

Me: "Uh, like yeah, I was kind of in a failure of mourning at the onset,and beyond, kind of like uh, with extreme pain and exhaustion, disorientation, unable to speak coherently and having to leave work early. And like losing my f-ing job and fearing/knowing I would never be able to work again, and having no means of support, though I continued to try different types of very part-time work, uh, yeah. Losing a career, yeah, uh, a failure...of mourning.

And uh, like I was kind of in mourning because uh, after onset, some months later, my husband left me because he didn't want a sick wife, so sure, uh..mourning, mmmmm."

She has failed to learn about ME before she designed the shoddy qualitative/philosophical vehicle for her ponderings a la Lacanisme.

So, there is no science base here.

This whole thing has angered me all day.

 

In these psychological narratives, the illness is always something that can be easily overcome. You just have to get over your own fears, face your sadness, release your true desires and so on. The pieces you need to solve the problem are all there, in your mind and just have to be rearranged.

The point of the narrative is apparently not to correctly describe reality because usually no effort is made to ensure it does. The point is to be an inspiring story that gives a sense of control. It's insulation against a cruel reality where bad things happen to good people and sometimes nothing can be done.

In the long term reality denial is harmful. One way it can be harmful: if the dominent narrative of ME becomes that it's not really a serious illness, but a psychological problem that challenges patients to become a better person, one should not be surprised to see little effort put into biomedical research and healthcare.

The irony is also that you also can't really help people psychologically unless you understand their true situation.

 

I was diagnosed as having a physical disease in 1984 when ME was considered a physical disease and research into it's physical causes was being done.

When all the psychological stuff was being brought in I was totally shocked. As a sort of defence, my family began a kind of game where everyone we came across with a disease we worked out why they needed it at that point in their lives.

It is easy to make up a reason for everything from toothache to the flu. Point is it is you can make up anything but you have to prove it and the BPS side don't do that. They do the opposite and leave out any evidence for a physical causation.

Put simply, if the patient was functioning well one day then long term sick the next was it something physical that changed, something in their circumstances or something psychological?

 

Yes dear Shak8, it is angering, but she's in a web, like a spider's web, called Lacanian analysis. If someone living in Scotland (is this where she is?) has a free moment, it might be useful to send her a few articles about ME (by mail). I am sure the university would forward them to her. Perhaps an organization can do this. This is the best approach with folks who are into this stuff. It might just move her off ME a bit, and she may focus more on "fatigue" in her 'book.' After all, ME is not primarily about fatigue but about exertion intolerance, PEM, etc.. Best wishes.

(PS. When we have medical visits now, we carry around a folder of articles about ME in order to give to physicians, because here in Canada, very little of substance is known about this illness.)

 

Thread on her paper, "Fatigue as the unconscious refusal of the demands of late capitalism":
https://www.s4me.info/threads/fatig...ands-of-late-capitalism-2022-diserholt.29941/