Psychoanalysis? Or a caricature of "woke" intellectual pretension?

 

I present, for your edification (?), the abstract of an article in the April 2021 issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, titled "On Having Whiteness".

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

In case you think that's just one extreme example from an otherwise worthy journal, here are the titles of some more articles in that issue.

• “I Do Not Have a Racist Bone in My Body”: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on What is Lost and Not Mourned in Our Culture’s Persistent Racism
• Black Rage: The Psychic Adaptation to the Trauma of Oppression
• Murderous Racism as Normal Psychosis: The Case of Dylann Roof
• Observations on Use of the N-Word in Psychoanalytic Conferences

Can you say "an unhealthy, one-sided obsession with race"?  Yes, I thought you could.  I can, too…  If you substitute the word "Jewishness" or "Muslimness" or any other group-"ness" for Whiteness in that abstract, you see how obscenely warped and twisted it is - yet it's accepted for publication in a "peer-reviewed" medical (?) journal.  If those peers found that article acceptable, I certainly don't want to be treated by any of them - and I absolutely do not regard them as my peers in the human race.  That level of bigotry is what one would expect from a Nazi concentration camp guard and member of the SS.

This sort of pseudo-intellectual claptrap makes a mockery of any hope that rational, logical thought might influence the Journal's deliberations.  Rather, it automatically labels its contents as "junk science", dedicated to political correctness rather than authentic, genuine, scientific-method-based research, and irredeemably corrupted by neo-Marxist "critical theory".

I can only suggest that if you're looking for psychoanalytical help, you first check to see whether your prospective analyst is a subscriber to the Journal, and/or agrees with its psychobabble.  If they are and/or do, strike them from your list at once.  They're not only unworthy of your time, they're likely to be actively detrimental - if not downright dangerous - to your mental health.

Peter