[...] divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)

cultural arrogance

...................................

paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world, name of the world is ‘conflict’ =/= instinctual needs for acceptance and for the assignment of a place)
para + nous (~ out of mind, beside the mind) --> part of the everyday life : when you think you are “somebody” or you have “agency” you are on a small dose of paranoid delusion. {do we always need some dose of paranoia to form critical relations with our current condition?
according to Lacan: *Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac* --> psychoanalytic treatment = inducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)

it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain

sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor

(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent

four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory توبیخی (--> under intensive evaluative scrutiny)
3. litigious دعوایی (--> conspiracy)
4. exalted متعالی (--> grandeur)

*attribution error: social perceivers has to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others
*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions

from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousness

the direct link(?) between socioeconomic status and development of paranoia
(physically:) high blood pressure & hardening of the arterial walls (& drug abuse) ==> decline in brain circulation ==> paranoid reaction


still paranoia has a better prognosis (تشخيص قبلى) than schizophrenia
(paranoia is a limited schizophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)

state of deafness --> paranoia

•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose: break between the ego and its object, a bond of identity
•Otto Rank: myth of the birth of the hero --> world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia

(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)

(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech


*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)


...................................

[Searles]

schizophrenic individual is struggling with the question, not so much of ‘how to relate,’ but ‘whether to relate’ to others

(Searles's interpersonal ideal:) connection = relatedness without merging

spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference (pygmalionesque love?)

psychological illness = a disturbance of natural tendency to heal others (patient's unconscious therapeutic initiative)

“all patients have the ability to ‘read the unconscious’ of the therapist” (Searles)

*acknowledging what the patient's transference materializes*

...................................

apass's aetiology: the philosophical study of causation of disease
(deriving from the Greek words aitia = cause and logos = word/speech) --> “tell me what causes your psychosis or art”

(thing that actually drives you crazy:)
other individuals [~ tormentingly insecure nature of the ever-ambivalent symbiotic relatedness in infancy and childhood] ==> schizophrenia
nonhuman environment ==> Anxiety(?)
symbolic bad object ==> depression(?) (always an active state)

(poorly integrated personality -->) externalized psychosis (~= “acting out”) ==> (situations which will) engender psychosis in other people (*whereas they themselves remain immune from overt symptoms* <-- in smaller/different doses of psychological assault of the very selfish people who externalize their “ideas” and “impressions” by telling effective stories about them, and so on. --> **determine psychosis in others and protect themselves from psychosis** @Arjang, Jassem, Sina, Ali )

psychological assault by parent upon the child (reflected in the child's earliest delusion) [--> meeting child's own defensive and aggressive requirements to avoid psychosis] ==> schizophrenia (symbiotic relatedness --> within an dependence-independence schizophrenic struggle the patient's belief is that if he should improve and become well in the normal sense [if he becomes an individual by separating himself psychologically from her], his mother would become psychotic)
(--Sina--> [*]adulthood: not getting crazy by others [people, pasts, events, objects, etc.] while connecting with them ~ #my definition of storytelling http://ajayeb.net/?q=figuring+out+how+to+inherit)
(a psychodynamic:) ‘desire for individuation ==> drive the mother crazy’ ~ ‘kill the parent ==> really grow up’


Searles's notion of “tends to drive him crazy” (~ schizophrenic) : the initiating of any kind of interpersonal interaction which tends to foster emotional conflict in the other person--which tends to activate various areas of his personality in opposition to one another


maintenance of a functioning ego

•inexperienced or unconsciously sadistic analyst (who makes *premature interpretations*) ==> drive the patient psychotic (weaken the patient's ego to gradually assimilate previously repressed material...)
•stimulate the other person sexually (in a setting where gratification is impossible--for example to behave in a seductive way toward the child) ==> conflict (between sexual needs on the one hand, and rigorous super-ego retaliations)

parental double bind
**simultaneous or rapidly alternating stimulation-and-frustration of other needs** ==Searles==> a disintegrating effect
**chronic pleas for sympathy** --> child's desire and felt-duty to be helpful

Jassem/Sina typically engaging the other in some politico-philosophical debate, in which he talks with machine-gun rapidity expressing himself with a virile kind of forceful, businesslike vigour (while the other feels quite strongly urged to argue some of these points with him, though not being given a chance to say much), while he strolls about on his mobile phone and posing himself physically irrelevant to the other --> when in-fronted with Jassem or Sina, one feels strange (losing your mind, feeling like an insecure child *engaged in such a broadly divided interrelatedness with a parent*) while that feeling appears as simply a ‘crazy’ product of one's own imagination

(is non-verbal interaction always sexual?)

nonsequitur (a typical schizophrenic technique)

(to get free from) the delusion that you had had not one mother but many different ones

a continual unexpected switching from one conversational topic to another without any marked shift in feeling-content is in itself a mode of interpersonal participation which can have a significantly disintegrating effect upon the other person's psychological functioning --> a remark for me in my lecture-performances, i can't cause disintegration on other people's thinking for the sake of art --> *to undermine the other person's confidence in the reliability of their own emotional reactions and of their own perception of outer reality* ==> de-maintain grasp on reality <-- (often) artist's failure to develop **adequate reality testing**
-the artist is not allowed to make the audience crazy!!?? @Jassem, Dominguez's “mental cruelty”

techniques of undermining of ego-functioning (in the form of: deliberate experiments in the service of totalitarian political ideologies, cultural undercurrents in present-day democratic societies, and in the lives of the schizophrenic)

-what are the effects of your work on other's ability of participation in life?

Searles: effort to drive the other person crazy can be motivated predominantly by a desire to externalize the threatening craziness in oneself
(-artists do that?)

*introjected crazy parent* (==> predominance of the one's own irrational and cripplingly powerful superego)
(parents, crazy or not crazy, are always introjected[?])


love and solicitude (in mother-child relatedness) ==> impel the child to collaborate with mother in this pathological integration
-child loves her mother so deeply that he sacrifices his own developing individuality to the symbiosis necessary to her personality-functioning


Foad's psychology: bringing upon himself any catastrophe which is sensed as being inevitable, in his effort to diminish intolerable feelings of helplessness and suspense in the face of it


(parents who are not sufficiently openly psychotic ==> child secret knowledge of parent's craziness -->) child's transference phenomena --> always one or another of the parents was “a little crazy”
[+ not to mention that one strugghng against a developing psychosis will project his or her own threatening ‘craziness’ on to one or another parent]


desire to find a soul-mate to assuage unbearable loneliness <-- a parental motive reflected in child's fanatical loyalty to the parent
(the very lonely person who hungers for someone to share her or his private emotional experiences and distorted views of the world) --> “tried out” her paranoid ideas on him (!!**)
[==> chronic schizophrenia]

our immediately and vividly real parent-image ==> a libidinally cathected reality

(to get free from) our magically ‘close,’ magically ‘mutually understanding,’ two-against-the-world relatedness with the parent

infantile-omnipotent relatedness between:
•the ‘sickest’ least mature areas of the parent's personality
•the patient's personality
==Searles==> obstacle to the patient's becoming well

transference development: therapist inevitably becomes deeply immersed in the subjective experience of magical closeness and shared omnipotence with the patient

(offered to the patient in childhood by the parent:) the *lure* to share the delights of being ‘crazy’ along with the parent


or:
(?Jassem or Sina's motive and genuine effort of) making the other person crazy (~ to weaken their personal integration ~ to diminish the area of ego's competency) <~/?=> *making the other person present* (Martin Buber) --> fostering of the other person's intra-personal and interpersonal integration or self-realization, (an effort to) to help the other person [seen as a child to become mature?] toward better integration ~ love

[for Guattari, the problem is not to reach an integrated ego, but to constantly change the composition ==> to unblock the situation (reactive assemblages causing paranoia) ==> to be able to do something else ~=> to become someone else]
[how to learn your way out of philosophy as philosopher ~= *to apprehend what you know* in a creative way]

loving relatedness --> responding to the wholeness of the other person (relating to a small child or to a psychiatrically ill adult, and so on)

}--> (which is fundamentally) a parental disposition [and the offspring might represent a miscarriage of the parent's wish]
-the problem is that you cannot always know the precise ego-capacities of the other person
-your interventions could be ill-timed or ill-attuned ==> disintegrating effect


questions regarding the processes of feedbacking in apass: to help the other person (not to become aware of truth about themselves or their work, rather) to construct figures about themselves and their relationships with others, figures which could provide the basis for rapid ego-growth and personality-integration. but sometimes it is too fast, the ego regresses, and it becomes an experience of developing psychosis

pathological defense:
•delusions
•hallucinations
•depersonalization
•

skilfully dosed and skilfully timed increments in psychotherapeutic participation [such as premature interpretations demanded usually in feedback sessions] ==> opposite effects (rather than an integrating effect upon the artist researcher)


the schizophrenic patient's individuality resides partly in his symptoms
(Searles > Szalita-Pemow)


?gratifications in the ‘crazy’ symbiotic mode of relatedness (despite the anxiety- and frustration-engendering aspects that it offers)

earlier struggle between child and parent to drive each other crazy --> evolving transference of the patient-therapist relationship --> to crack each other


the economy *feelings of confusion and unreality* for iranians, in public political realm of state and individual symbiosis, as well as intersubjective early childhood and parent symbiosis --> the ways it enters cultural imaginary and artistic expressiveness --> *how and why iranian artists often try to make their audience crazy* [-and myself included, che[...]