The Great Derangement
This dispatch is a brief reflection on the practices of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis and the ways in which these practices have informed my thinking concerning our deathly world of suffering.
My aim in writing this dispatch is to consider why and how it is that the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project is, for me at least, a psychotherapeutic project.
The perpetration of the War on Terra by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs, their proxies and redeemers, and their rivals and would be successors is the consequence of what has been called the “Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh. In his book titled The Great Derangement, Amitav Gosh writes, “[Today] our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of [rationalizing and rationalized] history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but towards our self-annihilation.”
Seeking to understand the genesis and structure of our suicidal pattern of rationalizing and rationalized history, I have found myself returning to Sigmund Freud’s work on trauma and anxiety.
In a book titled Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud proposed that our egos produce anxiety in us in order to keep us from spontaneously acting in ways that our egos anticipate will cause us harm. Our egos do this by calling to mind images of past experiences that (dis)simulate anticipated harms before they actually take place. Sometimes the images that our egos call to mind evoke traumatic events from our past. When traumas are evoked, our super-egos enter the mix and censor the images recalled, repressing and distorting these images before they fully come to mind. The effective result is this: on the one hand, our egos recall images that provoke feelings of anxiety in us and keep us from acting spontaneously; on the other hand, our super-egos repress and distort what is recalled so that we cannot properly make sense of what we are anxious about. Unable to make sense of what we are anxious about, we proceed to rationalize our inability to act spontaneously—that is to say, in other words, that we come up with abstract reasons to explain why we shouldn’t act spontaneously.
The person who has been traumatized is often, but not always, a person who is unable to spontaneously act in caring ways because they have come to anticipate that caring will cause them harm. Whenever the traumatized person feels the urge to care for themselves or to care for others, their egos call to mind images of experiences that have taught them to associate caring with harm but, at the same time, their super-egos repress and distort the images called to mind. The effective result is this: the traumatized person is apprehensive about spontaneously caring for themself and for others, but they cannot make sense of what has made them apprehensive about caring. In lieu of making sense of their inability to spontaneously care, the traumatized person will come up with abstract reasons to explain why they shouldn’t spontaneously care.
Anyone and everyone who uses abstract reasoning to justify denying themselves or others care is a traumatized person engaged in rationalizing their apprehensions. Freudian psychoanalysis teaches us that the only sensible justifications for denying care to oneself or to another are to be found in one’s concrete experiences, and not in one’s abstract reasoning. Thus, it is imperative (i) that we dismiss the abstract reasoning that we use to justify our inability to care and (ii) that we uncover the concrete experiences that we are simultaneously recollecting and repressing whenever we have inhibitions about caring.
Psychoanalysis tells us that it is foolish to believe that reasoned debate alone can convince a white-supremacist capitalist patriarch that blacks, women, and the unemployed are deserving of care. We shouldn’t devote so much time and effort to debunking claims that care is a privilege for the deserving by way of critiques of the Bible, or Spencer’s doctrine of “survival of the fittest”, or Guns, Germs, and Steel. The white-supremacist capitalist patriarch who believes that others are undeserving of care is not the victim of faulty reasoning. Rather, the white-supremacist capitalist patriarch’s belief that others are undeserving of care is a rationalization of anxieties that are the effective result of traumatic experiences that the white-supremacist capitalist patriarch is either too afraid or too ashamed to fully acknowledge to himself.
It is trauma, in other words, that has fueled the advance of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and the War on Terra for the past five centuries. Indeed, the production of certain kinds of traumas is both the means and the ends of the War on Terra. We must all be traumatized if we are able to rationalize the routine denial of the most basic forms of care (food, housing, etc.) to black, brown, and indigenous women engaged in providing for social subsistence while, at the same time, we are able to accept care being lavished in gross excess upon those white men who are most profitably engaged in capitalist relations of production. More profoundly still, we must all be traumatized if we are able to rationalize a way of life that allows us to disregard the fact that wildlife populations on Earth have plummeted by more than two-thirds in the past half-century due to ecocide, and to disregard the fact that half of the languages on Earth are likely to disappear over the course of the next century due to ethnocide. Indeed, simply put, the “Great Derangement” is the very fact of all of us being so traumatized, though in profoundly different ways and to extremely varied degrees.
Trauma has become an increasingly popular topic of conversation today, and this marks a profound and propitious shift. People are finding trauma everywhere now because trauma is, unfortunately, everywhere to be found, but healing starts by and with finding trauma where it is. Still, however, most commentators who speak about trauma today remain too afraid or too ashamed to fully acknowledge the depth of the trauma that is everywhere to be found, and so they tarry at the surface. Many, if not most, popular commentators focus their attention on the superficial Oedipal triangle: “Mommy, Daddy, & Me”. They refuse to acknowledge the ways in which Oedipal dramas have been part and parcel of the advancement of imperialist patriarchies for five millennia and, more importantly for our time, they refuse to acknowledge the ways in which Oedipal dramas became part and parcel of the advancement of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy over the past five centuries.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari made this same point fifty years ago now, when they published Anti-Oedipus in 1972. They pointed out that the Oedipal complexes of individual human beings diagnosed by way of Freudian psychoanalysis are part and parcel of the Imperial complexes of human societies diagnosed by way of an extra-Freudian psychoanalysis or “schizoanalysis”. Then, going further, Deleuze and Guattari pointed out that there is no therapy that can effectively treat the individual’s Oedipal complex without also treating a society’s Imperial complex. To treat the individual’s Oedipal complex alone, in the manner of a Freudian psychoanalyst, is to provide palliative care to the individual. Curative care, by constrast, must treat a society’s Imperial complex concomitantly with the individual’s Oedipal complex.
In light of all of this, it has become clear to my mind that my Four Essays on Reparations and my (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project are the anti-imperialist complements the anti-oedipal projects outlined in my earlier books.
My Triptych was about dismissing the abstract reasoning that I had been taught to cite when justifying my inability to care for myself.
Other Related Matters was about dismissing the abstract reasoning that I had been taught to cite when justifying my inability to care for others.
My Four Essays on Reparations and my (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project are about working through disturbing realities that inhibit spontaneous acts of care and (re-)creating motives, means, and opportunities for spontaneous acts of care.
