Words Are Not Enough ("Clinical" Review)

I like to pretend I'm helping people

**This is not an actual review, just some words that I wrote while watching a movie.

Kant was famous for two things: the Critique of Pure Reason and having people name their dogs after him when he published it. But Kant, far from trying to destroy Reason, was attempting to save Reason by subjecting it to a immanent critique of its power. Thought is much more than thinking, because thinking can be so automatic, and loves to cling to ideas of a Good and Common Sense. What’s the other thing we always say about Common Sense: oh yeah, it isn’t Common at all. Which is generally met as a sentiment that the people who “have” Common Sense are somehow elite, but the true expression of this statement is in “the powers of the false.” Common Sense is a fiction we live by, a way that makes life easier; thought, on the other hand, is pushed to its furthest limits precisely when it is challenged by an event. All Events are violent in this way.

What does it mean to “confront your trauma?” Imagine you’re a psychiatrist that actually does talk therapy (kind of a misnomer, I would say), but imagine that then you get savagely attacked by one of your patients. What’s the outcome? You now sit on the Other side of the therapeutic dialog while simultaneously carrying on your own private practice where you just sit and stare at your patients like a couple who can’t decide where to eat, (“What do you want? I don’t know, what do you feel like having?”). This should be good.

Plasticity is a common enough topic in the sciences: your brain can make all sorts of new connections. But you never hear about Negative Plasticity, which is essentially a concept that Catherine Malabou talks about in her book, “The New Wounded.” In it, she describes how trauma and cerebral events are capable of producing people that are, after the event, strangers to their own former identity.

Imagine now that you’re the psychiatrist and you’re sitting across from a man who says these same words: when I look into the mirror, I see a stranger. How do you proceed? Do you attempt to explicate with the former identity, or engage with the new identity? Do you attempt to stuff a square peg into a round hole and converge the two? In other words, how do we make an immanent critique of the subject?

You could force them to try and remember things from their past, have them reconstruct the trauma bit by bit, effectively suggesting that reminiscence is key to healing. Or you could take the road of Proust and attempt to find those sensuous qualities that launch you back into the past. I’ll have you notice that during “Clinical,” she suggests reminiscence for her patients but is continually “triggered” by involuntary sensuous qualities that bring her trauma back to life; which means she’s either a hypocrite, or she has yet to understand what healing effectively is. Maybe there’s a pill for that.

What we need to inject into the conversation is that some form of spirituality is essential. I’m using essential on purpose because we are talking about essences. As anyone can tell you, spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean religious; and it shouldn’t. What does it mean, then? It means finding a strand that links two disparate objects, two disparate identities, two senses of Time. Spirituality is ultimately an understanding about Time--it is an invocation of a future based on your understanding, imagination, and feelings about Time itself. It is no coincidence that all talk of religion seems to gravitate toward the idea of Eternity.

So how does a traumatized psychiatrist find their spirituality in the biomedical model? They are confronted, once again, with the same trauma revisited on them, literally, by the exact same person as before. Time, remember? Repetition, yes? And then you could give them a frontal lobotomy with a corkscrew but even that won’t help. Because you see, spirituality simply means finding another style, another frame of discourse, as Life or God or whatever pushes you further along a timeline. It is a matter of leaping as much as it’s a matter of walking a tightrope. You are explicated by Time, essentially.

Final thought: the psychiatrist who represses finds the style of a lunatic. But wait, there’s 20 minutes left: what could happen except for a turn toward redemption? Who is the one that is redeemed, though? The traumatized subject or the originary one?

There’s no reason to choose one over the Other. To make a ramified series of identities, is this not how one manages, finally, to escape and cast-off their excuviae?

Which in this case means violently tear off someone’s face.