Bergson's Ghost

Mind is like the fiery path torn by the last rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders of the spent rockets that are falling dead.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

🧵On the human or a Manifesto for Cyborgs.

1/ We tend to imagine “the human” as a stable essence: a dialectic between the body’s biological priors and the cultural narratives that program us. This interplay is supposed to define who we are, what we mean, why we matter.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@deontologistics @rechelon My 2.8% Neanderthal genes would like to have a grunt with you.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@deontologistics @analytichegel @HeXXiiiZ Indeed. Yes I am. I will see myself out! 😶‍🌫️

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@deontologistics @analytichegel @HeXXiiiZ Girard is the theory of desire for people who want desire to be engineerable. Kojève and Lacan are what remain when you realize the problem is not just that we imitate one another, but that human wanting is bound to recognition, negation, and lack in ways no feed can truly master

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@bengoertzel The Human Use of Inhuman Intelligence

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@MiTiBennett Raw dog it next meal. No salt.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler Freud had a superb sense of humor! Of course it is dry, sardonic and period Jewish-Viennese...and also built less around obvious punchlines than the absurd logic by which people justify themselves. And of course he wrote a whole book about jokes! But good to hear you are bestys.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler Alan Bass’s work on “concreteness” is useful here. A client’s failure to “connect” may not indicate an absence of transference, but a defense against the differentiating fact of the analyst as another mind. The apparent nonrelationship may itself be the relationship being enacted

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler “Not connecting” does not mean there is no transference; disconnection may itself be the relational pattern being enacted. But if the client cannot or will not examine that pattern the treatment may fail or require a different therapist.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@nntaleb @bryan_johnson Münchausen by Biomarker

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler Of course. But resistance is broader than negative transference, and neither requires prior “rapport.” Freud’s point is that the patient’s hostility, suspicion, idealization and attachment all enter the treatment as repetitions to be interpreted and worked through.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler None of this is to claim that psychoanalysis has a monopoly on therapeutic benefit. But if you are going to reject Freud, reject what he actually argued, not a pop-therapeutic caricature.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@DreamyGeorgian @JonathanShedler Importantly, the patient does not wait for a working alliance before transferring. The patient arrives disposed to repeat old relational patterns. Good analysis does not manufacture transference through rapport, it creates conditions in which transference becomes legible.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@kylejunlong I agree with that. Freud's ideas are deeply embedded in our culture, yet much of what circulates under his name bears little resemblance to what he actually wrote.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@drmichaellevin @LeoBez7 @MacrinePhD A stable two-headed Levin phenotype would be quite something.

[Bergson's Ghost @BergsonsGhost]

@kylejunlong That is a correction of pop-Freud, not Freud. For Freud, repetition in the transference is already a mode of remembering. One need not recover a historically exact “root scene.” Fantasies, screen memories, constructions, deferred meaning all complicate any simple model of trauma.