Matthew Bennett

Psychologist, author, lecturer, professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. All tweets are tentative hypotheses.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

Well said.

Women are culturally taught that to be assertive and agentic makes them undesirable, which is misogynistic for "worthless. " It's just adding insult to injury to then critique women for doing what they've been trained to do.

Women can, and will, overcome this trap, but its very emotionally expensive and painful to do so, and they need support and allyship in that effort.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@DrWinarick Are you okay man?

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@xgabegottliebx Yikes. Sending you some more books asap

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@Kathleenpsyd Reminds me of this passage I love from James Stephens:

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

Deleuze, in Anti-Oedipus, inspires us to liberate desire from familial capture and Oedipal coding.

This is one of my biggest critiques of Freud and classical psychoanalysis: their reduction of desire to the Oedipal triangle.

Desire is neither about daddy, nor mommy, nor you. It is not even, as Lacan claims, about lack.

Desire is productive, free, unruly, nativistic. It feels important to me that psychotherapy accommodate this principle.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@xgabegottliebx Sounds like you're confoozled.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@kentonklassen No! What should I read?

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@drglennsullivan Carson McCullers
Mark Twain
Pat Conroy
Stephen King
Herman Melville

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@FeistyKittyPie @OldHollowTree I'm just pollen your leg.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@FeistyKittyPie @OldHollowTree That's what happens when you try to wing it.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@KathleenWinche3 Vetiver

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

Because the Enlightenment places its confidence in rational consciousness, then Freud and Jung both become disruptive figures.

Freud remains largely within the disenchanted worldview created by the Enlightenment. He explains religion, myth, and symbolism as psychological projections rooted in instinct and childhood dependency.

Jung takes a different path, asking whether the symbolic forces discovered by psychoanalysis might reflect deeper structures of meaning that modern rationalism had excluded.

Freud pushes Enlightenment assumptions to their limit, but Jung is more radical in that he moves beyond them entirely (or rather, returns to assumptions predating the Enlightenment).

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@the_mel_jar Ahhh the arrogance of atheism.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@adgirlMM Freeze Frame by J Geils Band. I'm sure it's played on repeat through the PA system of hell.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@Blaze_YYZ @weiss_hadas The only thing worse than asking a boring repetitive question is asking a question you got from a table of questions

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@faramadini As long as it's atmospheric

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@the_mel_jar I hate pictures of myself as well.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@FeistyKittyPie @CatOfCrisis

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@proud_penelope @FeistyKittyPie

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

Shame is a free gift from the universe...we are probably capable of it almost immediately after birth (see "proto-shame"). I think some animals are capable of it...I am convinced dogs feel shame, but I'm not sure about cats, haha.

Guilt has to be earned and developed...it is a developmental achievement. Guilt is founded on an anaclitic capacity; you feel guilt when you feel attached to someone and may have transgressed or caused harm.

Some implications:

1. Whether someone is capable of guilt vs shame is diagnostic (sociopathic & narcissistic personalities may experience primitive shame behind rigid defenses but not necessarily guilt, and schizoid personalities avoid the whole viper's nest through what Lacan calls aphanisis).

2. Guilt rotates us over the anaclitic horizon and back again: we feel guilt exactly because we love and attach, yet guilt is a profoundly introjective function, pulling us back into ourselves, a recursive feeling that is part of the psychic braid of adult emotional life once we are capable of both anaclitic and introjective functions...what Freud called the self-protective and libidinal functions.

[Matthew Bennett @drmbennett]

@FeistyKittyPie @proud_penelope Not be a psychoanalytic fussbudget, but what I see in cats isn't so much shame but rigid defenses against shame :P