The world is positively agog at Pope Francis’s admission
that he consulted with a female Jewish psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires. He worked with her once a week for six months to resolve some personal
issues and found the experience enlightening.
Of course, for anyone who knows about psychoanalysis, six
months of once-a-week treatment is not psychoanalysis. Back in the day, when
psychoanalysts were rigorous, such treatment would have been called
psychotherapy, the bastard cousin of the real thing.
Author James Carroll offers some reflections on it all for
the New Yorker. He seems to imagine that this is a momentous event, but merely
shows that he does not really know very much about psychoanalysis. He
certainly does not know about how the discipline fared in France after World
War II and how it is faring in Argentina today.
In France where people understood the affinities that
psychoanalysis had with Catholic theology it was common for Catholics, even
priests, to undergo treatment. A certain number of them left the priesthood and
became psychoanalysts. Under the aegis of Jacques Lacan French psychoanalysis always opened itself to Catholicism. Priests regularly referred parishioners to
psychoanalysts. For a full account one should read some of Elisabeth Roudinesco’s
writings about Lacan and psychoanalysis in France.
As it happens, you cannot understand the place of
psychoanalysis in Argentina if you do not understand what was happening in
France. In the Freudian world, Argentina was merely a colony of France. In
Buenos Aires everyone—and that means everyone—consults with psychoanalysts. Not
seeing an analyst would be more uncommon than seeing one. In fact, if you live in Buenos Aires and aspire to belong to the intellectual elite you are obliged to have undergone psychoanalysis. It's like an initiation ritual into a cult.
As best I can tell, psychoanalysis is still alive and well
in Argentina… and even in France. It serves as a bulwark against the temptation to become part of the Anglosphere. After all, how else can you explain why
Argentina, a country filled with bright well-educated people, is such a
political and economic basket case? The answer, if you care to think about it,
is that the intellectual, political, media and business elites have all been psychoanalyzed.
Thanks so much for all this uplifting stuff. Let's examine...
ReplyDeletePsychoanalysis is common in Argentina. Pope Francis is Argentine. Pope Francis admits to undergoing psychoanalysis.
Curious. We traditional Catholics feel we're undergoing psychoanalysis everyday with the secularized $#%@ coming out of the modernist Vatican.
Pure, unbridled nonsense. Every. Single. Day.
We're marginalized, called names. Yet while the number of people in the pews goes down in Novo Ordo parishes, they unanimously agree those Latin reactionaries are crazy. "Child breeders", women with veils, proud men at the end of the pew, etc. Certainly too many children. Good gracious, they're having more than 2.3 children!!!
Simply crazy. Nutso.
More and more people are filling the pews at traditionalist parishes conducting Tridentine Latin Mass. So frightening... people wanting to purely live out their devotion to their Church. Shouldn't they go to psychoanalysis??? Why not?
Goodness, I am so eager to see the fruits of Pope Francis' liturgical reform. Can't wait to see the theatrical broomstick wiccan allegory for transubstantiation, complete with fog machines and a laser light show with a suspended priest flying through the air to Depeche Mode instrumentals. That'll be a hoot. No wonder Lord Acton said what he said of the pope of his day...
Pope Francis is a complete disgrace.
So now we know Pope Francis' psychoanalysis is not uncommon. It's an entry point into a membership in the intellectual elite. Francis is a trained Jesuit, and no doubt wants to understand the intellectual elite. Perhaps he was seduced by it, but Jesuit training is very powerful (after all, they are Catholic militants indoctrinated to take over the world). That's what we are told to believe. God's Marines. Si.
Anyone have any doubts?
It's certainly clear Francis is definitively not a part of the Anglosphere, yet his attraction to psychoanalysis might make him a French philosophical colonialist. Most curious.
Since psychoanalysis is the rationalization of primitive/primordial emotion, we now understand Francis' obsession with Climate Change. He's been psychoanalyzed into a French person, and it's overcome his Jesuit Catholic training. This assumes the Jesuits are still actually Catholic, which is quite suspect these days and empowered by Pope Francis' subjective pantheistic mysticism pontificated to a media world writ large, and one that can hardly understand Jesuitical distinctions.
Behold, the media rock star pope. Can fill a studio of 50 dolts, but can't fill a stadium of 50,000. What a leader. Nifty.
I wonder if South American economies have anything to do with Climate Change... or whatever they'll call bad weather tomorrow.
Ducky. This guy is perfect for a world with abundant confusion. I am spiritually inspired.
More of his psychoanalysis, please... por favor.
Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said... We traditional Catholics... More and more people are filling the pews at traditionalist parishes conducting Tridentine Latin Mass.
ReplyDeleteI had heard priests used to do mass in Latin, but didn't know what it was called before. So it changed in 1970?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tridentine_Mass
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Benedict stated that the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal is to be considered an "extraordinary form" of the Roman Rite, of which the 1970 Mass of Paul VI is the ordinary, normal or standard form. Since that is the only authorized extraordinary form, some refer to the 1962 Tridentine Mass as "the extraordinary form" of the Mass.
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IAC: Pope Francis is a complete disgrace.
I thought the pope was infallible? It does look complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility
Of course recalling that the pope in the middle ages was elected based on who had the money, its easy to accept we all can't depend on simply following a man, if our own conscience demands something else.
I did like Pope Francis's joke about "not needing to breed like rabbits". I wonder if he got that from God or his Analyst or his own intellect?
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/20/378559550/pope-francis-says-catholics-dont-need-to-breed-like-rabbits
My sister has mental illness, and was hospitalized for 6 months in her 20s, and I met her 30-something roommate who had 14 children and she told me proudly she planned to break the world's record for having the most children. I don't know if the Pope's advice would have helped her, but I must hope.