Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 02:24:20 -0500
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: Rolf's transference


>Rahul:
>-----
>Chris, have you unwittingly betrayed the way you view your role on this
>l'st?
>
>
>Chris:
>------
>
>Because I like your sense of humour I am tempted to reply,
>"That is an interesting suggestion. Would you like to say more
>about why you see me that way?"

Well, Chris, I find you amusing as well. Actually, far more than that.
Apropos of your homily on "transference," I should mention that I seem to
have transferred my intense desire to marry my mother onto you. It helps
that you have an androgyonous name. In fact, I've entertained stray
thoughts that you may in fact be as limp-dicked as Adolfo claims.

My major complaint with you is that, as you seem to imply in the very
message to which I am currently replying, you view yourself as therapist to
this l'st, with the rest of us being merely your laboratory animals -- I
think sometimes you medical types call them "patients."

>My paragraph in which I made more general points, was also "witting",
>despite being in appalling English.
>I believe that the opaque nature of communications on this l'st
>stimulates transference between individuals across many planes.
>For example some people really appear to feel they have met Stalin here.

Too much postmodernism, Chris. A real icepick and an imagined one feel very
different.

>Obliging someone else to accept your projections, is one of the
>power plays of this l'st.

How about beating your chest and roaring? Your analysis often seems to
apply rather to the African savannah (or substitute any "nature red in
tooth and claw" site, if you feel that Africa already has it bad enough
with its paucity of foreign direct investment) or a Wall Street trading
floor than to  this cultured, refined, and highly intelligent group of
people -- or perhaps it's the case that if you analyze people long enough
and hard enough on the basis of marginal utility or who ceremonially mounts
whom, they inevitably become debased? Well, I doubt that you attain to
quite that level of power all by yourself, but you do the best you can in
that direction.

>The experience of Foulkesian group psychotherapy is profoundly
>democratic, althoug in a psychodynamic group: it is not task orientated.

I have no direct experience of group therapy, nor of mass lobotomy, but I
rather doubt that such an experience is as democratic as it may sound.
Unlike you Brits, we get to elect our head of state, but I haven't noticed
too much democracy emerging out of it.

>An approach that emphasises the subtlety of
>the experiences  of the individual in a *social* context deserves
>serious favourable consideration by marxists.

Okay, but do you have to do it here?

Rahul




     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---