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Slavoj Zizek on Applying Psychotherapy to Culture

September 29, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer 2 Comments

Here is a somewhat startling video of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek talking briefly about trying to apply the insights of psychotherapy (which deals with individuals) to cultures:

Watch on youtube.

His remarks about being able to relate an "anonymous social field" reflect Heidegger's conception of "Das Man," i.e. our tendency to conform to social norms, seeing through eyes that are not authentically our own.

As Žižek says, society, in establishing what counts as normal, employs "pathological distortions, cuts, and so on." This means that cultures themselves can't be classified as "normal" or "abnormal;" these terms only make sense within a culture. So you can't legitimately categorize a culture itself as pathological, at least using the techniques of psychoanalysis.

I'm not sure this should worry us, though. Using Freud's analysis in Civilization and its Discontents, we can certainly rate the health of a culture based on how much repression it necessitates and the quality of freedoms and other benefits it grants in return, so an extremely restrictive society can be accurately characterized as repressed, uptight, self-flagellating, and otherwise sick in a manner that is admittedly metaphorical but not unclear because of that.

For a little more Žižek, see his analysis of permissiveness in today's society in this video: we have a culture that allows us freedom, but cultural forces (presenting themselves as the best science of the time) urging us to indulge without danger, and thus likely without real satisfaction.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: Things to Watch Tagged With: civilization and its discontents, philosophy blog, philosophy podcast, Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Zizek

Comments

  1. burl says

    September 29, 2010 at 4:47 pm

    A very Jungian perspective – bringing the entire zeitgeist to bear. As I recall, Jung had stated at one point when he entered pre-war Nazi Germany that he could feel dark tensions all around.

    Reply
  2. xtian says

    June 7, 2014 at 11:47 am

    Notice Zizek’s hand gestures when he says “normal”–it’s the ‘normal distribution’ bell curve!

    Reply

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