Psychoanalysis is quackery. It was progressive at a certain point, but it got pretty fast reactionary.

Systems getting warped by the cultural/social/economic conditions they exist under… I go to therapy every week and while I have derived a lot of benefit out of it, it is also persistently painful going to a therapist who talks in individualism and trying to figure how I can translate that back over to something that will make a difference in my life in the long-term. It honestly feels sometimes like a language barrier, even though we are both speaking in fluent English. I always get the sense they mean well and are doing everything they know how to do, to help me (and some of it does help) but I can also sense the underlying “the system works, it’s you that is broken” undercurrent of it that is not explicitly said, but is expressed in the solution focus always being on elements like “you have no control over others and can only change how you react to things.” I think if I were to say that I want to tear down the system in those exact words, they might actually support me to a point, but from a framework again of individualism and how does the individual do this as an individual without being too forceful toward other individuals.

And like, I don’t expect them to say “you have nothing to lose but your chains” and they could probably get in trouble depending on what they were advocating for in a therapy context. But then it comes back to, what is the status quo and what is considered something bad to advocate for, within that. And that’s where under capitalism, at least in my experience in the US, it’s confined to the individual. The very cause of wanting to make a difference is isolated out into a sort of personality trait, like what movies you like to watch, rather than an organized movement that goes beyond any one person. And in this way, it allows a sort of shallow “diversity” where people can be all sorts of directly conflicting things, as long as they don’t try to translate those things into organized behaviors. What I would call individualist therapy, in my experience, seems to encourage this as a solution, that you sort of figure out how to co-exist alongside those who are radically different or retreat from them and find others more like you, rather than directly confronting the contradictions and either forming alliances on clear grounds or rejecting one another entirely on an organized level.