Lambs of Desiring-Repression

The disagreement with Orla over whether the question of “desiring one’s own repression” is an interesting or useful one to pursue has led me to reconsider the circumstances under which we took up the question in the first place.

It seems to me that what Carl and I really want to get at in asking this question is the POWER to convince someone else that they, “desire their own repression.”

It’s a useless and well-nigh pathetic thing to say to someone, or some group, “Your problem is that you desire your own repression.” That statement is met with denial, disbelief, and contempt at the intellectual presumption of the utterer that they know what someone else desires, that what is desired is harmful, that what is desired is repression, and so on and so forth. It’s also useless to sit back and take these reactions of denial as further evidence that what’s being witnessed is the classic response of the repressed – unwillingness or inability to bring the repressed contents into conscious awareness.

In pressing on how to speak responsibly of " desiring one's own repression" we want to cut through this -- but without cutting... We want to be able to speak objectively about someone else's subjectivity and have them accept our objectivity...but without the taint of authority discoloring our objectivity or their acceptance of our objectivity.

At one point in time, the psychoanalyst had power and prestige and some confidence in the "objective" curative or therapeutic value of the psychoanalytic method which corresponded with some faith in the same by the general public. Then, the maneuver of telling people what they “secretly, really” wanted had found some acceptance, but the decision of what consisted of real desire and what consisted of illusory desire by a “professional” always had an authoritarian and reactionary edge to it… Its acceptance by the patient also seemed to depend at least in part to succumbing to authority. ( Or internalizing it.) I don’t care a hoot for the disclaimers and provisos issued by “professionals” that their patients are merely being helped or aided in the discovery of their own “real” desire rather than having these “real” desires foisted on them by the "professional."

I have my terrible, painful and ongoing problems with authority – is it because authority is a fucked up mess and it’d be stupid not to have terrible, painful and ongoing problems with it such as it is, or is it because I have a poorly-resolved Oedipus complex? Or a little of both? Whichever way it is, who says? I think that we all agree that whoever it is who says does not say from a position of neutrality, and as far as I can tell, a wealthy bourgeois psychoanalyst, no matter how “liberal,” is going to see “real” desire as the desire which ultimately fortifies the status quo, and will dictate desire accordingly.

Of course, such an analyst will register my resistance to therapy as a desiring of my own repression – it will appear that I want to perpetuate and cling to what I have already admitted is a terrible, painful and ongoing state of affairs. And I don’t want to have my explanations and denials that my resistance is in response to other considerations treated as a further symptom of repression.

I don’t want to be treated this way, and I don’t want to treat others that way.

I do, however, continue to take seriously some notion of repression, and some notion of desiring repression as a fundamental mechanism of the perpetuation of human suffering. Therefore, I seek a “responsible” way to work with the concept of “desiring one’s own repression.”

What that “responsible” way comes down to, though, is wanting a form of power which will not exert itself as power… It will “convince.” Convince, but how? What will distinguish the power I seek from the power of the analyst which I claim to reject?