Last Edited, July 05, 2023: Made some quick clarifications.
From how Bobby’s name came into being, all the way to uhhhhhhhh….Yes! I was going to publish this a few days ago, but I forgot I had it prepared because I fell asleep where I had a dream of a pineapple.
Cheers,
B.
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“Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.”
―
I read this passage the other day when I was looking up quotes for my other projects. It’s kind of interesting to think about. In psychoanalysis, fear is a form of repression. It is a way for you to block an experience that you are unconscious of. In certain ways, fear is “somewhat” similar to anxiety (they often get confused by the person experiencing it). It is reminiscent to how some people gets fear or anxiety when they talk to someone they love or like, which is similar to what Freud is describing here.
But let us forget about psychoanalysis for now. Can you imagine not admitting or talking to someone you love because you were scared? Do you think you will regret it in 10 years where you might ask yourself, “What if I wasn’t scared where I spoke up and admitted my love for them back then?”, “Would my life be different?”. And if you truly love them, it will be the “What if…” that will rip your heart out because deep down, you know you could’ve at least done something about it and possibly changed how the game was played.
Personally, I don’t like to live with regrets. Well, I mean there are lots of things that I regret not doing, and things that I regret doing because I could’ve done better LOL. But I would rather say something stupid, embarrass myself in front of everyone, shit my pants, and get a heart attack talking and admitting my love for someone than to regret never trying. Even if it might not work out or if they hate me for it. And maybe 10 years down the road, even if I failed, I won’t feel as bad because at least I know I tried my best.
Love without risk is an impossibility.
Remember that. 🙂
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Chinese and English Name
I won’t give out my Chinese name on here. But it consists of three characters. The first character is my last name in English. The second character means “Thought” or “Think”. The third character means “Handsome”. My parents wanted me to grow up to be thoughtful and handsome which I definitely am. 😂
My English name was given by me when I was 4. As I mentioned last time, my parents was going to name me Eric when we were preparing to move to Canada. One day, I told them I wanted to be called Bobby because it sounds like a dog name. So I kept it ever since. I’m not even joking.
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Is there such thing as someone without an unconscious mind?
Yes. A person without an unconscious mind is pretty much a psychotic.💀
Psychosis becomes a possibility when the analysand continuously fails to see the ambiguity to their conscious thoughts—even after the analyst had been producing the proper space for them to prop their desires for the first year or two of analysis. Psychotics represses nothing and lets everything lay bare in their minds. In a clinical setting, an entirely new strategy needs to be used by the psychoanalyst to help psychotics.
Similar to perversion, psychotics are less common than neurosis. Perversion however, is often seen as the most rare to be diagnosed in people as a clinical structure. Perversion requires more introduction to various concepts that I haven’t spoke too much about, especially the concept of denial. If I remember correctly, Freud used the German word “Verleugnung” (did I spell that right?) that is often translated as “disavowal” in English. But some translators and analysts believes “denial” is a closer term to describe what Freud meant. I think it’s mostly preference. Perversion is a really good place to introduce one of Lacan’s most famous diagrams called, “the graph of sexuation”. In psychoanalysis, human sexuality is inherently perverse.
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Things I would tell my younger self…
If someone is trying to get to know you, open up to them.
Because bonding with others requires you to share information about yourself.
Stop thinking so much
Learn to stop and smell the flowers. Live for the day. Appreciate the small things. Enjoy the moment.
It’s okay to not be productive every once a while
Being a “productive” member of society probably causes more harm than good to our world these days. The world already produces too much—much more than we need.
Don’t try to fit in.
Being normal ain’t your thing man. Being a weirdo is much cooler. 😜
It’s okay if you suck at sports.
Your body will wither with age, but your mind will continue to grow. Elevate the limits of your mind. Be smart af.
Sometimes, you can’t cure stupid.
So you don’t. Learn to know when it is not worth your time and effort.
You can’t always change the world, but you can try to change yourself.
As human beings, we are very limited to what we can do on this planet. Sometimes, the most we can do is try to be the better person.
Some people will think you are scary to talk to…
If they ever give you a chance, prove them wrong.
Don’t be afraid to love unconditionally.
Not everything has a reason. If you have a reason to love someone, then you don’t love them. Real love is unconditional.
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The best compliments…
Are the ones that aren’t about your looks.
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What are INTJ 4w5 like when compared to other INTJs?
INTJ 4w5 is the rarest INTJ out of all INTJs (they make up around 3% out of the 2% of all INTJs). They are the type of people who can be really social, attends social events but will mysteriously vanish from the face of the Earth after. 4w5 INTJs are also the type of people who turns art into science, and science into art. They deviate from the stereotypical INTJ who are often really blunt, logical, with a lack of social grace. 4w5 INTJs are usually much less blunt and understands the concept of socialization relatively well (developed Fi; though there are exceptions). They are also more creative, fiery, emotional, and expressive like INFP and INFJ. This is why type 4 INTJs often gets mistyped as INFJ.
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The funniest jokes…
In our day and age, there is nothing funnier than telling the truth.
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Why do people suck?
Idk. I really hate people sometimes lol.
The other day, I was ranting to a friend about why some people are so fake. And he was like, “That’s everybody”. It’s not completely true, but it was funny. 😂
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Social Media
I don’t use social media very much. I rarely scroll through my news feed on Instagram these days. If I follow you and I like your posts, it either means your post appeared first on my news feed, or it means I deliberately clicked on your profile. I think my online daily usage of Instagram went from something like 20-30min a day to 2-3 minutes in the last two years….It’s probably a good thing.
It’s not applicable to everyone, but a good chunk of social media is like a popularity contest and who has the most followers and subscribers and who is more “influential”. I spoke a little about this before, but I definitely think social media has become one of the most protruding psychoanalytic and capitalistic symptoms of 21st century with platforms like TikTok and Instagram as prime examples.
My friend always sends me all these degenerate TikTok videos that always makes me lose hope in humanity. But they are also really funny because people are actually so stupid LOL. I also sometimes notice how some of the “self-help” quotes on Instagram are borderline self sabotage and it’s really funny because there are so many likes for it. Like damn, our world is doomed and this therapist needs a therapist.
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On Politics, Spectacle, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
The other day, I was reading about politics and voting. It reminded me of Guy Debord’s super famous book called, The Society of the Spectacle, where he talks about how spectacles (images and ideologies) are produced through advanced capitalism that reify itself via the people in its system. Basically, this famous position suggests that humans do not own commodities and ideologies. Instead, it is objects, commodities and ideologies that owns and controls humans which makes the latter endlessly reinforce the system (it is equivalent to the big Other in psychoanalysis where we serve the Other’s desires; the more we reinforce this system, the more alienated people become).
An example of the spectacle can be seen when people are going to work and tries to get along with their bosses and co-workers where they see these relationships as “normal” or “natural”, even when it had been perpetuated to them throughout their entire life in different mediums (other people, TV shows, etc.) where these relationships consists of many ideological manifestations that are reinforced by society. People are essentially taught how to behave and act. Yet, those who recognizes this spectacle imagery of worker-boss-coworker relationship can’t do anything about it. Because if they don’t get along with them, they might lose their jobs and become homeless, etc. As such there is no one who can escape the spectacle, even if they consciously recognize its ideological manifestations. It’s sort of like how people perpetuate the dramas from “Reality” TV shows into their lives or the romantic dating scenes in movies; or from things that their friends tells them.
As Debord might say, what ideology once was, society has now become. We are living in the ruins of ideas that the world once thought was ideal for society. We can think of how people built cathedrals in light of their world views during specific periods of time who thought their ideologies would last until humanity’s extinction. Yet, these structures has now become nothing more than tourist sites. We don’t see these cathedrals as ruins due to the effects of the spectacle and simulations, where its beauty seduces us.
Hence the spectacle reinforces the system by trapping people in it’s imagery (ideology). From your job, human relationships, TV shows, politics, all the way to democracy and your “freedom” to vote. This is why I once pointed out how the views on freedom from the Freedom Convoy in Canada is naïve and lacks critical insights. If we follow Debord’s thoughts, perhaps voting left, center, or right might not change the fundamental system of contemporary society because the image or simulation of change is the spectacle created by society to reinforce its structure. Society produces a simulation of change without any real fundamental changes.
Loosely speaking, this is one of many reasons why some renown leftist intellectuals like Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou tells people to not vote in France (when I say “leftist”, these people are radical leftist thinkers). As Badiou once pointed out, today’s political left and right provides no alternatives to another system that could possibly solve all the issues that are at play in capitalism (i.e. inequality). The current political system simply offers, as Badiou puts it, conservativism (right), and reformism (left) which amounts to the same fundamental system at the end.
Advanced capitalism is out of control where corporations and governments endlessly makes people (re)produce the spectacle without them realizing it, from commodity objects all the way to your social and political identity. As long as people reify these spectacles that are perpetuated and sold to them, they do not care about your mental health (even if they say they do) as long as they are making money. People think they are free, even when they are dominated by the spectacle so to become a certain identity—or in a psychoanalytic sense—to become the Other’s desires. From this perspective, if you want to see authoritarianism at work, all you need to do is look at contemporary society. Oppression and violence is already here at full force that silently lurks behind your everyday lives. This is why I once spoke of how society has become a system that breeds mental health issues which gets turned into a vicious cycle.
This influential idea of the spectacle is built off of Karl Marx and a renown intellectual named, Gyorgy Lukasc. It has a history that goes back to the Frankfurt school in people like Theodor Adorno and even Herbert Marcuse. Parallel to these ideas, Marcuse took on the position that modern consumerism shapes our subjectivity which produces desires that aren’t necessary in their life (Marcuse was well known for using psychoanalysis as a tool for cultural analysis). As a result, consumer society ends up not just producing more goods, it also creates and reinforces mental illnesses of all sorts where it destabilizes people’s identities. This idea is also seen in people like Frantz Fanon.
Nevertheless, the spectacle can be traced to German Idealism, particularly G.W.F. Hegel and his famous essay called, “Master-Slave Dialectics”. This essay from Hegel had a profound influence on intellectuals including Karl Marx; and in 20th century France like Louis Althusser, who formed the French “New Left”, where he pointed out how things as simple as a handshake perpetuates the image of the spectacle. Hegel also influenced Jacques Lacan in the field of psychoanalysis which he famously coined as the “Masters discourse” that is associated with the “Capitalist discourse”. Jean Baudrillard also wrote a famous book that talks about the spectacle called, In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities.
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once described the common spirit that existed in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (hermeneutics is the study of interpretation). Ricoeur used this term because he saw how these figures tried to uncover the truth behind all the illusions and deceptions of reality in all sorts of radical ways. Clearly, we can also see this radical spirit in Debord, who is likely one of the most revolutionary social thinkers of his time. Such spirit of Marxist critique was also discussed by Jacques Derrida in a famous book called, The Spectres of Marx. Over time, this spirit of criticism has become a tradition that many renown contemporary intellectuals has embodied in their way of life and thinking styles.
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What other disciplines are you familiar with?
I studied quite a bit of film theory and its relationship with philosophy back in the days. I’ve also studied a lot of Eastern philosophy (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism). I am also decent at narratology, the study of narrative structures and techniques that are found in books and films. I am also a fan of casual reading about string theory, general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and neuroscience.
One of my favorite research paper from grad school was about narratology and psychoanalysis. It was a very ambitious essay. I ended up liking it a lot! Maybe I will share it on here one day.
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On removed sections from my previous posts
In case anyone visits my old random thought posts. I removed a few sections from some of them because I think the person I wrote about reads my blog (85% certainty; if she does, she is probably a PhD in Bobbyism by now). I believe I said something on here that made her upset. Anyways, I just want to thank those who read the deleted writings. It means a lot to me. I still have the removed sections backed up Lol.
I remember I once told her that no matter what happens, I just want her to be happy regardless of where she is or who she is with, and I want to keep it that way. It’s true, and there is no way around it: I love her very much—much more than she will ever know. I want what’s best for her. I want her to be the best version of herself. I also want to get to know her and be with her too. But unfortunately, those aren’t my choices to make. Hah! Coming to think about it, it has been 3 or 4 years (maybe 5) since I encountered her.
You know, I still run into her sometimes. My intuition tells me that she wants to talk, but she is afraid to talk to me. But I’ve been wrong before. Maybe she hates me and doesn’t want to talk to me LOL. Either way, I honestly don’t want to think about it anymore. One of my friends mentioned her the other day and my response was the same. Right now, I just want to focus on other things. If she shows up one day and feels comfortable enough to say hi, then I would welcome it gladly. If not, then it is what it is.
Life must be lived by looking forward. But it can only be understood by looking backwards.
The future is always to come!
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The Love Letter (Freud)
“What does ‘thinking of you’ mean? It means: forgetting ‘you’ and frequently waking out of that forgetfulness (without forgetting, life is not possible). Many things by association brings you back into my discourse. ‘Thinking of you’ means precisely this metonymy. For, in itself, such thinking is blank: I do not think you; I simply make you recur (to the very degree that I forget you). It is this form (this rhythm) which I call ‘thought’: I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing:
Why do I turn once again to writing?
Beloved, you must not ask such a question,
For the truth is, I have nothing to tell you,
All the same, your dear hands will hold this note.”
—Roland Barthes
The book is written in “fragments” or short essays where each passage is influenced by different thinkers, from Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Rilke, Proust, Goethe all the way to Plato. Each piece is fluttered with intensity and grandiosity as Barthes animates human desire and attempts to grapple love into written words. It is rich in thought, culture, and history. I often feel like younger generations don’t really know what romantic means until they read this book (Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena comes really close; Kafka is an incredible writer). Reading Barthes always puts a smile on my face. He reminds me that there were people like him who existed in this world. Very rare, indeed.
Here are a few more well known passages from the book:
“Am I in love? —Yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
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“Someone tell me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a good thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”
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“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”
❤
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