Home · Book Reports · 2018 · Tracking the White Rabbit - Essays in Subversive Psychology

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Thoughts

This one of very few books that actually made me angry. Most of this subversive stuff I look at from a scholarly perspective, but this, this seemed like the debasement was that of a true believer, a useful idiot. When you read Propaganda or similar works you can at least appreciate the evil genius behind them, but this is more the result of years of being exposed to the cultural degradation present in the modern university. The product being an intelligent person that spews utter nonsense like “violence through words, words can KILL”!

I would not suggest reading this, not even this review let alone the whole thing, unless you want to get a look into the mind of the snowflake precursor. An old school, born in the 40s, feminist, lesbian, Jew. Cringe.

The author has been fully indoctrinated in Jewish victimhood. Holocaust! Anti-Semites! The Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years! Maybe because Jews are subversives? This is literally a book, by a self proclaimed subversive Jew, that promotes the subversive change of culture. The Jews are mentioned every few pages.

Both pro-feminist and anti-male points are belabored. While this is more “common” today, this book was published in 2002 and the essays it contains were written decades ago. Women are portrayed as powerful and compared to mother earth’s volcanoes that can tear apart man’s work, but women, at the same time, are also oppressed…

Given these positions, it is not surprising that Lyn is a lesbian. She claims that even the word lesbian is wonderful because lesbian starts with L, like lusty. But why not lame? Honestly I don’t even know what else to say to this “point”. Men are magnificent (or malignant)? Heterosexuals are Happy (or heretics)?

“victims are likely to be individually victimized as women, people of color, children, animals; or collectively as Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, lesbians and gays, old people, handicapped people, and so forth.” And so forth seem to allude to everyone but men is victimized. How is this not completely divisive? I suppose it is, and also not a surprise when the whole book is about subversion.

Now she talks about “apparent victimhood”. “The apparent antidote to victimhood is paranoia: trust no one, use deadbolt locks in your home, practice safe sex in your own bed, buckle up in your car, wear a hard hat and keep a cool head at work, know your rights when dealing with smooth-talking salespeople, police, and therapists.” Calling paranoia what is simply reasonable action, perfectly sensible if you are a subversive.

There is a whole chapter on how heterosexuals are lacking something and can’t love “the same” are “neurotic”. It goes on to say that society programs us to be heterosexual… what about the other animals? Sure there is homosexuality here and there, but it is the odd state, not the default. Again, isn’t this exactly the same as the claimed oppression that gays are suffering under? If I said gays were programmed by the media, I would likely be ridiculed as a homophobe, but if a lesbian says the opposite it is acceptable.

The last chapter equates melancholy, which the author self identifies with, to intelligence. She uses comparisons to Greek gods as evidence, something that is done regularly throughout the book. Even her so-called intelligence is used to usher in another level of victimhood; she has to contend with understand the cruel world we live in. As if some ignorant fool can’t suffer.

Lyn Cowan, I pity any of your clients. I wonder what would be worse: you psycho analyzing someone or a lifetime of numbing drugs? Quite the tossup.

Exceptional Excerpts

“though his [Lewis Carroll] moral character as a Christian clergyman was impeccable, and his scholarship as a mathematician more than acceptable, he seemed capable of high excitement only when in the company of young girls, whom he photographed in the nude whenever possible. Fortunately he is remembered for his writing and not his photographs, which, lovely and poignant as they are, in our day would probably land him jail, or at least banned from the Web."

“Before words had lost much of their meaning and power to move, hatred could be spoken, articulated, pronounced – in the form of a curse – and the effect was as forceful as any physical weapon. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can truly kill me."

“It is practically impossible to say anything about sex without saying something about gender. In our culture they are so confused and undifferentiated as to be synonymous. Considering the fact that they have been confused for about 5,000 years, it is no small effort to try to separate them. I believe that one of the major tasks of our species is to begin to differentiate and separate ideas of gender from ideas of sex."

“Scientism is the religion of our time, with psychology one of its sects."

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 01: Tracking the White Rabbit Notes on eccentricity (or, A quick tour with Alice through Wonderland)
• 02: Feeding the psyche: Junk words and corn-fed music
• 03: Women and the land Imagination and reality
• 04: “Taking The Dark With Open Eyes” Hidden dimensions of a psychology of abortion
• 05: False memories, true memory, and maybes
• 06: Styx and stones - Hatred and the art of cursing
• 07: The archetype of the victim
• 08: Homo/aesthetics, or, romancing the self
• 09: Sexual encounters of the third kind
• 10: Blue notes: Some reflections on melancholy

· Preface

• The author puts forward the argument that, although “psychology” and “subversion” are not usually thought of as belonging together, they should be.

• Begins with a quote from Alice in Wonderland.

· Introduction

page 2:

• I want nothing less than to change the culture, to make it a psychological, soul-serving culture.

page 3:

• it [Jungian psychology] is subversive in the political sense as well, attempting to change the culture by altering individual perceptions of and participation in it.

page 4:

• psychotherapy lends unconscious support to our culture’s preoccupation with upward growth, forward progress, and a morality based on law instead of Eros.3

page 8:

• In clinical practice, a “successful” analysis is a corrosive process, eating away like acid at the dearest values, the most obvious assumptions, the most cherished images of who we are, corrupting our sense of the world as a place where we might expect justice if we are innocent (for we are not innocent), truth if we do not consciously lie (for we often lie unconsciously), honor if we do not betray family traditions (but we must betray them if we are to grow up), and acceptance if we conform to the bedrock values that have been ingrained in us (but the price of acceptance is too high, we cannot conform or we die of suffocation).

· 01: Tracking the White Rabbit Notes on eccentricity (or, A quick tour with Alice through Wonderland)

page 12:

• [Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson / Lewis Carroll] He was fastidious in habit and though he lived alone, he corresponded with a broad circle of literary, religious, and political friends, including Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti.

• though his moral character as a Christian clergyman was impeccable, and his scholarship as a mathematician more than acceptable, he seemed capable of high excitement only when in the company of young girls, whom he photographed in the nude whenever possible.

page 13:

• Fortunately he is remembered for his writing and not his photographs, which, lovely and poignant as they are, in our day would probably land him jail, or at least banned from the Web.

page 23:

• The experience of being in confusion, emotional disarray, nowheresville, out of whack, off center, is much closer to our realities, much closer to how it really is with us, and is the sure and certain sign that we are alive.

• A sign we are alive or a sign that the oligarchy is working to keep us confused by telling us confusion equals alive?

page 24:

• 2 The real Alice Liddell, Carroll’s heroine, bears no resemblance to John Tenniel’s famous illustrations, but actually looks like a dark-haired young femme fatale, beautiful and older than her years. Looking at Dodgson’s lovely photographic portrait of her, one can see the archetypal figure of that Victorian obsession, la belle dame sans merci, even in such an obviously child’s face and demeanor. Morton Cohen’s biography of Dodgson (Lewis Carroll: A Biography, Knopf, 1995) documents that nearly every man who met the young Alice fell in love with her, and that only the intervention of Queen Victoria herself prevented one of the royal princes from pursuing marriage to her.

· 02: Feeding the psyche: Junk words and corn-fed music

page 26:

• The whole language [in Orwell’s 1984] consisted of one-syllable words, a few prefixes and suffixes, words purged of all ambiguity, complexity, and ambivalence.

• It did not contain only one-syllable words. The chocolate ration has been increased… Newspeak itself is 2 syllables.

• even though I’m a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn. I believe in the devil because I hear him everywhere – he’s a Newspeaking sweet-talker, just as he was in the garden of Eden, and he lives in our language. He is not the clichéd, ugly red devil of Christian tradition. The devil I’m talking about isn’t even evil – he is merely hollow, like many of our words. He creates the illusion of depth and significance in words that have neither. He puts nice words in our mouths so that we don’t notice our hunger for, and absence of, not-nice, high-protein words. He gives us mass-produced, one-dimensional simplistic words.

• The devil is a hard-core right-wing literalist and is the enemy of metaphor, imagination, romance, and real, plain, emotion. The language of modern psychology has become, for many of us, the language of our daily lives, and it is the devil’s native tongue.

• Huh? The devil is a “hard-core right-wing literalist” and the psychologists speak his language?

• But I can tell you, what the devil most fears is this: if women ever bring the fullness of our emotional and spiritual power and authority to consciousness, continental plates will split apart and reshape the face and core of the planet and the Great Mother Earth will have so many splendid multiple orgasms that she will shift on her axis.

page 28:

• Mentalspeak is a language of the patriarchal mind.

• Second mention of the patriarchy. Is it men or the devil keeping you down lady?

page 32:

• If we are to find a vocabulary that begins to express the fullness of our lives, we may have to stop looking to the Father who creates merely by speaking the disembodied, desexualized Word, and start looking to the Matrix, which is our sexual body, with its sensate imagination.

• I am convinced we will not find the words we need in the vocabularies of masculinized Western institutions.

page 35:

• as we enter the male world as girl-children

· 03: Women and the land Imagination and reality

page 38:

• Our attitude toward land was conditioned more by our Jewish history of migrancy than by the fact of actual ownership in modern America. After centuries of displacements, it is hard to settle down in just a generation or two.

• Does the subversive Jew ask herself why they were “displaced”? I wonder if it has less to do with Jew and more with subversion…

· 04: “Taking The Dark With Open Eyes” Hidden dimensions of a psychology of abortion

page 45:

• Artemis brings to consciousness the necessity of choosing oneself, a choice that confronts every adolescent entering adulthood. But it is a choice especially difficult for girls, who are still taught from birth to choose someone else – a husband, for example.

• Boys aren’t taught to choose wives. “You complete me.” Seriously, this book is horrible, a subversive man-hating Jew spewing her rage in flowery language. She is the kind of teacher that helped create the clusterfuck we see in modern universities.

page 47:

• the unborn child’s “claim [to life] is equal [to the mother’s] – a life for a life.” I think it is precisely this inability – or refusal – to differentiate between mature life and nascent life, between conscious, responsible, independent life and unconscious, reflexive, dependent life, that constellates Artemis and draws her to the scene.

• So anyone that is dependent is ok to kill? Seems the complete opposite to me. We should protect the nascent dependent life with more fervor than the mature independent life.

page 49:

• The first worst crime is to imagine that she actually, not rhetorically, has power over her body – that she has the power and authority to decide whether to bear or not to bear a child conceived in her womb – even a divine one.

• For all the talk about how men dominate and control, it seems odd to say that women have “power over [their] bodies.” Second, women do have the authority to decide whether to bear children. It is called not getting pregnant (rape aside). You might WANT to have sex, but it is your choice…

page 50:

• On a less profound level, cultures of longer histories than ours accuse Americans of youth worship and of indulging in the longest collective adolescence on the planet. While we elevate the child’s longings for comfort, safety, and feeling good as our highest values, the rest of the world regards us as irresponsible, undisciplined, and self-absorbed. Consider the astounding proliferation of “help books” on the theme of “the inner child” or “the child within.”

page 53:

• In the absence of provision for the child’s food, housing, medicine, future education, the promise of meaningful work, and/or the absence of love, desire, and responsible maturity in the procreators for their child, the maternal concern for the well-being of the child may consider abortion the best course.

• She makes the decision in maternal consideration of the child’s viability – the same consideration that moves Artemis to kill a wounded fawn rather than force it to live crippled and defenseless.

• Can we kill all the cripples then? I mean, out of maternal consideration of course.

· 05: False memories, true memory, and maybes

page 57:

• The question which in recent times has generated so much heat is whether memories of childhood abuse recalled years later in adulthood are accurate recollections of literal events, or whether they are distortions: vague, confused half-fantasies, or even downright false fabrications.

• “false memory syndrome”

page 63:

• This alone should make us stop and wonder why we assume that sexual experiences are so much more harmful to children than continual verbal condemnations from parents, public racial slurs and humiliations from schoolmates or teachers, or force-fed religious and ethnic bigotry from the child’s community. All of these childhood experiences constitute “child abuse,” and each of them is a violation, a violence perpetrated upon children that leaves scars for life. Some may be even deeper than those we expect from sexual trauma.

• Words = violence, this lady was ahead of her time. I know I can’t tell the difference between name calling, a broken eye socket, and sexual abuse…

• the most pressing question in the debate is not about the accuracy of memory but about the interpretation of what has been experienced.

• What does it matter that a woman or a man in pain comes to therapy and remembers, thinks they remember, isn’t sure they remember, wants to or doesn’t want to remember, that they were sexually approached, coached, touched, seduced, molested, or raped twenty, thirty, forty years ago? It matters greatly because they say it does. It matters because for human beings the subjective reality of pain and emotion has primacy of value and importance. It matters because their psychic experience is real, and true, even though it may not be perfectly factual.

· 06: Styx and stones - Hatred and the art of cursing

page 71:

• Hatred is also stupid. It is an attitude based on stupid ideas about racial or religious or sexual superiority. At the time of writing, there are more than 2,000 websites on the Internet that promote this sort of stupidity and ugliness. My personal hostility towards these sites is not because they lack decency (which may also be said of half the politicians now holding office), but because they pollute the intellectual environment with excremental stupidity, and there is already enough shit in the world.

• Funny, I think this book is intellectually polluting shit. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

page 72:

• if we take time to hate well, and give hatred enough rightful time and attention, we may begin to mitigate some of the actual violence in our world – not all of which is physical

page 74:

• Before words had lost much of their meaning and power to move, hatred could be spoken, articulated, pronounced – in the form of a curse – and the effect was as forceful as any physical weapon. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can truly kill me.

page 75:

• When I speak of “truth” and “truthfulness” here, I do not mean it in the sense of a moral or legal or historical truth. I do not mean truth as a collective moral value or as literal fact. Truth is not necessarily fact, just as facts may, in some sense, “lie.” I mean “truth” in the sense of personal integrity, an accurate presentation of your character.

page 76:

Cosmic loving, as in “I-love-humanity,” is as useless and ridiculous as “I-hate-Jews(Catholics, Blacks, gays, telemarketers, whatever your group preference).”

page 83:

• Styx guarantees that we remember the truth of Auschwitz as well as the truth of Christmas.

• She can’t get away from it. Must… reinforce… Jew… hatred…

· 07: The archetype of the victim

page 86:

• The apparent antidote to victimhood is paranoia: trust no one, use deadbolt locks in your home, practice safe sex in your own bed, buckle up in your car, wear a hard hat and keep a cool head at work, know your rights when dealing with smooth-talking salespeople, police, and therapists.

• This is paranoia?

• The victim embodies those qualities that conflict with, threaten, or challenge that value system. The most obvious example of the previous century is the Nazi (mis)perception of the Jews as an “infectious” and powerful people who would poison the purity of Aryan society and take over the world.

• Citation please. Oh, none of the “anti-semite” stuff is cited? Maybe we can cite some Greek poetry instead…

• victims are likely to be individually victimized as women, people of color, children, animals; or collectively as Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, lesbians and gays, old people, handicapped people, and so forth.

• What about victims of the oligarchy? The financial pharaohs? Nope, that would get pretty much everyone on the same page, the author must keep us divided and fighting among ourselves.

page 91:

• consciously and voluntarily giving up our fantasies of total independence and self- sufficiency. We cannot save ourselves, and we are not sufficient unto ourselves. Only someone with a pathological compulsion for autonomy and do-it-yourselfism would argue this.

• Only a true commie would argue otherwise…

• As a collective example, the Jews historically have been forced to enact the victim role with such repetition that the very name of the people has become practically synonymous with “victim.” Photographic images of skeletal death camp inmates have given us an austere visual definition of archetypal victimization, which is why Jews began referring to the Nazi genocide as a holocaust, literally a “burnt offering.”

• “Forced to enact”? Maybe there is something to the repetition? Maybe, as so clear in 2018, being a victim comes with TONS of benefits? Jews can parasite via Wall Street usury, spread their hypersexuality from the Hollywood hills, and genocide Palestinians… but if I say any of that I must be a no-good Jew hater anti-semite! The Jews are the victims. And “victim” is the perfect shield to deflect from any wrongdoings.

· 08: Homo/aesthetics, or, romancing the self

page 95:

• Women and men learn to interpret the eroticized aspect of animus or anima (unconscious masculine or feminine components in the psyche), projected on to a literal opposite-sex person, as romantic love. Not only do we so learn to interpret, we learn to experience this projection in a culturally predetermined way: finding beauty in what is not like ourselves because we have learned that that is where beauty resides, finding our sexual desire flowing out toward a figure we recognize as Other because we have learned that the “other” must be literally so

page 97:

• A heterosexual woman or man suffers a loss of soul by not knowing that figure in the psyche that delights in a homoerotic aesthetic.

• A homosexual woman of man suffers from no progeny.

• No one is one-sidedly sexually oriented, except those neurotic souls who are completely identified with one sexual polarity or another.

• This is what aggravates me. You want to be gay, go for it, but don’t tell me anyone that isn’t a little bit gay is neurotic. How would she feel if I said all homosexuals are a little bit neurotic because they don’t understand what it is like to identify with their true soul (or some similar nonsense)?

page 98:

• The psychic image of Narcissus, gazing into the pool with desire and lovesick eyes, does not want an explanation of itself, it wants itself. That sweet, beautiful youth of not-yet-fixed gender is itself an image of wanting, and of wanting denied.

· 09: Sexual encounters of the third kind

page 105:

• Psychology – certainly depth psychology – should be more subversively concerned with changing the culture than with changing the patient, because what the patient needs – any patient, any of us – is not to learn how to adapt to the status quo, but how to change the status quo so it won’t make us sick.

page 106:

• It is practically impossible to say anything about sex without saying something about gender. In our culture they are so confused and undifferentiated as to be synonymous. Considering the fact that they have been confused for about 5,000 years, it is no small effort to try to separate them. I believe that one of the major tasks of our species is to begin to differentiate and separate ideas of gender from ideas of sex.

page 107:

• Our assumptions about gender and sexuality are rooted in ancient, unconscious notions about women, men, reproduction, and sexual pleasure, all of which long ago were cast in the form of theological ideas,

page 116:

• Heterosexuality is the locus of one of our culture’s root neuroses

• Heterosexism and its correlate, homophobia

page 118:

• Imagine what might happen if we began to think of sexual promiscuity as merely boring. Imagine sensual interest in another person that is not harassment; imagine delight in the sexual awakening of children that is not incestuous, not guilt-ridden, not exploitive.

page 119:

• In the last century we have had two revolutions initiated by women: the first came in the 1920s when women got the vote in America, left the Victorian invention called “the home,” went to work, and threw off the restraints of corset and convention. Then, after the catastrophic regression of the 1950s, the second revolution came in the late 1960s- early ’70s. The first revolution had to do primarily with political and economic freedom (and that revolution is far from over); the second revolution had to do with intellectual and sexual freedom (and that revolution is far from over). I think the next revolution – starting, I hope, no later than next week – must be a radical exploration of the sexual imagination,

• Torches of Liberty…

· 10: Blue notes: Some reflections on melancholy

page 124:

• In the Renaissance, it was understood that too much thinking made one melancholy. It was not just that much learning, study, and scholarship was taxing on the brain, it was also that these heady pursuits changed you – changed your attitude toward life, and led to thoughts that heavily burdened the soul. In the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:18) the preacher says, “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,”

page 133:

• Scientism is the religion of our time, with psychology one of its sects.

• The first thing I agree with!