A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

While I did not find this article particularly deep, psychoanalysis has hardly been discredited. The core of the theory has been infused into almost every psychological modality practiced today aside from CBT, and studies have shown its general efficacy as a practice to be on par with others and in some cases superior. For the past 20 or so years, the field of neuropsychoanalysis under Mark Solms et al. has done a lot of good work understanding memory, dreaming, and higher cognitive processes stemming from Freud's ideas. Nobel Laureat Eric Kandel wrote in the 90's that psychoanalysis still constitutes the most intellectually satisfying model of the mind; Kandel has gone on to promote studying psychoanalytic ideas with modern neuroscientific techniques. Although several authors have been critical of psychoanalysis, having been criticized by some does not make an idea instantly discredited. There remains no clear way to verify a model of higher cognitive processes in the same fashion as a physics formula.

The toxicity of social media is that it plays into the darkness of our cognitive process and hightens tribalistic thinking. And in the article about social media, instead of recognizing this, the author chooses to use social media as a jump off point to pseudo intellectually glorify his tribe while bemoaning the oposite tribe. It's re-hashed fox/cnn with longer words. As someone who is non-affiliate to either tribe and finds the tribalism silly, the conceited sound of the article is jarring. I'm pretty sure the inspiration for South Park's smug alert episode was based on people who write this stuff.

The author talks about the good of social media as such:

> street uprising of the late spring felt like its joyous opposite—a future in which platforms were responding to and being structured by the events on the ground, rather than those events being structured by and shaped to the demands of the platforms. This was something worth our time and devotion... As people in the streets toppled statues and fought police...

And talks about the perils and evils of social media as such:

> promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation. These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers... That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” ... why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles?

Kitsch and fascism have been linked for quite some time. Fro Dwight MacDonald's "A Theory of Mass Culture" (1953):

When to this ease of consumption is added kitsch's ease of production because of its standardized nature, its prolific growth is easy to understand. It threatens High Culture by its sheer pervasiveness, its brutal, overwhelming quantity. The upper classes, who begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically, end by finding their own culture attacked and even threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed. (The same irony may be observed in modern politics, where most swords seem to have two edges; thus Nazism began as a tool of the big bourgeoisie and the army Junkers but ended by using them as its tools.)

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...

(The link is stronger than evident in this passage though most of the connections are more verbose than merits quoting here.)

> Hardly been discredited.

In 2015, psychoanalyst Bradley Peterson, who is also a child psychiatrist and director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, said: "I think most people would agree that psychoanalysis as a form of treatment is on its last legs."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/tell-it-about-yo...

Not really singing its praises.

> Nobel Laureat Eric Kandel wrote in the 90's

Sure and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said:

> If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can't all be there. It's too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time.

>Article mentions Freud's desire for death.

Yes. Which is not the same as a caricature of Freudian analysis.

>Freud theory is bunk. It's unprovable, can't be verified

Not everything has to be verified. This tendency of Anglosaxons/Analyticals to want to "verify" everything is bunk. Heck, it's itself unprovable and can't be verified (you can't verify the need for verification -- in the end you always get to some unverified tenets you need to begin, e.g. utilitarianism).

>To quote a poet "Brevity is the soul of wit".

To quote another poet: "I have heard many people say, "Give me the ideas, it is no matter what words you put them into.... Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words".