Bob Log #18: Therapy=Drugs? And RIP RUC? LOL

So I know I said I would resume updating 'regularly' once I returned to Essex, but obviously I was lying. The first three days back I basically spent in a coma, nursing a cold and jetlag. After that things got a bit better. Class topics have been getting increasingly more varied and thus more interesting: Jung and Nietzsche, Psychosomatic Therapy, and Transference have all been discussions thus far. The weather has generally been mild and sometimes even sunny. I've gotten back in touch with friends and professors, and I might even dare to be productive.

There's two things I'd like to talk about tonight. First I'd like to martial my thoughts about the idea of transference and how I think it actually might be a bit misunderstood, and how that in turn affects my view of psychotherapy. Then I'd like to discuss the impending demise of Rutgers-Camden.

Is psychoanalysis bullshit after all?

You can't study a subatomic particle without affecting either its speed or position. This is a fundamental problem in physics, and some have extended it to all of science. Can you study anything without disturbing it in some way, which would then affect your own results? How would the uncertainty principle come into play with studying animals, or say, people?

Freud coined the term transference sometime around 1910. Basically 'transference' is a term used in therapy to describe what happens when the patient directs feelings towards the therapist that were originally directed towards another person, something that presumably occurs without the patient being aware of it. Freud believed that these feelings were originally directed usually towards someone in the patient's childhood (e.g. the mother). He described the transference as inappropriate, and that making the patient consciously aware of this redirection of feelings was crucial. For if the patient becomes aware of why they project such feelings, they may in turn find the cause of their mental distress. Thus, to Freud sublimation of the transference was the goal of therapy.

This view has changed a little in the past 100 years, mainly because therapists now acknowledge the importance of the so-called 'countertransference'. The countertransference is what occurs when the therapist directs feelings towards the patient, presumably as a reaction to the patient's transference. Freud believed it was essential for therapists to be devoid of any countertransference, or else their interactions with patients could become compromised. Eventually though psychoanalysts began to value equally the countertransference, because observance of reactions and hunches towards a client could offer insight into the right course of action. One person who saw the value of this before anyone else was, not surprisingly, Jung.

Embedded in all this talk is the notion of projective identification. A projection is of course a package of feelings an individual directs upon another person. These feelings often have to do with something the person hates about himself and cannot totally accept. For instance, Bill hates his own job, and thus he becomes very scathing of successful people. Or Mary hates her own disorganization, so in turn she constantly harps about her husband's clutter. Projective identification is the phenomenon that occurs to the recipient of the projected feelings. Someone who has a cluster of feelings projected onto them will actually identify with their own feelings that match the received cluster, and in many cases will bring forth those feelings tenfold for the occasion! In terms of a couple, both parties project onto the other, and if things go sour a sort of dismal equilibrium is met, where both parties are living within the bounds of the transference. People tend to go on with their lives without any awareness of this subliminal information at work.

Cool shit, huh?

But notice how I turned to normal relationships, not therapeutic relationships, as examples. Because that's the key here: transference isn't something that happens solely in some therapeutic vacuum. It should occur in all of our relationships, to some degree with every person we ever meet. I would imagine this is one reason why Jung put value on the countertransference. But even he spoke of the therapeutic relationship within a sealed vessel, a matter of alchemy. But as one of our speakers this past week noted, the notion that you can keep the transferences of client and analyst confined to an office is not really all that feasible. Furthermore, if 'transference' is occurring all the time, who are we to define boundaries for it?

I think you can start to see the prelude to my gripe here: transference is something that occurs all the time, and thus the idea you can confine it or even control within the therapy room seems erroneous to me. The therapist is put in a position of power that allows himself to dissect or disintegrate the the projections of his client at will. This is especially true of the classical Freudian view; as far as I can tell the goal there of getting rid of transference is basically a way of absolving the therapist of any responsibility within the relationship. At least most psychoanalysts today put import on their own transference, but even then there is this presumption that transference is inappropriate, something to be rid of (especially for the patient!). I don't buy that.

What are hunches, what is intuition (and I at least partially mean that in the typological sense) without prior experience to base an inference off of? If I transfer feelings towards you that I originally associated with an abusive schoolteacher and a host of other degenerates who affected me throughout my life, is my hunch then- the feelings of my transference- probably trying to tell me something useful? Isn't this essentially just my instincts and past experiences at play to give me some information that may be useful for my own survival? If transference serves some sort of evolutionary purpose- if it's about learning and adaptation- then surely it isn't inappropriate, right?

Freud himself suggests that people constantly lie to themselves. This week in class we visited Nietzsche's parable of the ancient Hebrews. The story goes that, once the Jews were kicked out of the Holy land and enslaved by the Babylonians, they had a very hard truth staring them in the face: that maybe they weren't God's chosen people. They were too scared to accept what their instincts told them, so instead they created this written myth about a promised son who would fix everything, and thus the Bible was born. In turn this created a 'bad conscience' of repressed truths deep in the psyche of humanity, waiting to burst forth. This tale is very Jungian because it speaks of collective instincts that society would be wise not to ignore, but I think it is even more akin to Freud: we are faced with a truth too horrifying to accept, so we repress it and create a nice story to get around the whole problem (As an aside, I feel as if this is a great way of bridging Freud and Jung. Jung's collective unconscious encompasses those instincts whispering to us the truth. Freud's unconscious is the 'bad conscience' of repressed thoughts and GUILT. Thus, Nietzsche acted like a mediator between Freud and Jung well before the advent of either man).

Anyways... what if neurosis has less to do with the act of transference as it does with the failure to acknowledge what the transference is trying to say? When a man despises and secretly envies the rich, is it because his hunch that rich people are selfish is wrong? Or is the problem that he fails to acknowledge what he is afraid of: that there might be something wrong with him for not being successful, thus perpetuating his jealousy? If you acknowledge the truth, you are left with merely an insight. Similarly, if a girl gets a bad vibe about her boyfriend, is the vibe the cause of the problem, or is it the unacknowledgement of that vibe, thus leading to further psychic misinformation in the form of negative projections?

Thus my gripe is this: psychoanalysts assume they can manipulate conscious awareness of the transference in their favor. A woman falls in love with her therapist, who then explains to her that it is not he who she really loves, but rather what he represents, and that coming to grips with this will allow her to happily conquer her own life. But if the transference doesn't lie, then maybe she really does have feelings for him. If so, then this dissection of what's happening between them is just a cruel way of destroying something natural, something that perhaps the professional shouldn't have been meddling with to begin with. Because here's what seems to often happen afterwards: the patient continues to just pay the bill and sit at the therapist's knee, eager for validation, until something occurs in her life that makes the sessions no longer practical (e.g. moving away).

Of course not all therapies end that way (but I'll bet my Colchester bus card it often does). Nor do all therapists choose to freely manipulate the transference. So I am not trying to crucify all of therapy here. But I do think, if my logic about transference is right, that it serves some sort of innate evolutionary purpose, then there is something flatly cruel about causing a person to pour their heart out to you, only for you to tell them that whatever they subsequently feel about you is misguided. Then the patient is completely at your will, and suddenly psychotherapy is equivalent to drugs.

If that's true, I'm not sure what that says about either, other than that if you want to help people, you best understand the sheer responsibility you face, and you better have the balls to accept it when it comes rather than blanketing yourself with a cheap professional veneer.

The transference doesn't lie. But people do.

Goodbye Rutgers-Camden?

For those who don't know, Governor Christie of NJ has announced a plan to basically excise Rutgers-Camden from the Rutgers community. Rutgers will keep UMDNJ, the major medical school in South Jersey that was affiliated mainly with Rutgers-Camden, but the rest of RU-C will be bartered off to Rowan University, just twenty minutes away. Wow!

There's a lot of outrage about this, though I'm not sure why it's such a surprise. If I recall correctly this rumor has been floating around for more than a year. It is a poorly kept secret that Rutgers New Brunswick has always seen the Camden campus as not really being part of Rutgers. Unlike the many Penn State campus, that all tend to work together and send many students to the main hub for the final two years, transferring (ha, we meet again) from Rutgers-Camden to Rutgers-New Brunswick requires jumping through seven hoops of fire and accepting the insinuation that the education at Camden is inferior to the one at New Brunswick. Honestly it's probably easier to transfer from RU-C to most other schools in the area than it is to the 'sister' campus. New Brunswick doesn't want Camden students, wants nothing to do with the RU-C community, and has probably been looking for a way to dump off RU-C for a long, long time.

The current economy and apparently some sort of financial issue with UMDNJ probably presented the right opportunity to pull this plan off. I have little doubt that a bunch of smug fucks in Piscataway hatched this plan long before Christie ever announced it. Of course everyone is blaming Christie because they're passionate liberals and he's a jackass Republican (plus: he's really fat!), but come on. Rutgers, I mean the real Rutgers, not the fake one in Camden, wields so much power in that state that there's no doubt it's Dick McCormick and friends who wanted this to happen. I also suspect the plan was in place for some time that Rowan would take over. For three years now I've heard talk about Rowan increasing their presence in Camden, and all I can think is: where? The decrepit church across the street? The crumbling RCA building? It seems so obvious now that they wanted to take the Camden campus; there's nowhere else to go.

For some reason though a lot of people at RU-C seem to be having trouble accepting all that, most bafflingly the not-new idea that New Brunswick could give a shit about Camden. No one wants to acknowledge the fact that Rutgers-Camden was never really Rutgers, but just a (yes) glorified commuter college that happened to hold the same name. It seems people are really embarrassed by that truth and don't want to accept it (aha), so instead they're blaming UMDNJ or Rowan. A lot of people are claiming they don't want a degree with the Rowan name, partially because Rowan does not have the reputation of a research school (fine), but also because they claim the Rutgers-Camden name is simply better. Lol.

Listen, friends. I went to RU-C myself, and I have a lot of friends who are still there, and who are going to be adversely affected by this change, either because their degree requirements will change or disappear entirely. And there are a lot of people in the faculty and staff who I either consider friends or like quite a lot, and they're going to get the shaft here and I think that's bullshit. In other words, there's a lot of people I like at that place and I don't want to see harm come to them. But let's be real: the Rutgers-Camden degree is not superior to the Rowan degree. In fact, in some cases it's probably inferior. A biology professor told us once about a student from the business school who finished with a 4.0 and applied to a firm in Philadelphia, that told the student they couldn't trust his grades because they were from Rutgers-Camden. Out of eighty biology students a year, on average four get into medical school. Someone I know with good grades was going to apply to University of Pennsylvania for graduate school, but was told not to by her professor, stating "you're not going to get into U Penn from Rutgers-Camden." Rutgers-Camden is not Rutgers, and it (and perhaps the Rutgers brand in general) is not some awe-respected name. This poorly kept secret is apparently not known to you, but it is known to everyone outside of Rutgers-Camden. The idea that Rutgers-Camden is suddenly a million times better than Rowan is just stupid. Rutgers-Camden is a community college masquerading as a state university with a few graduate programs, many of them absolute shit. It's the truth.

The real problem is that people will lose jobs and students will suddenly find themselves with unclear and entirely new degree requirements. Some might lose their departments altogether. That's going to affect a lot of people I like and truly is unfair. Dick and Wendell apparently sent out emails explaining the situation and assuring there would be time for dialogue, but from what I've been told in-between-the-lines the truth is clear: this is a done deal. Anyone thinking that discussion and passionate protest is going to make a difference is either has some sort of pathological fixation with student activism or otherwise still buys into the myth that Rutgers-Camden ever had any say to begin with. Everywhere on facebook people are planning protests and discussions and filling their walls with big red Rs. It's like sending flowers to make nice with a girl who doesn't like you, a girl you never even dated, but maybe in your infantile mind you believed you really did. Rutgers doesn't want anything to do with Camden. Why does Camden still clamor for that love?

The Scarlet Raptors have never been the Scarlet Knights, never have been, never will be. But that delusion has been the source of all problems at Rutgers-Camden. It's why it takes two months to get any paperwork processed. It's why you have a campus center that acts they're a hip 24/7 campus when it's really a bland bunch of buildings in fucking Camden. It's why you see a mix of burnouts and pompous fucks teaching there, because they're in this crossfire between state funding and the reality that no one there is doing research that is worth a shit to anyone. It's why you have a ridiculous situation where they've spent millions on a new cafeteria, a new gym and new dorms while the primary building for classes rots with sewage, roaches, and the occasional dead heroin addict. It's how you can have administration clamoring for more students, year after year, with no resources to back them up. It's why the biology department decided it was time to open a PhD program with no building or staff. Rutgers-Camden is not Rutgers, yet it is entirely dependent on Rutgers for everything. All money and data go through New Brunswick first. All power goes through New Brunswick first. But the willing ignorance of that is what causes all the problems for Rutgers-Camden, and precisely why this is now happening. You had it coming.

(As an aside, this is all also why certain alumni couldn't wait to get the hell out of dodge.)

It's been a sinking ship for a while guys. They've just taken the flag with the Big Red R off the top of it. Hell, I don't want to see people lose jobs or get fucked over, but this plan probably does make sense from New Brunswick's perspective. Instead of protesting the inevitable, people should start making plans to find a better boat.