I was going through some old photos when it suddenly struck me why it is that psychoanalysis has repelled me for so many years. As a theory, and a cult, it has been on the stage for more than a century, yet it keeps reading life through the prism of literary criticism.

Psychoanalysis emerged more or less at the same time as cinema, and many have written about the impact of psychoanalysis on cinema (and film studies), but if you look into any possible influences the other way around, there is not much to find, for it's all "text"

The subconsciousness and its production are often experienced in AV terms, thus the concept of psychoanalysis was to split the inflamed tissue of personal trauma and the "story" about it, so it can operate on the latter in a safe, sterile, verbal environment.

To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, we've been living in the age of memories' mechanical (and digital) reproduction for quite some time, however, any seasoned psychoanalysis therapist will tell you that audiovisual media is just an object, what matters is our rapport to it.

"Serious" intellectuals picked up the torch, so the academic canon of XX century is basically a long string of guys theorizing only what can be ascertained and corroborated with words (as opposed to AV "entertainment"), because everything else felt impure.

But this is not today's reality, this is not who we are, especially in this particular moment, stuck in some existential limbo, looping our own audiovisual memories (and others' too) both as a lullaby and as a vague promise of a future.

Unless I missed something, our civilization still hasn't discovered a "healthy" way to engage with audiovisual excess, we're constantly swinging between various versions of eating disorders for the senses and the mind.

Without an updated psychotherapy theory and practice that encompasses AV (and especially social media), mental illness is left in the hands of clinical psychology and psychiatry, where it is being treated, well, with more pharmakon.

Nowadays, psychoanalysis is a profitable institution demanding clanified obligation and ritual repetition of the Father's way, with Lacan de facto being an exception that proves the rule.

Anyway, I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, really, please do your best.

Currently reading about dialogue in film, only to be reminded about psychoanalysis, again, with its rigid framework of slave-narrative and master-narrative (excuse my 2000s IT lingo), with the dialogue merely fueling libidinal transactions.

We can be at once Hawksian at work, Eustachian with friends / family, Godardian on social media... What most psychotherapy practices aim for, not just psychoanalysis, is establishing a separate, clear channel of communication where all the others can be scrutinized or toyed with.

The pandemic fused these frequencies with their carefully groomed codes and styles into an overwhelming cacophony, hatching meme after meme yet very low on meaning (which is supposed to be true in any post-%whatever% situation but 2020 aligned all this in a single-screen context)

What we may need is not simply a revised version of psychotherapy but a whole new, post-2020 media theory capable of making peace between the various dialogues and channels we exist in. There's no going back to how things used to be, we need to move forward.

We live in a constant, consensual submission to the gaze of the Other (not only in psychoanalytical but also sociopolitical terms), amid voices, gestures, libido without bodies. The question is how to telos instead of this perpetual flirt with psychosis.

Because, let's admit it, inhabiting an environment post-somatically, where communicating oneself (with the ready-made, fungible tokens provided by web 2.0) as a way to communicate with the others, is a bad eternity of e2e4.

I should read more often.