Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis get lumped together as mental health treatments, but the difference between them is crucial. Understanding that difference helps make sense of why mainstream culture marginalizes not only psychoanalysis, but also astrology and divination. 1/19

The Lacanian psychoanalyst Raul Moncayo characterizes psychotherapy as a narrative discourse that “supports certain social ideas and helps the individual ‘adapt’ to society. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on thoughts’ empirical truth and utility. 2/19

Psychoanalysis, in contrast, “unifies the subject but does not necessarily make [them] normal from the point of view of morality or social values” and in practice it “temporarily suspends social values and authority to reveal the unconscious signifying chain.” 3/19

The aims are totally different. Psychoanalysis aims at revealing the subject to themselves, and leaves it up to them how to take that out into the world, whereas psychotherapy has works to help the person mold themselves to a normative image of how to be in the world. 4/19

In my own practice as a therapist, I primarily work with people with so-called “treatment resistant mental illness.” It’s intriguing to think about “treatment resistance” bearing in mind the above distinction between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. 5/19

If “treatment” has been experienced as a way to coerce them into a mode of being that does not fit for them, why shouldn’t the patient resist it? For some people, being ill may be the only available means of holding onto their own subjectivity, rather than surrender it. 6/19

This business about analysis “revealing the unconscious signifying chain” is crucial. For Lacan the unconscious is not within us but exterior to us: it has to do with how the meaning of our speech/thought is not a function of our intention, but of the discourse of the Other. 7/19

We depend parents, laws, cultural ideals and norms, etc. to make sense of our own desires: they reflect it back to us. Moncayo writes: “This means that the subject does not really know what they are saying until the meaning of their statement comes back from the Other.” 8/19

In psychoanalysis, the analyst works to enunciate the unconscious meaning of the patient’s speech to reduce their alienation from their true desire. Psychotherapy already knows what the patient should desire, and aims to align thoughts and feelings along “correct” lines. 9/19

The way mindfulness strategies and self-help tools function primarily to ensure people get up on time and feel happy enough to work 40-hour work weeks represents a particularly striking example of the sort of normative encouragement modern psychotherapy often entails. 10/19

In mainstream psychology, psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor, and it is hard to imagine that this is not ultimately because psychoanalysis is essentially disinterested social values and cultural morality and therefore does not benefit the right people in the right way. 11/19

(Side note: this is not true of all branches of psychoanalysis. Ego psychology’s explicit aim was the adaptation of the conscious ego to everyday life, and so what I am writing about does not necessarily apply across the board.) 12/19

For astrologers, heavenly bodies are structured like a language, and for Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language: “we only grasp the unconscious finally when it is explicated, in that part of it which is articulated by passing into words.” 13/19

Astrology used in a divinatory sense can be a method of accessing meanings exterior to one’s own conscious understanding in the service of coming into relationship with a discourse that can reveal an ever-unfolding truth of one’s particular desire—that is, one’s fate. 14/19

Encountering how astrology is viewed within mainstream psychology, it gets derided as a lesser alternative to psychotherapy, at best a kind of “quasi-therapy” that mimics therapeutic discourse outside of the range of therapy’s legitimate, scientific authority. 15/19

Rather than attempting to legitimate astrology as a form of therapy, though, couldn’t we see its liberatory potential as more like analysis? As a way of “speaking with” the Other, of unifying the subject through speaking an ancient language that can work against alienation? 16/19

Divination, in the sense of speaking with the gods, is a method of encountering the Real and unknown that works through and exists beyond us. This is the liberatory work of accessing and coming into discourse with the unconscious in its most mysterious, awesome sense. 17/19

Although there certainly could be (and are) forms of astrology that are not liberatory in this sense, it is not hard to understand why astrology and divination must remain marginal to the extent that they are not solely tools for coercing humans into modern social norms. 18/19

Viewed this way, the unconscious is not within us or part of the psyche: we are within the unconscious, and our psyche is part of the real unknown beyond us. Divination has liberatory (anti-alienating) potential to the extent that it is a dialogue with this unconscious. 19/thread