From Peter Pan to Queer Theory: Bret Alderman on Eternal Youth and the Myth of Deconstruction

[@VeritasElysium931]

I found my people!! I have had these thoughts before ever going to grad school. Thank you for your continued commitment to these issues in the psychology field.

[@johnstuart1688]

I’ll share this. I totally get the idea about Judith Butler and Peter Pan, but I’ve started to think of her more as a Loki figure…revelling in disruptions, enjoying the discomfort of others, mischievous and somewhat malevolent; also with a marked sense of superiority to lesser beings. This is quite appropriate too, as Loki is seen by many as gender ambiguous. I’d be interested to know what others make of this characterisation.

[@nonpareilstoryteller5920]

Indeed. And to come down to reality from myth; a malignant narcissist with none of Rousseau’s “pity” for the human beings that are the butt of her joke.

[@Banana04218]

Excellent conversation. Re the fancy syntax and the pseudo intellectual garb of allegedly sophisticated language - I would say that this speaks to Butler and Derrida's grandiosity (manifestation of narcissism. Narcissism being at its core a state of arrested development)

[@AndyJarman]

Great conversation. Ideas like this made up a lot of the appeal of Jordan Peterson pre COVID. It must be hard for Leslie being married to Benjamin, I hesitate to mention that Benjamin features the Lost Boys motif in a number of his episodes. It's a very fertile avenue to explore, I think the identification of Butler and Derrida as labouring under this state was particularly insightful. My sympathy and admiration goes out to anyone who has set themselves the task of comprehending the Postmodernist's texts, let alone going on to digest and critique them from a psychologist's perspective.

[@joschmoyo4532]

Oh I'm looking forward to this one.

[@normanshadow1]

That was great! I'm a senior, and I have a high-school education and this made total sense to me. This gives me a new perspective on what has been taking place.

[@B463L]

Molecular behavioral genetics have started to make the practice of diagnosis look somewhat silly for heritable disorders. There are something like 80 different genes where a bad loss-of-function mutation will predispose you to a severe case of autism -- consider just how much of a molecular mosaic will get slapped with one label and shipped off to the public, and then consider that humans always try to lump stuff into categories for the sake of understanding it. You have a list of labels that vaguely describes the far more complicated reality of gene x gene and gene x environment interaction effects and the far greater breadth of things that can go wrong in a developing brain and humans, being humans, will frantically scoop up every halfway-eccentric or slightly-dysfunctional person to toss them into one of the bins they know to toss people in. This is why two people with the same diagnosis can have very different symptoms: looking under the hood to see their actual neurobiology, they don't necessarily have the same illness. It also gives laypeople a handy list of labels to misapply to everyone they know via armchair diagnosis. The other obvious problem with diagnosis is that it's binary: instead of using psychometrics to identify and measure clusters of related symptoms, you either "do" or "don't" have a condition, which of course doesn't always say much about whether you suffer from a particular symptom associated with that condition.

[@GrimrDirge]

Most people are coming to this fight very late, I'm so glad to see you are committed to building a therapy counter-culture.

[@AndyJarman]

Well worth relistening to, thank you both of you.

[@AndyJarman]

The screen in front of you as you read these words, is your portal to Narnia.

[@christianbolt5761]

Thank you for another great discussion. Intellectual but practical and accessible to the average person.

[@kimberleyfloyd8179]

This is a very interesting conversation. I have a fascination with coming of age stories, and perhaps that's why I liked it so much. I might listen twice 😂.

[@d.lav.2198]

Derrida's 'text' and Foucault's 'discourse' remind me of the LLMs - like Chat-GPT - currently being talked about a lot. Indeed, there is nothing outside of the text ('Il n' y a pas de hors-text') for these language based networks but what they so obviously and critically lack is agency and agency - I believe - is immune to both deconstruction (Derrida) and historicizing (Foucault). The day I realised this was like being born again!

[@Gingerblaze]

57:00 sometimes visualizing life stages not as a straight line but as a spiral which treads over new ground or experiences that are familiar with deeper and also expanded understanding can be useful. Even more useful can be the visualizing of a spiraling torus.

[@Oobido]

New subscriber. Thank you for the talk ❤

[@MarkMiner-ei6dv]

As with anyone speaking about depth psychology, the question is never, "Does he have access to the Fairy Deep?" Everyone does. The question is, how helpful is the material he's presenting to other people who are trying to climb out of the flooded libido-well? Has he gotten past the Underworld bugaboos well enough to be able to help others get past the Underworld bugaboos?

[@AndyJarman]

I am frequently astonished at how many people refuse to consider there is a "well". Peter Boghossian and Sam Harris seem to have concluded that consciousness is the water that fish swim in. It's quite frustrating not being able to ask them "what is it that is watching when you watch something?"

[@d.lav.2198]

Bret, you don't need to invoke the problematic idea of "direct perception" in order to critique the 'text/discourse-obsessed" approach of the post-structuralists. Perception is not - and cannot be - 'direct'. Vision, for example, is a dynamic and computationally complex construction from rather messy retinal input. It is so good at what it does that it does indeed seem "direct", but if you know your Quine you will know that any model is underdetermined by its data and, so, the relationship between what's 'out there' and the reality/model we construct is not direct. It's dynamical, for sure. What the post-structuralists were/are so dismissive (or ignorant) of is the idea that humans have a temporally deep prehistory during which time certain key, basic, problem-solving practices evolved and became culturally encoded. So, human social reality does have 'natural' roots that fix certain key practices (contra Foucault's historicizing discourse/power approach) BUT these roots are no more 'direct' in their 'fit to the world' that our modern discourses. Everything is an underdetermined dynamical model (compare this with Derrida's impoverished claim 'Il n'y a pas de hors-texte'.)

[@Knuck_Knucks]

Good chat. Reminds me of some Squirrels I once knew. Thx! 🐿

[@AndyJarman]

I've heard squirrels frequently forget where they've put their nuts. That's why the trees don't mind having some of their babies eaten, enough get buried and forgotten to make it worthwhile.

[@Knuck_Knucks]

@@AndyJarman Oh, for sure. I forget mine all the time. Drives me nuts! 🐿

[@magnolia3671]

Thomas Szasz ., it is Humgarian, sz is pronounced sas, soft a....i planned an alt education conference out of Evergreen around 1980, was pretty leftwing, too much for my tastes even then, key students were fans of educational model used in Cuba. Evergreen gave a lot of freedom but was always leftist libertarian in outlook afaik.

[@robertbdavisii9801]

Great comversation, great analysis. However, I think the idea that the archetypal power behind the stories makes them popular is too generous. Maybe I am too cynical. But I think there are plenty of archetypal stories out there that don't get such a grip on the culture. And if that was all it was, then why wouldn't we just be obsessed with Peter Pan or any other variants? I think the works being difficult and complicated is part of what has allowed them to become so widespread- not because people are interested in digging in and understanding and we have a culture of enormous intellectual prowess and interest, but the opposite; the difficulty of these texts gives them a veneer of prestige, and then they can be used as a weapon against status seeking- do you dare say you don't get it? Not in a room full of people competing for intellectual status. It makes sense to me that the same pattern causing its broader tendrils to spread (bullying and silence and cowardice) would be found at the core as well.

[@robertbdavisii9801]

Okay, he hit on this at the end. Respect.

[@NinjaKittyBonks]

Was blocked again, Ms. Leslie. Dr. Alderman is really good! Thanks for your great work🐈bonk

[@theradicalcenter]

Weird! What's up with the blocking, do you think? Thanks for being here :)

[@NinjaKittyBonks]

@@theradicalcenter ... I won't go into details here, but I know how and why.

[@AndyJarman]

I recommend people return to this video and check that their comments get posted too. I thought Ninja Kitty was blocking me. I think now my card is marked, even the most vanilla comments evaporate. Someone in California doesn't like me, I use too many asterisks.

[@Guy-lo3ld]

I admit that I read some very interesting papers using queer theory as a critique of normativity and social construction. However, some of the other work I read was extremely difficult to get through. 😂😂

[@joschmoyo4532]

Neurosis is the lack of Gnosis. If you fail to activate the bodies full potential you will slide in to denial, addiction and depression. Or worse become a middle class Academic who writes books nobody reads because they don't resonate with truth. God reads you bedtime stories in dreams. If you make the effort to decode the symbolism and metaphor he will take it up a notch until if you persist, he will take your spirit out of your body. Seek ye therefore the kingdom of heaven within you... Relax and let go. That's all it takes. Or you can read stupid books like men are from Mars or I'm ok your ok ! Empty promises on every shelf. Just pick a catchy title and surrender your rational mind at the counter.

[@DEWwords]

CRiT is a bullseye. Asked, & answered to infinity.--- Collect a fee just for asking though--- hell of a pdrformance!

[@airfire95]

How can you defend that a diagnosis "does not tell the full story" and simultaneously reduce two whole philosophical theories to a (mythical) diagnosis of Peter Pan syndrome? Besides, the reading presented here of Butler is at least inaccurate. I'll use the terms of Alderman: the bottom line is not that "what you pretend is real", but that, in a sense, "what is real is actually what is pretended". That is to say, without any more poetics, that what society presents as factual or natural is in fact its own pretending of said fact or nature-that our cultures, through ritual and repetition ("pretending"), make a social reality (that we only perceive as natural, of course). That these rituals are copying a copy of a copy of a copy the original of which (the real) is so distorted and far away that it only matters because we make it matter. That's why you can't "turn back" to reality-because it was never there. But the pretending is presented as real. And every other pretension that deviates from the norm is considered unnatural or unreal; which is why, if one were to pretend something else, they would simply not be acknowledged as real. There has to be a volition of those who make the rituals and repetitions to accept a new ritual as possible, to allow another kind of pretending (through cultural and social changes, for example). You should've read Kierkegaard (or postmodern readings of his work). Thinking the "subject" as someone who can be in three different ways (particular, universal, singular) helps, especially to see how there is disruption that comes from the fact that not everything can be communicated (like one's experience of self) by means put by someone else, or cultural constructs (presented as universal). Maybe i confused you in this last part, but do read Kierkegaard!

[@liberality]

"what is real is actually what is pretended" is delusional; it sounds like recycled Hegel. Reality exists independently of the claims we make about it.

[@ambermoon719]

⁠@@liberalityI agree, Reality exists independent of how we perceive it. Just even in looking at the light spectrum, how human eyes perceive & navigate the terrain vs how other creatures perceive & navigate the terrain. Interesting stuff.

[@d.lav.2198]

@@liberality Indeed, and for precisely that reason the only claim we can make about it is that we know nothing about it. We cannot take off the gloves through which we feel the world. Kant, Wittgenstein, Quine and, indeed, Foucault and Derrida, all argue for a version of anti-foundationalism which, I think, is the correct way to approach our relation to the world. Perception is not - and never could be - 'direct'. Reality is a construct, a dynamical working model that we collaborate in the making of. This does not entail Hegel's Absolute Idealism but it does suggest Kant's Transcendental Idealism (the world in itself exists but Reality is a model of this).

[@liberality]

@@d.lav.2198 Thanks for your reply. I would like to draw your attention to the work of James and Eleanor Gibson on 'ecological' perception. James Gibson was given the task in World War II of figuring out how pilots could land their aircraft on moving ships. He realised that it was impossible for the pilots to be constructing a mental model of the scenario, due to the complexity and quantity of information entering the pilots' eyes. That discovery implied everyone since at least Descartes had been wrong about the nature of perception. This realistic aspect of visual perception has terminal implications for idealism, the idea that we indirectly make the world according to our rationalisations. Idealism is also fundamentally anthroprocentric, since reality is supposed to exist in a man's head, not in nature. This is a secular formula for granting dominion over other species. Some men appear to consider women closer to nature, and therefore irrational. A man can rationalise that he is a better woman than a biological woman, because he has superior reason. Which leads to madness, but also wins sports trophies.

[@d.lav.2198]

@@liberality Hi yes am familiar with Gibson's work. I'm afraid I think he gets it the wrong way round. It is because of the messy stimulus array that our mental models behave dynamically in situ, rather than in the static, linear sequential way of the 'black-box' psychologists of the 50s and 60s. I recommend you take a look at Karl Friston's work on Active Inference. Perception is incredibly quick, reflexive and dynamic giving the (false) impression that it is 'direct'. Perception that works so rapidly and dynamically can only work if certain key assumptions about what's causing the sensory input are embedded within the processing stream very early on. These assumptions are the unconscious inferences of Helmholtz and the synthetic a priori of Kant's Transcendental Idealism.

[@thenatureofnurture6336]

"Talking about talking" ha! Narrative control of narratives is psychology. I love seeing this egg ALL OVER these faces.

[@OddawallWood]

I found your diagnosis. You have spilunctism!