[Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts

[C. G. Estabrook]

OK, let me try, using notions from a field I understand quite poorly (nothing new):

Jacques Lacan, half a charlatan and half the most insightful psychoanalyst of 
the 20th century, spoke of "forclusion" (it would be "foreclosure" in English, 
were the term not already in use) as a development of Freud's notion of 
Verwerfung, in the sense of a specific defense mechanism which is distinct from 
repression (Verdrängung), in which "the ego rejects the incompatible idea 
together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the 
ego at all." Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis, 
in which an element is rejected outside the symbolic order just as if it had 
never existed.

Foreclosure is to be distinguished from other operations such as repression, 
negation, and projection. Foreclosure differs from repression in that the 
foreclosed element is not buried in the unconscious but expelled from the 
unconscious. Repression is the operation which constitutes neurosis, whereas 
foreclosure is the operation which constitutes psychosis.

America is nuts (psychotic) to the degree that it has expelled capitalist 
imperialism, not just from its conscious discourse, but from its unconscious. 
It just can't be. As a Brit publication summed it up last week, "the United 
States has gone mad because those in power refuse to listen to voters."  That's 
why we're seeing psychotic symptoms at town meetings.

If you wish to pursue the matter, I suggest articles on "foreclosure" at 
<http://fmwww.bc.edu/pl/fac/richardson.fac.html> by Lacan's leading American 
epigone, William J. Richardson, SJ; also, consult 
<http://akriceinstitute.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=30>, the A. K. 
Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems (AKRI).  And for the masochists, 
I have several articles on the subject...  --CGE


rlangenh at illinois.edu wrote:
> Please define "nuts."  Ralph Langenheim
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