WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS IS A MORE RADICAL FIELD THAN PSYCHOLOGY?

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 One thing that attracts me towards Psychoanalysis is actually two things. One is my own pathological need to understand. And there is something very unusual about this. This is not some sacred curiosity, unravelling the secret bullshit. I think it is a kind of enjoyment that I feel without feeling guilty. Like, I can have fun with friends but there is always a guilt that I am not working but if I and reading psychoanalytic texts, it feels like I am having fun with friends, but also, I am working. This constant simultaneous satisfaction of ID and Superego is what I call a pathological need to understand. 

Secondly, Psychoanalysis, in my opinion, a more radical discipline like Philosophy. It is always Meta. It is always deconstructing the main superficial themes of society that are prevalent which sort of makes it like a Detective's job. Like, Psychology will ask, how to live a more satisfying and happy life? On the same lines, Psychoanalysis asks, 'What does it mean to be happy for an individual? What is satisfying? How do the two correlate? Do we always feel satisfied after happiness? Why there is a need to feel satisfied? Is it normal? How to determine what is normal? And so on and so on. 

My two attractions can be seen in my liking to particular people in Psychoanalysis. On one hand, I am afraid of Freud and Lacan and their mysterious and taboo seeming concepts, I do, however, Like Zizek's works. It somewhat makes me afraid but also, wants me to do it, in what sense, in a sense a child wants to have a ride on a roller coaster. 

On the other hand, my attraction to India and Indian culture and to understand my cultural psyche attracts me to writings of Dr. Salman Akhtar. His theories and understanding of Psychoanalytic concepts make me nostalgic and is more self-affirming. In simple poetic terms, I think I have found a home in Akhtar's writings. I find mystics, I find Geeta, I find spirituality and I find Buddha. In a weirdly amusing way, Psychoanalysis has become a little house near the dark forest for me, I daily go out of this house for an adventure in the woods, only to get scared further and run back to my home and then again repeat. 

In this process, I understand some very crucial aspects of my own life and of psychoanalysis in general. What would have happened if I hadn't discovered Zizek? if I hadn't discovered Akhtar? I don't know, A perpetual dissatisfaction in search of meaning and being perplexed about the desperation may be. 

With this, comes a need to write, write my understandings and write about some realizations. I am really afraid of the word "Research and innovation" because I do not really understand this job. Whether it is a detective's job, and we have to find already existing concepts or is it a poet's job where we have to invent concepts, in some way, hallucinate new things. It is somewhere in between. Something sort of sitting under a Kalpvriksha. Research is like sitting under the Kalpvriksha (A mythological tree in Indian Mythology which gives whatever you think, not what you desire, like whatever comes in your mind, even if don't want it, it appears). You imagine something and then it appears. and then you discover it. It is as if the link between your mind and the material concrete reality is so strong and the distinction so shallow that one can easily go from mind to matter and matter to mind. One must be cautious and afraid enough not to imagine demons. Or maybe do. But always run back to your home if the demon starts chasing you. This mysterious nature of psychoanalytic research attracts and scares me simultaneously


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