What the Interior Tells

What the Interior Tells--The Maeutic begins at the beginning.
How can we be Seeing Things Hidden. What's hidden is not absent--it's here, just nascent--unrevealed but operational.   So to see something important sometimes we have to peek?  Maybe we need to acknowledge a beast or two along the way, know that all stories are fiction--even the true ones.  Maybe we have to dance across territory inside ourselves that seems to have been mapped by someone else.  Maybe it's a bitter thing at times, to realize that we've been framed and the by ourselves, no less.


Here's where it gets dicey.  Why something as scary and, well, Freudian as "psychoanalytic theory"? Because we have to start with our own damn self, eh?  Modernism caught on and gave birth to twins (fraternal)--Critical theory and psychoanalytic/pyschological theory.  The U.S. has biologized the psychological in such a way as to render it either micro (cognitive studies) or macro (sociological study).  But the middle path, the third way, whatEVER you want to call it--but a way for an individual interested in reflection to inform herself about her own thinking's situation (something critical theory does offer through auto-ethnography combined with any of the critical stances one would like to apply)--it's missing.

[Sure, we're goverened largely by the presses of social context, our behaviroal hits and misses, the feedback loop of being in the mileau. But to go inside and try to find a new angle on our own thoughts?  We get shunted to religion (which I have no quarrel with but it needs translation and "bridging" into the secular world we must navigate) or the counselor (implying that only a specialist can help us with our own minds).] 

The pantheon?  A World of Fragile Things (Ruti), Gender Trouble (Butler), Practice Makes Practice (Britzman), Novel Education (Britzman), Reinventing the Soul (Ruti), The Beast in the Nursery (Phillips), The Colonization of Psychic Space (Oliver), Bitter Milk (Grumet), Empire of Signs (Barthes), Blood Orchid (Bowden), When Learned Men Murder (Patterson), The Semiotic Challenge (Barthes), More Than Cool Reason (Lakoff and Turner), Semiotics (Innis), Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff).  Hidden: Therapeutic Action (Lear), Problems of Art (Langer), Sublimation (Loewald).  Not in picture: in press book The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Ruti),