La Durée vs La Drogue

The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life
Jamieson Webster

I am indeed a Freudian psychoanalyst, that strange anachronism maligned by psychiatry for not being as scientific as medication supposedly is, by virtue of the control studies that can be done with drug treatments. Modern psychopharmacology goes hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnostic system that has, over time, been redefined to rely on medicating symptoms away rather than looking at the structure of the mind and its complex permutations in order to work with a patient in a deeply engaged way over the long haul. Modern psychiatry is hailed as a scientific success story, and drug companies have profited from the fact that talking therapies are often thought to take too long, their results frequently dismissed as unverifiable. I question, though, whether we should demand verified results when it comes to our mental life: Do you believe someone who promises you happiness in a pill?

Interrogating the discourse of efficiency by an appeal to time and to attention to complexity.

And so for day 2315
15.04.2013

Almost a Sales Pitch

Ian Brown "A Biography of Cannabis" in the Globe and Mail

Cannabis makes it impossible to remember all the details that threaten to drown us, and lets us concentrate on the one after the other, laterally and forgetfully. It impairs us, but in doing so allows us to experience the world not as masters of the entire universe but as liberated goofball bystanders, freed from the world's and our own blinding compulsions and expectations.

Of course there are relaxation techniques that operate on the body's innate chemical basis. It happens that "Cannabis does the same thing, just harder and faster."

And so for day 2168
19.11.2012

Tripping Out

Since you are all readers, you might enjoy a chuckle at this self-reflexive moment from a novel by William Gibson (Zero History). The narrator is describing Milgrim a character who is a recovering addict.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

Of course there is a link, a thematic link, to Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania which proposes its own set of links to the addiction to literature through the example of Emma Bovary in Flaubert's eponymous novel. I have in mind particularly the particles on page 131 where from I have constructed the following table:

religion	pharmacy
music	literature
non-mimetic	[ ? ]

This is drawn from the passage on p. 131 where Ronell is describing the pharmacists offer to Emma.

He [M. Homais, the pharmacist] has offered Emma the unlimited use of his library, inviting the addicted neighbor to mix pharmaceuticals and literature. [...] Literature comes down on the side of pharmacy, if somewhat negatively cast. Religion, which also deals in transcendental experience, appears to opt for the non-mimetic trance, which is why music is viewed as safe text.

And in my index card inserted at this point in the book I ask, "I wonder if this is related to how Ronell deploys non-address p. 93" but the question is besides the point for the reference at page 93 is about suicide as the violence of non-address. What I am after here is the term to complete the table and somehow I don't believe that a simple reversal of non-mimetic into mimetic will do the trick. And it is with a cheery countenance that I read many pages later (page 162) in a dialogue of the dead staged by Ronell that "Michaux speaks to Freud about psychomimetic substances and the miraculated subject." And voilà the term: psychomimetic. It's set up almost as a whispered aside as it is encased in parentheses and set in italic type &mdash just like a capsule that needs to be ingested to take effect. Note that the address is not to the reader directly it passes from one character to another — some residue of that non-address that is suicide — the text would not necessarily fall apart from an awowal of psychomimetic inclinations (but we would not have the wonderful effect of Ronell's reticence in the matter of Flaubert): tripping over the non-capusule high.

And so for day 868
29.04.2009

Hooked

About the character Milgrim in Zero History

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

William Gibson is very crafty here. The reader is of course reading while absorbing this information about addiction. Of course, if one were being read to one would have some resistance ... but bedtime stories have their own form of habituation...

And so for day 766
17.01.2009