quotes

Hence the body, via the agency of the subject, stubbornly refuses conflation into a brute thing (as in uprisings of slaves and women), while the image clings to the body as that which gives it “depth” and thus separates it from pure simulation.

Thinking about “body” has led us to think about representation on the most basic level: to ask what motivates our desire for pictures.

We make and view representations of the body because on some level we want to secure the depths of being—but paradoxically by indicating or summing up the subject as a two- dimensional picture (or static sculptural form).

In producing images we attempt to produce the self as unified, coherent, originary, and immortal (...)

The great paradox is that by doing so we mark both the interestedness of interpretation, the way in which our embodiment conditions our invested relationship to images as other “bodies,” and perform and expose our own contingency and mortality as the basis of all representation.

"Body" by Amelia jones
available on the writings page

for six weeks I saw a psychiatrist with a portrait of Freud on his wall

Illouz strongly emphasizes the fact that methodological perspective of psychology is individualistic. It entails the assumption that most of issues can and should be explained by the internal mental states of a particular individual, for in- stance, by one’s dreams or memories from the childhood. If one wants to dissolve his/her problems, one should look for the solutions “inside”. According to Illouz, psychology often reduces explanations of individual’s situations to his / her mental condition, at the same time excluding or undermining any outside factors such as culture and social structure. To simplify this thesis, it may be said that psychol- ogy claims that everything is in one’s head, and an individual is the only creator of his / her life, the only one who is responsible for its shape.

from "The Tyranny of Intimacy"
on the Writings page

“It has even become somewhat of a cliché of feminist critiques to view the therapeutic mode of self-understanding as a form of false consciousness that translates political collective problems into psychological individual predicaments, thus inhibiting the possibility of genuine structural change.”