it's a phallogocentric world (and i am sick of it)
OCD, therapy, and ways of knowing under systems of oppression
When I was a teen I used to think I understood Franny Glass (from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey). Yet, the only thing I understood at 15 was that a) she was chronically depressed, b) she had problems with religion, and c) she was trying to be the smartest person in a room full of men. Three affinities that I developed at 14. I could tell that all the knowledge she gained from books and all the intense rationalism she was bringing to the table were making her crazy—as a 15-year-old who read Plato, I could get that, I just could not understand why.
Most adults used to tell me that I was too young to be reading books like Crime and Punishment. They were right. I did not understand the entirety of Franny and Zooey when I read it. I wrote a paper on it for my literary theory class using psychoanalysis. I do not take psychoanalysis very seriously. Yet Salinger mentions Freud multiple times in his work. It is not far-fetched to believe that his books have certain psychoanalytic references. One thing I noticed is that there were hints of Franny having an anal personality. When she cries in the bathroom, she holds her knees in a fetal position, she frequently talks about “droppings”, and so on.
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I developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) last summer. Only then I understood Franny Glass. She mouths obsessively her “Jesus Prayer”— a prayer she learned in a book called “The Way of The Pilgrim”. The point is to repeat the prayer until it becomes a part of your heartbeat. Consequently, your mind and heart purify. Yet, Franny’s approach to spirituality is from a logical point of view. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot be spiritual. She is too in her head. Anyone who has ever experienced “pure OCD”—specifically intrusive thoughts—can probably resonate with Franny’s obsessive ritual. As Freud explains, "people who carry out obsessive actions or ceremonials belong to the same class as those who suffer from obsessive thinking, obsessive ideas, obsessive impulses and the like."
I do not know when I became obsessed with fixing my brain. I recall doing cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) as a teen. I remember being given lots of worksheets for my anxiety. I filled in the probability of certain events happening. I had to come up with balanced alternatives. This does not work with OCD. With OCD, filling in the probability of how likely it was for me to get raped did nothing. CBT believes that illnesses like depression and anxiety are caused by cognitive distortion. The goal is to learn to rationalize your thoughts and find alternative ways of thinking. Over the years, I learned to intellectualize all of my emotions. I learned how to live exclusively in my head. When OCD arrived, my head became my only reality. One I desperately wanted to escape. I would get a new intrusive thought every day. I would ask myself “socratic” questions. I would look obsessively for the grain of sand that made my mind go wrong. I would not stop until I found a logical answer to my insanity. The next day my mind glitched again. The (il)logical cycle would repeat itself. It was highly addictive. There was a rush in every night solving my thoughts in a puzzle-like manner. The morning after, I would try to hold to the pearls of wisdom I discovered the night before as if they were holy devotions. Now I see that the intrusive thoughts were smoke and mirrors. The ceremonials and rituals were the ones that condemned me to a life eternally in hell.
My OCD started last summer. Yet, it was due to happen. I spent so many summers trying to rationalize my depression with CBT. I looked out for the distortions and glitches in my mind—as if I had no body. I believed that if I found the right mindset the void would disappear. Yet the thinking only created a bigger gap. Lacan believes that when we enter the world of language as children, we split from ourselves for the first time. I want to go back to a time before language pulled me away from my body. I remember being fascinated by the arbitrariness of language as a child. I remember questioning who decided the name of an apple. It could have been named pear. All the existential questions I had at 7 reappeared in my university classes. I now know there is no reason why an apple is called an apple. It is a random choice. Language is arbitrary. It is not a reflection of the world, but a system that stands separate from it.
“I think therefore I am” is a travesty. Lacan says , “I am where I am not thinking”. The more you think about something, the more separate you are from it. I know this to be true whenever I overthink. The more I think about my feelings, the more separate I feel from them. I often craft narratives that at the end are so different from what I feel at the beginning. This is what Jacques Derrida meant when he said that language does too much and too little. Being lost in the realm of language taught me this better than the JSTOR articles could.
There is an irony in me having so many problems with language while loving writing. Yet that's why I love poetry. It exceeds signification. Poetry is about sounds, metaphors, contradictions. The fifth slide of thepost above says, “the only time I see my illegible feelings reflected back to me is through abstraction, forms that intentionally defy signification. is this what it means to be crazy, to feel alienated by rational forms? cixous says that this is what i means to be a woman, but i know plenty of rational women who would disagree”. I wrote my Bachelor Thesis on Cixous’ ideas on writing and logic. She says that women writers have to find an alternative to the traditional “phallogocentric” writing created by men.
If I say alternatives to phallogocentrism, I do not mean “no thoughts, just vibes”. There are times when thinking is necessary. My favorite Beatles’ song as a teen was Strawberry Fields Forever. The line “living is easy with eyes closed/misunderstanding all you see” spoke to me at 15. Things were not as simple as I thought. I grieved my innocence. Ignorance is bliss, I thought. I do not agree with that anymore. In a world filled with toxic ideologies, knowledge can be a tool for liberation. Yet as someone who is in academia and constantly trying to theorize new ideas, I wonder if I am overly logical in my own life because I spend most of my time wiring my brain to think in a unidirectional form, researching isolated in a room, without any interaction with the real world.
In “Pleasure erased, clitoris unthought”, Catherine Malabou explores how the clitoris can work as a metaphor for new epistemologies (ways of knowing). For her, the clitoris can serve as “another type of arousal to be had through intellection: in contrast to the monumental and unitary moments in thought, erogenous zones emerge as a multiple, collaborative, sometimes contradictory alternative”. This would mean ceasing to simplify the most complex topics such as sex or evolution.1 Malabou calls these erogenous points, points of “anarchy”.
I felt overjoyed when I read this. As an anarchist myself, I love finding connections to anarchism in my personal life. Anarchism is often associated with chaos and mayhem. It is not any of those things really. But it is a practice of learning to undo hard truths and dualisms. And to do that in my personal life, to accept that I cannot know the truth about everything, to be able to exist with contradictions, to let go of control and power over myself—- feels like entering a chaotic abyss that I am not sure I can handle. In order to do that I would have to stop intellectualizing all of my problems, the way anarchists do. Marxist-Leninists love to call anarchists “dumb” for not reading enough theory. That is not true. Most anarchists read theory, but it is not their focus. They rather favor praxis over theory. Anarchists understand that not everything can be theorized. There are things that need to be figured out communally, through experience, and cannot be deduced by logic.
Like phallogocentrism penetrates the attempts to solve the symptoms of a sick-and-twisted world, in the world of therapy there is an attempt to solve our maladies with a similar approach. There is a growing buzz that encourages people to learn questionable facts and guidelines that dictate interpersonal relationships, to the point of completely holding them back from experiencing any kind of significant relationship with anyone at all. I have been guilty of this. I tell myself it is better to isolate and “heal” before I date or even befriend anyone. Yet, certain behaviors can only be healed through people. Relationships are bound to be messy. People are going to have flaws. I do not mean we should not grow awareness of serious problems like abuse. but as I have said before, that has less to do with pathology, and more to do with power structures. In her latest Substack, Less TikTok, More Screaming, Persinette warns us against the “feeling nothing epidemic” encouraged by many social media therapists. She writes “I want to work through my complicated feelings about certain friends and family, pursue the question in the books I read and the things I write. I want to talk about it with people. These are real human problems, and it’s not supposed to be simple”.
Rayne Fisher-Quann writes that the “process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it’s not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list”. When I was 19 and into Instagram-therapy shennanigans, I felt super overwhelmed by the amount of Instagram posts that recommended me to “cut people out” and “create boundaries”, etc., etc., etc. There was endless information to learn. I saved many posts I could never have the energy to process properly. The Venn diagrams, the cute graphics, the minimalist font—they make you think being a better person is easy. This is the result of treating things as complex as mental illnesses and personal relationships as if they were computerized codes that you can force into someone's brain. We are not algorithms nevertheless. We have bodies and senses.
I had several distortions when I had OCD. I knew that. Yet the problem with my OCD wasn’t my irrationality. The problem was this worksheet thinking that flattened my brain. I recall someone on the OCD subreddit saying “OCD isn’t irrational, it’s rational to the point of irrationality”. Is this also what this world has come to? We have created layers of logic to defend “logical” fields that are at their very base bullshit, very similar to when I fight an intrusive thought with rationality. We are overflowing with discourse regarding our economic systems, capitalist economy prides itself in being logical, and of course, for those of us who have read Marx, we know it is not, we know it is full of contradictions. And yet we try to beat them with rationality too. Read theory, is what we reply as we roll our eyes. I genuinely do not think that any of those crypto-finance bros have a problem with thinking rationally. Their problem lies instead in that they try to come up with detached “logical” solutions without feeling anything about how those policies affect people who are not them.
This is why I believe logic is not enough. This system does not make sense at all to me. Yet, I do not only stand against it from a logical point of view. I hate it because it hurts people. I hate it because I feel for myself and others. I had a very scary existential crisis once where, once again, too much rationality drove me irrational. I had a derealization episode. Everything was blurry. Things were toned down. I thought that perhaps this was hell after all. I was trying to make sense of the world intensely through rationality. Yet, I could not find answers that satiated my hunger. I asked myself “what do owe to each other?”, and “why is abuse wrong?”. I knew the answers in my heart. Yet in a state of full dissociation, I could not find a logical answer that made sense to me. I tried remembering everything I knew from a sociological point of view. I tried to read books on ethics, but no explanation calmed me down. Finally, one day I went to the beach. I cried a bit more. I took a breath, listened to the waves, and came back to my body. The language gap disappeared for a second. Everything made sense then.