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). Needless to say, 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 when I was 14. I could tell that all the knowledge she gained from books and all the intense rationalism she was bringing to everything were making her crazy—as a 15-year-old who read Plato, I could get that, I just could not understand why.
Like most heavy books I read at 15, rereading them in my 20s made me realize that the people who kept telling me I was too young to read such books were right. I reread Franny and Zooey 3 times when I was 21. I did a paper on it for my literary theory class with a psychoanalytic framework. I do not intend on talking seriously about psychoanalysis ever again, but Salinger mentions Freud multiple times in his work, it wouldn’t be so crazy to believe that his books have certain psychoanalytic references. One thing that 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, and she frequently talks about “droppings” (not in the literal sense).
Last summer, I developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and only then I understood what Franny’s problem was. In the story, 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, and through it, your mind and heart become purified. Franny’s approach to spirituality, nevertheless, is from a logical point of view, so no matter how hard she tries, she cannot be spiritual— she is too in her head. Anyone who has ever experienced “pure OCD”—or more specifically intrusive thoughts—can probably resonate with Franny’s obsessive ritual. According to Freud, "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."
When I did cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) as a teen, I was given a load of worksheets for my anxiety. I had to fill in the probability of certain events happening and come up with balanced alternatives. With OCD, filling in the probability of how likely it was for me to get raped did nothing to disappear my gratuitous and gruesome thoughts. CBT bases itself on the assumption that illnesses like depression and anxiety are caused by cognitive distortions, so the goal is to learn to rationalize your thoughts and find “alternative” ways of thinking. Long-term, this hurt me more than it did well. When my OCD was at its worst, I would get a new intrusive thought every day. I would ask myself “socratic” questions trying to find where my mind went wrong. I would not stop until I found a perfect and logical alternative to all my insanity. The next day my mind would start glitching again, and the cycle of rationalizing my thoughts would repeat itself. It was kind of addictive, each night there was a rush in solving my thoughts in a puzzle-like manner. The following mornings, I tried to find a sense of security from the pearls of wisdom I discovered the night before as if they were devotions. But now I see that the intrusive thoughts were nothing, the ceremonials and rituals on the other hand were the ones that turned me into a nut-job.
My OCD started last summer, but it was due to happen. I spent so many years trying to rationalize my depression thanks to CBT. I tried to look out for the distortions and glitches in my mind without paying attention to my body. So I thought that once I found the right “mindset”, so to speak, the void between my mind and my body would disappear. But the thinking only created a wider gap. Lacan says that when we enter the world of language when we are children, we split from ourselves for the first time. I yearn to go back to a time before language pulled me away from my body. I remember not being able to sleep as a kid because I was fascinated by the arbitrariness of language. I kept questioning who was the first person to ever decide an apple was called an apple. For all we know it could have been called asdfdsj. Funnily enough, all the existential questions I had when I was 7 reappeared in my university classes. I am sure now that 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 quite separate from it.
“I think therefore I am” is bullshit. Lacan says instead, “I am where I am not thinking”. What he means is that the more you think about something, the more separate you are from it (because language is merely a system, not the real world). I've felt this whenever I’ve been overthinking, the more I thought about my feelings, the more separate I felt from them. I would create narratives that in the end were so different from what I started feeling at the beginning. This is what Derrida meant when he said that language does too much and too little. I could not comprehend this in its entirety in my literary theory classes, but being lost in the realm of language taught me this better than the JSTOR articles could.
It's ironic that I have so many problems with language, yet I love writing. Yet that's why I love poetry, it exceeds signification. Poetry is about sounds, metaphors, contradictions. The fifth slide of the IG post I shared 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 love the mention of Cixous because I wrote my Bachelor Thesis about her ideas on writing and logic. She says that women writers have to find an alternative to the traditional “phallogocentric” writing created by men.
When I say alternatives to phallogocentrism, I don’t mean “no thoughts, just vibes”. I would love to put an end to my ever-buzzing thinking brain but there are times when thinking is necessary. My favorite song by the Beatles when I was a teen was Strawberry Fields Forever. The line “living is easy with eyes closed/misunderstanding all you see” spoke so much to a 15-year-old who was starting to realize that things were not as “simple” as she thought. I felt like I understood what people meant when they said ignorance is bliss. I don’t agree with that anymore. I think that in a world filled with toxic ideologies, knowledge can be a tool for liberation. But I do wonder, as someone who is in academia and constantly trying to theorize new ideas, 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, selfishly for my own ego, and 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). She presents the clitoris 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”. I believe this would mean ceasing to simplify the most complex topics such as sex or evolution.1
Malabou calls these erogenous points, the point of “anarchy”. From what I have seen. the ways anarchists engage with theory are pretty different from how other leftists do it. MLs (marxist-leninists) love to call anarchists “dumb” for not reading enough theory. I don’t think this is true, I think that lots of anarchists read theory but it is not their focus, and more importantly, 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 simple logic.
Just like phallogocentrism penetrates the attempt to solve the symptoms of a very sick-and-twisted world, in the world of therapy there is this growing buzz that encourages people to learn so many—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 think I have been guilty of this. I have been telling myself it is better to isolate myself and “heal” before I date or even befriend anyone. The thing though is that there are certain behaviors that can only be healed through people. Relationships are bound to be messy, people are going to have flaws. Obviously, I don’t mean we shouldn’t grow awareness of serious things 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 this instagram-therapy shit, I felt super overwhelmed by the amount of instagram posts that were recommending to “cut people out” and “create boundaries”, etc., etc., etc. There seemed to be so much information to learn. My saved folder was full of posts I could never have the energy to process properly. The Venn-Diagrams, the cute graphics, the minimalist font—they all make you think being a better person is that easy. I think this is the result of treating things as complex as mental illnesses and personal relationships as if they were codes that you can put in a computer and finally fix a person. I blame CBT for insisting on the “cognitive distortions” method.
Of course I had several distortions when I had OCD. I knew that. But the problem with my OCD wasn’t my irrationality, the problem was this type of worksheet, Venn-diagram thinking that eventually flattened my brain. I recall someone on the OCD subreddit saying “OCD isn’t irrational, it’s rational to the point of irrationality”. I wonder if this is what this world has come to. We have created layers of logic to defend fields that are at their very base bullshit, very similar to when silly little Emilia tries to fight an irrational intrusive thought with buckets of rationality. I mean, all this discourse about economics, and yet very few people ask themselves if the very basis of our current economic system makes sense. Perhaps it does to someone who is only looking out for their self-interests. But that’s why I believe logic is not enough. To me, this system doesn’t make sense at all, but I do not only stand against it from a logical point of view, my main problem with it comes from my ability to care. I once had a very scary existential crisis where, once again, too much rationality drove me irrational. I had my first and only derealization episode. Everything was so blurry, things felt like they were toned down, and I was thinking that perhaps, this earth is hell after all (I am an atheist/agnostic, the joke tells itself). I was trying to make sense of the world intensely through rationality but I couldn’t find answers that satisfied me. I was asking myself things like “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 one that satiated 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.