48-54 The Problem of the Pavlovian Penis

[Joseph Tracy]

> On May 12, 2016, at 11:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Seems I thought I had sent this from drafts but maybe did not. Discard if duped. No double meaning intended. 
> 
> 
> Pointsman and staff are behaviorists. There is no room, no belief in the psychoanalytic. That comes from the narrator's consciousness. That is an enveloping way to understand Pointsman and crew, Pointsman who wants just "one little Fox"
> 
> p. 50. This 'transmarginal leap, this surrender" ---see Transmarginal inhibition as ultra paradoxical phase--'explains' the end
> of P's work after so many iterations, finally the letting go, the memory erasure so as to be wiped clean and new. CF 1984 per Ish. Cf. brainwashing, CIA, Manchuurian Candidate style. 
> 

I have a hard time thinking that Pynchon is setting forth as a premise that these experiments really are doing what Poinstsman imagines. In my mind Pointsman wants something that Spectro cannot produce: a clean slate to be writ upon.  It is possible to get people to say what you want them to say, but it is very hard to get people to think what you want them to think and  this kind of brainwashing seems  effective at all only with a person of limited intelligence in complete custody.

There are many indicators that Spectro’s work is failing to address the anguished state of his patients. Pointsman is blind to this. He lives in a world of theory and self- serving public power dynamics.  There is no evidence of a balanced healthy person who has emerged from the treatment, bad memories gone. In recent years, some therapies  with MDMA for PTSD have been very promising but not widely publicized.  After Vietnam, 50,000 vets committed suicide.

As far as we know, the MK Ultra program was a failure. Unless those guys with the copy of Catcher in the Rye really were the successes. John Lennon and Roald Reagan do seem an odd pair of targets. 

> Cf. P, who knows of marx's 'false consciousness" of Marcuse's similar insights, of McLuhan and the created mental structures of the world taking it to the beginning. To how anyone can be made to think what is wanted to be thought; how American psychological science has no belief in an essential human nature, qualities that are right and inviolable, Human rights as qualities. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> Am 09.05.2016 um 04:49 schrieb Joseph Tracy:
> Thomas has suggested the connection of
> Pointsman's pursuit of experimental subjects to MK Ultra which was
> clearly drawing upon  ideas emerging from behaviorist research. Those
> MK Ultra scientists also had wacky and unproven notions of reducing
> human experimental subjects to "a clean slate”. They sold these ideas
> to the CIA on a remarkable scale with nothing but theorizing and
> scientific sounding mumbo-jumbo. Part of P’s point in contrasting the
> psychics with the behaviorists is to show how easy it seems to be to
> seduce the powerful into any scheme that might afford greater
> control, no matter the moral or metaphysical implications.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> I assume that Pointsman's efforts to wipe the slate
> of the human mind clean can be linked to Pynchon's
> apparent knowledge about the CIA's mind control
> experimentation. For me, the scene in COL49 I referred to
> suggests that Pynchon was aware of these experiments, some
> aspects of which could be traced back to human experimentation
> in the concentration camps.
> 
> (Experiments similar to those of the MKUltra scientists
> were conducted by the military at Edgewood Arsenal and
> in Porton Down/UK.)
> 
> It is a tenuous link though. As far as I can tell,
> Pointsman is not and cannot be related
> to MKUltra which of course started much later (perhaps he
> will be linked to the OSS later in the book?).
> 
> Probably one should not focus on MKUltra too much here
> but instead on Pointsman's misuse of trauma therapy (cf.
> Weisenburger) to further his own goals. It is clear that in Pointsman's
> hands psychiatric science is not a therapeutic instrument
> to cure people from their neuroses and traumata but
> a tool to achieve control over them (put the control
> inside, perhaps?).
> 
> But then there is the next question:
> 
> If I am not mistaken, Pointsman's therapy consists of
> inducing a series of abreactions (reliving the traumatic experience)
> until his patients give in to the pressure. Then, catharsis is
> achieved, the patients' memories are erased and they
> become (like) children again.
> 
> I find surprising that the abreaction/catharsis scheme is
> linked to a complete erasure of memory in GR. Aren't these two types of trauma therapy
> two very different things, in fact mutually exclusive?
> 
> 1) "reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional
> excesses -- a type of catharsis" (Wiki); indeed a return
> of the repressed, of repressed desires and memories, into
> the consciousness, the cornerstone of Freud's
> psychoanalysis.
> 
> 2) memory erasure or induced amnnesia (including
> drug-induced amnesia) -- which is still a method of
> trauma therapy today, the goal being to erase unwanted
> memories (not to "wipe the slate clean" as Ewen Cameron
> and Pointsman want nor to reprogramm the mind after it has
> been emptied as the CIA
> wanted).
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
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> 

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