An Introduction to Psychological Cartography

The psychoanalyst thinks differently; to him nothing is too trifling as a manifestation of hidden psychic processes; he has long learned that such forgetting or repetition [at 7 o clock/at 7 o clock] is full of meaning, and that one is indebted to the “absent-mindedness” which it makes possible the betrayal of otherwise concealed feelings.
— Sigmund Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci

Everything in this world can be picked apart into the core components of desire and survival. There is nothing that can not be charted with these two terms in mind. Psychological Cartography is the process of discovery of desire and survival in the narratives which are crafted through the self and the other. It’s a simple method, but a cruel method. The subversion of the fictions which compose reality take away reality itself in some way. Psychoanalysis does not try to be cruel, but its very nature is that of cruelty, the bringing of the human being to terror of looking at its raw animality. Desire and survival are not mere human things, they are a biological constant in everything which is alive.

So why do this? Why subject ourselves to our burn core, the reductio ad absurdum of existence itself? Desire and survival are two controllers being tangled up constantly through our use of language and our interactions in civilization.

This weekend is a good of a weekend as any to start a psychoanalytic blog. The thirst for a public execution was stymied, a strange trial where the only two results possible seemed to be the nation’s highest office for a judicial official or transmutation into a subhuman form unable to get a job at a Pizza Hut due to moral degeneracy. In other news, twenty people died in a limo crash going to a wedding the guy who wrote Calvin and Hobbes was invited to.  The BBC calls this, “terrible,” in quotes. Did you know Bill Watterson was invited, BBC mentions. The closer you get to the incident, for instance the local Albany news, the more you get the nitty gritty details which attempt to recreate the horror of the thing.

The supreme court confirmation seems to me like it has provided a constant “Trump” to carry the democratic socialist outrage for the next 35 years. Truly a progressive gift if you’re cynical enough, but progressives rarely are; or rather, they are a different kind of cynical. But back to the news out of Albany, where 20 people died at a wedding the guy who made the best newspaper comic of the last few decades was invited to. How would we universalize this? What hidden narratives lie within this limo crash? The wedding postponed, the anonymity of the deaths. Does a factory worker become eternally petty bourgeois when they die in a limo? CBS Albany has a nice quote here, “There was no information Sunday on the limousine, its origin or its integrity.” 

The conscious mind demands us to egoically keep this interpretation to a mere tragedy. But here we have a destroyed limo, and 20 fatalities in a car accident. What do we make of this floating limo of death with unknown origin and integrity?

Survival failure. Desire brought to a close. What is newsworthy is the human failure of both.