Chaos breeds Conflict

.....or how do fantasies fill the void? And how do these fantasies function as distractions? We have been trying to make sense of our social and political context for a long time. We are both psychotherapists who invariably return to the problem we have in trying to think about and think through something that invariably seems to resist our paltry efforts. Trump and all that the name now represents, has amplified this resistance to thinking. So we go round in circles and in so doing forget our original starting point. IN which case the image is not of a circle but a spiral or some such so as we move we end up somewhere that seems a long way from our starting point. The other day I wanted to name this sense of resolute difficulty and resistance to any conclusion. I thought of a void. That somewhere in our social imagining there seemed to be a void that also could be posited as something, symbolically, that seemed to reside in our democratic society. And now I remember the French polit...

For the last few months all discussions between Ron and Ken have not surprisingly centred on Trump. Yesterday our conversation moved in a slightly different direction. Is chaos the absence of a pattern? Or is chaos the absence of an observed pattern? For some Trump represents chaos, but what if the chaos is intentional? In which case chaos here hides something. What it has to hide is a pattern. That's to say something has been thought out here, not just on the surface but, so to speak, underneath as well. So we intend to seek the pattern(s) in what appears to be our chaotic world, at the moment, symbolised by Trump. If we consider Trump as not just a man-child fool; if we consider that he like anyone else is controlled by both his unconscious and outside forces then we can begin to look for connections. If we look at what he does rather than ponder what he says then a pattern emerges. We can begin to join the many dots. To begin with, what he has said can be seen as a distractio...