Textbook Errrors
PROLOUGE /
This piece was written in an evening of discontentment, recalling another moment of annoyance a year prior.
I was in college at the time, aloof of what psychoanalysis has to do with my life’s work beyond being helpful with creativity and navigating social interactions. Up until this point I had read several scientific journals for “leisure” and was frustrated about not knowing next steps to further my research.
I hit an intellectual dry spell and the drought was becoming unbearable.
august 28, 2017 /
I remember feeling malnourished in my psychoanalytical studies during my junior year in college.
Though I wasn’t reading my usual C.G. Jung studies as I typically would when I was experiencing a learning withdrawal, this need for something entirely new was out of place to me. Not too out place apparently, because I found myself at the nearest local library I was so hungry to find something grandiose and revolutionary in my own experience.
This library was a grave disappointment, as it would be to travel back to your childhood home and realize that this place just didn’t have the spark it once use to, or rather the psychic associations with your senses and this special place have vanished entirely.
I was disturbed but still determined.
I was excited and alert and could smell the hobo sitting in the far corner of the library; unfortunately when I am at my highest focus threshold my senses are at their sharpest. I weaved through the walls of books on my own. Even though efficiency is an upmost importance to me, I refrained from asking for geographical guidance due to my lack of impromptu social competency. If you were to Google this behavior you would figure out that I have severe social anxiety and that therapy is the remedy I should seek… I will not discuss the irony of going to a social anxiety therapy consultation at this time.
Once I had found the psychology books I was rather turned off as the selection was scarce. I flipped through the largest psychology textbook they had and I immediately felt grief. How could anyone read psychoanalytical vocabulary terms, observe stock photos of men and woman expressing different “candid” emotions, and look at examples of inkblot tests (I didn’t actually see this in the textbook, I assumed that there was a graphic insert of one somewhere in there) and be convinced that they are educated in psychology? One is severely mislead if they think they can absorb psychology without being intelligent in feelings, intuition, imagination and heightened self-awareness.
Learning psychology is dependent on the individual’s actual experience. This is why I have innately enjoyed creating and studying on my own ambitions. My appetite for genuine creation and knowledge absorption only ferments when the suppression and structure of a government classroom curriculum are absent. I avoided taking any psychology classes for this reason, yet I failed to see this with content creation in filmmaking as it is the same process of deriving intuitive conclusions in organizing symbols and archetypes in a way that the observer can understand.
As I near the end of my film school career I can feel my unconscious igniting with untamable flames… it knows we are about to be free.
This mini essay is just a micro-product of what is to come.
ANALYSIS /
At this time I was gravely unaware of my gift of psychoanalysis or my actual requirement of pursuing intellectual curiosities.
By this I mean, if I do not indulge my psychoanalytical postulations, I am then refusing to accept my identity.