Žižek in the Clinic Quotes

“It is a misconception that a client comes into therapy for happiness. More accurately, they come into therapy for a movement in a direction where life becomes more sustainable, enjoyable, less painful. This is not the same as happiness. It could, for instance, make a client very happy to ritualistically cut their wrists. The definition of happiness is so broad that it is almost meaningless. What has more objective truth to it is that the client comes to therapy for a change.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“Both Zizek and early Hegelians hint at some sort of state that is both beyond and within reality, both an escape and a hyper-examination that allows for some sort of becoming that does not escape ideology, but at least to some degree has a self that knows the game which the mind is playing and is not fooling itself.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“During that time, he intuited that his patients lacked the proper insight into their own psychic condition. Lacan packed patients into a church and began to lecture to them. This intuition to lecture patients with psychosis is often glanced over… Lacan knew that for the psychotic he needed to provide symbolic order.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“The goal is to help move human beings toward a position to withstand the emotional turmoil of the contemporary global capitalist value exchange market’s tug on the psyche along with providing tools for every other facet of contemporary existence. The sublated individual is one who knows how external power and general systemic social structures are internalized and how the individual psyche interacts with them. In other words, if you want to surt, you must know how a wave pushes and pulls you, how desire is manufactured, where pain comes from, what is truly meaningful, what the nature of that meaning is and how that meaning should be approached.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“To suggest that we look to the past, to Freud and Lacan, in order to find a new ethical code may seem counterintuitive, but when capital reterritorializes the psyche into systems based on their compatibility with viral market shares of the mental health topographical map, it is hard to argue for an ever-forward, arc of history that always bends toward justice. This is where ethics must come into play.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“Capital recapturing the system of the psychotherapy industry ensures that the main goal of client improvement for client improvement sake is replaced by goals that are more marketable, such as fewer bad feelings or a better-behaved child for your parental dollar investment. Progress that isn’t immediately understood by a lay person may be tossed aside as unimportant, but these complex concepts simply are not unimportant.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“Technocapital is flowing at hyperspeed and is primed to grab onto our drives and pull us toward capitalistic integration into the will of the Other; therefore, now more than ever, we as a species need a conscious psychoeducation.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy