#European psych

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

William Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825 - 1905) The abduction of Psyche, 1895

[renaissanceoftheremarkable]

Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden

(John William Waterhouse, 1903)

[carlyraejepsans]

"yeah I'm rereading the little prince i just felt like doing it" <- words of a man reaching his limits

[mythological-art]

Psyche Opening the Golden Box

Artist: John William Waterhouse (English, 1849–1917)

Genre: Mythological Painting

Date: 1903

Collection: Private Collection

From the story in Greek Mythology about Psyche and her love for Cupid, the son of Venus.

Psyche, the daughter of a king, incurred the wrath of Venus who eyed her as a rival. She instructed Cupid, her son, to infect Psyche’s heart with love for an outcast, but Cupid fell in love with her and visited her every night in her chamber. Fearing Psyche would be unable to resist his beauty, he remained invisible and warned her not to steal a look at him. One night, overcome with curiosity and goaded by her wicked sisters, Psyche took a lamp and shone it over Cupid as he lay asleep. She was so startled by his beauty that she spilled a drop of hot oil on his shoulder and woke the god from his slumber. Cupid was filled with anger at her disobedience and departed at once, leaving Psyche sad and deeply regretful. She roamed the earth in search of her lover, facing obstacles thrown in her way by Venus, until Jupiter took pity on her and made her immortal so she could be reunited with Cupid.

[poundfooolish]

Deleting an entire rant on racist double think and the long oft-ignored history of white european cannibalism and the deranged hypocrisy of using cannibalism as a valid legal excuse to make slaves of other people especially in the Indies while practicing truly wild and bizarre amounts of cannibalism in Europe and the whole long sordid history of corpse medicine that we've politely disavowed and tried to forget because while it IS an interest of mine and I DO think it's vitally important to really face and square with these aspects of our history it doesn't need to be tagged onto someone else's post that's already being disrespected in the notes.

ANYWAY read 'Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires' by Richard Sugg for a real hard look at western european cannibal culture and how racist double think of assigning people the role of 'human but not human Enough' made it all possible

[bones-ivy-breath]

Psyche by Louis Couperus

[n3wy0rkd011]

History books and Collegeboard make women seem so worthless when they emphasize women who did absolutely nothing for “representation”

[funstyle]

i love reading about what are classified as "culture-bound disorders" like it really opens my eyes to how euro-american psychiatry oversimplifies things. the physical and psychological effects of grief were so intense and impossible to articulate for me. like of course it's no wonder that every culture has its own words and explanations for it. it's more than just grief or trauma. it's a demon. or a witch's curse. or being possessed by the ghosts of the deceased. or a mysterious illness that makes you act out violently. all across the world and forever and ever we've been trying to rationalise our own pain to ourselves. we just want it all to make sense. idk. people treat psychiatry like it's law despite its gaping sociocultural blindspots huh

[salvadorbonaparte]

I couldn't find any German Croatian textbooks that I liked so I got the Teach Yourself one and it's quite good but the funniest thing is that I forgot that English people don't have cases or genders and need those things explained

[ningtual]

lessera on esc next 🫶🏻

[dovesnest]

-

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

José Maria Veloso Salgado (Spanish, 1864-1945) Amor e Psyche, 1891 Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisboa

[littorea]

If I was a colonist and I saw an EN (UK) elk (Alces alces; Middle English elk [“great deer”] <- Old English eolh [“European elk (extirpated 900 A.D.)”]) I would probably cry.

[nerefee]

i think we should take fairy tales away from disney again, I think we should bring back the european fairy tale movies from the 60s with the horrifying practical effects and feverish set designs

[bones-ivy-breath]

Psyche by Louis Couperus

[headspace-hotel]

Just spent a couple hours digging into this book. I'm not even sure what has worse environmental impacts, the paper the book is made of or the opinions printed within.

Is "post-colonial" literary theory a joke? It's distressing that a book printed in 2021 by a reputable academic press can be so painfully Eurocentric, and I mean PAINFULLY. The philosophical and literary frameworks drawn upon in most chapters are like what some British guy in 1802 would come up with. In most of the chapters, every framework, terminology, and example is inseparably fused to Latin, Greek, and/or Christian philosophers, myths and texts, even down to the specific turns of phrase. You would think only Europeans had history or ideas until the 20th century.

Don't get me wrong, non-european and even specifically anti-colonial sources are used, and I don't think all the writers are white people, but...that's what's so weird and off-putting about it, most of the book as a whole utterly fails to absorb anything from non-European and in particular anti-colonial points of view. The chapters will quote those points of view but not incorporate them or really give their ideas the time of day, just go right back to acting like Plato and Aristotle and Romantic poets are the gold standard for defining what it means to be human.

In brief, the book is trying to examine how literature can shed light on the climate crisis, which is funny because it completely fails to demonstrate that literature is good or helpful for the climate crisis. Like that is for sure one major issue with it, it shows that people *have* written stuff about climate change, but it sure doesn't convince you that this stuff is good.

Most of the works quoted are rather doomerist, and a lot of the narrative works specifically are apocalypse tales where most of Earth's population dies. The most coherent function the authors can propose that literature fulfills is to essentially help people understand how bad things are. One of the essays even argues that poetry and other creative work that simply appreciates nature is basically outdated, because:

“One could no longer imagine wandering lonely as a cloud, because clouds now jostle in our imaginations with an awareness of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants” (Mandy Bloomfield, pg. 72)

Skill issue, Mandy.

The menace of doomerism in fiction and poetry is addressed, by Byron Caminero-Santangelo, on page 127 when he references,

the literary non-fiction of a growing number of authors who explicitly assert, some might even say embrace, the equation between fatalistic apocalyptic narrative and enlightenment…they are authoritative in their rejection of any hope and in their representation of mitigatory action as the cliched moving of deckchairs on a sinking ship

He quotes an essay “Elegy for a country’s seasons” by Zadie Smith, who says: “The fatalists have the luxury of focusing on an eschatological apocalyptic narrative and on the nostalgia of elegy, as well as of escape from uncertainty and responsibility to act." Which is spot-on and accurate, but these observations aren't recognized as a menace to positive action, nor is the parallel to Christian thought that eagerly looks forward to Earth's destruction as a cathartic release from its pain made fully explicit and analyzed. Most of the creative works referenced and quoted in the book ARE this exact type of fatalistic, elegiac performance of mourning.

I basically quit reading after Chapter 11, "Animals," by Eileen Crist, which begins:

The humanization of the world began unfolding when agricultural humans separated themselves from wild nature, and started to tame landscapes, subjugate and domesticate animals and plants, treat wild animals as enemies of flocks and fields, engineer freshwater ecologies, and open their psyches to the meme of the ‘the human’ as world conquerer, ruler and owner.

This is what I'm talking about when I say it's dripping Eurocentrism; these ideas are NOT universal, and it's adding nothing to the world to write them because they fall perfectly in line with what the European colonizing culture already believes, complete with the lingering ghost of a reference to the Fall of Man and banishment from the Garden of Eden. It keeps going:

“Over time, the new human elaborated a view of the animal that ruptured from the totemic, shamanic and relational past.”

Okay so now she's introducing the idea of progression from shamanic nature-worshipping religions of our primitive past...hmm I'm sure this isn't going anywhere bad

“While humanity has largely rejected the colonizing project with respect to fellow humans, the occupation of non-human nature constitutes civilization’s last bastion of ‘normal’ colonialism. A new humanity is bound sooner or later to recognize and overthrow a colonialism of ‘nature,’ embracing a universal norm of interspecies justice.” (pg. 206) 

OKAY????

Not only denying that colonialism still exists, but also saying that humans' relationship with nature constitutes colonialism??

Embracing limitations means scaling down the human presence on demographic and economic fronts…(pg.207)

ope, there's the "we have to reduce the human population"

Embracing limitations further mandates pulling back from vast expanses of the natural world, thus letting the lavishness of wild (free) nature rule Earth again” (pg. 207) 

aaaaaaand there's the "we have to remove humans from wild nature so it can be freeeeeee"

don't get me wrong like I am a random white person with no particular expertise in anti-colonialist thought but I think this is an easy one. I'm pretty sure if your view of nature is that colonialism involving subjugating humans doesn't exist any more and actually humans existing in and altering nature is the real colonialism so we should remove humans from vast tracts of earth, your opinion is just bad.

Anyways y'all know I have an axe to grind against doomerism so it was probably obvious where this was going but good grief.