Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

I get the impression of some kind of seductive and submissive person who's good at being attractive and changes their whole personality depending on who they're in a relationship with.

This might be a good time to mention that Fink says almost all obsessives are men and almost all hysterics are women.

Fink's case of hysteria is the typical woman raised by abusive father marries abusive husband then has a stormy relationship with him.

Phobia is where the paternal function almost works and the patient relies on something else to shore it up.

No, I don't get how this is different from perversion.

Fink's example here is Freud's case of little Hans, a young boy who was terrified of horses.

Quote, Quote,

The development of Hans' phobia coincidences with an abrupt decrease in anxiety.

The latter is bound temporarily when Hans takes the signifier horse as a sort of father substitute, a stand-in for father, for the farmer's name or no in the paternal metaphor.

End quote.

Scott writes, Whatever.

Could be worse.

At least he isn't spending the rest of his life sexually aroused by buttons.

After discussing some of this, Fink ends with a warning.

Now that there are more single mothers and the few remaining fathers are getting less strict, we are risking an explosion in psychosis cases.

This is pretty funny, insofar as the 20 years since Fink published have been boom times for perversion and neurosis, but the psychosis rate hasn't budged.

I expect that if I made this point to him, Fink would argue that my puny, DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure, which can't possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms.

Or maybe he'd refer back to the claim that transgender is a psychosis in the Lacanian sense, and so the rise in that counts as fulfillment of his prophecy.

Why did I read A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis?

I am happy to be able to give a clear answer.