CONSCIENCELESS
talk #4
with eric arnal
video 2024
[TRANSCRIPT] I think what interests me or what strikes me more often is much more to do with lack of power and lack of agency, and I think in particular the sense of how impressionable people are; how fragile and shifting and not-quite-there personality and subjectivity are. I think that is what is very disturbing in the psychotherapeutic set-up potentially—although I think less so because the psychoanalytic methodology is going out, which is very much about the idea of the transference, where repressed energies and emotions and experiences come out in all their revived rawness. But I think you can put two people or more than two people together in a space which is supposed to be controlled by professional boundaries and constraints, and actually something can happen between people which no-one is in control of. And almost that’s the norm: that people lose themselves very easily in certain circumstances. There’s this pretence of power whereas in fact there are all sorts of subjugation of the people into a kind of a machine or a madness. I think there are power games, I think they’re incredibly important, but I think there’s also a sense in which people are puppets, and highly suggestible, and able to be possessed and indoctrinated and gaslit and influenced (influenced, that’s a good word) much more than people commonly acknowledge.
One of the great writers on totalitarianism and the Nazis said about Germany that conscience disappeared. So few people resisted and stood up in Nazi Germany. It’s a great mystery, a great difficulty, a great secret if you like, in recent history and among people, that there’s this lack of personality and power.