Negative psychoanalysis is a perspective and methodology at the intersection of philosophically oriented post-lacanian psychoanalysis and existential therapy.

 

The perspective of negative psychoanalysis presupposes that today’s humanity, that is me and you, are living dead — sharing the unhealable inner wound of disillusionment that cannot be healed. The basic reason for this is not to be found in the injustice of social order, the worsening of life conditions, or particular tragic events, although all these cause great suffering. As we mature collectively and personally, as our power to think, communicate, learn and feel grows, as our abilities allow us to penetrate more deeply into the ambiguity and uncertainty of reality, we become less susceptible to illusions. The rise of consciousness and disillusionment comes at the cost of unbearable emotional suffering. For those who are not guided by illusions, the reality is painful in its every aspect: life hurts, thinking hurts, love hurts, and there is no cure for this (well, except for lobotomy).

 

The modern existential analyst Alice Holzhey-Kunz rightly claims one should not consider those who are particularly susceptible to depression as having a specific psychological disorder. In her view, a predisposition to depression rather suggests a hypersensitivity to reality (which leads to the incapacity to generate illusions that would mediate reality to make it acceptable). We are facing an epidemic of depression because we are becoming more sensitive to reality.

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We are living dead, for whom committing suicide is less painful than to go on as the heroes, the survivors of our lives. But all the most unbearable suffering is worth it, because of what we are at the end of this deadly path: a collection of scars that our lives left us with, beautiful revolutionary monsters. Only those who are not detached from reality, who don’t escape the great pain of facing it, retain the power to change it.

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By trying to deprive a person of emotional suffering and fostering happiness, popular types of psychotherapy ultimately support detachment from reality, the reduction of consciousness, the neutralization of thinking, and limitations on profound layers of interhuman intimacy.

 

Within the perspective of popular psychology, we are weak sick creatures who need to be numbed with antidepressants, so we can be happy or at least feel no emotional pain. In fact, what popular types of psychotherapy are trying to heal us from is our greatness and power that comes with the cost of unbearable suffering.

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Those who promise eternal happiness and an absence of suffering are manipulating you or are themselves frightened and seeking escape in illusions. Happiness is unattainable in the context of a raised consciousness, where the only possible form of joy is the masochistic pleasure of suffering from interaction with reality.

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Necropsychoanalysis is a practice of the commons, a custodian of a space where we are “allowed not to enjoy” (Slavoj Žižek), a space of universal human pain, through which we are all connected. A negative psychoanalyst is a medium connecting common survival experiences, communicating the message that each of us is not alone in our struggle and inner pain.