Post #1154271

2026-04-14 14:59 UTC

new odium symposium episode is now available on all platforms. we look Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s Gender Without Identity, a contemporary work of queer psychoanalytic theory. then we look at a case study in which it all goes wrong. www.patreon.com/posts/14-just-call-me-155052365 also we’re starting a discord for the podcast discord.gg/7tEEE39Fx also also we’re going to release our first subscriber episode next week, where we look at the pseudoscientists of paper repository viXra

Replies (2)

@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-15 03:15

Maybe it’s just because I’m rolling back through Age of Mythology, but I died laughing at “it’s like the centaur, Helen”

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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-15 19:12

Psychoanalysis really does seem to push the most obnoxious boundary in academic language. On one hand, it is legitimately valuable to create a specific framework to enable experts to talk about technical elements of the field. It reminds me of the old IT rant about users who think “turn on the computer” means “turn the screen on, no need to touch the actual computer part”. But at the extreme it creates opacity for its own sake and makes it hard for people who haven’t devoted their careers to the field to understand what’s being done. Particularly in a medical or psychiatric field where the patient is by definition in a lower-information group than the person treating them, this amounts to making it hard for the patient to understand (and therefore consent) to what is being done to them. I am by no means immune to the simple pleasure of knowing something that other people don’t, especially when the outside world reaffirms the value of that knowledge, and there is definitely a place for the specificity that this kind of jargon enables, but psychoanalysis seems to consistently stretch it too far.

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