Received: 18 October 2020

DOI: 10.1002/ppi.1557

ARTICLE
- Accepted: 20 October 2020

Psychotherapy in an age of stupidity

Manu Bazzano

School of the Humanities and Social Sciences,

University of Cambridge, London, UK Abstract
Drawing on Plato, Husserl, and the work of Bernard
Correspondence
Manu Bazzano, School of the Humanities and
Stiegler, this paper diagnoses our era as the age of stu-
Social Sciences, University of Cambridge, pidity; an era in which psychotherapy is increasingly playing
80A South Hill Park, London NW3 2SN, UK.
Email: [email protected]
a subservient role to the ideology on neoliberalism. By
reconfiguring and subverting its role, however, psycho-
therapy can provide the Winnicottian transitional space for
the creation of anamnesis, or recollection, and the re‐
creation of autonomous and cooperative thought and
practice.

KEYWORDS
Plato, psychotherapy, stupidity, transitional space, Winnicott

1 | INTRODUCTION

Stupidity always triumphs … it is always on the side of the victor (Derrida, 2011, p. 183).

Our Age is the Age of Stupidity. Sometimes described as neoliberalism, it breeds many ills—stupidity being,
arguably, the most prominent. Other contenders include disengagement, indifference, and alienation. Stupidity is
not lack of education; it is not the opposite of cleverness; being too clever by half is a sure sign of stupidity. It is a
systemic condition brought about by an invasive corporate technostructure which undermines freedom of thought
and short‐circuits spaces of learning. Like other practices, psychotherapy now increasingly operates within the
confines of the corporate technostructure.
Derrida’s (2011) pessimistic assessment quoted above is all the more poignant for having been uttered one
year before his death in 2004. It rings true today in a geopolitical landscape which favors rogues and treacherous
clowns as heads of state and is beleaguered by the global rise of right‐wing populism and misinformation. It rings
truer than ever in a psychic landscape marred by misogyny, racism, homophobia, hatred of difference, and xeno-
phobia; and at a time when we witness concerted attacks on the humanities and on psychotherapy in particular, an
insidious attempt to turn this deeply transformative art and science into a banal exercise in mental hygiene at the
service of the status quo.
Is it possible to adopt alongside this pessimism of the intellect a small dose of optimism of the will? Is there a
way out of stupidity? These are some of the questions pursued in this paper. To begin, it may be useful to look at
one definition of stupidity by Nietzsche.

Psychother Politics Int. 2021;19:e1557. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ppi © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 of 11
https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.1557
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2 | EXISTENTIAL INDIVIDUATION

In an uncharacteristic praise of Socrates, Nietzsche discussed stupidity in section 328 of Gay Science. The real
obstacle to human flourishing is not selfishness, the bête noire of all pious narratives, but stupidity:
The ancient philosophers taught that the main source of misfortune was something very different [than
selfishness]. Beginning with Socrates, these thinkers never wearied of preaching: “Your thoughtlessness
and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor's opinion is the
reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the happiest of all.” … This
sermon … deprived stupidity of its good conscience; these philosophers harmed stupidity (Nietzsche, 1882/
1974, p. 258).
Stupidity reflects our compulsion to follow the herd. It represents our inability to question (or momentarily
suspend) the introjected rules of our particular tribe, herd, and nation. It is, I would add, our inability to go
through a process of existential individuation. The latter is my designation for a difficult movement witnessed in
my clinical work, a movement toward self‐direction and authorship, often resulting in the expansion of one's
self‐construct and greater alignment with the organismic domain of experience. One key aspect of this process
is acceptance of essential solitude, what Derrida (2005) called “the absolute solitude of the existent in its ex-
istence” (p. 110). Another aspect is developing greater sensitivity toward (and readiness to learn from) the
unknown and the unconscious, as it is often through exploration of these enigmatic and uncertain terrain that
new vistas might open. Signposts in the directions of human flourishing (eudaimonia) also emerge from those
passions or daimon(s) whose intrinsic intelligence is often neglected by an increasingly fearful psychotherapy
culture in favor of legalistic obeisance to the rules of social hygiene. I speak of existential individuation to
differentiate it from the notion of individuation popularized by Jung (1928) who, for reasons examined else-
where (Bazzano, 2017, 2019a), chose to frame it in terms of intrapsychic integration; thus in my view failing to
appreciate the realities of separation, fragmentation, and difference. Despite his own rather pallid version, Jung
at least acknowledged individuation. Contemporary psychotherapy promptly consigned it to oblivion in favor of
integration. Interestingly, the latter is a fairly dependable replica of the coercive pressure lived in the public
sphere by immigrants and refugees routinely required to integrate into cultures which are said to host them. It
is also a replica of the covert or overt demands imposed by our societies of control (Deleuze, 1992) on anyone
who dares to challenge the status quo. No dominant political discourse ever asks people to individuate. It invariably
expects us to integrate within the existing order. This is (sort of) understandable; it is in the very nature of the
Powers to behave in this way. What is astonishing is how gladly psychotherapy culture follows suit. The effect
is disastrous: it prevents real psycho‐therapeutic exploration from happening; it short‐circuits the transitional
space, that vital “intermediate area of experiencing to which inner reality and external life both contribute”
(Winnicott, 1971, p. 3). By supinely accepting the dictates of a pervasive neoliberal ideology, psychotherapy
effectively poisons the transitional space by establishing “a relationship … of compliance” (Winnicott, 1971, p.
87) with reality. Our connection to reality is distorted:

[T]he world and its details [are] recognized … only as something to be fitted in with our demanding
adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the
idea that nothing matters. (Winnicott, 1971, p. 87)

Institutional power demands compliance: we become subjects through our subjugation to the existing order.
We become a self or a subject “through our primary submission to power” (Butler, 1997, p. 2). My identity is one
with interpellation: in Althusser's (1970) famous example, a policeman calls a passerby and the latter responds
identifying herself as the one who is called.
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3 | COMPLIANCE AND EMANCIPATION

Psychotherapy's desertion of (existential) individuation is parallel to desertion of the fundamental psychological

and political value of emancipation (from emancipare—to be sent out; i.e., to be freed from external control) in favor
of avowed obeisance to customs, conventions, and traditions—what Hegel (1807/1977), in a discussion of Spirit in
Chapter 6 of his Phenomenology, called Sittlichkeit. As a result, therapy across all theoretical orientations now works
as a rule in the service of compliance rather than emancipation. Lingos and methodologies vary; what does not vary
is overall genuflection to normative adaptation, to the rules of a stultifying project whose drive is to control the
perceived chaos of human experience.
Hegel's custom is an apt term here, given that in the age of stupidity the ethical order is wholly indistinguishable
from rules of behavior internalized through acculturation. The term used by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler
(2013) for this rife state of affairs is disindividuation, defined as “a deficient relation to potentiality, a failure of
individuation” (p. 62). A telling example of how the obliteration of the transformative notion of existential indi-
viduation has occurred within traditional existential therapy is through the literalization and dilution of the writings
of two pre‐existential thinkers and archenemies of ethics‐as‐custom: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In Fear and
Trembling, Kierkegaard (1847/2005) presents us with the most confrontational example of individuation: God's
horrifying call to Abraham to kill his beloved son, to give up what he cherished the most—to go against morality and
humanity, foreswear all sensible customs and humane decrees in the name of an allegedly divine and patently cruel
logic.
Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical is far from gratuitous. It is educational as well as
metaphorical (Bazzano, 2017); that is, conveying the persistence of the aesthete's sublated sensibility in a so-
phisticated spoof of Hegelian dialectics that journeys from aesthetics through ethics to religion. Crucially, for our
investigation, he also conveys in the most tragic form the dangers attendant to the essential solitude of
becoming oneself. Sadly, contemporary psychotherapy culture (including traditional existential therapy) un-
derstands solitude negatively, as something to be conquered through relatedness, possibly in the attempt to
build a manic defense against solitude. Whatever the case, I believe the loss is enormous. A culture that does
not value solitude prevents us from growing out of stupidity; it does not allow us to accept the pain that
comes, as Klein (1975) maintained, with the loss of imaginary omnipotence. It prevents us from appreciating
the difficult loneliness of the woman in Rich’s (2013) poem Song who passes through towns and villages in
which she might have lived and died. Nor can we notice the solitary beauty and splendor of the rowboat in a
winter landscape that knows itself to be separate from winter light and the iced lake—a boat that knows itself
to be wood, with a talent for burning (Rich, 2013).
A literal reading of Kierkegaard—this most exciting, superb, and maddeningly ambiguous religious poet—misses
his barbed incitement to a dangerous and meaningful life modeled after the radical example of Christ. To classify his
plea as a “dangerous folly” in the name of an ostensibly didactic appeal to morality, as an influential voice in
traditional existential therapy has done (Spinelli, 2017) implicitly endorses the regrettable development we are
witnessing at present, namely existential therapy's turn from a potentially emancipatory methodology into a project
of social and political compliance.

4 | HETERONOMY AND DIVIDUATION

Suppressed from current discourse, existential individuation is still merely the necessary first step, the catalyst for
an enquiry that takes us away from a narcissistic search for authenticity toward greater recognition of the primarily
multiple, non‐atomistic nature of the self—what Nietzsche (1878/1984) calls dividual or “dividuum” (p. 54).
Existential individuation is not individualism, for it recognizes that we are but a coalition of affects, while individ-
ualism anachronistically defends an atomistic view of the human subject. In Spinoza (1677/1996), autonomy is
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parallel to increased receptivity; power corresponds to the power to be affected. This is true for both facets, as it
were, of the bodymind continuum: as the mind's power to think is linked to its “receptivity to external ideas” [so]
the body's power to act is intimately linked our body's “sensitivity to other bodies” (Hardt, 2007, p. x). Greater
autonomy is grounded in, and constituted by, heteronomy (i.e., the concrete influence of others).

5 | ALIENATION AND INAUTHENTICITY

A similar operation to the substitution of individuation with integration has taken place in contemporary
psychotherapy with the replacement of alienation with inauthenticity. The difference between the two could not be
greater. The notion of alienation is receptive to the sociopolitical context in which the therapeutic encounter
necessarily occurs. It is a dialectical, historical notion (Goldmann, 1977; Lukács, 1968), presupposing estrangement
from one's own self and from others. It first emerged “in a certain historical condition, with the generalization of
market production [and with … reification” (Goldmann, 1977, p. 33). Reification: turning a living human being into a
thing (res), for the purposes of creating profit for the ruling class. Alienation is the product of the colonization of the
everyday at the hands of late capitalism.
Inauthenticity, the product, for Lucien Goldmann, of Heidegger's misappropriation of Lukács's notion of
alienation, is abstractly ontological; it is a‐historical, nondialectical and, in the ways in which it has been popularized
in existential/humanistic therapy, entirely imputable to the individual. Society, history, and politics vanish into thin
air. It is now the person's task to confront and surpass her alienation through cultivating empathic attunement and
striving in the wild‐goose chase for authenticity. Alienation is still a fruitful notion in an era of accelerated
exploitation of human and natural resources, an era which has morphed into something worse than capitalism and
neoliberalism, with the creation of a new class, the vectoralist class (Wark, 2019), the 1% of the population that
owns the vector or information infrastructure. Mackenzie Wark (2019) explained:

The dominant ruling class of our time no longer maintains its rule through the ownership of the means
of production as capitalists do. Nor through the ownership of land as landlords do. The dominant
ruling class of our time owns and controls information. (p. 5)

As for the remaining 99%, we produce information which then gets sold, arranged, and organized. No matter
how innovative or radical our ideas may be: we only have to post our scribbling on line or write a book for an
academic publisher to realize that we are now ensconced within a technostructure that will eat up and regurgitate
us alongside our “product” before we can say “authentic.” We will be promptly itemized within an information
market driven by a cluster of stereotypical and bigoted algorithms. Whatever one chooses to call this sad state of
affairs—capitalism is as good a word as any—one of the things it breeds, alongside alienation and disengagement, is
stupidity.
The technostructure has grown in size and complexity since Galbraith (1967/2007) first coined the term 50
years ago. It is corroborated by what is commonly described as neoliberalism and its attendant ideology.
Despite being a bewildering notion with “multiple referents,” anthropologists helped us somewhat understand
neoliberalism in two fundamental ways: “as a structural force that affects people's life‐chances and as an
ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities” (Ganti, 2014, p. 89). The once rather abstracted network of
managers who controlled the economy both within and beyond individual corporate groups has in recent years
flaunted its dark heart. We live now in the age of surveillance capitalism, “a new type of commerce that re-
imagines us through the lens of its own distinctive power” (Zuboff, 2019, p. 352). Under its auspices, social life
is achieving new levels of degradation (Taplin, 2018; Vaidhyanathan, 2018) bringing Marcusian repressive
desublimation to new heights by “turning libidinous impulses into marketable products” (Seymour, 2019,
p. 162).
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6 | ATROPHY OF THE NOETIC

In a world where the Enlightenment's dream of universality is finally achieved, tragically, by the market; in a world
where ontology is effectively, in Mark Fisher's (2009) words, business ontology, the other thing that happens is
atrophy of the noetic; that is, a shrinking of the ability to produce creative thoughts, to and imagine the new—for
instance the ability to fathom a different economic system other than capitalism.
The ability to think freely and creatively has a long and venerable history, the momentous event of the
Enlightenment—Aufklärung in German, the clearing of clouds—being one case in point, a mode of thinking and
seeing the world that may bring about, in the words of Kant (1991), Mündigkeit (maturity). That is, one's “inability to
use one's own judgment without the guidance of another” (Kant, 1991, p. 54), the ability to think without an
external locus of evaluation (Rogers, 1951) and without juvenile handing over of one's freedoms and re-
sponsibilities to political leaders (de Beauvoir, 1948/1976).
Reason, properly understood, is at the very center of this project of maturation. For Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/1997), reason has degenerated into rationalization, a socially accepted form of stupidity. But rationalization is
not reason; it is irrational. This compulsion to conform, this lack of autonomous thought has become widespread
with the acceleration of capitalism into vectoralism and with systemic disindividuation. For Bernard Stiegler (2013)
“rationalization … destroys reason as desire” (p. 27) because it is in effect a process of vulgarization that shuts down
potential space for imaginative and independent thought. Our societies of control create a pervasive condition in
which “drive‐based tendencies are systematically exploited while its sublimatory tendencies are systematically
short‐circuited in such a way that pathos has essentially become poisonous” (Stiegler, 2013, ibid). Because it is
pervasive, no one within a “consumerist industrial system” (ibid) escapes it. A similar critique of rationalization is
found in Husserl, who wrote the following lines with Hitler already chancellor for 2 years, and when a plebiscite
would grant him the title of Führer and the support of 92% of the German population:

The exclusiveness with which the total worldview of modern man in the second half of the nineteen
century let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced
mean an indifferent turning‐away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.
More sciences of facts produce a humanity of facts. (Husserl, 1954/1970, pp. 5–6)

7 | ANAMNESIS

Surprisingly, I found in Plato (a thinker I had spent years opposing) the most helpful insights in trying to make sense
of the current situation: his notions of anamnesis and hypomnesis. Anamnesis means recollection or remembering, a
process intimately linked to psyché, to the imagination, where autonomous and creative thinking can emerge. For
Plato (2009), anamnesis constitutes the very origin of philosophical knowledge/wisdom. He lamented that the
original process of memorizing and conceptualizing through the dynamic spoken word had degenerated into
hypomnesis (i.e., the use of other—indirect, automatic—means of memorization). For Plato, the culprit at the time
was writing: by the time a living thought (born of conversation) is written down, we are distanced from the dynamic
flow of ideas. Philo‐sophia, a term coined by Plato, is love of wisdom. But love of wisdom is not wisdom itself; the
love in question is for something at a slight remove, something we try to reclaim.
Anamnesis is the potential antidote for this gap: the re‐creation of the imaginative space of memory, a space that
fosters autonomy out of which flourishing may emerge. Derrida helped us understand, however, that autonomy has
always to do with heteronomy. The two do not oppose, as Plato thought. They compose. The tangible presence of others,
alive or dead, human or nonhumans, is within us. Their ambivalent message is implanted in us (Laplanche, 1996).
Freud's famous dictum where it was, there I shall be, may be rendered as where it was, there others shall be.
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8 | IN THE BEGINNING WAS EXTERIORITY

Hypomnesis—memory through technical means—does not signal a fall or the loss of the imaginary virgin terrain of
human interiority. Exteriority was there from the start, implanting indelible and fertile messages, creating the very
space of psyche. Time was out of joint since the beginning of time. What hypomnesis does signal, however, is the
short‐circuiting of the potential space that may assist the emergence of existential individuation. The struggle
against the technologization and commodification of human experience is genuinely valid; yet, it would be naive to
discount the originally pharmacological constitution of spirit itself (Stiegler, 2013).
Something similar may have happened with the Buddha's teachings: like anamnesis, smŗti, the Sanskrit word
commonly translated as mindfulness, also means memory. This was not meant as the worship of a decontextualized
cognitive faculty, that is, popular today through corporate mindfulness, but as mindfulness of impermanence:
alertness to our own mortality, the transient nature of life and our own insubstantiality (Bazzano, 2010, 2013,
2014, 2019b). This form of contemplation and practice is fertile ground in the process of existential individuation.
Without this context, mindfulness is another manifestation of stupidity, in this case applied to the Buddha's
teachings—a vulgarization of the complex mythic, religious, spiritual, ethical, and psychological richness of the
Dharma.

9 | COMMUNALISETION

Moving out of stupidity means recreating the anamnesic circuit, but this does not have to mean rejection of
technology and regressive defense of the human inner life. Creation of technology and reaction to it are part of the
very same thing—what Derrida (1981) called pharmacology. Pharmakon is both poison and remedy (Derrida, 1981;
Girard, 1977). What is needed is a pharmacology of the spirit (Stiegler, 2013), and here counter‐traditional exis-
tential therapy might be of help.
Rebuilding the anamnesic circuit means to some extent recreating on a transindividual/cultural scale the
equivalent of Winnicott's transitional space, a space where independent thinking can be fostered through exper-
imentation and playful, committed adherence to development and maturity. This is a space where the writer‐artist's
authorship, the art of creating one's own life (de Beauvoir, 1948/1976), can come into being—a space where
existential individuation can materialize. In the cultural sphere this was potentially fostered by what Husserl (1962/
1989) called communalisetion, an environment created by a community of peers nurtured by conversations/en-
counters, fostered by an educational system whose task is to store up and transmit tertiary retentions (an archive
of texts, oral teachings, libraries, plus numerous other means of documenting, and granting access to material that
aids reflection and recollection).
How alive are these networks today? How effective? Most of these forms of tertiary retentions have been
“monopolized by the culture industries” (Stiegler, 2015, p. 211) with a lethal effect on communalisetion itself:

[It] produced an asymmetry between producers [who complied] with the criteria of these financial
backers … and … the mass of consumers who no longer from publics in a public space and public time,
but audiences for publicity. (ibid)

The result was de‐communalisetion, which Stiegler described as “dissociation of symbolic milieus and … dis-
individuation” (ibid). We may still use the word “existential” when describing our approach to therapy. Do we refer
to a form of communalisetion that was rife in the heyday of existential phenomenology and has now expired,
leaving us with a carapace of empty signifiers? And are perhaps the latter “mere” fetishes, empty tokens of a once
vital and fertile transitional object? Winnicott (1971) himself hinted at the link and deep similarities between the
transitional object and the fetish.
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10 | TRIBAL ENCLAVES

I have often wondered whether the apocalyptic narratives arguably predominant in current progressive discourse
emerge not solely as a response to the undeniable urgency of climate change and the global shift to the right, but
also because the closing down of the transitional space in the culture leaves us with nowhere to turn. The three
major movements of the last 2 decades or so—Anti‐globalization, Occupy, and Extinction Rebellion—are driven by a
spirit of self‐preservation against the greed of institutional and financial power. The generous excesses, utopian
reformulations (“power to the imagination!”), and anarchist ethics that were a feature of the insurgencies of the
1960s and 1970s are simply absent, perhaps unthinkable. We now seem happy with asking modestly for a slightly
fairer, more humane world, or at least for the chance for us and our children to go on surviving, please. Imagination
is not entirely dead: it can easily envision the death of the planet but is nevertheless incapable of ever imagining the
end of capitalism.
Nor can we fathom the end of our insularity and parochial belonging to nation‐states and/or compartmen-
talized identities, including theoretical identities within the world of psychotherapy. The best we can muster, within
our little tribal enclaves (if and when we grasp that our struggle is common to the struggle of other groups) is to
speak of solidarity. I am reminded of Luxemburg (1995), for whom to think of solidarity as if two equally disen-
franchised groups were “external” to each other is buying wholesale the “divide and rule” ideology of the Powers.
Hardt and Negri (2019) mentioned the analogous examples of Iris Young and Keeanga‐Yamahtta Taylor. Young
(1981) urged male socialists to leave behind empty talk of solidarity with feminism and appreciate feminist fight
against patriarchy as part of the very same social and political struggle: anticapitalism and feminism are, in this
sense, “mutually constitutive” (p. 90). In her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Taylor (2016) makes a
similar case, urging us to understand antiracism and anticapitalism as one and the same struggle. “In fact—she
writes—the American working class is female, immigrant, Black, white, Latino/a, and more. Immigrant issues, gender
issues and antiracisms are working‐class issues” (Taylor, 2016, p. 216).
All of this is relevant to existential therapy, both because it is crucial to inscribe the latter within a progressive
political project, and because current fragmentation into insular tribes is one of the consequences of the short‐
circuiting of the potential space that psychotherapy might help re‐open.

11 | SHEPHERDS OF STUPIDITY

Psychotherapists can be instrumental in rebuilding an anamnesic circuit, alongside those of us involved in facili-
tating and delivering psychotherapy trainings in universities and colleges. The great difficulty is that the therapeutic
space has been commodified and turned into a repository where clients go in order to convalesce before re‐
occupying their reserved seats in the traffic jam. As for universities and colleges, they are now by and large
corporate businesses whose priorities only indirectly contain true learning. Therapists and trainers/academics alike
are currently required to be shepherds of stupidity. We are obliged to be the rationalisers: in many cases our
designated task is transmitting to clients and trainees a peculiar condition and institutionally endorsed pathology:
OMD, obsessive measurement disorder—a term coined by Andrew Natsios (2010), once administrator of the US
Agency for International Development. This is a condition also known as the McNamara or quantitative fallacy,
named after Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. It involves making a decision
based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring others. The reason given is often that these
other observations cannot be proven. I hear this sort of complaint regularly by trainees who have been told that
neither empathy nor the unconscious exist because they cannot be measured (Bazzano, 2020). Yankelovich (1972,
Internet file) summarized the stages of this major pitfall:
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to
disregard that which cannot be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and
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misleading. The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured easily really isn't important. This is
blindness. The fourth step is to say that what cannot be easily measured really doesnot exist. This is suicide.
What can be done? Help comes from a variety of sources. One of these is Nietzsche's use of the mask—not as
concealment but artistry. For centuries, philosophers had to wear “the mask of the contemplative priest, for their
vocation was suspect” (Bazzano, 2019a, 2019b, p. 57), and at times did so in order “not to be burned at the stake”
(ibid, p. 96). They did so intelligently, some of them succeeding in transmitting the subversive teachings of untimely
and radical philosophies. Like Nietzsche's free spirits, we too may need to wear the mask of the academic and the
therapist in order to sub‐vert (turn from below) what these particular professions have become and to redirect their
energies away from reactive forces and in favor of active forces. This brings us to another definition of stupidity:
what makes a particular entity stupid is when it is being ruled by reactive rather than active forces (Bazzano, 2019a,
2019b; Deleuze, 1962/2006).
A reactive force is a natural force that has turned against itself and is unable to reach the deep end of where it
can go. It is dominated by calculability and self‐preservation. To turn a profession, an activity or a craft from
reactive to active is a difficult task. An active, life‐affirming force that does not denigrate life and can trust its own
momentum is an extraordinary thing. Almost nothing within the tradition supports it, because the tradition is built
on foundations made up of reactive forces.
The other useful inspiration comes from the Situationists: it is the practice of detournement (Debord, 1994)
which consists in learning, absorbing a particular frame, discipline or form of communication within the tradition
and subsequently bend it in favor of emancipation. An example of this is already found in the writings of Karl Marx:
a traditional, learned analysis of economy is put to use for the subversion of the status quo. A more recent case is
that of the activist group Pussy Riot, which made headlines when five of its members staged a Situationist‐type
performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012. They have gone on to make incisive videos
against the Trump presidency, the police state, and in solidarity of Eric Garner who died after a NYPD officer put
him in a headlock in July 2014. Sophisticated, media‐savvy, and well‐produced, these videos are exemplary of
Situationist detournement: turning expressions of a system of exploitation against itself.

12 | ACTING OUT

We might be able to gradually move out of stupidity by acting out (Voela & Rothschild, 2018). In order to do that,
it would be helpful to stop genuflecting at the altar of that shadow of God, Heidegger's “Being,” and boldly
embrace an ontology of actuality, a key notion in the writings of the Frankfurt School (Dews, 1986). This is closely
linked, in my understanding, to two fecund notions that applied together would propel existential therapy out of
its theological closet. The first one is Whitehead's process philosophy, a “philosophy of the organism [where] the
subject emerges from the world” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 88). The second notion is expressionism: a thoroughgoing
critique of intentionality in favor of expression and expressionism in psychotherapy. Strangely unquestioned in
existential trainings and writings, intentionality substantiates the internal properties of experience and leaves
current existential theory stuck within the boundaries of the Cartesian subject. Expression is its necessary
antidote, the basis for a different notion of subjectivation as heterology or logic of the other. My “identity”—its
“imprint”—is clarified through expression, through action (the domain of history, ethics, of finite, embodied
existence) with others, through the way it affects others and I am affected by them. It cannot be mere assertion
of subjectivity (and on its basis, the establishing of a “consensus”). Emancipation then becomes political sub-
jectivation; that is, the formation of an identity, that is, not a self but a concrete, conflictual (and loving) relation
of self to another.
Acting out—a phrase condescendingly used in everyday language for reprimanding unruly behavior and bad
habits in a client—means engaging in actions which by their very nature long for a response, summoning a relational
domain; not as given, but as object of desire whose realization is forever uncertain.
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Acting is not reacting. It calls upon active forces; it expresses a desire for the lost communalisetion that was
dear to Husserl and that is vital to a living practice, as opposed to that treasured museum exhibit called “existential
therapy.” This call to action is far from the metaphysical wish, rife within traditional existential therapy, to salvage
an imaginary “Being” from an equally imaginary “fall from Being.” Being or not‐being—this is no longer the question;
the question is the unrealised. Equally, this call to action does not ache for libidinal liberation either, nor does it
presuppose the reality of a beach beneath the street—however, alluring these reveries are. This call is pragmatic,
expressed within the pharmalogical domain: it is both poison and remedy (Bazzano, 2019a, 2019b) but no less
urgent or utopian in its ambition: it demands the (re)creation of a transitional and transindividual space.
For Gilbert Simondon, the chief philosophical error is to believe that the individual comes before individuation
(Combes, 2013): individuation is a process out of which the individual emerges. The deed comes before the doer,
and the doer recognizes her imprint in the deed. Similarly for Nietzsche (1974/1882), the very notion of the self
comes out of our chronic belief in causality, the idea that there is an “I” (cause) behind a deed (effect): “an intellect
that could see cause and effect as a continuum—he writes—would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and
deny all conditionality” (p. 173).
We step out of stupidity by doing something stupid. This is how I read, incidentally, the activism of groups such
as Extinction Rebellion: as a set of stupid actions that are useful in getting things moving, awkward actions that get
it wrong until they get it right; actions that “enacts the desire for a relational holding” (Voela & Rothschild, 2018,
p. 60). Acting is an act of faith: by acting we conjure up a transitional space implicitly conceived as capable of
containing our actions through an adequate degree of attention, care, and desire—all necessary attributes of
therapy. The latter creates an environment where the client may act out, is allowed to repeatedly fail and fail
better, and through her words and actions begin to sketch a kernel of her individuating process.
Conversely, there is a specific name for an environment that cannot tolerate stupid actions, experimentation,
and least of all creative uncertainty. In his essay Communicating and Not‐Communicating, Winnicott (1963) called it
fascism.

O R CI D
Manu Bazzano https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3595-1191

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A U TH O R BI O GR A PH Y

Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice and an internationally

recognized author, lecturer, and facilitator. He is an associate tutor at Cambridge Uni-
versity. Among his books: Buddha is Dead (2006); Spectre of the Stranger (2012); After
Mindfulness (2014); Therapy and the Counter‐tradition (2016); Zen and Therapy (2017); Re‐
visioning Person‐centred Therapy (2018); Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (2019), Re‐visioning
Existential Therapy (2020). He is a regular contributor to several academic journals and
magazines.

How to cite this article: Bazzano, M. (2021). Psychotherapy in an age of stupidity. Psychotherapy and Politics
International, 19(2), e1557. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.1557