Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization — that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.
I’m not saying that children aren’t molested or abused, in many cases it’s absolutely devastating. But therapy makes it even more devastating by the way it thinks about it. It isn’t just the trauma that does the damage, it’s remembering traumatically, remaining a victim in memory, keep patient in the position of the child, because memory is locked into the child’s view, and I haven’t moved my memory.
abused by a father… you want your father to love you. But you can’t get that fulfilled by your father. You don’t want to get rid of the enormously important desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he’s the wrong object. But maybe we shouldn’t imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of “my job,” “my finances,” “my government”—all the things that we live with. Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, “What is actually abusing me right now?” That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.
Therapy, in effect, aggravates and profits from the abuse