A Civilizational Diagnosis of Modern Consciousness
Essays (Articles)
Introductory reflections that develop the project’s central claims in conceptual, philosophical, and historical form.
Psychology Without Soul
by Brenton L. Delp “Since uncle Jack died you’ve never been the same.” “Well of course I haven’t, I don’t have uncle Jack anymore, have I?” (Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles) A peculiar confusion governs much contemporary discourse about mental life. The language is now almost automatic. The brain prioritizes. The brain evaluates. The brain…
Jung, Hegel and the Problem of Opposites
by Brenton L. Delp The comparison between Hegel and Jung becomes most interesting precisely at the point where easy comparison fails. At first glance they can seem to be confronting the same fundamental issue. Both are preoccupied with opposition. Both reject one-sidedness. Both believe that truth does not lie on one side of a division…
When Medicine Became Morality by Other Means
by Brenton L. Delp The modern medical world speaks as though it were simply reporting facts. It presents itself as descriptive, empirical, evidence-based, and therefore beyond the old vulgarities of blame and sermon. Yet anyone who has spent time around discussions of addiction, obesity, depression, sexuality, trauma, chronic illness, or “compliance” knows that medicine very…
Kurt Cobain
Success, Addiction, and Civilizational Neurosis by Brenton L. Delp Around the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, the culture remembers him too quickly as icon, victim, or martyr. But Cobain remains more important than remembrance. He is diagnostic. He reveals something about a civilization that can recognize a gift, reward it, amplify it, and still destroy…
How does it feel to be one of the Beautiful People?
Your Friends & Neighbors by Brenton L. Delp “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” In the Beatles lyric, the question does not sound innocent. It carries the strange aftertaste of arrival. It is not the voice of someone merely gazing upward in envy. It is the voice of someone who…
Madness and the World
Why Individual Diagnosis is by Definition Incomplete by Brenton L. Delp An individual cannot be adequately diagnosed until the world that contributed to his formation is also brought under examination. This does not mean that personal suffering is unreal, that severe disturbance is merely political, or that every psychic crisis is a disguised social critique….
Why Did Jung Turn to the Obscure: Was it Madness?
Catastrophe, spiritual poverty, and the necessity of the later works by Brenton L. Delp Jung’s later writings are too often approached in one of two inadequate ways. They are either revered from a distance, as though they belonged to a sacred but inaccessible chamber of his thought, or they are appropriated in fragments, flattened into…
8MM
by Brenton L. Delp Why this movie is still culturally relevant. The deepest truth of 8MM is not simply that modern culture contains depravity. The film is more severe, and more human, than that. It asks whether the human soul can still remain sacred in a world increasingly organized by appetite, money, mediation, and access….
Can Christ Redeem Modern Self-Consciousness?
by Brenton L. Delp The question is no longer whether Christianity can still be defended in the abstract. The more urgent question is whether Christ can redeem a form of consciousness that has become burdensome to itself. That is the real issue. The modern self does not first experience itself as sinful in the old,…
Severance: A Consciousness That Cannot Bear Itself
by Brenton L. Delp The consciousness that cannot bear itself is not simply a weak consciousness, nor merely a diseased one. It is a divided consciousness: a form of inward life compelled to remain with itself beyond what it can humanly sustain. It does not merely feel pain. It must witness its own pain, manage…
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
by Brenton L. Delp Mother, Repetition, and Feminine Redemption An absurd film, of an absurd world, done brilliantly. The symbolic center of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die becomes much clearer once one sees that Ingrid is the Man from the Future’s mother. That fact shifts the film from a merely clever science-fiction comedy into…
Spirit, Spiritual Malady, and the Logic of Addiction
“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada “This essay proceeds from the assumption that addiction is not a personal failure or clinical anomaly, but a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness”. To say this is not to deny…