Reading Lacan, part 2

More "pre-reading" exercises:

The other night I went to a party at Chad's house. We talked about aliens, conspiracy theories, and new religious movements. He posited that if someone was interested in one of these subjects, it was nearly guaranteed that this person would also be interested in the other two. I agreed, and offered up an explanation I borrowed from Elaine Showalter's Hystories: the reason is that recountings of alien abductions, religious experiences, and conspiratorial mania sound very similar. To her, all of these responses, as well as other historical phenomena like hysteria and PTSD were all responses to trauma.

Chad strenuously objected to this premise, because he felt it was bad psychoanalysis: it destroyed the historical context for hysteria. He felt that WWI PTSD is a wholly different experience from Victorian hysteria. I don't think it is, but I do think I did a poor job of explaining Showalter's book. What sounded to Chad like an ahistorical romp that attempted to tie together disparate pheonomena under one roof, sounds to me like a demonstration of how historical circumstances produce different explanations. In other words, alien abduction is different from shellshock, but trauma is trauma no matter the form.

I've found people who dismiss psychoanalysis because it seems to them completely ahistorical and unscientific, and I've seen people who portray it as the exact opposite: totally historical and of scientific merit. I'm looking for a middle ground. On the one hand, the concept of repression is individual desire folding under societal rule--cries out for context. However, we're never not in culture, so the concept of repression actually does look pretty universal to me--but the forms it takes will differ.