PREFATORY REMARKS

Libertarians vs. Macroeconomics as a Discipline: Prof Bug Takes Up the Challenge

A good two days ago, at a stimulating libertarian web-site run by Arnold Kling, prof bug took up the challenge that Kling made to me for criticizing a list of his ideal course-curriculum for an ideal econ undergrad major. That list set out a number of strictly limited libertarian or free-market courses, all microeconomic in nature. Yes, that's right: nothing in macroeconomics.

Is that surprising?  Not really.  A Chicago University-trained economist, Kling --- like his professors at Chicago --- regards macroeconomics as largely a creation of a misguided Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and then elaborated on, wrongly, for the next three to four decades . . . with more and more efforts by US and European policymakers, seen as especially futile and harmful to properly working free-markets, to fine-tune their national economies with a mix of fiscal and monetary policies. 

Why Libertarians Dislike Macroeconomics, Born in the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s and 1940s

In libertarian thought, to put it tersely, there's no proper role for economic policymaking beyond keeping the money supply growing in line with potential GDP growth, holding taxes to a minimum, and protecting property.  Otherwise . . . stand out of the way, guys!  You will invariably muck up things!

Is such stringent faultfinding justified by the record?  The key question here, right?  And the answer: no, not according to the record.

What it does show, that record, is that the earlier Keynesian efforts --- which downplayed monetary policy, pursued over-ambitious fiscal fine-tuning of the national economy, and supplemented these macro-level policies with an array of excessive, ill-founded regulations --- were the culprit, not macroeconomics itself.  And for that matter, however over-reaching those efforts were, they did keep the US and West Europe from sliding again into the nightmare of Great Depression days . . . which, bad enough in the US and UK, were the precipitating factors (not the underlying structural causes) that torpedoed one democratic country after another in West and Central Europe and brought Nazis and fascists to power. 

And however overly ambitious the misguided fine-tuning of the national economy's short-termed fluctuations might have been, both the US and West Europe did manage to experience 25 years or so of rapid rises in GDP and per capita income.

Since the Mid-1970s

Since roughly the mid-1970s, which marked the end of that post-WWII growth surge everywhere in the industrial world --- yes, even in Japan --- the uneven thrust in West Europe and especially the English-speaking countries has been to deregulate much of the economy (especially labor and product-markets), reduce taxes, and try to limit government spending.  The record here across industrial countries has been uneven.  Obviously.  It has been most successful in the English-speaking countries --- especially in the US, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand; one and all, they have thoroughly reformed their welfare-systems, deregulated formerly over-regulated industries, freed-up product and labor markets, and --- with Britain and Canada something of an exception --- reduced taxes and governmental spending, all the while opening up to far more international competition thanks to globalizing forces and changes in governmental policies.  (In the US, it's worth adding, federal government spending has remained more or less steady since the late 1970s --- at about 33% of GDP.

More recently, many of the West European countries on the Continent --- all big-spending welfare-states, with highly regulated product- and labor-markets (until recently) ---have followed certain of these free-market reforms. 

In Particular . . .

They have sought to reduce their much higher-levels of structural unemployment by freeing up their labor markets --- which means in effect two changes: 1) requiring the unemployed to take a job within a year or lose most of their unemployment or welfare benefits, and 2) making it easier for firms to lay off excess or unproductive employees.  Similarly, but with less success so far, many of the same countries have tried to make their product markets more flexible and competitive as well. The outcome? Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Austria, and Spain have improved their growth rates of GDP and job-creation, at any rate compared to the previous decade or two. By contrast, Italy still lags badly on these scores, as do Greece, Belgium, and Portugal. 

And France?  It remains a case stuck in between these two groups: announced reforms aplenty, with little by way of actual effective implementation . . . the country, it seems, deadlocked in a stalemate, each reform contested not just by left-wing parties but by every status-quo group using its market-power, political patronage, and street demonstrations to undermine any tought measures proposed by conservative governments since 2002.

Note though.

None of these market-oriented policies means that macro-economics --- which, in the short-run, studies the fluctuations in a national economy of prices, output, and employment . . . all associated with the business cycle --- is itself a dead discipline.

Only free-market libertarians think it should be dismissed, an ideological excuse for governmental fiscal and monetary policymakers.  to try smoothing out these fluctuations and reducing their severity. In fact that has been the case since 1945, compared to the previous 150 years of economic life in the US and Europe: no major depressions of the sort that badly dislocated the industrial countries in the last three decades of the 19th century and the Great Depression years of the 1930s, when one unstable democratic government after another on the European Continent fell under the control of fascist, Nazi, or authoritarian reactionary dictatorships.

Since 1980, the US economy has noticeably improved its ability to reduce the degree and severity of recessions too: where one occurred every 4 to 5 years between 1945 and 1982, we have had only two brief and shallow recessions --- 1990-1991 and the first three quarters of 2001. (No, we're not in a recession now, and though GDP growth has definitely slowed, unemployment seems table at around 5.0%, financial markets seem less roiled by the housing bubble's aftermath or (remarkably) severe oil price-shocks, and GDP growth looks like it will start picking up in the 3rd and 4th quarters, not to mention next year . . . at any rate, according to the best forecasts.

The Crux of the Issue At Stake 

Enter the theoretical question at stake between Kling and me (and in the posts at Econlog joined by others): is this better economic performance in sustaining high levels of GDP output, job-creation, impressively low levels of unemployment, and overall price stability a matter of simply freeing up to an extent previously over-regulated labor and product markets or, additionally, better and wiser policymaking by above all the Federal Reserve in monetary policy and, to an extent, fiscal stimulants in the early 1980s Reagan era and the early part of this decade in the Bush-Jr. period?

What follows is a literal re-posting of the buggy prof's comments left at the Kling site five days ago (May 24th, 2008)

                                             Introductory Comments

                                 Long-Term Economic Growth.

Nobody disputes that long-term economic growth is largely a matter of an efficient private sector: especially the inputs of capital investment (productively employed), technological change, and (more controversial but sound in my view), vigorous entrepreneurship. The reason for the latter's need? If we're talking about radical, structurally changing technological breakthroughs that come generally in clustered waves --- roughly every 50-60 years since the first big wave in the 1760s-1820 period or so (iron, steel, textiles, and new energy systems for the machines that produced these) or since 1975 or so in ICT and the Internet --- it takes new dynamic start-ups to generally bring them successfully to the market-place.

                                Introductory Comments

Immigration and US Educational Performance 

Here's a set of comments that prof bug left earlier today at a good libertarian site, The Marginal Revolution, about the variation in American educational performance, viewed comparatively, in international exams --- especially the PISA for 15 year olds administered every three years in science and math --- across 30 industrial countries and several others not in the OECD. 

Remember, prof bug is not a libertarian and has criticized its transformation of free-market capitalism into an all-encompassing ideology.  As today's comments will show, he is severely critical of this view even though he is equally hard on politically correct radical/liberal ideology. 

The subject?  Illegal immigration out of Mexico and Central America, and to an extent even legal immigration from that region . . . which is, in his view, laying the base of a new, ever larger underclass of poorly educated people, with to boot (as marks an underclass) 50% now of Hispanic births illegitimate and all the expected consequences in gang-banging, violence, and hatred of women that follow from single mother-headed, poorly educated families.

What To Do about Illegal Immigration? 

We have as a country benefitted enormously from it in the past . . . including in the 19^th and very early 20^th century poorly educated immigrants out of Europe (and to an extent Pacific Asia) when the US had a labor shortage and tens of millions entered here freely . . . as did, observe, several hundred thousand African Americans who came here out of the Caribbean islands then and later.  Since then, our economy has been drastically transformed.  In particular, as we have shifted from an industrial manufacturing country ---40% of the US labor force in mfg. industry in 1950 and now about 9% ---to a knowledge-based economy in which at a minimum a good high-school diploma is needed for a half-way decent job, and the gap between college-educated and other Americans grows ever larger, we clearly require a far different kind of immigration policy that takes into account the ever greater need for a well-educated work-force.  It's no giant intellectual challenge.  Our neighbor to the north, Canada, has been using a skill-based immigration quota policy for decades now, without any harm to their educational standards.

No, Not a Perfect Policy, Canada's

We can do even better.  It's a matter of adjusting all legal immigration to skill-based needs, whether the qualifying immigrants are out of Latin America, Asia, Europe, or the Middle East.  As for illegal immigration, fortunately --- for the time being --- the thrust in all political circles has been to toughen up border controls and, if we're lucky, to penalize firms that hire them.

    The Marginal Revolution Post by Its Head: Tyler Cowan, a Professor of Economics at George Mason

The subtitle of this excellent book, by Daniel Koretz, is What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.  Here is one excerpt:

"The distressingly large achievement differences among racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups in the United States lead many people to assume that American students must vary more in educational performance than others.  Some observers have even said that the horse race -- simple comparisons of mean scores among countries -- is misleading for this reason.  The international studies address this question, albeit with one caveat: the estimation of variability in the international surveys is much weaker than the estimation of averages."

". . .We are limited to more general conclusions, along the lines of "the standard deviations in the United States and Japan are quite similar." 

Which they are.  In fact, the variability of student performance is fairly similar across most countries, regardless of size, culture, economic development, and average student performance. I was shocked to read this but the book is highly reputable and persuasive.

                                  Here Is Prof Bug's Reply

Note That It Begins with a Quoted Paragraph from Another Blogger

The quoted remarks that follow refer to the latest PISA study (2006), which is administered every three years by the OECD to 15 year old students in all 30 OECD countries, plus several others that participate.  The study assesses student knowledge and performance in science and mathematics on several categories.  American 15 year-old students tend, on balance, to score somewhat below the average level for all the participating countries, but the performance of our students varies markedly across ethnic/racial divisions, and those differences entail all sorts of debates, and especially two: the controversy over immigration --- largely out of Mexico and  the poor Central American countries --- and the IQ contrversy and what factors (genetic and social) explain the large differences in IQ between European- and Asian-Americans on one side and Hispanic- and black-Americans on the other.

We won't enter into the IQ controversy here, though --- for what it's worth noting --- prof bug has delved into it in the past.  The rapidly growing Hiispanic population in the US is, to repeat, the focus of our current interest.  Here is a summary by the quoted poster (referring to an earlier post in the Marginal Revolution thread by prof bug) of the ethnic/racial differences in the PISA exam of 2006:

"The word "diversity" can mean a lot of things. What really matters is that Canada has higher median human capital than America. Canada has very little illegal immigration and thus practically no Mexicans, and is only about 2% black. It's system of legal immigration is explicitly designed to benefit current Canadian citizens by carefully selecting those applicants with the highest human capital. I, for example, took the Canadian immigration online assessment in 2001 for an article I was writing and failed to score high enough to qualify for an interview with a Canadian immigration official. (Their opinion was that they had plenty of journalists already, thank you very much, don't call us, we'll call you.)

"Here's the executive summary of the latest PISA report from the federal National Center for Educational Statistics on U.S. performance:

" 'In the combined science literacy scale, Black(non-Hispanic) students (409) and Hispanic
students (439) scored lower, on average, thanWhite (non-Hispanic) students (523), Asian (non-Hispanic) students (499), and students of morethan one race (non-Hispanic) (501)."

[The OECD average is set to 500.]' " --- Steve Sailer

Observe, in passing, that the buggy prof had posted earlier there the link to the latest PISA exam results (2006)

                                       Prof Bug's Own Comments:

                                 INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Self-Tangling Psychoanalytical  Turgidity

Prof bug is grappling mightily still with two cumbersome books on psychoanalysis and its varieties, the struggle a good 10 days old now --- contrary to what he had expected: not least, because he knew a fair amount about the subject from earlier research and writing.  Alas, as with almost everything written by psychoanalysts or their insight-oriented spin-offs --- the latter conducted by Ph.D. or M.A. holders in clinical psychology, and not the graduates of psychoanalytical institutes --- the writing is chock-a-block with endless abstract neologisms that serve as theoretical concepts and that then, in turn, sub-divide the arguments into endless classificatory sections.  All of it very long on claims and assertations, with little or no concern for empirical evidence above and beyond some clinical observations by the writers of their own patients or, no better, the countless footnotes to writers who share their opinions and theoretical orientation. 

Any Exceptions?  Only One Comes to Mind

Much of what's called object-oriented psychotherapy --- now really merged with the broader relational-therapy (which looks mainly at the interaction of a patient with the therapist or with initimate persons in his or her life) --- was based on observations by clincians at the Tavistock Institute in London of infants and young children.  (Objects, a concept coined by Freud himself, means in effect other people: in orthodox Freudianism, including the British Melanie Klein offshoot of the interwar period, objects (other people like mom and dad) are supposedly understood by the infant and young child as valuable only insofar as they gratified certain biological drives and instincts, all egocentric and without any particular concern for attachment, acceptance, and nurturing needs.)

What the better Tavistock psychologists and psychoanalysts found found was revealing: contrary to Freud and his followers --- including his daughter, Anna and especially Melanie Klein --- infants and children have basic, irreducible "drives" to be accepted, loved, and nurtured, rather than ego-centric drives of dominance, pleasure-seeking (erotic or otherwise), and a sense of self-centeredness in general, all of which, in Freudian terms, had to be blunted and repressed if the child, as it passed through pre- Oedipal, Oedipal, and post-Oedipal dynamic stages of personality development, were to fit into the world of the family and society, however much it might cost the child in neurotic symptoms.  And so relational therapy as it evolved shifted the thrust of much psychoanalytical therapy from intra-psychic phenomena toward inter-personal relations . . . with later schools of that sort adding their own theoretical approaches to it. 

Whatever core empirical work existed in the early Tavistock group got buried under more and more neologisms and the disputes among this school or that school . . . all matters to be discused when prof bug's splattered brain recovers from its immersion in the self-punishing morass of psychoanalytical psycho-babble.  But note.  At the same time, ego-psychology --- the more orthodox sort worked out by Freud and his gifted daughter Anna: along with the structural theory of the mind (the ego, the unconscious, the punishing super-ego) --- continue to reject the new object-oriented and relational psychoanalysis as a dangerous diversion . . . the key problems of a distraught and demoralized patient a direct outcome of a compulsive and reiterating intra-psychic dominance of the conscious ego-parts of the patient's mind by early childhood traumas and negative fantasies that bring the patient into constant conflict with the real world.

From that viewpoint, all sorts of relational psychoanalysis are escapist and overly subjective distractions in therapy from the core problems of the analysts' patients.

Bad Reputation in Academic Psychology

For the time being, no matter.  Simply note how academic psychology became suspicious early on of psychoanalysis and, later, non-analytical insight-therapy . . . endorsing, instead, cognitive-behavioral approaches that concentrate on learning-theory and efforts to change the harmful thoughts that are closely linked to emotional distress.  Feelings, after all, are very difficult to change.  Thoughts are easier to recognize and deal with.  Anyway, more of this for later buggy articles.  And cognitive-behavioral therapists seeks to find ways to pin down measurement-data that will allow them to gauge and generalize about the success-rate of their therapies.  (How successful they happen to be will be discussed in subsequent buggy aritcles).

In the meantime, on to . . .

                              TODAY'S BUGGY ARGUMENT

Instead, for today, here's a post the buggy prof left at one of the best economic web-sites around, Mark Perry's Carpe Diem, a liberatrian site.

No Bugged-Out Libertarianism 

Prof bug, remember, is no libertarian.  He has criticized its atomistic reductionism of social life into distinct independent individuals, its inability to distinguish among different kinds of democratic governments --- all politicians are regarded as equally suspect, dishonest, wasteful, or corrupt --- and above all its failures to understand the institutional and power-base of both domestic economies and the global system of exchange: flows of goods, services, investments, multinationals, and technologies.  Still, what distinguishes Perry's site is his impressive daily efforts at providing his readers with commendable empirical data to back up his libertarian arguments.  You might not agree with each of them, but you then know why you disagree and can offer both theoretical and empricial counters. 

(A brief clarifying remark or two about the libertarian approach to diverse democratic governments.  The core assumption remain active in all libertarian theoretical work and goes without questioning: all politicians are equally suspect, dishonest, wasteful or outright corrupt, and if there are any differences across democratic countries --- say, the USA compared to the Continental welfare-state systems --- it's in the degree of statist interference with the spontaneous operations of the capitalist market-system.  At bottom, you see, libertarians are convinced that markets will --- if left alone, protected by property rights and a legal system --- they will always produce optimal economic outcomes: the most technological innovation, the most entrepreneurship, the most growth in GDP, the most job-creation, and the only efficient ways to respond to consumers' given preferences . . . taken for granted as the basis for business firms to satisfy wiithout restriction. 

What follows?

Well, to put the answer in a nutshell, the US government may be run as much by incompetent, wasteful, and venal politicians (and bureaucrats) as the EU governments or those even in Latin America or Pacific Asia, but at least government regulations of the market, subsidies, trade-protection, distributive and redistributive policies, and ambitious social policies --- and above all, government spending as a percentage of GDP --- are lower or less intrusive here than abroad.  And that is more or less the only difference that matters.

Today's Subject

It's Mark Perry's endorsement of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that bemoans the widespread pessimism plumbed in recent public opinion surveys regarding the state of the US economy and the thrust or drift of the Bush administration (as well as the Democratic Congress).  As prof bug notes, such pessimism has been found off and on for decades now in studies by political scientists, and the attitudes they uncover are --- well, just that: attitudes, not deep beliefs.  And they are definitely subject to a variety of changing infuences. 

Please note that though prof bug is no libertarian, he does admire Perry's web site --- always crammed, daily, by data-filled posts.  Whether you agree with Perry or not, you know exactly why and can either nod yes or reply rigorously. Click here for Carpe Diem, the name of the site. 

                                   MARK PERRY'S VIEW

              "What a difference a century makes:
'1888: America excites an admiration which must be felt upon the spot to be understood. The hopefulness of her people communicates itself to one who moves among them, and makes him perceive that the graver faults of politics may be far less dangerous there than they would be in Europe. A hundred times in writing this book have I been disheartened by the facts I was stating; a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding strength and vitality of the nation chased away these tremors.
---"The American Commonwealth" by Britain's Lord Bryce' "

"2008: There is something both startling and disturbing about the gloom that has settled over Wall Street and the country in general. In fact, looking back over the past century, it would be a stretch to rank the current problems as especially notable or dramatic. Something else is going on - namely a cultural rut of pessimism that is draining our collective energy, blinding us to possibilities, and eroding our position in the world." --- Mark Perry  Click here.  The WSJ article he is referring to is the following:

~Who Stole the American Spirit? by Zachary Karabell, WSJ

                                   WHY SUCH PESSIMISM?

The buggy response to his query: Is such pessimism really a surprise?  Hardly: it surges every time there is a recession near-by, and the US is led by a weak president. Survey data have brought this out clearly for decades in American opinion, with especially the decline in respect for politicians, including Congress and the Presidency, back in the 1960s.

The nadir was in the Carter period. Under Reagan, the country bounced back, and opinion surveys showed a clear upsurge in optimism, even though it never approached the 1950s period.

Same cycle in the early 90s. Germany and Japan supposedly won the cold war, the economy was rotten, employment turnover was at an all time high in public opinion (funnily, economists couldn't find this in the stats), and Bush Sr couldn't have cared less except for the presidential race.

Then it changed in 1996. Until then, the US economy was supposed to still be tanking, Made-in-Japan (like Made-in-China) was on the verge of controlling the US economy, etc etc. By 1999, all that had changed in opinion surveys again --- though still short of the 1950s.

So What's Going On?

Essentially, several influences are at work here, none of them new --- other than the discouragement caused by the Bush administration's policies at home and abroad, with the president nearing an all-time low in public opinion support. 

1)A decline in respect for traditional authority, now documented for decades.

Prof bug is putting the last touches on his two follow-up posts about the different kinds of psychotherapy --- insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral --- with, please remember, those articles inspired by HBO's In Treatment, a creative breakthrough in televised drama. If you're new to the buggy site, you'd do well to read the initial article on that series. Found at the top of the buggy home page, it ranges widely and sets out the multiple reasons for prof bug's thumping praise.

In the meantime, you'll find a new follow-up on psychotherapy in the bugged out comments that follow . . . adapted word-for-word by prof bug from a lengthy post he left at the HBO forums on the drama. The topic? Paul Weston, the chief character in IT (In Treatment) --- played by Gabriel Byrne --- as a man and as a psychoanalyst who appears in all 43 episodes of the drama.

                 PAUL WESTON, PSYCHOANALYST, HUSBAND, AND FATHER

1) Paul Weston . . . yes, certainly a complex character and a difficult role for Byrne play: 1) full of insight and empathic help for his patients --- his therapeutic slant, criticized by Gina, is essentially relational psychotherapy, with a danger that empathy can erode boundaries between the therapist and the patient; and yet 2) totally at sea in his personal life, as full of self-deception as any of his patients and lacking emotional engagement with his wife or his children.

2) In both capacities, Weston's character required Byrne to limit his emotional range. In his personal life, he emerges as a drained, dissociated man, cut off from strong feelings and swept up in a mid-life crisis (AKA, existential crisis) that he hasn't the slightest insight into. In his professional life, he's more engaged, but lives indirectly by means of his empathic projections of his own mind into the minds of his patients.

His total confusion about Laura underscores something else about his inner life: he is lost in fantasies about her. Not just sexual ones, mind you: if anything, he shows himself incapable of any passion whatsoever in her presence, either when she's in treatment and sitting on a couch a few feet from him or when he's at her residence for a show-down in which, no sooner does he arrive, than he starts launching dissociated patter about abstract art and whatever else might distract from his presumed motive for being there: his professed love and yearning for Laura in all senses of the term.

3) Weston's fantasies don't stop with Laura, or a desire for her body and her adulation for him (he hopes). His mind is crammed with kinetically charged fantasies of a marked escapist sort: he wants to shove off his patients onto Gina, then run off with Laura to the Caribbean, where he will scuba dive during the day, drink cocktails with her on the beach in the evening, and fuck and suck her all night long until the imagined paradise repeats itself the next morning and the morning after.

These are the fantasies of a troubled adolescent boy, whose maturity is roughly equal (as In Treatment shows) to Weston's.

In the end, whether fully intended by the writers of IT or not, Weston emerges as a laughing-stock of sorts, a figure of fun.

    ALL OF WHICH LEADS TO SOME REFLECTIONS ABOUT PSYCHOANALYSIS

4) Note, for one thing, that Weston is the only patient who repeatedly appears in IT who's left stuck in psychotherapy at the end of the series. All the others have taken responsibility for their lives, for good or bad, and left: Laura, Kate, Alex, Sophie, Jake, and Amy (reluctantly maybe: the dramatic series is ambiguous here).

The book on relational psychotherapy --- entitled, strangely enough, Relational Psychotherapy (Patricia A. Young the author) --- arrived Friday night, and prof bug is reading through it, prepratory to finishing the two follow-up articles on psychotherapies . . . divided roughly into insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral therapies, with each of these two major categories divisible in turn into sub-schools. Meanwhile, as further entertainment, here's another divertimento I just posted at the HBO forums on In Treatment for the benefit and delectable pleasure of the frothing in-tizzy girls and guy-girls there: one and all, convinced prof bug is off his rocker.

HBO MEMBERS' FORUM

Some Outraged Lather

"I've been thinking tonight and I've decided that not only is his academic life a fake, but I'll bet that any photo of his wife he may post is really one of those that you get when you first a wallet... the kind of people that only exist with an airbrush. "I'm still sticking with this idea.......he's actually a bloated, balding dishwasher who lives in a trailer park. His wife is toothless and plays the banjo."] DiamondCat

"You know what you are Gordo? A sick indistinguishable phallus symbol in the permant relaxed position. As in flaccid? His brain is flaccid" Orwellian 1984

"Solong, darling, what's going on in this thread? I was away for couple of days, by coming back I found this freak gordongordo troll here jamming all the good posts. Is there a way we can get rid of this nightmare? Solong, I trust you will find a way! One disturbed gordon troll sinking such a good thread...love, 40bee" 40Bee

From Flilppo Rat-Man to Freakish Buggy Guy

Prof Bug Explains Himself

Ouch! Ouch! Gotta hand to you, guys and girls: now that you've caught on to me, I have to fess up --- I'm a hopelessly loose-in-the-bean mental wreck. Want proof?

Then go lickety-split to the latest updated edition of the papers of Sigmund Freud --- lovingly, yea worshipfully, kept fresh up to the day by cult-member disciples --- where you will find, next to one of his most famous case studies, "RatMan", a long case study entitled "Bugged-Out- ProfMan". No need to remind someone like you with your psychiatric genius what ailed poor RatMan . . .. the pioneer freak in psychopathology whose DNA slipped stealthily into my great great grandfather bor in 19th century Vienna at about the time our Tail-Length Rodent Blaze-setter entered analytical history.

Who?

For the benefit of the laymen and lay-women in this forum --- not to mention quite a few Skinnerian behavioral conditioners who carry certified Learning-Theory credentials to treat us all, but who purposefully ignore Freudian case-studies --- it's necessary only to say that Rat-Man, an obsessive type convinced he would be devoured by sewer rats one day, was persuaded by Sigmund in analysis to face manly his rodent-repulsions, dress up in Mickey Mouse guise, jump into the sewers, and spend some quality time with the little four legged guys.

Alas, as Ruby, 1974, and 4Bee obviously know by heart, one lonely slime-covered night Rat-Man was chewing the rag with some alligator pets of his rat friends when who should slither by ---- of course! of course! Mickey's mini-skirted Main-Squeeze, Minnie Mouse herself. Poor RatMan! It was heads-over-heels amour in seconds.

And within seconds, he ran off with Minnie down a connecting sewer where, for 12 hours straight, they sucked and slurped and screwed like bunnies (if you'll pardon the reference to another rodent species). But, but . . . in his passion, Rat-Man had forgotten to bring along more than 16 condoms. For a sex-mad rat, usually enough, no? But not for Minnie; no sir. And so when Minnie --- her brain floating and spinning in a tidal pull of orgasmic bliss after 16 pokes in various orifices--- insisted that such a paltry number was only foreplay for her, and challenged RatMan to show exactly what kind of Real-Man Rat he was, what could he do?

Electrified with renewed passion, the poor RatGuy returned to his screwfest with --- OH OH, unprotected sex!

Poor Poor Rat-Man and His DNA Inherited by Prof Bug

Found dead with slime-ridden plague the next morning by a sewer-crew, RatMan's body was covered up, put in a casket, and sent to UCSB, my university, to be examined by Willy Wankalana, my great great grandfather who was a pioneer specialist in dissecting the DNA of rodents. And wouldn't you know, cutting his finger one day in RatMan dissection, his blood got infected by RatMan's DNA, and the rest if history: down through the ages into the genes of baby gordongordo.

A Sad Sad Story, No? And How Poor Buggy Boy Became Flippo

And not made any happier because I was aware of being off my rocker as early as age 5.

You see, boo-hoo, I got screwed up in my Oedipal phase when I thought I was supposed to act out my fantasies and actually fuck mom, not just lecherously visualize it with some wet-dream squirts. Fortunately, mom was very understanding. Then too she hated dad . . . an ultra-macho type, actually (truth to tell) the trainer of Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1950s and early 1960s; guy always cheating on her, much like David with Gina. Boy, did she teach me a lot! We moved from her blow jobs to simple coitus and then 69 --- well, actually, what with my three-foot height, 34.5 . . . but soon, within weeks, mom assured me that I now qualified for 45.2 in oral sex. Wow! Was I ecstatic!

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Not to Despair, Buggy Visitors:

Yep, no need to despair or fret. Prof bug, you see, is still busy writing the two follow-up articles in the buggy mini-series that began on April 27, 2008 --- four days ago --- on various kinds of psychotherapies, roughly divided into two major categories: insight-oriented therapies and cognitive-behavioral ones. Most of the two-follows have been written, any delay in posting them due to a recent intrusion: tersely put, in his wanderings around googled cyberspace, the bugged-out prof chanced two days upon a fairly recent book on relational psychotherapy . . . a form of insight-oriented therapy, originally conceived by an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Henry Stack Sullivan in the middle of the 20^th century, and increasingly popular in insight-oriented circles --- psychoanalytical or not.

No need to mention the book's title or author yet. After prof bug read a few of the pages available at Amazon, he ordered a copy; it just arrived; he will read through it tonight --- maybe tomorrow if need be; and see what's what by way of additional material for the two follow-up articles.

In the Meantime, Some Teasing Waggery for Your Enjoyment

Yes, by way of enjoyment and titillation --- and perhaps a little insight into what's going on at the HBO forums --- here's some joshing fictional banter that prof bug banged out in about 40 minutes a day or so ago and posted at one of the threads there. In that new, off-the-wall thread, which was started by one of the brighter Gabriel-Byrne adulators --- with, prof bug quickly adds, some natural writing talent that she's working hard on to improve: hopeful even that she might find a publisher sooner or later --- the posters are supposed to imagine scenes in which that adulator and GB strike up a relationship, sexually charged of course, but not just that, and then these same posters project their half-lecherous, half-infatuated projections of their own libidinal-charged fantasies onto both the original poster and GB.

Oops, prof bug just guffawed several seconds at the whole thing. Can't help it!. Couldn't breathe; had to stop for a good minute or so. Seems silly, no?

And yet . . . well, the girls there are trying hard to work themselves into a fiction-writing mood, and the bugged-out prof not only can't object to that effort, he has been propelled by his pedagogical obsessions to encourage them in their struggle to improve their writing skills.

In short, it'st just the sort of mental-tripping adventure an old lecherous pedant like yours truly can't resist throwing himself into . . . his unconscious tugs, intellectual and cock-wise, leaving him no choice. Hence the daft, half-waggish, half-pornographic story that he left at the thread there for the eroticized GB infatuates to do with it as they wish.

The Setting and the Four Main Characters:

The cognoscenti in the HBO forums --- whether the adulating girl/girls or guy/girls (not to forget the lesbian girl/guys and the bisexuals), with prof bug now down to the last of the dumbo Neanderthal-heteros who haven't been driven off by those still hoping to plunge their faces into GB's fab-ass and, they hope, bazooka-packed pecker --- naturally know who the characters featured in this not quite Nobel prize-winning literary piece are . . . three of them, you see, featured prominently in the HBO In Treatment series, with the fourth, Ms. Tushy-by-the-Poet, obligatory according to the rules set by Flirty-Legstrom. Flirty is the chief writer in that thread, though Tushy writes a lot in other threads, fiction and non-fiction. Both are good natural writers; just need a lot of discipline and hard work, plus encouragement, to become adept professionals . . . like four or five other posters there. They also have to learn how to concentrate their reading on talented short-story writers in the contemporary era, like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Updike, and Flannery O'Connor . . . four names and links to their collected stories that prof bug left in another thread there. Yep: concentrate, read a lot, notice the different styles, and . . . well, prof bug will just quote what he left there in that thread;

These are good stories, a nice start --- all of you posting them have natural talent. Really. It does need to be nurtured and worked on diligently by all of you; and the best way is for you to study carefully some outstanding contemporary short-story writers. Look at all they start their stories; look at their styles --- simple or complex --- and their characters (which are entered into by the writer from what perspective?); the settings, and how they're sketched in; the dialogue as reflecting each character's personality; the plot (which has to be simple compared to a novel), with the characters revealing something important about themselves --- but unable to change fundamentally as is often the case in novels. And the emotionally charged insights and revelations about life you come away with from the stories: whether about one or two individuals or a community or a country or the human condition.