slumberdisrupt
Really, every one of these occupations is gross. Even gaming "ideally" as the poor sap relegated to emulation does is a perversion. And let's not forget those digital collectors. Who reading this thread doesn't have an organized stash of ROM files on their external drive?
Back to the scalper: what actually separates him from the collector? That he fetishizes the money form over the commodity form? In objective terms, the money form really is the purer and cleaner one; it's the commodity form that is marred and gross. Although:
> Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.
But none of this matters if you want to stay constrained to some narrow set of nerdy interests. After all is said and done, don't let me "yuck your yum"! So yummy, that corroding PCB smell, those shallow vertical bevels in the gray plastic, that soft crackle of the compressed music of the Nintendo 64... who am I to take that from you? I am no "scalper"!
I'm sympathetic to this even if this lethargic attitude goes back to the religious period as you say. We can at least find the roots of it in the Enlightenment with Newton's "hypotheses non fingo".
Every psychoanalyst of course has their theoretical meta-psychology, but every clinical psychoanalyst knows that they must fight to abandon it at the door as they confront every analysand anew. Psychoanalysis is not a matter of instructing the patient of the death drive, of resistance, of the Oedipus complex, and so on. (Freud was wrong about why his intervention with Little Hans "succeeded".) Freud himself searched for something beyond hypnosis because the hypnotic technique required a susceptibility of the patient to suggestion, and furthermore required a constant relationship with the patient, otherwise the patient would invariably suffer a symptom relapse. Relate this to the dismal long-term rates of regression of CBT patients. (And this is the forbidden evidence of this "evidence based therapy".)
The analysand enters the analytical relationship supposing (as you have supposed) that the analyst knows something crucial that the analysand does not. So what happens as the analysand comes to realize that the analyst does not, in fact, possess this knowledge? The analyst indeed knows they don't know, but this is presumably nothing like what you assume the analyst supposes themselves to know.
The analyst is, in their role as an analyst (and not a therapist), merely the secretary of the analysand. They "take notes" on what the analyst says, in order to help show the analyst what they've said.
But GP is completely correct that all of the fun, magical projects in the OP article are antithetical to the profession.
I'll only admit I've cheated a little: that Freud's contribution was a scientific one is not an assertion that is "generally regarded as correct." But Freud believed himself to be a scientist and frankly I agree. It's not like Einstein, Wegener, and Darwin are uncontested figures, but certainly Freud is much more so.