I dig ideas, and values. And I admire them in others and am attracted to them. Psychoanalysis doesn't quite admit such statements as stand-alone. It reduces every action every behavior every habit and personality characteristic as arising from a need or a need to alleviate personal distress. It wears it's own convenient blinders, and uses it's own convenient language to twist meaning to suit it's perception of succeeding to explain. "a higher need". which I call ambition, because one can easily survive without it but chooses not to in pursuit of a goal. Maybe one 'needs' a goal, you could say; maybe one needs ambition; possibly because without it one perceives life and this world to be pointless and hopeless. But you couldn't say that the ambition satisfies the need for hope then. Or would you? It is somewhat similar to how economics has reduced altruism to 'warm glow'. In both philosophies, one wouldn't do something unless it made one better off, satisfied some need or gave some reward or alleviate some pain or personal distress.

I am reading Sherry Turkle's Empathy Diaries. I was struck by how she says the youth of the 70s, politically conscious and active and idealistic, rejected psychoanalysis' diagnoses of their idealism and actions arising from self distress. That's how I felt when my admiration for and attraction to courage was reduced to my need for the other to listen to my point of view; my need to interrupt and argue against patriarchy taken to be arising from personal distress; neither made sense, neither satisfied me. Unless you argue that I have a need to feel and be different, from others around me; a need to feel non-ordinary.

Turkle also talks about how her work was initially rejected because it seemed unlike the establishment, even questioning it. I remember telling the interviewer who came some months ago researching the question of gender in economics academia, that possibly women collaborated less with other people because the nature of research was defined by men into these tight boxes into which women's ideas, thoughts, methods, and work probably didn't fit very well, and that this might lead to a reluctance from women to collaborate (with men).

And then today I read Marilynne Robinson, "There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival or procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. .... We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and too small."