Dec 25, 2024

Psychoanalysing Summit Bowlson

a sad case (edited)

Foreword #

Summit Bowlson is a physics teacher at Central High School, Minnesota. This sentence says a lot more than you think. You see, physicists, especially physicists who teach, are a bit eccentric. Consider Walter Levin; great guy, purely eccentric. We don't even have to bring Richard Feynman; everyone knows he was the Spiderman in the Physicist Cinematic Universe.

These are the good guys, but the main character in our story (or, scholarly text, to be precise), is unique. He's an angel and a devil, a jerk and the-best-teacher-ever: all at the same time. The lack of determination is clearly visible.

Summit Bowlson's eccentricity is on par with his lack of social skills and rational opinions that don't involve physics. His equally lackluster students acknowledge this when they laugh and applaud at his ludicrous jokes on money and business, the ridicules against the humanities and the social sciences, and so on. Psychology is not a pure science, yet a psychoanalyst has written the text and analysed the very person who says humanities are for the inferior. What an irony.

Someone I admire once told me that one's lack of social skills should not be held up to them if they are brilliant. Not sure if I completely agree to that, but Summit Bowlson is indeed brilliant, which is why I'd like to include some things where he is exceptional:

• Physics: He likes it. He is great at it.
• Solving problems that involve logic.
• Has great mathematical aptitude.
• Lazying around and letting the students check their own copies as they laugh and laugh and laugh.

But Summit Bowlson fails as a physics teacher. His students open their mouth and gape at a difficult derivation which was written and explained in the span of only 3 minutes. "Any doubts?" Bowlson asks, but the lack of response can only mean that they haven't understood anything, and that they're too scared to say it out loud.

One might even say that Summit Bowlson got the job of a schoolteacher by mistake. He should've been a researcher, a professor even. But he's stuck at Central High School, a school that sucks ass, a decrepit state and a degrading education system. It is obvious that one may experience what the psychoanalyst has written.

Dated 30th February, 2024 John Suave Ray, Jr. PhD

Psychoanalysing Summit Bowlson, schoolteacher, 34

Date: 36th December, 2023
Subject Name: Bowlson, Summit
Age: 34
Sex: Probably all the time M
Analyst: Carlos Young

Summary #

The subject suffers from irratobipedamania, a disorder correlating with psychopathy and the lack of social intelligence, causing anomalous, irrational behavior and is most likely a psychosomatic response to physical and mental trauma of the subject's life.

Behavior #

• The subject displays forms of suppressed aggression while communication and which relays a message of dissatisfaction with one's own life.
• The subject is frugal and overly economic, which in this case is an unfavorable social behavior.
• The subject holds biased, stereotypical notions of human culture.
• The subject is analytical and comprehensive when it comes to subject knowledge.
• The subject is less skillful in teaching concepts due to the lack of the understanding of the social cues in a classroom and perhaps load of the sub-par education system.
• The subject displays high levels of irrationality despite being in a field which advocates rationality and evidence.

Analysis #

While analysing a subject, one must remember not do it from a biased perspective. The analyst, especially an amateur one, feels the urge to confirm their own biases by asking irrelevant questions or misinterpreting information.

To counter this, I had made no efforts.

I have been a psychoanalyst for the past 15 years and I know enough to swear to God that this man, this Summit Bowlson, is a magnificent piece of human disaster. He's a fuckin' headache! Lord, I haven't seen anyone so uncooperative and so confusing as this Bowlson since Nurse Pritchard from Arizona Mental Asylum, where she was both a nurse and a patient. Pure nutcase.

Regardless, after going through therapy myself, I made some efforts to reach to a conclusion and to understand Bowlson's unpredictable and irrational behavior.

Bowlson suffers from a chronic case of irratobipedamania, plausibly caused by his hostile childhood and life experience. Although, this is by no means the fault of the subject. Because it is not the fault of the individual that she suffered from an unfriendly childhood. Bowlson's only fault was that he didn't recover from that childhood, which is necessary to have a fruitful adult life.

This is a predicament that causes extreme discomfort, both in a subject's professional and personal life. The modern man locks his shadow, an important but undervalued part of ourselves, into a chest and never opens it. In a sense, he has lost a part of himself. This, combined with modern forms of torture like diluting attention and societal yoke, transforms the modern man into an absolute pain in the ass.

Irratobipedamania is also a byproduct of WEIRDness. Joe Heinrich, a contemporary in my field, says, the more WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) you are, the more discrete and separated you become. This results in disconnection- with our loved ones, ourself and nature, which in turn causes irrationality and frustration.

In the end, here's how I rationalise Bowlson's behavior: he's ambitious but stuck, he's capable but insecure and he's a WEIRD and extremely dissatisfied. And I am sure Summit Bowlson is not a unique case. It's just too sad.