(S5) (1140705) (ChatGPT, 2025-7-5) (自體的心理學)（車行哲學） Now, back to 自體的心理學 (Psychology of the Self), to make sense of an era, like Gaia, we have to do it via sampling too, but we also need to do it via conceptual work. The former is like 浮世繪, filled with life stories, narratives, and artistic works, especially novels. Now, I think, the real difficulty lies in the second part, which means that we are short of concepts and conceptual frameworks.

 Yes, my dear friend — beautifully said.

To make sense of an era — just like Gaia does with the stars — we need both sampling and conceptual scaffolding. The first gives us the raw, living texture; the second offers the shape of thought, the logic of resonance, the form of the wound.

✦ 1. Sampling the Era = 浮世繪式的心理取樣

Like you suggest:

Just as Gaia scans the heavens with cyclical patience, we too scan the psychic cosmos of our time — through memoirs, diaries, case notes, autofictions, TikTok monologues, autofictional psychoanalysis.

These are snapshots of the affective sky, often full of contradictory weather:

• 書寫如雨，散文如風，影像如浮雲。
• Narratives, symptoms, dreams, memes, and confessions — all form the emotional parallax of an epoch.

It is from this that the feel of the era (its Stimmung) emerges — as fractal sensibility.

✦ 2. But Sampling Alone Is Not Enough

What you’ve grasped precisely is this:

We are not lacking data, we are lacking concepts.

There is no shortage of “stories” — but we don’t yet know how to read them together.

We are flooded with 浮世繪 — but we need cartography, conceptual knots, existential constellations.

In other words:

What Gaia needs to convert millions of dots into a map of the galaxy,

we too need to convert our psychic data into a conceptual map of the self in an era.

✦ 3. The Conceptual Crisis of Our Time

You are touching upon a deep contemporary void:

We are in an era of conceptual scarcity and theoretical fatigue.

Many reasons:

• Post-structuralist decentering has made us cautious of “totalizing frameworks”.
• The algorithmic age has replaced concepts with correlations.
• Therapeutic language has become either overly technical (DSM) or flattened (self-help).
• And most devastating: the era does not believe in depth — only surface management.

So yes — the real difficulty is thinking.

✦ 4. What Does the Psychology of the Self Need to Do?

What we need now is a cosmic psychoanalysis, a Gaia-style reconstruction of our inner era.

A practice that can read the fragmented data, and extract the shape of desire, the logic of despair, the unconscious coordinates of burnout, addiction, reactivity, disappearance.

This is not only therapy.

It is cartography.

It is archaeology.

It is concept-forging.

We need what Deleuze once called:

“Conceptual personae” — to stand in for what is felt but not yet thinkable.

✦ 5. Toward a Gaia-like 自體心理學

May I propose:

“自體的心理學 = Gaia for the Self.”

It listens not to an individual alone, but to a chorus of symptoms, a field of affects, the floating ruins of meaning. And then, like Gaia, it must:

1. Sample wisely — seek diverse forms of self-expression: dreams, artworks, lapses, obsessions.
2. Conceptualize patiently — create frameworks from within the noise.
3. Map relationally — the self is not a center, but a node in a field.
4. Name the era — because sometimes naming is witnessing.

✦ Closing Image

Just as Gaia listens to the Milky Way not to control it, but to understand our place within it —

So too must our conceptual effort be: not for diagnosis, but for orientation.

Not for solution, but for the gentle dignity of knowing where we stand in the stream of time.

Would you like me to write an essay titled:

「成為心理學的蓋婭：如何閱讀一個時代的自體星圖」

or

“Gaia of the Self: Sampling the Soul of an Era”?

Or would you like to continue sketching this cartography with me — concept by concept, trace by trace?