The Ayoto Problem

A Case Study in Overidentification

Dr. Karel Vytorin, Dipl.-Psych., Psychotherapist (HP), GAN (Founding Member), Lecturer in Somatic Ethics is a Berlin-based psychotherapist and part-time lecturer committed to exploring “regulated presence” as both clinical method and moral imperative. Trained in medical psychology at the Charité and certified in trauma-informed CBT, his current work addresses the psychosomatic legacies of charisma, narcissistic defense as a cultural script, and the failure of post-liberal empathy. He teaches in the Somatics and Power program at the Hochschule für Humanistische Psychologie and co-founded the German Association for Applied Narcissism, where he currently serves as spiritual moderator.

I remember when he handed out those business cards—Paul Jung, printed meticulously on an obnoxious lino-pressed slab of 350 gsm off-white cardstock, like a funeral invitation to a personality that hadn’t died yet. He gave it to me at an opening in New York as if it were a relic.

“I made it myself,” he said. “Every card is slightly different.”

They weren’t. They were all the same—like him.

And then suddenly: Ayoto Ataraxia. No warning. No transition. Just a new website, emails forwarded. He told someone, not me, that he saw the name in the sky during an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru.¹ But I always suspected it came from a Japanese toilet brand, TOTO, his one pony trick, repeated ad nauseam, always unprompted, always over dinner.² Something about pressure / cleansing / absence of shame.³ This is his formula: sacred from the profane, myth from plumbing. How original.

The suits came next. He’ll never admit it was because of Steve Jobs. More likely undiagnosed autism or just inability to dress himself. He tells people he has a full wardrobe of them, but I know he could only afford one. He told people they were handmade, but I recognized a bulk tailoring shop from China a mile away.

“You can choose your buttons,” he bragged, as if that were the measure of manhood.⁴

Then he went to gentrify Berlin, like a bunch of those who worked in fashion. He went to Japan that one summer, stayed with a half-Korean friend, and returned dressed like a disgraced Shinto priest. Every garment was a story: This linen is from a temple market outside Nara, woven by monks. I Googled it. It was Uniqlo.⁵

He reads Fanon once. I remember. Ellen, a white woman, suspected he hadn’t heard of Black Skin, White Masks. She said it might help him learn a thing or two. He read three chapters and quoted the footnotes at parties. “Colonial desire is recursive,” he said. “So is mine.”⁶

He carries a Chantal Akerman book around; it was performative, an accessory, not a reading. At least he moved on from the faux paper bag-as-Jil Sander purse phase. Just another way to get laid. Same with Tsai Ming-liang. I asked him once about The Hole.

“Which one?” he said, and smirked.

His queerness was shamelessly curated. Just ambiguous enough to get invited as the token Asian to one of those Temple Nights—you know the kind.

Watching him flirt with liberal guilt (fetish) was like watching a fat kid at a buffet: no restraint, no shame, and somehow no one ever calls it what it is—tasteless.

He never seemed to get the memo that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

He called it “failure.” Honestly? I think he’s just horny.

He said once that he didn’t believe in the concept of home. Something about “diaspora is a looped condition, not a location.” What he meant, of course, was that no one ever invited him to stay. He couldn’t even get his own apartment, living with loose women he meets at swinger parties. He claims he left “the West,” but only after it ignored him. Like so many of these postcolonial intellectuals who treat marginalization as a brand opportunity.⁷

I once offered him a speaking slot, a generous invitation to present what he then still referred to, rather earnestly, as his “thesis.” It was part of my long-running Philosophical Colloquiums series, known for bridging the sexual political with the philosophical. I assumed he’d be grateful.

Instead, he sent a six-page email—accusatory, circuitous, and, frankly, hysterical. Accused me of “orchestrating a racialized performance context” and, I can’t quite believe this, of white liberal curatorship.⁸

Which, I must say, felt beneath him, this narcissistic injury. I had given him a platform. He simply didn’t want to enter through the door like everyone else. There was a kind of theatrical refusal at play.

I tried to explain, gently, that the program had already been printed. That there were other presenters already scheduled to speak on the theme of Squirt. That the schedule had already been set, and someone with more experience, someone more appropriate and mature, had already been confirmed.

He told me that was precisely the problem.

Now, of course, he quotes Lacan like a televangelist with a semiotic side hustle: “jouissance,” “foreclosure,” “the big Other.”⁹ He dropped “squirt” from the subtitle but not from the performance. Claimed ejaculation was a “rupture in the symbolic order.” The audience laughed nervously. One woman whispered, “Brilliant.” I excused myself.¹⁰

Then there was that time he tried podcasting. Like every disaffected millennial boy trying to turn breathwork into broadcasting.

“Not therapy, not theory. Just texture,” he said.¹¹

I tried telling him it was unlistenable. The royalty-free elevator music was too loud. Too many pseudo-profound pauses. Too many sighs trying to pass for meaning. He called them “affective thresholds.”

He once gave a talk on the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, where he claimed that white liberalism was a kind of “soft fascism in Birkenstocks.”¹² The German women clapped. Cringe.

It wasn’t even his idea. I’d said something nearly identical, years earlier, at the spa in Baden-Baden. He was there, following me around like the tourist he is—pretending desperately, not to take mental notes.

The last I heard, he’d moved back to Brisbane to look after his mother, claiming it was a political act.¹³ Still milking the Oedipal complex like it’s a residency application.

“Care is refusal,” he wrote on his Substack. Easy to say when someone else is paying for the groceries.

He writes now as if he’s preparing for martyrdom. But even his footnotes are performative: Latin phrases, untranslated Chinese,¹⁴ references he doesn’t understand. He never met a marginalia he didn’t want to seduce.

He overshares shamelessly and calls them correspondents. It’s just a gossip column. And still, somehow, I read every word.

Addendum

I debated sending this to him directly. But, as always, he needs to speak first.

1. Actually, it was just some chocolate mushrooms he bought online from California, from some ethnically ambiguous woman.

2. He did this while unwrapping his rice paper spring rolls. No one asked.

3. The phrase “absence of shame” recurs in his writing. I suspect projection.

4. The buttons were plastic. One fell off during a lecture.

5. He claimed the linen was “woven by monks.” I checked. It was from the Uniqlo LifeWear line. 65% polyester, 35% desperation.

6. He also said “I contain multitudes,” then paused to make sure we’d heard it.

7. He once described himself as “not between cultures, but under them.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I don't think he was either.

8. He also claimed the race card when I simply made some minor critiques of his talk.

9. He once said “the phallus is not the penis. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” I was ordering him a coffee.

10. He said “the mirror stage never ends.” I thought: clearly.

11. Someone should tell him that you can’t drown verbal diarrhea with more reverb.

12. Technically, I said “ethical consumerism is moral cosplay for barefoot fascists.” Close enough.

13. He once told me he sees filial duty as an “aesthetic stance.” I’m pretty sure it’s just co-dependency.

14. I looked up his Chinese quotes. It was from that Ming Dynasty restaurant menu next to the Chinese embassy.