Monthly Archives: Jul 2018

Forces of Destiny

Am really lingering on Christopher Bollas’s lines on the nature of life itself for many hours. That consciousness is blind to unconscious development, and that unconscious development is radically destructive.

“You could say: ‘But what is it destroying?’ Perhaps it destroys all mothers and fathers; perhaps the evolution of any self destroys what was formed for us earlier by the mother, or by the father. Perhaps any evolution is going to break the desires of the other. It is then that we create our destiny, and live it. There are objects of desire and objects of hate, object of intimacy and corpses of the expelled; and then, when we look back, in a Sophoclean way, one could say: ‘My God, what have I done? Only now I understand it all.’ And we see that progression as a tragic one, or as the ordinary way in which life is lived, as something unavoidable. Thus, in the notion of existing, or of experience, are the concepts of a ruthless breaking, of an opening up, of a dissemination, of a perilous venture. And, in addition, of something which borders on a kind of reflective faith: a kind of belief, upon reflection, that what’s taken place was unavoidable and essential.”

From Now on,

Am going to describe “love” as such — a form of energy that moves outwards. It emphasizes its biological foundation and the otherness, foretelling the consequential unruliness and unpredictability. This word has long lost any shred of precise meaning.

One definitive sign of psychosomatic forces at work is, most of my best ideas take shape after a good run. The rush of the energy just breaks through all psychic and cognitive barriers and makes connecting of all dots possible. And freest of all associations!

The frame of language, as Wittgenstein argues, cannot effectively extend or reach the realm of sensations. We cant sensibly describe sensations. Then — that’s where music (and perhaps painting) comes in. It directly works on the brain’s affective area, whereas language/words only scratch the cognitive one. That’s also why music, in most cases, is a more powerful medium.

Although the philosophical era of dictum “to live is to be perceived” has long passed, it put its finger on something that really matters. The world comes to us through our awareness. The quality of our consciousness decides the quality of our life. What we perceive, or choose to perceive, affects our life most of time than what’s out there. After all — we cannot step outside our mind. We can choose to live a wider and deeper life by tinkering our perception.

Isn’t this the foundational concept underlying CBT? Your behavior got you into trouble and misery? The cure is to find out (counter-productive) thoughts underneath your behavior and revise them.

American Flirtation vs Continental Affair

In flirtation one does not take risks, one only sustains their possibility. Here is how Freud (brilliantly) describes it:

“Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind.”

Why is it so difficult for us to really believe that we don’t know what we want ?!

It is a fundamentally useful Freudian insight that we are never coincident with the images we have of ourselves. And in a certain sense there are no selves, only families of images that we sometimes choose to collect as a self-image. Kristeva writes: “Even the soundest among us knows just the same that a firm identity remains a fiction.”

=====

Malcolm Bowie: Psychoanalysis, “is overwhelmingly concerned with the production and transformation of meaning”. Whatever cannot be transformed, psychically processed, reiterates itself. A trauma is whatever there is in a person’s experience that resists useful re-description.

=====

Bollas: the articulation of the self is the transformation of the self; to speak is to become different. Taking Freud seriously involves acknowledging “most of what transpires in psychoanalysis — as in life itself — is unconscious”. The aim is not so much understanding — finding out which character you are — but a freeing of the potentially endless process of mutual invention and reinvention.

For Bollas the so-called mental health, or rather, his version of a good life, entails the tolerance and enjoyment of inner complexity; the ability to use and believe in what he refers to as a kind of “internal parliament”, full of conflicting, dissenting and coercive views. There is no final resolution here but rather a genuinely political and psychic vigilance in the face of the insidious violence of over-simplification.

=====

Commitment to complexity ! How complicated we can allow ourselves to be?! Many people cannot bear the complexity of their own minds and so take flight into the collusive solace of coupledom, or family life, or group allegiance.