Unhappiness, while related to suicide and homicide, is not their determinative factor. Pain, related to suicide and homicide, is also not their determinative factor. Is there a third factor, linking unhappiness to pain, that centers us in destruction? I believe so. It is the absence of a peculiar kind of love: love at the beginning of life.
The state of
the world – ISIS genocide crusade, Jew and Palestinian hatred, Ferguson,
Missouri racism, and the infinite variations on our perpetual doomsday clock – is
proof of the necessity of selfishness, what psychologists call primary
narcissism. If the child’s selfish needs
for loving touch and touching love are not met, there will be pain and
emptiness. Both together – there should
be a word for this emptiness kind of pain – lead to a later person who is the
embodied loss of all the beautiful human potential, who senses it but probably doesn’t
know it. His sense of it, of his death
in life, must, absolutely must become the way he exists in the world.
He could be
Robin Williams, with emptiness depression and its palliative of love and
humor. He could be Adolf Hitler, with
emptiness rage and its palliative of delusion and murder. He could be any of us, with a flawed birth of
forceps and incubator, caesarian and drugged labor, abuse, shell parents, all
the rest. And we may never kill or be
killed, yet it sleeps in us, remains the choice embedded in our chemistry.
Psychotherapy
can be described as too-late love. This
makes it no different from the rest of the world, which we could also hold up
like a mirror to see ourselves, also lean on. People reject therapy, they reject the world, they can't find themselves, and the
clock ticks on.
- - - - - - - - - - -
* See "The shootings," post September 16, 2013 for related ideas.
Thank you for mentioning the current events, some of which are heavy on our minds.
ReplyDeleteAnd I appreciate your tolerance for my guru-like approach that purports to explain the entire world in four paragraphs.
DeleteIf one is lucky, one is born in the love and required separation distance, so much so that life is succulent, and so it is relatively easy to face death over the accumulation of a life well lived, day after added day.
ReplyDeleteFor most of us, though, (just look at the world and see its broken aspirations) we experience a (psychic) (or even near-physical) death at the beginning of life (when we have the least resilience) and spend most of our days clambering up the sides of that unfathomable abyss. We make it. (We make it).