A certainty of mine: People are too complex to be able to validly endorse whatever they claim to believe in, or claim to feel. A twenty-six-year-old woman says she loves her mother. But her mother was always immature, whimpery and self-enclosed, never acted with primary consideration for the child. So the young woman actually hates her mother, feels like a dead rock in her mother’s eyes.
Bertrand
Russell, philosopher and mathematician, said: “I believe that when I die I
shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life.
But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do
thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man
has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach
us to think truly about man’s place in the world.”* I do not believe that Russell
felt the meaning of these thoughts,
but would be in a frisson of disconsolate and other emotions at the real consideration of his imminent
death. And the man on the scaffold? A desperate dissociation of terror, anesthetized
with some storybook noble or learned feeling: “pride.”
A man loves his
wife. But he simply lacks a capacity for empathy. This is understandable, as he
never received a single atom of loving-care from his parents. He is empty of
it. So what does he really feel?
People believe
in God. Does having a good or self-bolstering gut-chest-feeling about something
you’ve been taught equal belief? Does some kind of mental attachment to a weakly
logical notion (the essences of the universe can never be comprehended, so the Incomprehensible must have caused them) equal belief? Does saying “I
believe” make belief real? It seems so (try it!), but how could that really be?
People’s beliefs weather, they have doubts, their wine turns to water.
Does a white
supremacist hate black people, Jews, Hispanics? Hatred, like “cause(,) is not
what it used to be,” as Lord Russell noted.** We know that hate starts, in the
person’s life, with hurt, with the failure to receive what should have been
given by parents. Loss congeals over a pained heart and becomes fire over ice
over fire. This, then, wants an idea, because thinking distances us from pain. “Immigrants
are not real Americans.” This is not a belief. It’s a desperation.
I deconstruct
people in this way because I have to: It’s both how I see the world and a feature of my therapy. But another
part is the blindness that is our molecular, organic structure: We just live
and we just feel. We don’t “know,” we don’t “believe.” I’d like us to feel
better and maybe to wonder what everything, what anything, is.
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* Bertrand
Russell quotation – https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28449-i-believe-that-when-i-die-i-shall-rot-and.
** Russell,
lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian” – https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/whynot.html
– subheading The First Cause Argument.
Musings
ReplyDeleteI like to conceptualise life as binary-like, that is 0-1-0; you are born nothing, you become some-one, and then you become zero again. But oh! Those hyphens! I think that that slope from 1 to 0 is (in anticipating) fills us with terror, not only the physical deterioration, but the (not so) slow loss of self, as we lose the ability to form words and sentences which keep us sane and to represent in the world we have found ourselves to be in. (“I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will”)
Ok, as one gets closer to the time, it gets a little less scary (as we self- talk ourselves into an acceptance of the inevitable), but nontheless, that imminent loss (annihilation) of self is terrifying on those few occasions we allow ourselves to see it full-face – if we let ourselves get near it in the present, which, of course, our need for sanity prevents us from doing so, by and large. (Moses was only allowed to see the back of God).
The journey from 1-0 seems to me to be the same, though in reverse, to the journey from 0-1. I mean, it must have been terrifying to be born (unless you had the most perfect of parents! – impossible!). Imagine being born but having no words or sentences to make sense of all those objects drifting around before you, or to explain pains from the gut, or why it is so difficult to breathe. I would guess that there would be moments (even minutes!) where the infant dances on the edge between some kind of sanity (the ability to make sense of phenomena – by attaching words to them) and the deep black hole of annihilation. (In some ways, it seems to me that paranoia is an inevitable concurrence of being human – if a baby feels, for instance, gut pain – what else is it to conclude other than that this is being inflicted from the outside? Is it supposed to self sooth and think “oh, this must be acid reflux because the (non return valve) hasn’t developed enough maturity yet to be effective”? No, it’s bound to conclude something has imposed from the outside, that it is being attacked, I think all so-called mental illnesses come from a similar crucible as this, it just depends on the severity of the neglect, or lack of congruency between (usually) the mother and child, or waking alone in the dark, or hearing the harsh voices of humans arguing. All of these. Trying to make sense of it all, without the cognitive resources. Existential fear! (Lack of connection yet, between the Limbic system and the Frontal Cortex at this stage of development.)
I know in some way we need labels to interact with each other, inter communication, but in another way applying a label freezes phenomena in space-time, rather like a photograph freezes the essence of a real human being in action. Labels lead to theories, theories lead to schools of thought, university courses with their degrees and diplomas, and some theories become more like mantras, I guess one has to earn a living!
For me, when I look into myself, Janov has always been the nearest, precisely because he doesn’t fall into the trap of drifting downwards into fixed theories or incomprehensible labels for the sake of validating one’s status. And Winnicott.
Theories are equivalent to taking a photograph, they tend to fix things in space and time, and a label can mean death (figuratively speaking!! – although I’m sure there are people who have died physically (mostly it’s mentally) actually because of a label they’ve been given). My experience of life (and the imagination) is that it’s continuous, like a movie, not static, like a photograph.
That’s why I enjoy reading your articles, because you are not fixated with labels and theories. Yes, you’ve had to go through all that kind of learning, to get to where you are now. But you are not bogged down by them.
Oh, and I forgot – Ernest Becker: viz:
https://youtu.be/up5_mVRyxiY
Paul -- I'd never heard of Becker and looked at some of his quotations -- thanks. If they are representative of his thinking, then he was more of a downer than I am. At least I'm not caught up (figuratively speaking) in excrement, as he seemed to be!
ReplyDeleteThanks, TPS, for your reply. I don't respond to Becker in the same (initial) way that you outline above. His two books Denial of death and Escape from Evil actually lifted me in spirit as other books have that deal with how it feels to be alive and why we do what we do and feel. The video is a concentration of extracts from his books and perhaps that gave you the impression that he was rather morose. I believe one can still be positive/hopeful, even when we are faced with the harsh facts of life and death. Isn't that the paradox?
ReplyDelete