End of the year fin de siècle*

 

This may be one of the blog’s longest dry spells. I believe I’ve had absolutely no new ideas over the past few weeks. Ideas come from introspection and from client work, along with some unin­vited guests. I may have thought myself out at this point. Clients, while all different, essen­tially have the same problems. I’ve been seeing quite a few veterans lately, and I really don’t believe most of them have PTSD as their calling card says. “I’ve been shook up and got stuck in a mem” – their unwritten rock ‘n’ roll song goes. Outside of actual PTSD, which is superficial stuff (when it’s not perched atop earlier trauma), each person is two rambling eyeballs in a lost head looking everywhere but to his or her sick body. Recently I saw a client, a veteran who raised lostness to a new height. He had no idea that he was angry for reasons: He thought it was just who he was, his nature. Picture his surprise when I showed him that he had been made to be hurt in his childhood: He was history embodied.

I’d say the most bizarre notion that has become part of me, though sotto voce and admittedly meaningless, is the sense that there are truths that, when spoken, would move everyone in the world. The failure of that conceit is not manifest in the therapy room, where certain words open up hidden tunnels in a person, bringing a frown, a shock and new inner feeling. For example, a young woman didn’t know why she continues to live with her childish, spitting-tantrum father. Beneath the top of her head, twenty-three years deep, there was an immovable mover of dependency. One doesn’t see that. (I know my nonsense feeling comes from some early beatific sense of fusion. Maybe it’s my mother’s womb calling.)

The fact is that psychology is pessimistic, seriously deterministic, and that is something that no one wants to see. The human race, in each body, runs blindly, illusorily, away from its roots. It is pretty well proven that no one wants to know this because even the heavyweights in my profession, who know about tragedy and loss and abuse and trauma, still invoke the magic messiah of “happiness,” chirp and warble about ways to get it. I’m sorry, but that is bullshit. We can be happy when we’re content, and that is a difficult place to get to. It requires soul mining.

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* Fin de siècle – “The term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The 'spirit' of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and 'a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.” (Wikipedia)