I'm sorry - I wasn't posting with the intent of upsetting you, but I can see how the way I responded was callous. I'm trying not to respond to the stories and thoughts of others with the same ' corrective' impulse I've used for a while, especially on here with philosophy, but thats just what I did, I think.

On top of thay, I probably should have trigger warning'd this thread. I'm in a volatile place as I have been for quite a while now, and this is volatile subject matter, especially for people who have experienced something similar. I'm working through these ideas, emotions, fears myself, and, while I'm trying to do so responsibly here, I'm also riding my own waves. The long story about my hospitalization was a sudden impulse, I typed it out very quickly (unlike me, i usually edit as i write) and I'm not sure quite why I typed it out - it wasnt a move in a game, or at least it wasn't intended as one.

I've had an experience perhaps similar, in some ways, to the one @All sight described.

The first time I was hopsitalized I was 19. I was working at an island resort in Maine. It was an island on a pond, accessible only by a 'ferry' which was basically just a raft with a dinky motor. Rich non-mainers owned houses on the island. They would all contribute to a island fund. They would summer for a few weeks, and we would make the food, wait on them, upkeep the island etc. while living there in a cabin (two cabins, to be exact - one for boys, one for girls.) The first week of work was the week before everyone arrived. It was cleaning-up and getting everything ready. I had just finished my first year of college and was severely depressed. I had taken the job because it had been offered to me, and because it was conveyed to me that this was a good opportunity (a lot of local 'kids' before me had made 'connections' doing this job. That was kind of part of it. It was part of the culture of it. But more than that, I felt responsible to my mom - that I needed to prove I could do a job, that other parents kids were doing - that I could do a job like anyone else.

But I was severely depressed. The first week I could barely keep it together. At the end of every week, we could go home for a couple days. I did, and wrestled with the idea of suicide. I made a noose out of wire, which was less a real possibility of escape than something I used to contemplate suicide as something real and external, and my mom found it. Maybe I wanted her to? I don't remember that, but it would make sense.

Anyway - she found it, I was hospitalized. I was pissed. Because I knew I was going to miss work - and even though maybe that was the point, I still was mad. The head of the psych-unit was an authoritative presence. He was big and confident and used to having things done as he said they ought to be done. i hated him. He had a star trek ring tone on his cellphone that I hated. One time, in a meeting with me and my parents, it rang - and you could see him waiting for the effect to register, as though he wanted people to see that he had a quirky or nerdy side. At least I remember it that way.

I hated him a lot. Patients would talk about him in glowing, thankful terms - about how he'd convinced them to get shock therapy and they had resisted, but then acquiesced, and were now thankful. I thought of him as being an aggressive alpha personality with a stable of passive broken people over whom he could exert his will. He talked to my parents once, in one of our meetings, about a big celebration he was going to. I remember thinking that this was a guy who had two sides - the lovable, nerdy, star-trek ring-toned'd guy in public, and how he was able to maintain this by his shadow-life where he was discharge his desire for dominance over patients.

I denied everything. I was not depressed, I was not suicidal. I didn't say it, but I certainly tried to convey that I was smarter and more willful than him. I made little comics with names like ' dr mountebank and the nostrums' which were about him and his medicine.

He told my parents, with me there, that if I didn't change my behavior, that I was an idiot. He has an aide there too who explained, in less aggressive terms, that there exists a kind of mental-forest that some sick people go into. That, without medicine and adherence to the process, I would keep going into the forest. And that each time, I would come back more sick.

This was also my awakening to the overlap of psychiatry and poverty. I realized that most of the people there were simply living live in pure chaos, and that there responses, their breakdowns, were - if not 'rational' then at least understandable in terms of something other than deficient brain chemistry. This was a hard thing that stuck with me - because it seemed to me that there was no safety net ultimately - that if you lost control, you had no guarantee that you wouldn't wind up simply in the grasps of someone for whom control was more important than healing. And that maybe this was basically the ultimate structure of things.

So I fought him every step of the way. I never conceded.

And then eventually, I got to go.

I actually have no moral to this story. I thought one might come up as I wrote it out, but I got nothing.

Those are good points. I feel like I put you in a weird position, 'at-ing' you, as though I was calling upon you to defend or buttress my post. I didn't mean that.

But saying he was being fucking unreasonable is aggressive, no matter what your background. His response does sound aggressive. Like I was saying to wallows, an ideal psychiatrist or therapist would be able to withstand aggression and respond calmly. But, like @unenlightened pointed out, in the real world, everyone has their breaking point.

If you put yourself in his position, he was being asked to furnish an official diagnosis to others, while also being asked to disregard the steps he was supposed to take in his official capacity when giving this diagnosis. Whatever you believe about the merits of psychiatric medicine, he was being put in a position where he was effectively being asked to do something not-allowed for which he could be held responsible. If he provided the note, freeing you of work-obligations, he himself was obligated to provide the officially mandated treatment.

Now that might be a structural issue with institutional psychiatry. it may be - and i think i agree that it is - an artificial problem which shouldnt exist in the first place. But just as you were in a difficult, frustrating position and responded with anger, so did he. Thats human.

But what do you make of the situation? again like un said, the more we seek confirmation of the untrustwothiness of others the more we'll find it. You talk about how he was disgusted with your vulnerability - but were you respectful of his?

Tho actually - I think that this:

There is a religious aspect of friendship that I have in mind connected to forgiveness of sin — sign

is at the heart of it, what lets you move beyond. I remember at one point while i was deep in 'phase ii' geting drunk and scribbling down 'god cant forgive what he doesnt understand'

What i think i was missing is the hubris in thinking that 'god' wouldnt understand my suffering and 'sin'. It was really me saying - 'i can still hide what i need to' camoflauged as an anger at being failed by others

But I can imagine highly intelligent and critically minded clients seeing only confirmation of their general sense of the world as a stage of fakers in such a pose. To be above it and invulnerable is to longer be humanly present. — sign

Yeah, this was me my first couple years of therapy. I imagine I was very frustrating to work with. I had a theory of what was ailing me. I think the idea I had was that the point of therapy was to 'say' what the problem was. Once it was said, brought to light, the therapist would be able to produce an instantaneous cure. I would rigidly control the process because I thought the therapist would be liable to go down the wrong path, and so take us away from the moment where all would be revealed and the cure would descend.

I think what was really happening is that what I saw as 'dead ends' or inessential avenues were in fact questions about stuff that I wasnt able to fit into my neat theory. In other words they were threatening. They threatened the idea that I could get better without confrontation.

That was the first phase. In the second phase (which I'm not totally free of) I was aware that this was the problem. Instead of dismissal of difficult questions I would 'dissociate.' My mind would literally go blank - or, not quite. All I would be aware of was the other persons presence as somehow requiring something of me that I could not give. It was like being spiritually hunched over in front of another. It was protective and entirely isolating. I would also find that if I tried to talk, I would be talking in the 'fake' voice from the first phase. In other words, I'd be trying to manage the process from a distance - not lying exactly - I tried to explain it as 'lying by telling the truth.' It was - and still sometimes is - a double bind. Either remain hunched and silent or try to talk and tell 'lies'. The feeling was frustration and anger. and despair. I felt like this was a prison I was trapped in that couldnt be conveyed. I tried to describe it as being like the astronaut in 2001 with HAL making sure i couldnt escape. part of what I like about the Kalsched quote from the OP is feeling like someone beyond me understands. It deprives 'hal' of his pretensions to invisibility and omnipotence.

I still fall back into both phases sometime. I'm not sure whats changed so that sometimes I move past these defenses. Which is probably good. Im not sure I want to 'know'

One last thing regarding signs. I may have quoted this on the boards before but -

"The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has “forgotten.” It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is “playing” with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of “hide and seek.” A forgotten melody lingers in the back of one’s mind, and although he is unable to remember it he continuously searches for it, and whenever he hears a new melody (that might be it) it is the reshimu which tells him that it is not."

Thats the thing that would be lost in Husserl's project?

Have you looked at Spurs? I may type up a quote, but perhaps you've looked at the part about the forgotten umbrella. I think that Derrida finds the openness he points at beautiful behind its possible terror. In some sense he seems like an evangelist carrying the good news of eternal rebirth in eternal death. So far I just keep findings modulations of Christian thought from Hegel onward. The thought of the sign is the though of the incarnation, of the enfleshing and making-mortal of 'god.' 'God' like meaning is distributed across mortals and time. Certain peak emotions remain more or less constantly present as possibility, even though conceptualization is historical. Religion's pictorial thinking might therefore have an edge in some ways on conceptual 'theology' (philosophy that aspires to saying 'it.') — sign

I haven't looked at spurs! What is the umbrella thing? I've heard reference to it, a few times, but still have no idea what its about. If you're down to type up a quote, I'd be down to read it.

It's interesting that you reference christian thought - the idea of the sign as incarnation makes a lot of sense to me. But I've also heard the sign discussed in judaic terms, as the endless deferral of the messiah's arrival. Though---that deferral is often discussed as the deferral of parousia which is itself a christian term (I think?) denoting the second coming. So maybe: the space of language as a space of remembrance/forgetfulness which tends toward some future event (which is also a past event)?

Very much in agreement that pictorial thinking (I might say 'scenic' thinking) has an edge on conceptual thought which..

That is a fascinating theme. In this case I think Derrida really wants to say it, but he's had or rather repeats an 'experience of language' that shows the non-quite-it-ness of every sign. I think the first poem is pretty close to this. Fail again. Fail better. And enjoy this 'failure' as our basic human opportunity. 'Man' as a not-quite futile passion to name himself. Man 'is' metaphysics. Or what separates us from the other mammals who indeed feel is a kind of infinite metaphorical-conceptual project of saying what is, including this same project that evolves as its articulates itself.

Yeah! And I'm really interested in how that becomes an evolution - how the failure to say it isn't just a continual retreading of the same, but somehow progresses.

This is pretty speculative, and beyond the texts - but I've had this continual thing, in my life, of approaching 'scenes' that were too powerful for me, that I wasn't ready for. I have this vague idea that the being-outside-the-scenes (the space where language is sign- or trace- based) is the space where we fashion a self that is capable of returning to those scenes in a way that we can receive them, and be present to them, without being overwhelmed. Like : There's no passive relief and return, without a concomitant active struggle to be equal to it. So that the second-coming wouldn't simply repeat the first. The space between the two comings would be the space in which one hones one's ability to be consciously part of it. As though the point of life were to take responsibility of absence, to shape it, and bring it back into presence. Not quite saying what I'm getting at tho.

Beautiful. This makes sense to me. As I've been reading Derrida and Heidegger's 'breakthrough' lecture about 'pre-science,' I keep returning to Hegel, especially Kaufmann's translation of the preface. We go only on the surface when we take our fundamental signs for granted, as fixed entities. The instability of signs seems central for Hegel. Finite concepts point outward and exist fully only in an evolving relationship. Any account of what is has to finally take itself into account. Whatever it is that is can and even must try to figure out what it is. Reality is 'made of' questioning (among other things.) To think the real apart from the questioning of the real has practical advantages in some contexts but seems to pretty much avoid philosophy in any kind of higher sense of the word.

More on the impossibility issue, I relate to a kind of repeating experience of solitude. No one will hear your finest words exactly as you intend them. In our best social moments this problem just vanishes for a while. Souls are transparent to one another. Everyone is really 'there,' in the same-enough beautiful place. Things are rarely this good, and for me music has tended to be involved. Drugs help too! The language of feeling is more universal perhaps. The 'absolute' is pointed at by a rock'n'roll lyric, a mix of image and sound (the birth of tragedy in the spirit of music.)

Yeah! again. I wonder if these moments are something like sustaining 'foreshadowings' of where things are heading. Part of my trouble, in the past, has been to cling too strongly to these moments, and to become devastated when they disappear. Maybe part of the progression also involves figuring out how to relate to them when they're absent. Like - St. John of the Cross talks about how part of the trouble for the aspiring mystic is being exposed to the divine, then becoming bereaved. For the early mystic this is overwhelmingly difficult. The closeness to god is so sweet that its absence is devastating. BUT - without this bereavement, he would never be able to untangle his spiritual knots and move forward.

He's still a 'Hegelian' in terms of determinate negation. He exists on top of Husserl, for instance, and he is only intelligible in terms of something like Husserl's project, as the revelation of what eludes it. — sign

This is a good point. Speaking of Hegel - I think, if you read Husserl in terms of Phenomenology of Spirit, Husserl would be doing something like: trying to show how one can remain at the level of 'sense-certainty' where one can directly speak what one means. (tho this is definitely reductive)

If I read POS correctly, its the story of how one negotiates the impossibility of saying directly what one means - very Derridean.

I've been thinking recently that Sense Certainty is something like the beginning of the Duino Elegies - "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?" The simple impossibility of communicating launches the whole complex machinery of thought.

IMV, he wants to be understood. He intends something. But what he intends troubles every attempt formulate it, this same troubling, exactly and stably[..]From this perspective, I think it's even fair to think of Derrida as a negative theologian (and one too negative to embrace that as a final description.) The metaphysics of presence would then be framed then as a kind of idolatry or covering-over.

That seems like a fair, perhaps fairer, reading. Maybe its something of both? I'm thinking of something I quoted in my thread about trauma, where a therapist talks about situations in which there is an intent to communicate which is thwarted by - or at least at war with - a parallel intent to remain incommunicative.

Two poems by Dickinson.

"To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and ’twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air."

"There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As One within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone "

The first seems to me more Husserlian, the latter more Derridian - but not sure on that.

yeah in spades. He was often convinced he was going to hell. Very preoccupied with doing the right stuff to prevent that. Then falling into despair. Then coming up with a renewed idea of what constituted the right stuff. And so on.

I don't know much about Erikson. From what little I know, I think the conversation in this thread corresponds most to his shame/autonomy stage. Did Erikson talk about Luther?

Calling the sign 'matter' or 'mind' forgets that these distinctions are themselves instituted by signification. Calling the sign mind in matter or matter in mind might do the situation more justice. But does this get it right? Are we ever done saying what saying is? If we can say the origin of saying, then this origin is itself another sign that has saying as an origin. — sign

We had a Speech and Phenomenon reading group here a while back. I don't know how well I remember it. The thing I most remember is that, perhaps appropriately, Derrida seemed to not quite be able to articulate what he wanted to say. There was a lot of close-reading of Husserl (ostentatiously scholarly?) punctuated by rhetorical flights, as though he couldn't quite wait to cut to the chase.

I'm of two minds here. The first sides with Derrida. Any attempt to get at the essence, to get to pure philsophy, will be 'sullied' by the sign, which also carries with it some 'trace' of the nonessential (so history, the material, desire etc etc)

The second sides with Husserl. Even if we have to rely on the inessential, or the compromised, to talk with one another - still we can use that to direct our attention to something. The event in which their is a shared focus of attention seems to exceed the signs themselves - in the same way the experience of a play exceeds the contingent collection of [actors, costumes, stage, etc].

But. I think it is the case that any attempt to fix the truth, once and for all, and so 'have' it - that's doomed to failure. And it's probably fair to impart something of that desire to Husserl.

But where Husserl seems to want to 'have' the truth, Derrida wants to seem to defer any shared understanding of anything. More precisely: Derrida seems to want to have personal control of the process of understanding and confusion. He wants to bring things right up to the limit of some event of shared meaning, then forestall it.

Did my therapist you mean?

I had a therapist red face yelling at me over the summer, and display an almost disgust at my level of vulnerability. People don't pity me when I walk in the room either, particularly not mediocre frumpy men. He's lucky he was through a tv sceen. I just had a big manic break down, and needed a doctors note for work for a little time off. He wanted to medicate me, even though I was not at that time manic, and I pretty much told him that I didn't think that he knew how to help me, but I needed the diagnosis, so he told me that if I didn't agree to do what he told me, then I didn't have bi-polar, or a medical issue, even though he just got down telling me that I did. So I told him that he was being unfair and unreasonable, as not agreeing to his treatment doesn't mean I no longer have it, obviously. Then he got all super pissed off, so I told him he was an arrogant prick and left basically. — All sight

It sounds like a difficult experience, but I do want to challenge the way you've framed it.

You say first that his response stemmed from a disgust at your vulnerability.

But then you say this:

I pretty much told him that I didn't think that he knew how to help me, but I needed the diagnosis, so he told me that if I didn't agree to do what he told me, then I didn't have bi-polar, or a medical issue, even though he just got down telling me that I did. So I told him that he was being unfair and unreasonable, as not agreeing to his treatment doesn't mean I no longer have it, obviously. Then he got all super pissed off

That sounds less like disgust with vulnerability and more like frustration with the invulnerability that accompanies willful self-assertion. I've also noticed that those in the psychiatric field respond strongly to any pushback from their clients, so I'm not taking his side. Willfull self-assertion is often necessary and its important to advocate for oneself. Nevertheless, there are two different accounts in your post of what sparked his response.

Another angle is a condition known as scruples. Some Catholic saints had it. I think it's a coping mechanism. Maybe that author will mention it. — frank

Yeah, I think scrupulosity stems from a similar place. Have you read much about Luther?

I can relate to a lot of what you describe, especially the parasitic aspect. I was particuarly bothered, as a kid, by certain representations of parasitism (in cartoons, in the game parasite eve etc). The reasons for that feeling are starting to make more sense now.

I've also had the experience, especially at work, of being very uncomfortable with the idea that people around me can tell something about what I'm feeling, also to the point where I sometimes dissociate. I work as a dispatcher, and I've had times where I've dispatched calls while being entirely unaware of what I'm doing, and suddenly snapping back. One of the weird things for me has been that, on the phone, I often rely on an automatic 'persona' which is laid-back and friendly, and I've had drivers develop a warmness toward me which has at times been really confusing.

Kudos on finding effective treatment - I feel like I'm getting closer myself (in terms of finding the core issue, rather than (mis)treating the symptoms) but its still early for me.

For what its worth, here's my recounting of the LSD experience, as texted to my friend:


i had a weird lsd experience last night. very fluid sense of space, room shifting around a lot. whenever i would go to the bathroom, it would shift around and become a different, realer bathroom. there was a malevolent presence behind me. the door became ajar, with white light.

i was very young.

what kept happening was a struggle to be older. it was like the malevolent presence needed me to be young. i would feel myself becoming older and taller, and more present to the room. it was like i could leave through the door by doing nothing but simply standing self-assertively in the room as if to disregard the presence.

i wasnt scared of the presence, and i remember feeling like i knew this scenario and room, and had been scared in the past. however i wasnt able to fully go through with the whole scene because dan was tripping too and i felt weird about being in the bathroom too long. that was kind of frustrating.

i feel like the malevolent presence is somehow tied to philosophy and intellectualizing.

i remember the feeling was close to a master/slave thing. there was something to it of being a kid in time out and angry, and like my anger was externalized and it was a faustian deal almost like : if you are quiet and dont mess with me, ill take control and protect you.

the thing is we put on a record after and played music and there was some relinquishing of control and it felt like the music was working on me and unthawing me, in a way thats difficult to explain. in some ways like a spiritual and emptional massaging out of knots. Memories would pop up as if released. and these feelings that were bodily and emptional at the same time. it only went so far, and i drifted out of it as i came down. i feel like thats the closest ive come to confronting the core of my self-defense, but im also disappointed the confrontration feels incomplete and interrupted.

People who should have cared for me did not, and so, before I trust my friend, my lover, my therapist with the infinite depth of my vulnerability, I want to be certain of their love. But the tragedy is that love is like a rope, the only way to test its breaking point is to break it. Don't do it! Every relationship has a breaking point, and every time I find it, it confirms that no one can be trusted. — unenlightened

Exactly. This has been what has most hamstrung me in both therapeutic and romantic relationships. There's something to if of that thing Sartre says about vertigo - about how the fear isn't of the heights but of ones freedom to throw oneself of the edge. So the distrust of the other person is equally the distrust of myself.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the 'imp of the perverse.'

"Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term[...] Through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. "

The language, admittedly, has the distinctive ring of the pseudo-scientific charlatan, but.... he gives an interesting example, one that is almost a commentary on his style itself:

"There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged."

That's one of the thorny aspects of the 'repetition compulsion' that stems from trauma - how conscious attempts to circumvent it often up being the very thing repeating it.

I feel like somehow it all comes down to the inability to remain with silence. Especially in the presence of another.

I dunno, you're right, may not be helpful, and I don't have like ideas to offer, more than allusions, and practices. See, we understand others by mirroring them with the motor cortex, and that doesn't work so well when you aren't open and flexible (and the darkness is frightening). The ideas, or characteristic narrative that you inherit will just play in the mind in the back ground as a consequence of attaining the human form.

When people hurt you, you of course close off to people... I dunno man, I just got saved... by the most ridiculously convenient coincidence ever. To somehow distrust and hate everyone enough to be within a millimeter away from absolute certainty of their nonsense wrongness, and then I submitted to the essence of what all of the representations point to, without realizing that for the majority of the time that I was doing it. — All sight

That's awesome - I'm very much a believer in the reality of grace, and that it can visit itself upon people in many different ways. I don't want to project too much of my own beliefs onto your experience, but it sounds like one of those awakenings which fascinate me and which I am sometimes envious of.

I agree that its a matter of being opening and flexible - I guess that, for whatever reason, there are different paths different people have to take to get there.

I see this was added. What's your take on solipsism. Surely, one cannot become a solipsist with regards to their own mother. Maybe had you been adopted, that might have been a comforting belief to profess — Wallows

My take on solipsism is that its less a philosophical issue than an emotional one (there are no canonical philosophers who were solipsists, as far as I know.) But an emotional one susceptible to philosophical rationalization. I think you're on to something with adoption. My sense is that its something someone with any sort of attachment issue is susceptible to, and those who were adopted are particuarly vulnerable. But I think it can develop for anyone with any sort of attachment difficulty, including people who were raised by their biological parents.

Two-edged sword here. Who knows what is the issue? The patient only in some regards. There's only so much a therapist can do. — Wallows

That's true. I take some comfort in the fact that Kalsched's book is based only partially on his studies, but equally (if not more so) on his own therapeutic experiences, listening to his patients. He's trying to describe a similar feature he's seen in many of his patients. If you like, he's working inductively, rather than deductively. But i agree that, in the end, it always boils down to the particular therapeutic relationship. But in Kalsched's defense, the only way of imparting knowledge gained from the world is to generalize. And he himself is very cognizant of how one has to move from generalities to the particular case.

Please expand!

I'm not sure if I can here. I think there is an extent to which rationality - in terms of spiritual and mental growth - is a sort of mediating container. And I think that's a fine thing! But i think that ultimately it's a ladder that ---shouldn't be kicked away, exactly, but should be seen as a ladder.

I think, that trust is an issue for any person who has experienced trauma. Even (or especially) a schizophrenic experiences trust issues. Trust is such an important feature of humanity. — Wallows

Agreed. My biggest obstacle in life has been my inability to trust, as well as to feel myself trustworthy. Trust is the bedrock of community, and I think community is the bedrock of human wellbeing. It makes sense, having been traumatized, not to give out trust to whomever comes along. But eventually that also becomes isolating. Whenever I see someone new to the boards posting, despondently, about solipsism my gut-reaction is that this is someone who has been deprived of someone to trust and is looking less for philosophical engagement, than reassurance that there is no outside world (as well, probably, for some savior figure to help them reestablish that outside world.)

Yeah, my previous therapist put the onus on me to get better. He basically told me that I have to want to get better to get better. Difficult shit. — Wallows

That's a tough one. For a long time I've been preoccupied by the paradox of grace. The idea is that grace is always there if you can open yourself up to it. But if the state of being devoid of grace is the inability to open oneself to grace - then how can grace get in?

In less theological terms : if you need help, but what you need help for is not being able to receive help, how do you get help?

That's the sticky part when the mind starts whirring about this stuff - but in practical terms:

It sounds like your therapist was getting frustrated not with you but with your defense mechanisms. That's a human reaction, and understandable, but a therapist, in his professional capacity, should never place the blame on the person coming for help. If there's a roadblock, its not because the person doesn't want to get better, but because their defenses are keeping them safe. That's why I find Kalsched's approach so refreshing. He identifies this problem, and sees the complexity behind it - rather than reducing it simply to some form of obstinance.

Imagine a child therapist, trying to help a child who has been abused, a child who keeps growing shy and silent, or playing games to keep the therapist at bay. And imagine that therapist accusing that child of not wanting to get better. In these terms, there's obviously something amiss. But when a traumatized adult goes to therapy, the part looking for help is quite childlike. And its just as confused to accuse that person of denying help.

What else do you think about that? I think rationality is severely underappreciated. — Wallows

I think rationality is underappreciated in certain quarters, overappreciated in some. I like the image in the Inferno where Virgil (the embodiment of rationality) is necessary for getting Dante through hell, yet can't cross the boundary into purgatory. I think there's a moment in spiritual and mental growth where rationality has to take a background role. But I think, before that, its an incredibly powerful tool for remaining grounded in the midst of personal suffering.

I haven't read too far, but one thing Kalsched talks about is a safe therapeutic environment, where there is a mutual relationship of trust, a relationship that develops according to its own pace. Ideally, a good therapist will be able to meet you where you are, and help grow from there. Obviously there's no such thing in reality as an ideal, but its still a good guiding light. I think its often less about any particular therapeutic modality and more about the relationship itself. Which can take time, and sometimes a long time depending on what one's suffering from.

I sometimes think that a big part of recovery is just becoming comfortable with the reality of one's experience and situation, and the limits and possibilities that situation entails. That takes a lot of courage, I think. Sometimes the need for an 'escape' is part of the problem itself.

I agree about rationality. It's a useful grounding tool.

That's interesting. I take an approach towards treating trauma tantamount to the appearance of psychosis, though from an external and not internal event. Psychosis is, in essence, a trauma of the mind. But, to return to the topic... I think that trauma is a severe event in one's life that leads to the retardation of the development of one's psyche. The mind cannot cope with trauma and is, so to speak, stuck in the event. Defence mechanisms then manifest and are treated with significance wrt. to that very trauma.

I think that's spot on. Kalsched's take is that the type of defence he's talking about is a double-trauma. First there is the external event. The creation of the archetypes happens as a defence against external trauma, and does so by creating a kind of internal trauma, a secondary trauma so to speak.

'get out of yer head' ,yes, but in some ways that's like telling someone with anorexia to 'stop distorting your body perception.' Again, yes, but that's the end-goal, not the cure.

When you say:

'The secret, and truth is of course, is that due to all of the day dreaming, body is all bound together and twisted, and if only you could stay present long enough, you might start to notice all of the arches and pains you ignore and shut out, like you do with all pain.'

I agree, wholeheartedly. But there's a middle step missing - how to stay present.

You strike me as being capable of a lot, I hope that you don't ruin it with drugs.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I also think, though, that psychedelics are useful in reasonable doses, in safe environments. Opening the valves a bit, if they've been closed up too tight - but not too much, which could overwhelm.

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It seems to me to be a matter of "hope to get better". This can be provided by the active and imaginative part of the childlike psyche. Trauma often retards psychological development. — Wallows

I think I'm about to devour his books. From what I understand, the one this is taken from, The Inner World of Trauma, is essentially an attempt to create a portrait of these types of defense systems, as well as to sketch how they are born and develop. He has a later book, Trauma & the Soul which I believe deals much more with growing out of them. Though part of me is also reluctant to read too much - because this is so spot on , and part of my 'daimon' is intellectualizing - and so rendering neutral - things that could help me.

'theory of mind,' as rei is clearly using the term, doesn't refer to a generic theory. its a pretty well-known psychological term with a precise meaning.

Why do you think it's about "good boys"? — frank

Hegel's 'Beautiful Soul' is a (stage of the) soul which acts as though outside of the world, condemning the world

i.e. 'sitting in comfort to declare where you all have gone wrong.'

'good boy' is a flippant gloss, meant to suggest that when one takes the position of Beautiful Soul, one is doing so primarily a way of figuring out how to protect one's own goodness in a world that would muck it up. Imagine a world thrown into chaos - every conceivable species of inhumanity on display . A benevolent alien lands, surveys the scene reproachfully. How tempting to buttonhole him and say: "oh, yes, you're quite right, it's not good. Let me introduce myself. I see it just as you do. Not good at all." (Same tone as the monologuist in Camus' The Fall)



Or:

Rage is in-and-of-the world and is not beautiful. So rage's greatest trick is to sublimate itself; to put itself outside the world, self-beautifying, and place the ugliness in the world which it condemns.

Or:

Why did Owens say it in a poem?

sitting in comfort to declare where you all have gone wrong — unenlightened

yeah exactly. Beautiful Soul.

The content of Owens' poem is powerful and right.

The role of someone who agrees with Owens is sublimated 'good boys get recognized' or 'good boys ought get first dibs on the lifeboat'

It does seem right to me, but then again 'will' is such a loose term, even without taking into consideration semantic drift (Kant was writing in German in the 18th century, after all.) Empathy seems good, but it's hard to say exactly what empathy's relation to 'will' is. I feel like what Kant means by will probably contains empathy, but that's just a gut-feeling.

I'm not familiar with Goodman's new problem, but I get the sense that 'grue' is an ad hoc term that has been tailor-made to throw a spanner in the work of some very precise formal machinery. I mention this not to slam 'grue' - in philosophy, ad hoc term (concepts, situations etc) are all important. I mention it because I have the feeling that there is a boatload of preliminary argumentation leading up to its introduction, and its hard to tell, based on the OP alone, the precise work its supposed to do.

On the face of it theres nothing absurd about a predicate that would suggest different observables properties depending on time. There's plenty of examples, aren't there? But it seems, from the OP, that 'grue' is supposed to be doing something much more specific.

For what its worth - and I know this isn't quite relevant to the type of cause and effect this thread is about - but cause and effect does kind of work like this, when it comes to people and art. You can't always make sense of a work of art (esp music) or the way you're acting in relation to another person, until a moment later on. Then you see how everything that was happening makes sense in light of a later moment. That's a cool moment. You understand how all these past moments were directed toward enriching the present one, but you couldn't have known at the time.

In terms of QM tho. I mean - I don't know. I'm quite sure that, at most, 2 of us here are qualified to talk about this stuff w/r/t to metaphysical implications, and those 2 are liars.

all jokes aside, the cosmological argument is actually pretty interesting. A good parody would mirror its logic, and this one doesn't quite.

Ha ! this reminds me of the flying pasta man! its funny when you think about how people who are are so eager to believe in god are so unsure of the flying pasta god. It's obvious that if you believe in the one, then you have to believe in the other because the reasoning is just as bad. Its funny to see all these posts on religion in here when its supposed to be a philosophy forum for people who are supposed to be a little more reasonable, and believe in pursuing the truth. It was nice to see a post that was a little more open to challenge that. it reminded me of monty python, when you said goat, it reminded me of when the knights of ni wanted a shrubbery - so random, lol, but the randomness kind of proves the point. anyway I was interested to see your particular take on this subject and am eager to see what else you have to say about religion.

It really feels to me like a wittgensteinian ladder that has been turned into something else.

Also, you're discerning alot more consistency in my threads than I am! I'm not saying there isn't, but most of them are a confluence of very dim, general intuitions about various things which were brought out by specific occasions (the pride thread was a response to fdrake's thread on political discourse; the expression thread because I just finished reading a particular book, etc, etc). — StreetlightX

Oh, I figured. All the threads I cited felt, to me, like they were drawing on a family of conceptual knots, so I thought it might be useful to bring them together as a way of gesturing toward something.

I guess I'm still just circling around the same conceptual knot thats been troubling me for a while now. What I really want to talk about is the use and abuse of philosophy for life, but that's another subject, only tangentially related to this.

Something like: The philosophy of immanence seems doomed to chase its own tail, if its presented in a legible philosophical style. It seems like the ultimate end is to say being. To speak the truth of being. But to say the truth of being, in the philosophical sense, is to possess (my whole fixation on 'pronouncing.')

It goes right up to the edge and then stops.

I did lose track of this conversation though and and how it progressed. I had a bunch of ideas kinda sparking up but didn't really express them well or fully, and now theyve gone away a bit.

Something to do with: this kind of philosophy talks a lot about jettisoning imperial or assimilationist tendencies. But the extra-philosophical fields it draws on seem like wells from which to draw a series of examples furnished to emphasize a conceptual machinery thats already there. Deleuze actually more or lesse admitted this in some interview comparing himself to a mountain that brings with it a whole set of established concepts.

I think you're right that the problems and metaphilosophies are driven from within and can only be understood by immersion. But then how often do practitioners of this philosophy extract from e.g. chomsky without seeming to have mastered the linguistic probelms (it would take a long time to do this) from which his ideas developed?

This isn't very clear or an argument. Its just a dim uneasiness that I'm still trying to articulate.

If everything is immanence, and has to be understood in and of the world, what is this philosophy (as concretely practiced) doing? what are its effects, what ends is it serving?

Is this you?

-You don't believe in God (as traditionally understood- some of you play weird semantics games here coughcoughJohnDewey)
-You believe in some form of socialistic type politics
-You believe the role which has traditionally been played by God should be played by Reason

I am just wondering.

[...]

I am not here arguing against said position, just curious if people do indeed fit it. — Ram

Just wondering

Not arguing

Just curious




You're familiar, I take it, with those militant atheists who, under the pretense of curiosity, coyly bait theists into making explicit the reasoning behind their thoughts. They do this, the atheists, because they are quite confident that once their opponent's reasoning is made explicit, the absurdity of that reasoning will be laid bare. Then, dropping the pretense, they, the atheists, will be able to pounce.

You're also familiar, I take it, with the idea that the militant atheist's mode of interacting with theists is driven by insecurity, resentment and rage. For people so ostensibly over a theistic way of life, they seem obsessively drawn to it, as though driven by a compulsion to stand defiantly in front of it and assert their freedom.

And you can understand, I hope, the suggestion that this whole way of interacting smacks violently of deep insecurity. Only someone who is at some level deeply unsure of their beliefs will be drawn so acutely, and so helplessly, toward this kind of confrontation.

Or to put this otherwise, the so-called 'meta-philosophy' is internal to the philosophy itself, it does not stand over and above it; it's the philosophy itself that structures and generates even the meta-field, the array of seemingly 'opposed positions' form which it distinguishes itself. You wouldn't even be able to 'see' or recognize the 'other' 'meta-philosophy' from the 'outside'. There's no such thing as meta-philosophy. It's all very Hegel I know, but it's what's needed to short-circuit the endless proliferation of "meta-metas" that end up seeping their way out if you really think that 'meta-philosophy' constitutes it's own self-enclosed field. The only justification is immanent. If you don't like it - create. — StreetlightX

I agree with this. I worry that it leads to effective (not metaphysical) solipsism. Or at least a shared, niche, solipsism.

As you pointed out in an earlier post, the meta-meta proliferation is ultimately a endlessly deferred (necessarily infinitely deferrable) question of authority. The only way to stop a regress of authorization is immanent self-authorization.

Drawing on your recent threads:

(1) Expression versus possession: 'the thing (whatever it is) coincides entirely with its expression: it is not something apart from its expression and does not possess it as though it stood outside of it’s own ‘properties’.

(2) Levinas on Shame (keeping in mind possession as a thing standing 'outside' of its own properties): "It is therefore our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful"

(3) Infelicity : 'the very effectivity of speech has failed, and not just it's 'content', as it were'


I want to say something like this:

There's a way of discussing Deleuzian philosophy that fails. It provides the 'content', but is not effective. It doesn't express it, precisely because it is still trying to possess it. What's expressed is not the purported content, but the will-to-possession itself. The will-to-possession is expressed in a kind of triangulation, which is legible in the form. There is the writer, the content, and a specific didactic form: the authority of one who speaks what is known to be true. The content is approached and handled in the way that form dictates. Its a kind of ownership.

The 'content' of Deleuze is something like immanent self-authorizing expression. If the form is not as much a part of this self-authorizing expression as the content, then the speech will fail. It will be read, correctly, as a kind of insular self-authorization.

It's insular because it's really speaking to an absent third-party. It can neither fail nor succeed because the third party isn't present. That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority.

If the expression doesn't render effective its content through its expression (especially when the content is the philosophy of expression) then there isn't any content. It's deeply infelicitous

And somehow this is all related to shame and joy

anyway it just goes to strengthen my a j ayer theory:


The most 'sensible' among us are sitting atop a reservoir of wild shit

i take offense to that as a long time crossword fanatic. but cmon youd 'psychoceramic' this thread without two blinks if it was someone else.