Kathleen Norris

from Kathleen Norris's Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life:

being suspicious of our motives need not mean indulging in self-loathing or unnecessary guilt, for God has provided us with everything we need to cope with our bad thoughts and temptations. The corresponding virtues, or good thoughts, are always at our disposal. When Evagrius asserts that "virtues do not prevent the demons from assaulting us, but they do preserve us guiltless," he is elucidating an all-but-forgotten aspect of the doctrine of sin. The bad thoughts come to everyone at one time or another. No one is exempt from anger, jealousy, greed, gluttony, lust, pride, acedia. Our job is not to deny them or run from them, but to make our way through to the virtue on the other side. The virtue of greed is a fearlessness concerning one's future needs that translates into sharing what one has at present. Lust's virtue is a self-giving love that can endure all things. Acedia's virtue is a caring expressed in thoughtful and timely acts that enhance our relationship with others. . . .

modern life is increasingly unstable, marked by a lack of constancy and trust. In defense we adopt a disproportionate self-regard that does not allow us to perceive as sanity the early monks' refusal to see themselves as good or in the right. We are likely to recoil from Abba Poemen's response to the question "What is integrity?" He replied, "Always to accuse [oneself]." It is important to recognize that he and other monks were suggesting that people not become doormats wallowing in self-abnegation, but individuals with a realistic perception of their place in the world. These monks were also well aware that in order to give up the instinctive impulse toward self-justification, a person needed a healthy self-regard in the first place. . . .

This superficial me may show a confident face to the world but inwardly is plagued by fears and compulsions, and remains blind to its true condition. All too often, it harbors an acedia that arises from unacknowledged anger and manifests as passive-aggressive behavior. Evagrius believed that acedia in its most dangerous form derived from a lack of self-knowledge. "[coming] into being when someone . . . does not perceive the meaning of his temptation and as a result fights against it without understanding." I am often "without understanding" in my attempt to navigate the dense thickets of my good thoughts and bad. When I am mired in acedia, enthusiasm seems foolish and false. And it is no easy matter to spurn the comforts of pride even though I know that only a proper and balanced self-respect can free me to love myself as I am, and also better respect and love others. I am slow to respond to my heart's wisdom, although I know that anything less is deadly. So, I struggle.

16 July 2013

Leo Bersani [Wisconsin]

Adam Phillips [Commonweal]

from Leo Bersani & Adam Phillips’s intimacies:

psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy, the saboteur, of this personal intimacy considered to be the source and medium of personal development. Psychoanalysis tells us, in short, that our lives depend on our recognition that other people — those vital others that we love and desire — are separate from us, “beyond our control” as we say, despite the fact that this very acknowledgment is itself productive of so much violence. Difference is the one thing we cannot bear. The dialogue of this book is a working out of a new story about intimacy, a story that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past.

“Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.” . . .

The new Penguin translations of Freud translate das Es, accurately, as “the It.” James Strachey’s Latinizing of the term as the Id in the standard edition of Freud’s work improperly removes it from ordinary language, and in so doing it misses its flat neutrality. Das Es, Freud tells us, is the repository of repressed sexual impulses; the word itself, however, both in German and in its precise English translation, suggests something beyond, or, more accurately, before all characterization. The It is unconscious not because (or not only because) it is the hiding place of the repressed; rather, the unconscious It, lodged within a subject that it vastly exceeds, is the reservoir of possibility, of all that might be but is not. . . . think of the unconscious as before consciousness . . . The It in the I transforms subjecthood from psychic density into pure potentiality . . .

There is, I have been suggesting, a mode of talk . . . a verbal play with the unspecifiable It of pure potentiality. The analytic exchange is psychoanalysis’s brilliant discovery of a relational context that needs, indeed allows for nothing more than virtual being. . . . the reprehensible failure to add passion to talk. . . . The impersonal intimacy of the psychoanalytic dialogue, the intimate talk without sex, might be re-experienced as an intimacy without passion. . . . to endure the sexual . . . to emerge on the other side of the sexual. But where is that? . . .

a special kind of talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk. . . . conversation suspended in virtuality. . . . willingness to entertain any possibility of behavior or thought as only possibility. . . . to free desiring fantasies from psychological constraints, thereby treating the unconscious not as the determinant depth of being but, instead, as de-realized being, as never more than potential being. . . . a love freed from demand.