#pyschoanalysis

Freud related the myth-grammar at work in us to the constellations of the family: to the tragically Greek "house." The psyche's layered contents reflect the structure of relationships within a home. Troy I, Troy II, Troy VIII . . . Secret, incestuous, murderous... The unconscious is the emblem of the labyrinth, the first royal "house," the house which is also, in myth, a maze which conceals its own shame, its subterranean bull violence.

It makes, then, complete sense that she should have such a loathing for modern art, which, along with the emergent field and discourse of psychoanalysis, disputed the very idea of a singular, unified self (Freud was only three years younger than Van Gogh, and the germs of psychoanalysis had begun to spread by the time of the latter’s death). In Gadsby’s world, and the world of #MeToo, the self begins as a unified entity, is broken by trauma, but is healed by storytelling, which returns the self to its moment of truth.

Psychoanalysis

AT THE WOLF'S LAIR

Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.

Lacan discovered, or brought out into the open, the fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with a theory of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as the phenomenological one). . . [he] concluded that it was precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned on account of this incompatibility, and that the point of departure should be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious

"Stendhal noted in the margin of the first page of De l'Amour: 'I undertake to trace with a mathematical precision and (if I can) truth, the history of the illness called love.' Love is an illness: it entails the renunciation of his individuality and reason. For Stendhal, the devotee of enlightenment, this means denying one's very reason for existing. Love becomes a mortal danger, and only a greater danger (Dracula!) can cure the person who falls victim to it: 'The leap from Leucates was a fine image in antiquity. In fact, the remedy for love is almost impossible. It requires not only that danger which sharply recalls a man's attention to his own preservation; it also requires -- something far more difficult -- the continuity of an enticing danger.' An enticing danger, just as that of love is a dangerous enticement: fear and desire incessantly overturn into one another. They are indivisible. "