#tad delay

Every tribe has its creation myths, and they are always illusions guarding against knowing too much.

What cannot be remembered will be repeated in our behavior. What cannot be spoken aloud will be ingrained in our rituals. We are as creative as we are fearful. Our creativity is a field from which we reap sustenance, but it is also the factory packaging denial of all we fear to be true.

We negotiate our experiences through the unconscious schemas placed upon us for the most part by the time we utter our first words, and not unlike Job, we are forever in the position of an ego demanding the big Other give account for the Real irruption of trauma.

What we shall covet is always a Thing mediated by its current status as our neighbor’s thing. Like a rabbit drawn from a hat, the object we covet is Imaginary and interchangeable for anything else. We did not notice we needed the thing until it became a Thing, which it became the moment the big Other said: Do you see this?—you cannot have it. The command to love our neighbour raises protests of envy, ensuing criminality raises the question of the Sovereign Good, and the failure to find the Sovereign Good leads the regressive vanity of false goods. Whether psychotic, neurotic, or perverse, the analysand must eliminate her demands for false gods.

. . . as Heschel wrote, it is hypocrisy—not heresy—that leads to spiritual decay. We are not to regress pure id, as if paradise were a social psychosis. We are also not to export responsibility onto the plane of the Symbolic, as if fidelity requires the enslavement of the obsessive neurotic. We are not to evade the big questions so as to postpone our confrontation with the pure truth that we tend to repeat what is not working, as if security can be found in hysteria. We can only offer a caution: who is asking us to see the world this way? And why are we so eager to submit to the Other’s self-proclaimed representative, whether in the form of a person or an ideology?

The traumas irrupting into our lives are always there beneath the surface, always reconfiguring the ways we see the world, always beyond our ability to quite put into words. ...Lacan calls the Real that which is unassimilable, the impasse of formalization, a knocking at the door that wakes us up before we have gathered our wits to interpret the knocking as a visitor. Perhaps it will be easier to understand by considering how when the truly unforgivable is committed against us, there is in society always a pressure on the victim to reinterpret what happened. Trauma is always in the Real, always lurking beneath the scenes in the aftermath. The unforgivable is interpreted through the Symbolic — however our culture devices up responsibility and blame — and the Symbolic pressures the Imaginary’s perception of the event. But we return over and over to the event in our minds, wandering through the course of details, and at each moment we are on the precipice of reinterpretation for better or (often) for worse. The Symbolic is always precarious, always unconscious, and always open to the slightest suggestion that it should impose upon the Imaginary a new framing of a traumatic event. It is the nature of the Symbolic to be in flux, and this flux allows both maturity and the worst aspects of painful regression. The soul does not cease to be written. Sometimes we heal and become unhealthy again — not because we did not adequately and appropriately deal with trauma in the first instance, but — because we allow in a voice that did not deserve to speak.