Black Gold

The oil spill is the cruelest of ironies: a man-made natural disaster that is the result of our efforts to master nature.  For all of its gushing physical reality, it is even more psychically real.  The oil spill follows the first rule of psychic life, the return of the repressed.  The repressed content, what is unacceptable to modern humanity, is our helplessness in the face of nature.  Our conscious emphasis on the domination of nature is, of course, an enterprise fueled by oil.  So it comes as no surprise that the repressed content, human fragility, would gush out of the very place we go in order to master the natural world.

When a tsunami kills 100,000 we mourn our dead and move on with the project of subjugating the mass killer, perhaps even with renewed vigor and purpose.  But when the very weapon used to wage war on nature backfires in our face, the psychic fallout is devastating.  Because the oil spill doesn't just symbolize our fragile mortality with the image of slowly bleeding out from a wound that can't be staunched.  And it isn't even the fact that this wound was self-inflicted.  It's that this wound was self-inflicted by the very process intended to cure the disease. The oil spill is that quintessential late modern tragic figure, the kid who got autism from his vaccines.

By way of oil we thought we could divorce ourselves from nature.  But oil is a strict Catholic and doesn't believe in divorce.  The oil spill reminds us that we are bound to nature until death do us part.  And nature will tell us when we can part, thank you very much.  If BP doesn't stop outsourcing its efforts to Wile E. Coyote and Acme, that parting of ways might happen sooner rather than later.  When plans A,B,C,D,E and F don't work what can we expect out of Plan G?  I say it's time to bring in the psychics.

Big Mac, Large Fries, and an Extra Large Reincarnation


In his excellent Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor notes the ironic core of the increasing belief in reincarnation among Americans (25% of Americans now believe in reincarnation, per http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html ). In traditional Indian culture reincarnation was viewed as a failure; each reincarnation signaled the individual’s failure to achieve the ultimate goal: liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This traditional understanding of reincarnation regards earthly existence as, at best, a great place to visit, but by no means the final destination. More to the point, it is a place to work out one’s karma, usually with a great deal of suffering. Earth as a place of suffering is at the heart of the traditional conception of reincarnation. In contrast, as Batchelor explains, contemporary Americans’ belief in reincarnation is fueled by a desire for more, not less, of earthly existence American style (not so sure they’re interested in reincarnating in what we used to call the Third World). Americans who believe in reincarnation want to come back. We are like the two year old for whom you just cranked the jack-in-the box the umpteenth time, only for us to shout “Again!” Reincarnation is the same in name only; somehow, for Americans who believe in reincarnation, the grass is no longer greener on the other side of death.

Before considering why America has reinvented reincarnation, it is important to note that traditional Indian culture is not alone in its stance towards life in this vale of tears. Christianity, natch, wants off the island, too: “Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven. (Matthew 5:12)” There are an infinite variety of takes on eternal life in the heavenly kingdom, but it is safe to say that everyday life in 2010 America is not a version. For Christians, the real world is but a prelude for what follows, which of course has implications for the reality we inhabit. Reality is never more than a first step, whether towards reward in heaven, or damnation in hell. This is a nice solution for the problems of evil and suffering, which, as in India, are the definitive aspects of this place we call home. A home from which Christians and Indians, whether by way of heaven or by exiting the cycle of rebirth stage right, just want out.

If the dominant spiritual tradition in America regards earthly incarnation in much the same fashion as the Indians traditionally have, then whence this mutant American strain of reincarnation? There is one seemingly reasonable explanation as to why Americans have transformed reincarnation from a necessary step towards departure into an infinite series of arrivals. The average American enjoys material improvements in living conditions undreamt of for nearly all of human history. The relative ease and comfort enjoyed by Americans has perhaps fundamentally altered the experience of life on Earth such that those who experience this Earth 2.0 are lining up to sign on for another tour of duty. In short, the presence of e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts in our lives empowers us all to echo Nietzsche and say “Yes to life!”

The problem with this explanation is that the joys of shopping at Walmart and/or Saks Fifth Avenue only run so deep; scratch the surface and you will find as much misery in America today as you’d likely find in any other time and place. If suicide is any indicator of net misery then the following from Wikipedia kills the joyful reincarnation theory: “According to 2005 data, suicides in the U.S. outnumber homicides by nearly 2 to 1 and ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the country, ahead of liver disease and Parkinson's. Worldwide suicide rates have increased by 60% in the past 50 years, mainly in the developing countries.” Material wealth, if anything, seems to have made us more miserable, which makes American reincarnation even stranger. We don’t seem to be jumping for joy, in contrast to what our version of belief in reincarnation would lead one to believe. We just watch TV, surf the web, go shopping, and slurp corn syrup to get through the day (the average American spends 151 hours per month watching TV, or 5 hours per day, 68 hours per month on the internet, just over 2 hours per day, and consumes 37.8 pounds of corn syrup annually; the average American woman takes 301 shopping trips for a total of 399 hours annually). And most of us get to do this a few years longer than our ancestors suffered through e.g. life before corrective eyewear. But we’ve always had wine, women, and song, and not a one of our manufactured consolations can top that. Not to mention that our material wealth giveth and taketh away in equal portions: there is a traffic jam for every luxury car, a sexually transmitted disease for every birth control pill, to mention but two of my favorite inventions.

We are as miserable as ever; you could make a case that we have gotten better at distracting ourselves from the misery, but these distractions weave their own unique web of desolation. And still, Americans want more, as if life were like the bottomless fries at Red Robin. Our many versions of bottomless fries are a good place to start if we wish to understand what may be at the heart of American reincarnation. Americans treat the world like a bottomless basket of fries, when there are only so many spuds to go around. According to a fun game on the web at http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/, if everyone in the world consumed as much as I do, it would take 4.1 Earths to provide the necessary resources. I am an American, I am eating the world, and I too have been increasingly looking forward to some reincarnation. This is all connected.

To understand why, let’s revisit Freud’s theory of the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains “that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things.” Following this logic, “inanimate things existed before living ones,” so “the aim of all life is death.” Ergo, the death instinct. Almost no one takes the death instinct seriously, which of course reflects the fact that almost no one takes his or her inevitable deaths seriously. But Freud’s greatest psychoanalytic successor, Jacques Lacan, did, and it is to his understanding of the death instinct and its role in human enjoyment that we must turn to fathom American reincarnation. To understand how Lacan can help us tease out the meaning of American reincarnation we must first introduce his concept of jouissance. Per Wikipedia, jouissance is a form of pleasure that is in opposition to our normal understanding of the term: “The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering.” (for this quote see http://www.answers.com/topic/jouissance ) The precise connection between the death instinct and Lacan’s theory of jouissance is too abstruse for consideration here (for a concise description see http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos ), but the key insight is that, due to the death instinct, we experience jouissance, that insatiable urge to overdo it. Thus, the bottomless fries.

If we take the death instinct seriously, as I believe we must, then we must be prepared, as Freud was, to follow the logic to its necessary conclusion and see if that conclusion matches the reality we see before us. So, here goes. If Freud is correct and there is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things,” by “becom(ing) inorganic once again”, then I see no more efficient means for the Earth as an interconnected organism to achieve this goal then by way of its human components’ consumption of mass quantities. The death instinct is driving us to literally eat the Earth back to an inorganic state. Does this seemingly bizarre formulation agree with the facts on the ground? I would suggest that the potential for an environmental apocalypse of human origins argues in its favor.

From this perspective, reincarnation American style is an expression of jouissance. Not content with doing our part to enjoy the pain of Earth’s annihilation just once, we shout “again!” Americans believe in reincarnation because of the instinctual drive for excess, and what is more excessive than using up four planets’ worth of resources not once, but until the job of killing this one planet is done? America is the ultimate “expression of the conservative nature of living substance,” (emphasis Freud’s) in the sense that we are at the vanguard of achieving the “final goal of all organic striving,” i.e. death. American reincarnation, then, is just reenlisting in the decisive march.

Perhaps the Indians and Christians are onto something when they consider the earth a place of suffering. Treating the earth as a place of excessive pleasure turns out to be in service of a death instinct that is leading us ever closer to the abyss; jouissance makes us lemmings, only we’re taking everybody and everything with us over the cliff. A return to suffering may just save us all. It may seem crazy to suggest that exercising a modicum of restraint at life’s various buffet tables would equate to suffering, but things have gotten so out of whack in late consumerist culture that for us Yanks the suggestion that we curtail our gorging is oddly anathema. But I’d like my children’s children to enjoy some French fries too, so one serving of fries will have to do. Okay, two servings.

Worms, Cells, and the Meaning of Death

There are two prevailing and contrasting theories of how cells die. The first, more comforting theory is that cells simply wear out from the rigors of life, and as wear and tear mounts become less able to fight off predators such as free radicals. Death appears here as an enemy at the gate, to be fought off in valorous combat until achieving the most honorable death possible for the Samurai, death in battle. The second, more troubling theory contends that aging and death are in fact preprogrammed into the cell’s DNA. This perspective essentially states “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

A 2008 Stanford research study, published in the 7/24/08 edition of the journal Cell, lends its weight to the latter perspective. The study looked at the impact of genetic programming in nematode worms, and found that the process of natural selection had resulted in genetic programming that predestined the worms to aging, and, by extension, death. A web article about the research, found at www.supercentarian.com/archive/genetic.html, explains the study’s key insight thusly: “key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake.” In essence, death becomes an existential dilemma for us precisely because it is in no way a dilemma for the process of natural selection. It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that our ultimate destiny is the result of nothing but an afterthought. (I have, of course, here made the leap from the death of cells to the death of cell based organisms; with the caveat that I am layman and not a cell biologist, we would appear to be on safe ground in asserting that the death of an individual human is intertwined with the death of his or her cells to a degree that makes this leap meaningful.)

We may proceed, with due caution but also with some degree of confidence based in scientific findings such as the Stanford worm study, in further exploration of the implications of our “planned demise from day one,” as one website’s description of preprogrammed cell death puts it (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). And if we are to proceed in such a fashion, then our first stop might very well be, yet again, at the doorstep of one Sigmund Freud. Because what the Stanford scientists and other theorists of preprogrammed cell death are telling us sounds remarkably like Freud’s most controversial theory, with apologies to penis envy, the death instinct.

Before discussing the particulars of Freud’s death instinct, it is important to pause for a moment in consideration of its singular lack of popularity. For really existing psychoanalysis, the worms at Stanford may be the bearers of bad news. Psychoanalysis would prefer to go about its business as if Freud had never postulated the death instinct. Psychoanlysis, like all the rest of us, is in flight from the specter of death; as David Loy explains, “our primary repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us individually and collectively.” (for this quote and a review of Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/padmas.htm) Psychoanalysis has repressed Freud’s death instinct, but, of course, the first commandment of psychoanalysis is the return of the repressed; those worms out at Stanford signal an opportunity for that return to emerge into consciousness from its current status as the unconscious urge towards compulsive repetition found in every form of death terror. Confronted with the science of preprogrammed cell death, psychoanalysis has no choice but to own the half of its legacy it has disowned, and the first murmurings of this reawakening to the death instinct can now be heard. (For an example, see http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=NP.006.0063A)

While psychoanalysis as a whole has repressed the theory of the death instinct, it is striking that the two most important psychoanalysts since Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein (Jung’s and Adler’s respective breaks with Freud led them to found significant branches of psychology, but neither can properly be referred to as psychoanalysts), both embraced the death instinct. In an article on the web about the death instinct (http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos), Pierre Delion explains that “For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict between the ego and the drives but always between the life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate response to the endopsychic perception of the death drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something beyond the pleasure principle forms the best starting-point for introducing his concept of the ‘Real,’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and jouissance.” It is my contention that Klein and Lacan achieved their theoretical insights precisely because they owned all of psychoanalysis, including the death instinct. It is my further contention that psychoanalysis has become marginalized as both a therapeutic practice and as a philosophical construct because it has only ever been, Lacan and Klein notwithstanding, half of psychoanalysis. As a mental health professional a week does not pass in which I do not hear psychoanalysis mocked by the phrase “So, tell me about your mother.” And rightly so, because psychoanalysis without the death instinct is a joke. Forget about your mother; tell me about your life in the context of your inevitable death.

To survive in any meaningful way, psychoanalysis must get real. Freud is, as ever, ready at hand with his reality principle, but we must be sure that our understanding of reality is shaped not only by our appreciation of life instincts such as libido, nor only by the demands of civilization as enforced by the superego, but also by their equal partner, the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that “two kinds of pressures are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory.” For Freud, these dual processes are less than harmonious, as he sees “an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” Our neurotic inability to reconcile what Freud calls the “Vacillating rhythm” of life and death instincts is inscribed in the worst of human history, especially war. In a letter to Freud on the origins of war, Albert Einstein described our inability to cope with the death instinct succinctly: “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” (for the full text of the letter, see http://www.braungardt.com/Physics/Einstein-Freud.htm)

Zeroing in on exactly what Freud meant by the death instinct helps us see to exactly what degree the theory of the death instinct foreshadowed the theory of preprogrammed cell death. Per Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’” (emphasis is Freud’s) Freud’s assertion here that death occurs due to “internal reasons” is shocking in its prescience in relation to theories of preprogrammed cell death. However, his assertion that “the aim of all life is death” contrasts with the discovery that death is a mere afterthought to processes of natural selection. We are stuck with death not because it is the aim of all life, but because life only cares for the life of the species and cares nothing for the death of the individual. To correct Freud, the aim of all individuals is death, but, inevitably, life goes on.

But if we recall that the life instinct protects the cell up until the point that it has performed natural selection’s task, only then to succumb to the death instinct preprogrammed into its DNA , then the following passage just a few paragraphs later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates that Freud’s death instinct may account for natural selection after all: “The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organic shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to organic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” In short, Freud’s insight here is that the life instinct and natural selection are ultimately subservient to the death instinct’s agenda, in that a healthy organism will ward off external dangers in the name of natural selection, but ultimately in the service of allowing the death preprogrammed into the organism’s DNA to obtain. The death instinct has but one card to play; it must play it last and if it does it trumps all.

We continue to repress the death instinct at our collective peril. In the most literal sense possible, the only way forward for each and every one of us is though death. As Pema Chodron writes in her commentary on the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong slogans, “ Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.” And if Freud and the scientists at Stanford are right, it not only comes for us at the end, but is there with us every step of the journey; death is a part of who we are. In the same commentary, Pema Chodron counsels us to become familiar with death throughout life: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.” It is only by doing so that the death instinct can emerge from repression. It is only by doing so that we can remain sane in the face of our preprogrammed eath. The leap of faith here, to be watered by practice, is that underneath all that death terror is what Pema Chodron calls “the innate ability to let go and feel compassion for others.” I’d like to die trying.

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (and the Price of Lunch is Your Free Will)

An old sign, commonly posted in public indoor spaces in the days when all men wore hats, read “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must.” This sign captures the reality of what we like to call free will. Like it or not, Freud’s breakthrough conception of the superego impinges significantly on free will, that notion that human beings are free at all times to choose. What Freud realized is that rather than roaming the range of existence freely like wild buffalo we are much more like cattle, free to graze as we choose within the given confines of our surrounding fences. Given the superego, the notion of free will must be replaced by what I would call zones of autonomy. And it is only because free will is shrunk down to zones of autonomy that we are collectively able to enjoy the fruits and protections of civilization. In essence, to participate in civilization is to be not free. This cost of doing business for the venture, civilization, which makes human existence possible is a steep price indeed. As always, you get what you pay for. The message at the core of Freud’s lasting philosophical statement, Civilization and Its Discontents, can be boiled down thusly: In order for civilization to function, it’s participants must sacrifice free will; this sacrifice makes us all neurotic.

One may sacrifice one’s free will to civilization in one of two ways. Minus the superego, whose emergence in the individual is never certain and is the result of what is best described as a moral education, the individual’s free will is almost inevitably curtailed by the state, whose “justice system’s” true function is to assure the ongoing viability of civilization in the form of the state. Those who exercise free will in opposition to the will of the state soon find this free will demarcated by prison walls (or, it is important to note, in the case of defiance of the state’s economic necessities via failure to manifest marketable skills, banishment to the varieties of Siberia that include urban slums). Paraphrasing Alcoholics Anonymous, stomping grounds of many a soul who has chosen free will over the law, the path walked without the superego will lead you to one of three places: jail or other institutions, hospitals, or your grave.

Conversely, if one is the recipient of a modicum of moral education, the thoughts and behaviors necessary for the smooth functioning of civilization are encoded in one’s psyche as the superego. The particulars of the superego will vary by individual depending upon the vagaries of his or her moral education. But you will always know if the superego is present and functioning effectively in the individual if he or she is generally managing to stay out of trouble. Those individuals who get into trouble due to the dictates of conscience, see Martin Luther King Jr. or the Berrigan brothers as examples of those jailed for acts of civil disobedience, have the most advanced superegos of all, and as such pose no true threat to the ability of civilization to function. In fact, those burdened with outsized superegos are perhaps the most important contributors to society of all, for by imbuing civilization with a semblance of justice they tamp down the collective neuroses resulting from the loss of free will. Just as in Animal Farm where all animals are equals, and some are more equal than others, in civilization, where none of us are free, some of us are less free than others. And they are irrefutably the best of us.

One of the superego’s craftiest maneuvers is in allowing us the appearance of free will in everyday life. As long as our thoughts and behaviors remain within the boundaries set for us by our respective superegos, we are free to think and do just as we please. I am free to go to the movies with my free time on Sunday mornings, or play tennis in the park. Countless little decisions are made by the individual from the seat of agency, the ego, each day. The sheer mass of choosing that accumulates from these unnumbered choices feeds the illusion of free will; if I am free to choose in this infinite variety of everyday moments I begin to have the emotional satisfaction as if it were the case that I am free to choose at all times. This effect likely keeps us all sane.

But what I am really experiencing are life choices made within the boundaries of my zones of autonomy. If one had an exceptionally rigorous moral education, the ferocity with which one’s superego wields the only weapon it needs, guilt, may discipline one well enough such that the great majority of one’s time is spent in the zones of autonomy, thereby amplifying the illusion of free will for the most moral among us. But while not all of us give in to the temptation to put our foot up the ass of our obnoxious neighbor, we all at least think of putting a well deserved foot up this neighbor’s ass. And because the superego monitors thoughts, and not just actions, we are all inevitably subject to its recriminations in the form of guilt.

And if you doubt the power of guilt to shape behavior, then it is time to take a long hard look at what is keeping you out of trouble. I have a close friend who I have known since childhood. I can vouch for the comprehensive nature of her moral education, which was of the progressive social justice Christian variety. She shared with me that what shapes her behavior is embarrassment. For example, she was recently embarrassed by a server at a local restaurant, and emphatically stated to me that she will never set foot back in the establishment, even though they have an amazing wine selection, because of this incident. Understanding embarrassment as simply being made to feel guilty for one’s behavior, it is clear that the feeling of guilt was so powerful for my friend that she will likely never again engage in the behavior that, rightly or wrongly, led to the feelings of embarrassment/guilt. But an even greater witness to guilt’s potency is the fact that she can’t even return to the scene of the “crime.” The restaurant will always be the site where she drowned in guilt. It is submerged forever.

I am certainly not immune to this. At work recently I was “embarrassed” by a colleague who happened to be coming down the stairs in the stairwell when I exited the stairwell via the door on the landing. I was in a funk that morning and didn’t notice that she was headed for the door in my wake, so I failed to hold the door for her. When we made it to the office she announced to anyone who would listen how “some people” were so rude that they couldn’t hold the door for those behind them (and yes, I did gently confront her- I am getting better at this kind of thing). Whether or not I deserved this rebuke or not, and for what it’s worth my wife gives me a free pass after hearing my version of events, my superego certainly took notice. I now wait approximately forty-seven seconds after opening any door before passing through, on the off chance that someone else might appear out of the ether and need me to hold the door for them. I am tempted to start wearing a doorman’s uniform to work. All that to say that when the superego talks, people listen.

Wittgenstein said “You can mistrust your senses, but you can’t mistrust your beliefs.” If you are blessed with a superego (and I do mean blessed; remember the alternatives), it functions as the ultimate belief which can’t be mistrusted. The superego bounds one’s choices in the same way that death bounds life. You can ignore the superego just as we often ignore death. But, like death, the superego inevitably comes knocking. Inevitably because the last time I checked nobody was perfect. And the superego demands nothing less than perfection.

So what does it mean for us that “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must,” i.e. those of you with superegos may choose to follow civilization’s dictates, and we’ll lock the rest of you up? The first step forward is always to get real about just where you actually are. As long as we cling to illusory notions of free will we shall remain lost in a fantasyland made out of the denial of our most profound existential dilemma. The dilemma common to every human being, male, female, etc., is that to enter through the gates of civilization, as we all must (language acquisition alone guarantees this entry), is to irrevocably forego free will in exchange for that shabby impostor I call the zone of autonomy. Every one of us is Meatloaf singing “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” And then we all do precisely that. What else is there to do?

Freud is a hero because he refused to flinch in the face of this defining existential dilemma. He saw no way out, and so he took none. His philosophy, and Freud was first and foremost our greatest psychological philosopher, owned this central problem of being human. He showed us exactly where we actually are, and he died a pessimist.

Unlike genius brother Freud, I am just folks. But like Freud, I too will someday die. And while I have begun to face the need to own where we humans actually are, I hope not to die a pessimist. There is a popular Buddhist book titled The Wisdom of No Escape. Freud showed us that there can be no escape from our shared dilemma. I turn to Buddhism to learn the wisdom inherent to this place we can not leave. I told my wife tonight that I believe that Buddhism is the “religion of last resort”, which is English for “the wisdom of no escape.” Pardon me while I remove my hat.

A Survivor’s Guide to Swine Flu

As the days shorten and I put my pajamas on even earlier than the standard 7 pm, signaling, respectively, autumn’s yielding to winter and my enthusiasm for shutting off contact with the outside world at a more reasonable hour, flu season remains undimmed. If 2007 was the Year of the Pig, per Chinese restaurant placemats, 2009 has been the Year of the Swine. If not quite a swine flu panic, 2009 has witnessed full blown swine flu paranoia. Symptoms of swine flu paranoia are evident in any public gathering place. Foremost among these is the ”sanitizing station”, where one receives in one’s hands some version of cleansing fluid, gel or foam in a fashion that is highly evocative of receiving bread at communion. The occasional surgical mask sighting or the placing of newspaper over an offensive subway train pole demarcates the boundaries of the protective sphere cast by the sanitizing station. As we swim in an ocean of hand sanitizer, we talk incessantly of the invisible threat around us: about the dangers of coming into contact with children, whose schools have been reduced to germ breeding grounds; or the risk of entering people’s homes – pity the Mary Kay lady who takes her life into her hands to make her living. Most of all, we are afraid that each person we encounter in our everyday travels is a danger to our health and well being.

It will be important to return to these fears, but a reality check is in order. The public health and medical communities have broadcast loud and clear that YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT DIE FROM SWINE FLU. As names with the word Doctor in front of them are usually very reassuring in such matters, a quick web search should act as a tonic for swine flu paranoia. Dr. David Lipschitz, on creators.com, opines on swine flu thusly: “all the evidence suggests that swine flu is no more aggressive than any other seasonal influenza virus….it is also important to understand that only a very small percentage of people infected with this illness will develop life-threatening complications….we can all take a few simple steps to protect against the swine flu.” These simple steps basically amount to staying home if you’re sick and washing your hands regularly, with a little hand sanitizer thrown in for good measure (one could, of course, avoid touching one’s eyes, nose and mouth between hand washings, which is easy if you pee relatively frequently, so one could argue that drinking lots of your favorite beverage could replace the hand sanitizer, but hey, I’m not a doctor).

For a second opinion, Foxnews.com (yes, that Fox News) proffers Deborah Lehman, whose street cred practically drips from her title, Director of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Dr. Lehman provides the added perspective of comparing swine flu to what we’ve always simply called the flu: “At this point it looks like the seasonal flu will be responsible for more deaths than swine flu.” Dr. Lehman’s August forecast has held up. National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (there, that should get the taste of Fox News out of your mouth) reported this week (week of 12/7/09) that while the number of flu cases is up a bit, the number of flu deaths is only one third of its average rate. So, to sum up, swine flu is a bit easier to catch, but much less likely to kill you than good old fashioned flu. Everyone knows this by now; the bodies are simply not piling up at the morgue. But the hand sanitizer flows at a rate second only to the gushing of anxiety. The paranoid response to the reality of swine flu can only be described as irrational.

As irrational behaviors herald unconscious processes at work, if we are to understand swine flu paranoia we are tasked with interpretation. If that psychoanalytical giant Lacan is correct, and the unconscious is structured like a language, then words, signs, and symbols are the material in play. The beginning, then, is that honest name, swine flu. Too honest, in fact, for our times; swine flu was publicly sanitized into H1N1. But there is no such thing as H1N1 paranoia. What people fear is the “swine flu”, and in that pairing of nouns “flu” only relates to the fear in that it provides structure for how the fear manifests, because if we were really that afraid of the “flu”, we would have had sanitizing stations for the last one hundred years. Swine flu has opened the valves of anxiety because of the effect of the word “swine”.

That effect has nothing to do with our relationship to that class of animals which includes pigs, boars, hogs, razorbacks, etc. Swine flu paranoia is unrelated to the individual’s choice of whether or not to consume bacon (my wife tells me pigs are now considered smarter than dogs, which I take to mean that in fifty years when we’ve killed off most other species we’ll feel a little better about eating dogs, but I digress). Scroll down to the second definition of swine on the internet dictionary site that Google takes you to, and you will find “contemptible person”. Swine flu paranoia only takes on meaning in relationship to this secondary definition of the word swine. In short, swine flu paranoia is all about contempt.

We can begin to approach the link between swine flu and contempt by way of what some call, a bit melodramatically (our era majors in dishonesty with a minor in melodrama), the Conservative Media. Whatever else you say about the right, it’s populist radio talk show hosts are a reliable source of free-association levels of unconscious material, especially as relates to the aggressive drive (re. conservatives and the aggressive drive, I kid you not, I saw this bumper sticker last week: “Nuke Iran before Iran nukes us.”). So, according to MediaMatters.com (a lefty organization whose raison d’etre appears to be to reverse that tiresome cliché of “the liberal media” into its equally tiresome opposite) the Conservative Media (read: annoying radio hosts and Fox News) has been portraying the swine flu as the work of the devil, i.e. illegal immigrants. The right’s contempt for illegal immigrants appears to be one notch below that withheld for terrorists, although with swine flu’s help illegal immigrants might get to #1: MediaMatters.com reports that on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show a caller discussing the swine flu stated “each one of these people (illegal immigrants) is a biological weapon”, O’Reilly responded “You might be right.” If illegal immigrants can be considered terrorists, then there is no limit to the contempt in which one may hold them.

MediaMatters.com quotes a passage from talk show host Michael Savage that is even more telling regarding the link between swine flu paranoia and contempt. Discussing his strategy for remaining swine flu free, Savage remarks “How do you protect yourself? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and I don’t give a damn if you don’t like what I’m going to say. I’m going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants. I will have no illegal alien workers around me. I will not have them in any of my properties, I will not have them anywhere.” (Savage was later heard stating “I do not like them with a fox, I will not eat them in a box, I will not eat them here or there, I will not eat them anywhere.”) Savage’s obvious deficiency in common sense aside (should Savage be able to somehow guarantee that no illegal immigrant crosses his path, I’m not sure how he will prevent himself from catching swine flu from a neighbor who has been infected by one of these walking biological weapons), his contempt for immigrants as would be carriers of swine flu is remarkable, absurdly comical, and frightening.

The Conservative Media’s irrational rage towards illegal immigrants as swine flu suicide bombers unmasks the interplay between contempt and swine flu paranoia. But if the Conservative Media is the crazy uncle who frequently ruins Thanksgiving, the rest of us remain garden variety neurotics, and it is to our swine flu paranoia that we now must turn. Just as the right wing talk show host’s swine flu rant expresses his contempt for illegal immigrants, our everyday acts of swine flu paranoia, the immersion in baths of hand sanitizer and the deluge of swine flu anxiety chatter (both external and internal), express our increasing perception of “the other” as a contemptible person. Swine flu paranoia is an expression of anxiety related to contact with the contemptible other, and a set of (neurotic) behaviors intended to inoculate one’s self from the dangers of contact with the object of one’s contempt. Each sanitization of one’s hands is an attempt to cleanse the contamination resulting from contact with the contemptible other.

The other is contemptible, of course. We are all contemptible. Each of us is a strange, fluid composite of the admirable and the contemptible. But swine flu paranoia reveals the degree to which we have collectively repressed those contemptible qualities which make up such a large, and necessary, portion of human character. This repression has been aided and abetted by what is best called the culture industry (a term coined, I believe, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). The culture industry, via the interwoven means of media and commerce, has been, amidst mountains of stuff, selling us one idea. This is the idea that if the individual conforms by consuming ever increasing mass quantities appropriately, then he or she can transcend all that is contemptible in him or herself, thereby attaining to a version of the self that is exclusively admirable. We purchase this idea in every thoughtless act of consumption. And with each purchase, we repress another piece of the contemptible within us. Or it might be better said that we put our contemptible traits on lay-away, because swine flu paranoia is the return of the repressed. Those qualities that we have repressed, in our undying effort to resemble the perfect advertisement for ourselves, have returned. We now see them in everyone else, and for reminding us of what we have rejected in ourselves we hold them in contempt. It is the ultimate irony that the mechanism for so much of our repression, the variety of media, is the primary carrier for the spread of swine flu paranoia. As the culture industry consolidates its grip ever further, instances of mass neuroses are inevitable, i.e. you ain’t seen nothing yet.

For the skeptics who might doubt the leaps involved in meaningful interpretation of irrational behavior, trust that there is method to the madness. But to question how one gets from the repression of contemptible traits to standing in line at the hand sanitizing station is not unreasonable. The theory in play holds that the return of the repressed necessarily includes irrational behavior. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, describes the psychic distortion that leads to the return of the repressed in irrational and unrecognizable forms: “All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as ‘the return of the repressed’. Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original.” (p. 127) In other words, we repress that which is unacceptable in the advertisement for ourselves, and the repressed, contemptible traits undergo a process of distortion. At the end of the process the repressed returns, as it must, only now it takes the form of the contemptible other, who has me running scared for the sanitizing station.

As this interpretation began with language, it is to language that we turn in closing. My wife saw a sign at our synagogue the other day which warned “Germs are everywhere”. We now know that this sign is warning us that contemptible persons are everywhere, so slather on the Purell. But if we wish to step back from irrational swine flu paranoia, and towards basic sanity, the etymology of the word “germs” provides a clue. Germ is first recorded in 1644, with an original meaning of “rudiments of a new organism in an existing one.” It had the sense of a sprout or a bud; think “wheat germ” or “germ of an idea”. But by 1805 germ came to mean “seed of a disease”, and by 1871 it came into the meaning it has in common usage today: “harmful microorganism”. Our increasingly pathological relationship to that which is contemptible within us mirrors the evolution of the meaning of the word germ. We increasingly relate to our contemptible traits as a harmful microorganism within us to be eradicated. But eradication is impossible, and repression, and its eventual return, the inevitable outcome.

But if we return to the original sense of germ, conceiving of our contemptible traits as rudiments of a new self in an existing one, we begin to get close to a truth that our spiritual traditions have known down through the ages. The way forward is through the flaws and the pain, through what is contemptible in each of us. It is the by the grace of God that the repressed must always return, even if that means scrubbing our hands raw at our local sanitizing station. For if the repressed did not return, if we could indeed eradicate the contemptible, we should have rid ourselves of the only way out of this great big mess. I’ll start by not trying to be a hybrid of Phillip Marlowe and John Boy from The Waltons, which I somehow decided long ago was the perfect advertisement for me.

Take out the papers and the trash (in the same trash bag)

Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).

Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.

Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.

So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.

So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.

We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)

So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.

Gotta Get Back In Time

Socrates’ famous remark, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”, is perhaps history’s most pithy commentary on the illusory nature of reality as it is lived. The magic that maintains the illusion, and the element which makes the illusion necessary, are one and the same. Sometimes dressed up as The Fourth Dimension, that which beguiles Socrates and all the rest of us hides in plain sight as the common coin of daily drudgery, time (see “time is money”).

Our collective complicity is necessary for the magic to work; we maintain the illusion by accepting the received wisdom that time marches ever forward in a linear fashion, and, even more importantly, that within this inevitable progression cause always and necessarily leads to effect. Cause and effect is the most fundamental given of our daily experience of reality, and as such shapes our encounter with time, thereby empowering time to delude us all into believing that reality is unassailably monolithic. To encounter reality instead as soft clay, one must first disenchant the spell cast by time, a spell that bewitches via the sorcery of cause and effect.

Time’s power, its ability to pen us into the present moment with its attendant horrors and without hope of escape, rests in our programmed experience of the present as impenetrably remote from the past, and untouched by a not-yet-existent future. In our belief in a bright line which separates past from present we are like a racehorse wearing blinders; seeing only that present moment right before us ,we rush forward, blind to the big picture that is our true reality. This big picture is captured best by William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” To that I would only add that the future is not even future.

What Faulkner understood, and what we like to ignore through our purchase of time’s snake oil, is that the past is right here in the room with us in the present. Psychoanalysis is nothing other than a system of healing founded on this, time’s dirty little secret. Those psychotherapists who insist upon attending exclusively to the here and now are trafficking primarily in illusion, as whatever help they offer leaves the patient still stranded on an island that does not exist. Psychoanalysis stakes its claim that speaking in the present is giving voice to the past. Everything we do and say in the “here and now” is always a reckoning with everything that has come before; the present moment is nothing other than an improvised encounter with the past. This is all well and good for as far as it takes us, but where Faulkner and Freud’s past leaves off we are still haunted by cause and effect. With a nod to Dickens, enter the Ghost of Christmas Future.

To repeat, the future is not even future. The radical step necessary to demystify the nature of time is the acknowledgment that “cause and effect” is joined by its equal partner in the realm of causality, “effect and cause”. Conditioned to believe that an effect can only follow a cause in the sequence of time, what we traditionally refer to as “cause and effect”, we have repressed our knowledge of the truth that effect can and does occur in the sequence of time prior to its cause, a phenomenon we might simply label “effect and cause”. Amidst our repression we give voice to our intuitive insight into “effect and cause” with that everyday cliché, “everything happens for a reason.” This cliché, commonly used as a verbal crutch when, as so often happens, there is a void in the place where we go to find meaning, is actually a trace of deep folk wisdom. This is the knowledge that if the reason or cause for an event cannot be found in the past, that the void is not an absence of meaning, but a sign pointing to the future genesis of that meaning, i.e. the cause of the effect is yet to come.

A popular Taoist legend, copied here from www.webtapestries.com, hints at the presence of the future in the “here and now”:

‘A chinese farmer's neighbors came over to offer him their sympathy after his horse ran away. "I'm not so sure it's a misfortune", said the farmer. The neighbors left, shaking their heads.
The next day, the farmer's horse returned, and three wild horses came home with him. The neighbors returned to congratulate the farmer on his good fortune. "I'm not certain that it is good fortune", replied the farmer. The neighbors left, more bemused than before.
Later that week, the farmer's son broke his leg trying to train one of the new horses, and the neighbors came by to offer condolences. "I'm not sure this is a misfortune", said the farmer again. The neighbors left, discussing the man's mental state among themselves.
The next day, the emperor came through, gathering up young men to be in his army. They bypassed the farmer's son, since he had a broken leg.’

The traditional interpretation of this legend is rather straightforward: since we can not see the future, we are unable to determine what is blessing and what is curse, so let us instead live detached from our mind’s storylines, peaceful and awake in the moment. Seen from another angle, however, the legend is subversive to the reification of the concept of cause and effect, clearing space for a liberating relationship with time. Understood thusly, the legend is an exemplar of a chain of “effect and cause”, with the horse’s escape “caused” by a temporally subsequent “effect”, the return of the horse with three additional wild horses. Continuing the chain, the return of the four horses is “caused” by the “effect” of the son’s broken leg, and, finally, the son’s broken leg is “caused” by the “effect” of the conscripting emperor.

With the radical move of establishing the reality of “effect and cause” accomplished, our understanding of the interplay of past, present, and future can be fine tuned. It is an oversimplification to oppose “cause and effect” against “effect and cause”, as if only one element, past or future, comes to bear on the present. It goes without saying that some degree of “cause and effect” will always be in play in the present; in the legend above it would be foolish to deny that a series of events, perhaps the farmer’s son having left the farm’s gate open, has played a role in the outcome of the horse’s departure from the farm. However, in every present moment “effect and cause” partners with “cause and effect” to shape the possible experiences of the present moment. In this example, the horse’s subsequent return with three additional horses is equal to the postulated left-open gate as a causative force in the horse’s escape. To be crystal clear, the events that occurred after the horse’s escape were just as important in causing the escape as the events that occurred prior to the escape. “Cause and effect” works in tandem with “effect and cause”, equal partners in crafting the potential present. The old saying “that horse has already left the barn”, commonly used to express the irretrievable quality of the past, may also be understood to say the future is now.

We may discard our notion of time as a linear flow from past, to present, to future in which each moment is sacrosanct in its isolation, and in which each inviolable moment lays a stranded human monad. In its place we might think of time as a thread with three strands woven together such that encountering the thread at any site along its length we come into contact with all three strands: past, present, and future. This thread is both the abstract notion of time and a lived human life, unending as time itself. Lest this understanding of time threaten with the specter of hard determinism, rest assured that all which is created by the past and the future in crafting the present is but a stage for the creative improvisation of the now. We always act in relationship to the past and future, but our actions within the scope of this stage are free and unlimited. As for time travel, there is really nowhere to go. The boundless landscape of past and future are right here in the infinite present.

Hipster (a working definition):  One whose enjoyment is subservient to one’s perception of the acts essential to one’s self image.  

From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the hipster is one with a rigid, perhaps fundamentalist, investment in the fiction of his or her ego, placing the hipster at a radical remove from the truth of his or her subject.

The geek, however, experiences no limitation in his or her enjoyment of the experience; in fact the geek has the opposite problem in getting carried away with his or her enjoyment, in other words going too far in the sense of alienating others. The geek, whether engaged in civil war reenactment or on-line World of Warcraft gaming does not know how to limit his or her enjoyment, allowing his or her excessive enjoyment to interfere with basic social functioning. To use a (possibly hip) Lacanian term, the geek has an over abundance of jouissance. On a personal level, I am a closet geek about tennis equipment, but I have enough of the hipster in me to keep this geek enthusiasm largely concealed.

The hipster’s enjoyment is restricted by a rigid self image, and the hipster’s perception of his or her own sexual attractiveness is a key element in the hipster’s calculus of acceptable acts. The hipster is limited at all times by the idea of how he or she will be perceived by others, unlike the geek who could care less about the opinions of those not engaged in e.g. medieval warcraft and costume gatherings. The hipster is the far more tragic of the two conditions, as he or she is, ironically, as socially and sexualy limited as the geek; just as geeks only get laid by geeks, hipsters end up only having sex with other hipsters. But while the geek must struggle with an excess of jouissance, the hipster, bound by his or her rigid ego, exiled from the truth of his or her subject, can only nibble at the life-giving buffet table of jouissance, while everyone else helps themselves to Cheesecake Factory portions. And the geeks go home with doggy bags.

Finally, the phenomenon of “geek chic” in which the hipster attempts to coopt the yearned for jouissance of the geek but only ever manages to shackle the geek’s excess freedom, reveals the truth of the hipster’s subject as a narrative of the geek in flight from himself, i.e. the hipster is nothing other than the necessary ego fiction accompanying the truth of the repression of the geek into the always obscured subject.  

Witness the author’s circa 1995 immersion into thrift store clothing, wine-colored hair, local Perth indie rock bands, and a subsequent ill-fated long distance love affair with an Australian hipster sheela.  After further romantic catastrophes amidst a prolonged hipster phase, my care of the self has consisted largely of a modulation of my hipster terndencies in an effort to give the truth of my own subject room to breathe, e.g. allowing myself to devote untold hours to staring at tennis racquets on internet tennis gear websites and, ahem, posting thoughts on the pro’s and cons of various racquets on chat room message boards; perhaps if I can let myself chat up the occasional stranger in an elevator about the reason I am considering a switch from Head to Dunlop I will have truly relented my investment in a hip facade.  All that said, the most important step in the journey towards my subject was wooing and marrying a decidedly unhip, but manifestly cool (as in the true meaning of cool in the sense of the real meaning of Christmas) Jewish chick.  L’chaim!

 

 

Interpreting a Freudian Split

 

            Slavoj Zizek, the renowned Slovenian provacateur and Lacanian psychoanalyst, describes the (in)famous rupture between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thusly:

“(T)he difference between Freud and Jung is insurmountable: the fundamental premise of Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ is that the universe is utterly meaningless- it is not structured in compliance with human desires, there is no harmony between microcosm and macrocosm- whereas Jung reinscribes a psychoanalytical problematic into the frame of ‘cosmic principles’ which guarantee correspondences between human life and the universe at large (yin and yang as psychic and cosmic principles, etc.).”

 

            But perhaps the meaninglessness of it all, which was so evident to Freud, is, paradoxically, the very guarantor of meaning.  Jung wrote extensively about the symbolism of the alchemical effort to transform base metals into gold; for Jung the alchemical process represents the process of individuation, the maturation of the soul.  But the process of individuation, melted down (to extend the metaphor) is nothing other than a byproduct of the individual’s day-to-day reckoning with suffering, a suffering which is rooted in the meaningless void into which we are all thrust as human beings.  Freud’s meaningless ground of suffering becomes the fertile soil out of which grows, respectively, the human soul, the insights of history’s religious geniuses, and civilization itself.

 

            Against Zizek, then, the irreconcilable split between Freud and Jung can be recast as a divergence of exploratory interests.  Freud remained until the end transfixed by the problem of human suffering and its relations to the peculiarities of human sexuality.  His vision of psychoanalysis is announced in his famous statement that the best he could do with the psychoanalytical cure was to deliver his patients from the misery of their neuroses to a state of common human unhappiness (not a small accomplishment in and of itself, to be sure).  As pessimistic as Freud’s insistence on meaninglessness and the inevitability of suffering appear, it is a perspective absolutely vital to the endeavor of psychoanalysis, and appropriate to its founding father.  Freud grounded psychoanalysis in the fact of the meaningless void in which humans suffer.  Everything that we humans accomplish grows out of the encounter with existential suffering.  To deny that is to obscure the profound insight of Freud, and to lose psychoanalysis in the process. 

 

            Jung’s ability to comprehend “man and his symbols”, what Zizek labels “cosmic principles”, comes from standing on Freud’s shoulders, as must all psychoanalysts worthy of the name.  That Jung found meaning where Freud found none simply indicates where Jung’s genius differed from Freud’s; Jung’s genius lay in his willingness to bring psychoanalysis with him as he made the leap that each of the world’s great faiths inspire.  The leap to discover what mysterious, ineffable meaning emerges from the shivering, suffering human soul’s encounter with the meaningless void.  If God exists anywhere, it is there, in the least likely of places, right in front of us in our eternal suffering.  That Jung finds God in the best hiding place of all, the very place that Freud, and Zizek, believe obliterates the very possibility of God, is a testament only to Jung’s willingness to follow Freud’s lead up to the edge that Freud defined as the limit of psychoanalysis, and walk right over the cliff.

 

            We are left, inescapably, with one question: where would we have psychoanalysis lead us?

 

If It Sounds Too Good To Be True....

Apparent wellness, or the absence of observable neuroses, is most often an advanced capacity in the individual for complying with social norms, and is, as such, its own (well disguised) form of neurosis.  Social norms are indispensable in helping us manage to get along with one another, but strict conformity to these norms does nothing to broaden the soul.  A life defined by social correctness dressed up as "sanity" is as stable as the first little pig's straw house when, as they inevitably do, things fall apart.  The extreme exemplar of this phenomenon is the "perfect" college student: straight A's, varsity sports, good looking in a typical fashion, socially and sexually successful, paired with an attractive boyfriend or girlfriend.  But the process of achieving social perfection can so utterly alienate the late adolescent from the process of suffering and enduring everyday pains and humiliations (think bad acne, unacceptable fashion, prolonged virginity, the list of transgressions is almost endless, making the "perfect" adolescent's "accomplishment" all the more astounding and shedding light on where this is headed) that little by little chisel a human soul.  This process of achieving  true social, i.e. external, "perfection" hollows out the late adolescent's soul or internal life with a brutal finality, so that in the end her only means of retrieving her lost soul from its imprisonment in the social sphere is by violating the sine qua non of the social order, the suicide taboo.  Suicide, here, is a tragic act of liberation.

Translated into Buddhist language, this (in)sane figure is similar to the master practitioner of Samsara, who lives a life of comfort and ease, safely sealed off from suffering and assorted discomforts.  Deep in the womb of Samsara, he will be birthed into trauma when things fall apart, as they inevitably do.  Even, and especially, if this birth is the moment of death.  

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

            

My quest for the historical Jesus has been an attempt to make sense of this strange, wonderful religion in which I have been raised.  But before I go any further, let me put all of my cards on the table.  The son of an Episcopal clergyman and his theologian wife, so needless to say a baptized Christian, I have married a beautiful Jewish woman.  Together my wife Jennifer and I are raising our two daughters in the Jewish tradition, and I have been blessed with a firsthand appreciation for the depth and light of the Jewish faith.  And the primary spiritual practice in my everyday life is Buddhist sitting meditation.  I like to think that I am practicing Buddhism in order to be a better Christian.  Put another way, the Episcopal Church has not lost a Christian, instead it has gained a Buddhist.  This postmodern tableau is, quite simply, religion in the 21^st century.  Whatever your comfort level with religion as collage, the Episcopal Church must continue to build in the flexibility necessary to meet the spiritual needs of people for whom the possible avenues of faith are virtually infinite.

           

So, the historical Jesus.  In many ways Christianity asks more from its believers than any other major world religion.  The virgin birth, God walking the Earth as a man, and, of course, the resurrection, each of these is mind blowing enough in its own right.  Put them together and you have a landscape of events that leaves the post-Enlightenment western individual with few choices:  maintain a safe remove by labeling the Gospel stories as “myth”, chuck the whole religion as absurd, or choose to believe precisely because it is all so unbelievable. 

 

The quest for the historical Jesus, then, is an attempt to save Christianity by providing it some much needed ballast.  Imagine Christianity as a hot air balloon.  The beauty of Christianity as a mystery religion, with the feeding of the five thousand, water into wine, walking on water, and, of course, the salvation of human kind via the resurrection, is really what Christianity is all about.  But this stuff is all lighter than air and threatens to float away into the postmodern ether without something more substantial to hold it all down.  The quest for the historical Jesus, boiled down to its essence, is nothing other than the emphatic insistence that Jesus of Nazareth actually walked the Earth.  Without this fundamental grounding of Christianity, with the quest as rational pilot suspended in a basket beneath the hot air balloon of those mysterious Gospels, it would all just float away.

 

In this context, it matters little which Jesus historian you read, or which theories you find most credible, as the act of engaging in the quest for the historical Jesus is an end unto itself.  But most of the fun to be had on the quest is in immersing one’s self in the material, wrestling with the implications of each possibility, and coming out the other side with a position one is willing to stake one’s faith on.  A perfect jumping off point for a freshly minted “quester” is The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visons, coauthored by Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, the leading lights, respectively, of liberal and conservative Jesus scholarship.  In this work, Borg and Wright engage in a gentlemanly butting of heads regarding the central mysteries of the historical Jesus.  Among the topics up for debate is Jesus’ resurrection.  The effect of reading Wright and Borg consecutively is psychedelic, as their contrasting analyses distort the reader’s perceptions as she attempts to bend her mind around these ultimately irreconcilable Easter gestalts.  A closer look at both is necessary to determine which fork in the path leads to hallucination, and which to enlightenment.

 

Wright, first up to bat in the text, insists upon a corporeal resurrection.  Jesus is resurrected in the flesh:  “What the early church insisted about Jesus was that he had been well and truly physically dead and was now well and truly physically alive.” (p. 116)  But this simple equation is complicated by Wright’s next move, the assertion that the resurrection “is, rather, the transformation of the existing body into a new mode of physicality.” (p.120)  Wright postulates his theory of a “transformed physicality” in opposition to the translation offered by some of Jesus’ resurrected body as a “spiritual body”.  However, Wright is completely unable to elucidate what exactly this transformed physicality consists of, other than that it is “still concrete and physical” (p. 120) and that it is assuredly not a “spiritual body.”  I am left with the impression that Wright would be more than happy if the only “transformed physicality” to be found on the resurrected Jesus was the addition of a vestigial third nipple, thereby affixing Jesus’ bodily stamp of approval to Wright’s theory as if it were the Shroud of Turin.

 

Wright’s insistence on a bodily resurrection privileges Wright’s apparent fantasy of living in an impossible reality.  In his classic work Merely Christian, none other than C. S. Lewis, Wright’s conservative forerunner, explained that God is bound by the rules of logic that govern existence in God’s creation, and that this necessary limitation in no way detracts from God’s glory or dominion.  Even God, then, must play by the rules if the “game” is to have any meaning.  Wright, ignoring Lewis with his insistence on a bodily resurrection, would discard the rules that frame creation.  His is the classic mistake of fundamentalism; by insisting that Jesus’ resurrection conform to his set of doctrinal priorities, Wright negates the very possibility of a really existing world for Jesus to save.  “Well and truly” dead bodies return, irrevocably, to ashes and dust.  Such is the price of admission to creation.  By refusing to pay this price, Wright loses his grip on reality and any possible insight into how the resurrection is, for lack of a better term, really real.

 

Fortunately, Borg’s chapter on the resurrection comes after Wright’s in the text.  Post Wright, the relief one feels in the encounter with the basic sanity of Borg’s stance, “I see the empty tomb and whatever happened to the corpse of Jesus as ultimately irrelevant to the truth of Easter” (p. 130), is akin to being told that your loved one is going to pull through a difficult emergency surgery.  Such is the strength of Borg’s reassuring grip pulling us back from the abyss of Wright’s astonishing literalism. 

 

Borg expertly contrasts resurrection with resuscitation, though his endorsement of resurrection as “entry into a new kind of existence” (p. 131) may at first glance appear in danger of veering towards Wright’s “transformed physicality”.  But Borg steers a steady course towards something potentially far more transformational than Wright’s Zombie-Christ.  Borg’s most important step is in framing the resurrection “beyond the categories of space and time” (p. 131), in doing so he sagely takes us beyond the realm of the physical body.  Wright’s greatest failure is a failure of the imagination, as he is unable to envision a resurrection that does not hinge on a simplistic undoing of human mortality.  It is Borg who takes the real leap of faith by elevating his conception of the resurrection beyond the obvious.  As always, God works in mysterious ways, and there is not even the hint of mystery in Wright’s clockwork universe.

 

Borg’s reading of the risen Christ’s appearance on the road to Emmaus is a synopsis of how one can experience the resurrection story from a place of sanity, which is the necessary clearing in mental and spiritual space for the experience of Jesus’ saving grace:  “Most centrally, the story makes the claim that the risen Christ journeys with us, whether we know that or not, realize that or not, even as it also affirms that there are moments of recognition in which we do realize that.” (p. 134)  In comprehending the “post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality” (p. 135), Borg maintains the link with really existing creation necessary for Christianity to attain to its healing mission, a healing necessary due in part to what Borg calls “the establishment of a new set of requirements” (p. 141) found in Christian doctrinal requirements.  This new set of requirements would bind us bind us to Wright’s resurrection narrative, which would be like living in a mirage.

 

Having fenced with Borg and Wright, I am compelled to reveal the ground from which I currently encounter the resurrection story.  In doing so I do not propose a definitive final answer as to what occurred on the third day; when it comes to the resurrection I adhere strictly to the maxim Zen mind, beginner’s mind (the Christo-centric are referred to Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite).  Instead, my kaleidoscopic relationship with the resurrection is simply an example of the spiritual adventure awaiting the enthusiastic “quester”. 

To build my own bridge to the resurrection I turned to the least likely of sources, the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan.  One of Lacan’s greatest contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of the psyche was his concept of the human subject.  Understanding that the ego is ultimately a necessary fiction, Lacan found the subject always obscured behind the ego, but at the same time constantly speaking through the ego.  This motif of simultaneous presence and absence bears an uncanny resemblance to how we human subjects encounter God.  In his brilliant explication of Lacanian theory, Lacan, Lionel Bailly includes this insight into the nature of the subject:  “(T)he subject could exist whether or not the person is alive.  This is not just a philosophical fancy: it has clinical relevance, as one may see how a dead child or a past patriarch may still act like a Subject within the dynamics of a family.” (p. 67)

 

When I was a child my family traveled every summer to a beach cottage owned by my paternal grandmother and her siblings.  In the cottage was an ancient chair, timeworn but given pride of place.  The chair was always referred to as “Darling’s chair”, in reference to the family matriarch who had ruled uncompromisingly for decades from that chair.  Darling’s body had been in the ground for an equal number of decades, but her subject, represented by “Darling’s chair”, continued to organize the dynamics of my father’s side of the family. 

 

Now I must ask you, if Darling’s subject was potent enough to rule from her chair for decades after her death, then what might Jesus Christ’s subject, present in the cross, be capable of?