Becoming Human

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (4 – a reappraisal)

In my previous articles on the development of Reich’s thinking*, I have explained how his inquiry into Freud’s libido theory eventually led to his positing an equation between somatic and psychic states, an identity which I believe has been very therapeutically fruitful.

Reich of course went on to engage in work of a much more (some would no doubt say “even more”) speculative character, in which he sought to identify the energy present in orgasm with other energies physically present in the cosmos. From our modern perspective, this effort seems very strange, and to many of Reich’s admirers it is no doubt an embarrassment.

Bernd Laska’s biography helps us somewhat to see the chain of reasoning from Reich’s own perspective, and thus more sympathetically, but it remains evident that Reich in his later period wandered far from scientific method and truth, and one cannot help asking what these later developments imply for the scientific validity of his earlier orgasm theory.

And it seems to me that there is indeed a major flaw embedded in the earlier theory, which does not undermine its therapeutic validity but did lead both to the raft of later speculations and to a certain alienation from authentic sexual experience.

Reich’s error seems to me simple: he confused correlation with causation. Continue reading “Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (4 – a reappraisal)”

A cultural critique of polyamory

As someone who has for a long time intellectually moved beyond inherited notions of monogamy, and who certainly subscribes to the sort of ethical precepts people who expound polyamory defend, I have often wondered why the notion itself is not one that appeals to me more.

Perhaps it starts with the word itself: the blend of Greek and Latin is itself disturbing. Why can’t it be “multiamory”? Or “poly-“…?

Well, poly-what? The inability to decide if it should be “polyeros” or “polyagape” together with the technical/commercial connotations of “multi”-anything no doubt explain this unhappy (not so) neologism. We think we know what “amor” is, and we very “nobly” want more of it in our lives.

But actually we do not know what “amor” is, no more than the ancients. We do not even know what “eros” is (and we are so far from understanding “agape” that it is no more than a hypothetical alien lifeform to most of us, inconveniently embedded in our superego). Continue reading “A cultural critique of polyamory”

The prison of fear

Recent developments in my life have brought me into relation with the theme of fear in relationships, which is often the deepest level of our conditioning, underneath pride, anger, resignation, sadness and all those other various emotions with which we mask our ultimate feeling of vulnerability and abandonment. Continue reading “The prison of fear”

Why therapy hurts

When we stop telling ourselves that life has it in for us, and start believing in the possibility that the universe may, in fact, be on our side, we often only then start really to feel pain. Many people start to feel this pain, are afraid of it, feel nothing has worked, and then give up.

Why do we only feel our pain more as therapy progresses? Because the negative mantra had become an anesthetic, dulling us to the pain, but also to joy and possibility. Continue reading “Why therapy hurts”

Jealousy

Today I took my little boy to the childminding service at the school which is organized before classes start.

By way of background, I am probably the most obsessed person in the known universe on the subject of the attitudes of adults towards my children (and in fact all children). I am infinitely sensitive to the frequent occasions when those adults project their own neuroses and unresolved emotions onto the kids. When I see or feel it, there is no room for compromise. I am also in love with my little boy. I rely on him for most of the spiritual enlightenment I am ever likely to obtain. He is amazingly charming, almost always happy and playful and he has a really tender side also. He’s three (nearly).

Despite being impossible to please, I am pretty happy with the school. It’s not perfect of course, but it could be a lot worse. We feel comfortable sending him there.

The lady in charge of the childminding service seems to love him particularly. Whenever he arrives, he is greeted with open arms and a warm heart. As I love him and care for his wellbeing, what more could I want?

So, where I stand on this is pretty clear.

To my surprise, though, this morning, how I feel about it apparently is not. Continue reading “Jealousy”

Friendship, and sannyas

When I first encountered Veeresh’s emphasis on friendship at the Humaniversity, I must admit I found it a bit weak. Shouldn’t this all be about love, not simply friendship?

We imagine that friendship is something simple and accessible, something the vast majority of human beings have plenty of experience and little difficulty with.

I am not quite sure where this dumbed-down, commoditized notion of friendship comes from, especially bearing in mind the emphasis on it in the classical philosophical tradition, most famously in Cicero’s De Amicitia. Continue reading “Friendship, and sannyas”

Free love

Considering the willingness of many men to pay for sex with women, one might legitimately ask why women ever offer it for free. Yes sure they may enjoy it, but I may also enjoy my job; I still make sure that I am paid for it.

And indeed over the ages, women have had a sense that they had something that men valued and that they could leverage it in their own interests – whether it be with one man or with several. Thus was the commercialization of sex born. Together, no doubt, with the commercialization of everything else – the rise of the monetary economy and the scope it offered to organize society on a vastly greater, but also more inhuman scale. Continue reading “Free love”

Humanity’s one sole moral imperative

I am not someone who uses the word “morality” with any degree of comfort. Nietzsche is my hero, and Nietzsche believed that all that was good proceeded from vitality, not moralistic prescriptions.

However, I have recently discovered that I have, and believe in, one true moral imperative, one thing that is forever, irreducibly, beyond esthetics.

That thing is, simply put, meditation.

Up until now, I guess I had been working with the assumption that the spiritual path, the path of healing and self-discovery, was a sort of optional extra for people thus inclined. Not really indispensable. Nothing I could really exhort others to follow, however much I believe in and value it myself.

I now see that this is not so.

Indeed, evil and suffering have, it seems to me, only one source: our eternal propensity to flee our inner conflicts by projecting them on other people. And thus self-examination is the sole moral imperative to which the human race is called, the sole choice which is not purely esthetic.

This has, I guess, a worthy pedigree in moral philosophy, from Socrates’ exhortation to “know thyself” through Kierkegaard’s fevered piety to the esthetics of the post-structuralists. This notwithstanding, meditation has somehow, for me at least, stayed off the map. Perhaps it is the immobilism of the hierarchical cultures – India, Japan, China – which give most place to meditation in their spiritual practices which explains this unhelpful connotation. And yet, meditation responds most holistically to the Socratic call – not through the sole medium of the mind which the Greeks elevated out of all proportion, but through the media of the body, spirit and soul, the instincts, longings and pleasures which inhabit them, and the quintessential encounter with the other. Indeed, it is not only a question of knowing oneself, in some abstract and theoretical way, but of truly becoming oneself.

It has an equally worthy pedigree in sociology and social theory, with its roots in Marx, Durkheim, Freud and Reich, developed in the psychology of Erich Fromm, and is discussed in extenso in the present day discipline of psychohistory – the study of how childhood trauma relates to war and social upheaval. And indeed it has long been clear to me that I had no choice than to pursue my spiritual path because I owed it to my children. Still, I was reluctant to prescribe it to others.

No longer, then.

If you are reading this, know: your sole moral imperative on this earth is self-examination and meditation.

Befriending my sadness

Over the past few weeks, I have frequently been overwhelmed by sadness, sometimes to the point of emotional paralysis, and always with the feeling that behind it there was an ocean of tears I could not cry. When I did find tears, that didn’t necessarily help either more than temporarily.

I have been following for a few months now breathwork sessions with a guy called Geoff near Brussels (who I certainly recommend if you live near here) and last night this resulted in a new realization for me, which I’d like to share with you. It is that I cling so much on to this primal sadness because, actually, I really love it. And I really love it, because it is the way I comforted and loved myself when the small person I was met frustration, incomprehension and suffering. It felt good to be in that sad place, I felt alive there, it was a place where I knew myself and I knew the truth. I embraced my sadness like a teddy bear.

As I felt the sadness leaving my body during the session, I felt a real sense of loss, a presence that had been comforting me for so long that now was saying goodbye. That sense of loss moved me to tears. And yet I know that, if for some reason I want that sadness, I can always call it back …

But the sadness occupied such a default position as my easiest and most accessible “best friend” that that was where I always went for comfort. I feel that no person could compete. It was always harder to step out, trust and ask to be held than to go inside to this familiar primal place.

The problem is that that place, for all its warmth and comfort, is indissociably linked with feelings of low self-worth. It is very, very self-limiting and it always carries reinforces a sentiment of failure. When I am in that sad place, whatever I have objectively achieved in my life and towards my goals of healing always seems like nothing, and the path ahead an insurmountable mountain.

That is, however, not true.

I do not know if it is time to befriend my sadness or really to say goodbye, but I know that the sadness is mine and real, and honor it; and I know that the lies are not.

Dear woman

A friend of mine just posted this video on Facebook, in which a group of men issue their apologies to women for (unconscious) male aggression over the centuries. My friend suggested (to paraphrase) that it was a sign of a hopeful convergence between the sexes.

I would strike a slightly discordant note, however: while I don’t disagree with any of what they say, I do have a problem with the meaning being given to it, because it does not invite women into a similar introspection.

I do not believe that there is an imbalance between masculine and feminine energy, for me such a statement intuitively violates a law of nature similar to the first law of thermodynamics and Newton’s third law of motion. Such an imbalance cannot exist. All there is, is a lack of consciousness.

As men have perpetrated violence on women, so women have done so on men. They have merely done so on the next generation left to their safekeeping. The violence has been a defiguration of our shared humanity for both sexes. At the heart of men’s unconscious violence against women is the reflected anger of their mother against their masculinity which they absorbed as children. No-one started that, and we can only heal it together.

These guys’ gesture I appreciate and respect, but it tends to be the only perspective we get to see. It feels, to me, too much like they are saying sorry to mama because they are still childishly dependent on her love. I like the vulnerability, but I feel a lack of masculinity in the voices and expressions. These look like the nice guys who, for good reasons which women will never tell you to your face, are not getting any sex. Their masculinity is problematic to them and a source of guilt. Any convergence with the feminine results only from a lack of polarity.

In my experience also, those women who have a great appetite for this kind of mea culpa, and they are many, are often doing so out of an unconscious and unreflective misandry of their own (a word I am surprised to discover in fact exists – and that says a lot). They are not only punishing their sons for the sins of their fathers, they are punishing their own father for his emotional absence during their formative years. I can’t help feeling it is dangerously facile.

For my part, I deeply regret and weep over a state of the world in which men deny their nurturing, expressed as protection and honoring, to women, and in which women deny their nurturing, in the form of physical intimacy, to men. However, it is not my fault, nor the fault of any of the women I encounter, and, if it were, I would forgive myself and them.