It appears to me that he was dealing with the aspects of eros and thanatos that are often touched upon by contemporary thinkers of psychoanalysis. Teresa Brennan, in particular, has insights into the the manner in which subject are constrained, unawares, by the force of Thanatos, in such a way that marks their effective "castration" (which means, in her sense, desubjectification; in essence, a loss of vital force).
It doesn't solve our puzzle to know that there are such forces of eros and thanatos in the steam of society at large, and that they can affect us through release or castration of our subjectivity.
There must be more to it than this, and so it is worthwhile considering that whatever is Sacred gives spiritual life, and so pertains to Eros. Yet some people are unreceptive to the Sacred. Surely they are inwardly dead, as the scriptures do in fact imply:
But he said to him, 'Lord, let me first go and bury my father.' But he said to him, 'Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.'From the perspective of shamanistic inner vision, they have been overcome by the force of Thanatos -- the death instinct. Those who are dominated by the life instinct, Eros, are to leave them alone.
But why the warning that they will attack, then, when presented with the inner force of Eros? Surely, if they are truly inwardly dead, they would simply remain unmoved by such an encounter, rather than resorting to attack?
It seems that Teresa Brennan's writing on The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity can lead us to stumble upon an answer, for it seems that inward death -- or desubjectification -- is not a state of mere inertia. Rather it is defined by a state of deformity that has its origins in social relations.
To spell it out more plainly, there must have once been a time when those who have now become inwardly dead were not "castrated" (in the sense that they lost their subjecthood and will to act upon their own behalves). Those who have lost their inner selves would certainly prefer not to remember it, and would remain unawares so long as they were in the company of those similar to them. However, it is those who are still capable of being carriers of the knowledge of the Sacred -- those who have Eros still within them -- who, quite inadvertently, and by constrast with themselves, remind these others that they have become castrated.
It is for this reason that the dead will rouse themselves to actively attack -- but only when their minds recall all of a sudden that they are in fact quite badly off in comparison to others. It is on the basis of the comparison that these make between their own state (which is no longer receptive to the Sacred) and the state of others, that the dead believe themselve to have been insulted -- and so they rouse themselves a little to "fight back".
2 comments:
Reintegration can in itself be as traumatic as the loss and living without the soul
This is profound.
Yes, I see. It is the return of the originative trauma, the return of the repressed. But also a return of the missing love object -- the hopes and aspirations -- that had been repressed along with the trauma they were linked to. In a sense it is a return of the historical moment at the time when was transformed for the worse (the moment of the inward decision to reduce one's level of awareness, in order to feel safer or more secure).
This is why Nietzsche's formula is to affirm every historic moment of one's life, in order to facilitate the "eternal return". To deny any aspect of one's subjective experience is to repress it and to lose the vitality that was associated with it. One has to accept the negative aspects of it in order to welcome back the positive aspects, and this takes mental courage.
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