We take so much for granted when we speak with each other and with ourselves.
Words don’t exist in isolation but are elements held in a communal web of meaning: our language. Our language is a sometime fragile and porous boundary between our personal and communal struggles to discover and hold a mutual sense of meaning … and a sea of unpredictable and yet to be determined possibilities between us.
When the inevitable disruptions of life occur, it is only through our open use of language that we can address these wounds. No one leaves the site of such disruptions or efforts at repair without some transformation of their habitual use of language. There is a reciprocal relation between the wounds of our being together and the wounds of our language when managing the turbulence of life.
If the explorations of the use of language in psychoanalytic theory have taught us anything, they have taught us this:
Language meets the vicissitudes of life within and between our very bodies. Speech arises not simply from our minds but from the whole of our being together – bodies and minds. We have learned through our experiences of communication within the transference that we live, like it or not, mutually bound within the fabrics of meaning woven to face the unpredictable possibilities that is our existence.
In the moments of our encounters, when we reach out to meet each other in speech, authentic meeting occurs only when we can mutually tolerate the discomfort of actual challenges to our sense of meaning. The allowance of that challenge is experienced in the sentient bodies and the unsettled minds of both of us. There are no exemptions in dialogue.
The requirement for those who would use language to heal goes far beyond the necessities of training and technique. These are somewhat fragile rafts and unsteady compass’ navigating the ocean of existence allowed between client and therapist. The challenge to either is the challenge to both … struggling to navigate life together.
The essence of Freud’s method of healing is anchored in a paradox.
We allow the disruptive challenges to meaning together by holding to a kind of faith that between us in this surrender, the re discovery of meaning is possible. It is a revolutionary understanding of what it means to speak the truth.
***
Nothing preordains the psychoanalyst to take the place of the mystic.
And yet, it would perhaps be possible for an analyst
(if he could manage to stay in the only place that is his,
the void, that is, the unthinkable of metaphysics)
to begin hearing,
actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination
that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being …
For, facing abjection,
meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one.
“Divine,” “human,” the comedy or the enchantment
can be realized, on the whole,
only by reckoning with the impossible
set and maintained
right here.
Fastened to meaning
the analyst, since he interprets,
is probably among the rare contemporary witnesses
to our dancing on a volcano.
If he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine;
provided that, in his or her capacity
as a man or woman without qualities,
allow
the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred
to burst out.
Because of knowing it with a
knowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter,
an abject knowledge,
he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power
(religious, moral, political, and verbal)
that mankind has ever witnessed;
In the meantime, let others
continue their long march
toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed
with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,
wars that will necessarily be holy.
After Julia Kristeva
Powers of Horror:An essay on Abjection
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© 2013 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
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South Garden Press, New York