Listening requires a certain kind of dying. In fact, paradoxically, being awake requires a certain kind of dying.
What dies, allowing us to actually listen or stay awake, is the dream state and preoccupations we call our selves. Our selves are constellations of assumptions and beliefs that direct our mind/body reality within the web of our relationships. We can either be thankful or complain about the ‘rude awakenings’ that happen quite frequently – perhaps more often than we would like. It’s that ‘other’ person or thing, bursting the bubble of our habitual sense of self, which forces the ongoing dream to reawaken.
For the most part, we get used to a certain level of disruption. The little breakthroughs are tolerable as long as the foundational premises for our sense of self haven’t been seriously challenged or disturbed; premises in large part shared by our circle of intimates, friends and culture. The shaping of this habitual conversation, our sense of selves, wraps around an inner core of our reality – a reality that is dynamic and somewhat unstable. It both seeks expression and is protectively cautious. Winnicott’s dialectic between true and false self captures this reality
We are both true and false selves dynamically existing within an active communal web of true and false selves. The dynamism of this dialectic is the reality of our human world. This dynamism is the molten lava of our yet to be defined existence: the ever-unstable reality of our individual and communal relational volcano.
The effort to listen within this dynamism is fundamentally an allowance of a level of discomfort; surrendering convictions about who we think we are.
Are loving and listening actually the same?
… and is being loved our question being listened to?
***
Every question,
no matter its content,
reflects suffering.
Let us try
simply
to be receptive to this suffering,
and
if possible
open our ears
to meaning
of another kind.
after Julia Kristeva
In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith
© 2019 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
All rights reserved
South Garden Press, New York
For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com