Jon Corelis wrote:
>Freud said that his goal was to turn neurotic misery into normal unhappiness.
>He also said that the mark of the mentally healthy person was the ability to
>love and to work. Taken together, the implication is that depression is
>pathological because it prevents you from being an effective person, but once
>you're cured of it, you don't then exist in contented bliss. This is in the
>classical tradition of Aristotle, who argued that happiness is an activity,
>not an emotional state.
>
>
"Call no man happy who is alive, the dead are free from pain," or
however the last line goes. Well, yes actually. I'm not sure Freud was
wrong. Whether you wish to call his comment an insight into the Human
Condition or a crock, I would like to meet the person who is happyhappy
all the time so I can dip him in bronze and put him in the museum. The
kind of neurotic misery on which Freud commented is the kind that
freezes you, and that to unfreeze you into some form of activity,
however destructive, leads you to the standard excesses: sex, alcohol,
drugs, eating, not eating, etc., etc....anything you do because you
cannot NOT do it. Does Oedipus pursue the truth because he wants to
know the truth or because he already knows it and is bent on ripping
himself apart no matter who else gets hurt?
In one of her essays, Louise Gluck recounted her teenage battle with
anorexia. Late in her therapy, she turned on the therapist and said he
was taking away her misery, her source of poetry. "The world will bring
you suffering enough" the shrink replied. Anyone who has read what I
think are her two best books--Ararat and Meadowlands--will know the
therapist knew from whence he spoke. You can get clean and sober, eat
normally, stop screwing everything that moves, and will still find
yourself in Life's tribunal, presided over by Judge Ben Dover.
The last snapshot I added to the pile was about an animal. Animals are
much on my mind lately, as they've been in the past, both for their
soul-healing powers and their mortality. Inevitably we will lose them
before they lose us. They will remind us in some "Greek tragedy way"
that grief follows us, but that the inevitable grief does not erase the
gratitude for the gifts they gave and give us.
As Brecht's Baal said, enough of this aria.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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