“But by peeling away the onion-skin layers, the inauthentic accretions which smother the core of vital expressive need, psychoanalysis radically undermines the status of the word. Analyst and patient, as they descend the tenebrous spiral staircase of the bruised, stuttering self, hope to bring understanding and a healing measure of acceptance — these, too, are verbal constructs — to bear on the incipience of the speech process, on the shadow-line where the pre and the subconscious surge of the psyche must pass through the narrowing gates of inherited, public linguistic codes. This enforced passage (those Chomskyan ‘constraints’) both ‘maketh man’ and unmans him inasmuch as it deprives his intended meanings of their primal uniqueness, of their correspondence to his sole necessities and imaginings. Only dreams and madness and, partially, the translations of these ‘primes’ into great art and poetry, circumvent this passage. Thus a contradictory motion is implicit in the Freudian proposal (a proposal which I, personally, find no more and no less penetrative, ingenious and metaphorically suggestive than was the faith in demonology and exorcism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of European history).”

—George Steiner—
—Real Presences—

Whoa. That there is a lot of them fancy word combinations. Unless you talk like that all the time it hard to get on the fly.

What I got was trust your gut because it speaks the only true language worth knowing and cuz everything else is witchcraft which may be useful but only your gut knows for sure.

Or is this just reinforcing the notion that you really can talk something to death?

I'm not surprised.

I posted what I posted which I consider a Country Buffet rather than a word salad in hopes of getting Human's take on the quote. I have a lot of respect for his thoughts on such subjects and I also suspect he "gets me" somewhat as I am sometimes at odds with his writings.

I’ll come back later.

(On the other note, as much as I abhor your pull-up-your-damn-pants politics, among other opinions, yours, like Bradley’s below and a few others, is an RfM name I not only read but will sometimes actively look for. Cheers.)

Ran out of time. Daughter & man are coming over for a late breakfast and we have crap lying all over the place. Gotta clean up.

I’ll leave a quote from a work I know you admire as an illustration of the OP:

“The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language—perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother’s placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking—in blood utterances.”

—A Novel: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous—
—Ocean Vuong—

(Steiner spent a career laying out the massive gap between what we have to say and what we can say.)

I don't know if you might find benefit in researching more of the resources looking at the origins.

https://www.verywellmind.com/who-was-anna-o-2795857

"a proposal which I, personally, find no more and no less penetrative, ingenious and metaphorically suggestive than was the faith in demonology and exorcism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of European history"

Is this a critique of the Enlightenment? The loss of faith in exorcism may a major defect of modern psychology. Treating demonic possession with drugs is just dumb. All fields of medicine suffer from a rejection of the Astral realm.

As for psychoanalysis, the phase III trials of MDMA can't be finished soon enough.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2021 11:31AM by bradley.