To Have or to Be?

“Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that ‘free conscious activity’ (i.e., human activity) is ‘the species character of man.’ Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom – should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.

“Marx’s whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“In any case, what is suffering? I am not afraid of it, even though it be numberless. Now I am not afraid, though before I was. You know, I may not even answer at my trial…And it seems to me that there is so much of this strength in me now that I shall vanquish everything, all of the suffering, only so that I may keep saying to myself constantly: ‘I am!’ I may endure a thousand torments – yet I am, I may writhe under torture – but I am! I may sit in a tower, but I exist, I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there – that is already the whole of life.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent’s passage into the world is one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one’s partner.  The absence of rites at the climacteric works in the same way.  Common to the climacteric neuroses of the second half of life is the difficulty of freeing oneself from worldly attachments, as is necessary for a mellow old age and its tasks.  The causes of these neuroses are therefore quite different from, indeed the opposite of, those occurring in the first half of life.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world.  The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life – as compared with the symbolic life – are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.

“Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons.  Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere.  Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name.  The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time.  Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized – and admired.  Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power.  The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.  Worship of the ‘beast’ is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy.  One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.

“The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor – ‘work,’ ‘power,’ ‘money,’ or whatever they like to call it – which, in the telling phrase, ‘consumes’ them and leaves them little or no room as private persons.  Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and ‘experiences’ – unbelievably trivial, but plentiful – occupy every hour of the day.

“…Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and ‘isms’ of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.  Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life.  Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the creative magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord.  With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace.  We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world.  Other myths dwell on the ‘effortlessness’ of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the ‘everlastingness,’ the deathlessness, of such an existence.”

Meditations

“Remind yourself constantly of all the physicians, now dead, who used to knit their brows over their ailing patients; of all the astrologers who so solemnly predicted their clients’ doom; the philosophers who expatiated so endlessly on death or immortality; the great commanders who slew their thousands; the despots who wielded powers of life and death with such terrible arrogance, as if themselves were gods who could never die; the whole cities which have perished completely, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others without number.  After that, recall one by one each of your own acquaintances; how one buried another, only to be laid low himself and buried in turn by a third, and all in so brief a space of time.  Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes.  Spend, therefore, these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“Death is not an act, nor even an event, for the one who dies.  It is both for those who survive.  What it can be, and should be, is a transaction.  The physical horror of the Nazi death camps was compounded by the psychological horror, the prevention of dignity, self-assertion, or self-expression in the gas chamber.  There was no brave blindfold and cigarette, no defiance, no famous last words: in sum, no death transaction.  There were transactional stimuli from the dying, but no response from the killers.  Thus, force majeure takes from the script its most poignant moment, the deathbed scene, and in one sense the whole human purpose of life is to set up that scene.

“In script analysis, this is brought out by the question: ‘Who will be there at your deathbed, and what will your last words be?’  An added question is: ‘What will their last words be?’  The answer to the first query is usually some version of ‘I showed them’ – ‘them’ being the parents, especially mother in the case of a man and father in the case of a woman.  The implication is either ‘I showed them I did what they wanted me to,’ or ‘I showed them I didn’t have to do what they wanted me to.’

“The answer to this question is, in effect, a summary of Jeder’s life goal, and can be used by the therapist as a powerful instrument in breaking up the games and getting Jeder out of his script:

‘So your whole life boils down to showing them you were right to feel hurt, frightened, angry, inadequate, or guilty.  Very well.  Then that will be your greatest accomplishment – if you want to keep it that way.  But maybe you would like to find a more worthwhile purpose in living.’”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when he is confronted with what goes on outside his skull.  Each person designs his own life.”

In My Own Way

“As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This – which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name.”

In My Own Way

“I am therefore ill at ease with people who earnestly abstain from such things as smoking, drinking, and sex, to the point of making them squeamishnessly militant.  Obviously, there are forms and degrees in which these pleasures can be unhygienic, as also can be driving cars, climbing mountains, and nursing the sick.  There are points of view from which almost everything can be see as bad for one’s health, and Jung once remarked in jest that life itself is a disease with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.  And in this connection I might also quote Freud, writing to Dr. Fleisch: ‘As to your injunction to give up smoking, I have decided not to comply.  Do you think it such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?’”