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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Truth and the Person12/26/2006 12:36:43Happy holidays. This season has struck me with the power of preparation, particularly of a ritual kind, and its efficacy. The significance of the Advent season, which I almost entirely ignored, and felt the consequences. Anyhow, also the capacity of a holiday to serve as an excuse for transformation and redirection. These really are just days, like any other, but they can have such marvelous power. Anyhow: I just finished a nourishing reading of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's Gandhi's Truth. In it he examines the genesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence, Satyagraha, in analytic dialog with Gandhi as a person, as well as with Western psychoanalysis generally. It is grounded mainly in two conversations about Gandhi's life itself: the life cycle and moralistic sexual asceticism. The most moving moment, I think, is the apostrophic chapter "A Personal Word" in the middle of the book, in which Erikson addresses Gandhi in the second person, engaging in a back and forth with Gandhi's own words. It amounts to a personal criticism of the Indian leader's insistence on vow-taking and sexual discipline as enforced among his close followers, especially his wife. What Erikson is looking for, like Gandhi, is a universal in the particular (see my article Secularized Universals): both looks to Satyagraha as a (possible) strategy for the whole human race, an algorithmic passage to higher species evolution, distinguished by the embrace of radical nonviolence. Both, also, recognize the embeddedness of this transcendent possibility: salvific truth revealed in the mundane life of a human being. In his autobiography, for instance, Gandhi phrases the whole journey of his life in terms of "experiments with truth." Erikson, for his part, seems plagued by this tension, the need to separate universal from particular: that is, the perfect method from the imperfect (thought undoubtedly great) human being he finds in Gandhi. Erikson is aware of similar limitations in the study itself: drawing only on his knowledge, experiences, and biases, is he capable of unraveling the two? His pause in this regard, combined with the audaciousness of his ambition, strikes me as a very moving contrast. To strike another psychoanalytic note, stronger evidence recently surfaced of Freud's affair with his sister-in-law. Here's an article from Utah's Deseret News. The article ends by saying, "It doesn't make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct." It may be that neither Freud nor Erikson would agree. The great contribution of their kind to the thinking of our time is a hyperaware dissection of motivation. If Freud's attack on sexual taboos coincided with his participation in a taboo affair which he did not admit to in his life, their co-incidence can't be taken for granted. Intellectual work cannot be detached from psychological forces. (Today I would wholeheartedly embrace a thoroghgoing neurological and cognitive science revision of these forces. Freud's approach however, if not his mechanisms themselves, remains basically alive: social, cultural, and psychological life is driven in large part by medical mechanics.) The tension I identify in Erikson's study, that between Gandhi the man and Satyagraha the possible Truth, is an old one. It connects to Plato's discourses on ideal forms and to modern ecclesiastical debates about liberation theology (among other movements in which revelation is historicized). So much religious thought, and social life in general, is devoted to an escape from the limits of personhood and finding the possibility of truth. In Erikson's formulation, psychoanalysis both rules out the possibility of truth independent from person and opens the door for truth imbedded in persons to be sufficent truth, effectively mythological and divine. In this sense, he reminds us not to lose the insights of the analytic tradition as we move on to more powerful and productive psychological science. Psychoanalysis's drive to reconcile science to lived life led to insights that newer methods (for better as well as worse) prefer for the time being to ignore.
re:Truth and the Person - 12/29/2006 10:57:27
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