Why Do Some People Castrate Their Existences? « Clarissa’s Blog
A castrated existence must be very common — hence the logic of psychoanalysis, which I have never been able to understand, as it seems not to apply to me. The assumption that no matter what somebody is saying, they are lying, would apply as a general principle if everyone castrated their existence.
What I really don’t get is why there is no therapy for those who choose not to castrate their existence. The decision to move in the opposite direction is not without its problems, pitfalls and potential for chaos. Now that I’ve just written that, I realize these are precisely what I wrote my thesis to investigate. There are huge problems with choosing absolute freedom. Alternatively, you could re-interpret absolute freedom to mean the freedom to fit in, to make a buck and to get along with everybody . In that case, you probably wouldn’t encounter so many problems.
Anyway, the refusal to change is weird to me and, since I am rambling over my morning coffee, I will go on to say there are a number of reasons why I feel this way.
One is that I’m of a cultural group of individuals who selected themselves as wanting to live on the boundaries, to explore the unknown and to take risks. Those were the kind of people of whom colonial society was made up. Secondly, I had no option but to start again, existentially from scratch, when my family pulled up roots and I was 16. So, normality and stability — what are those? I can genuinely say I don’t know how to take my references from any idea of these. More conservative people think I’m trying to put it on when I remonstrate that I have no experience of ‘normal’, or they assume this is a sign of internal instability. Nothing could be more wrong.
To be afraid of life — yes, I can understand that. I’ve often been afraid of certain facets of it and was traumatised many a time by overestimating others, because I have had a tendency to project my own characteristics into those around me, leading me to vastly overestimate other people’s capacity for change.
Any overestimation of their abilities can cause some people to get upset and attack like you would not believe. I guess some people feel uncomfortable to be held to standards they have not chosen.
Exploring Black Sunlight, psychology, politics and history and how these intertwine 
We had this writer visit a few months ago who talked about immigration as a “personal apocalypse” (with reference to this novel http://www.editorialperiferica.com/index.php?s=catalogo&l=42) and I thought of you.
Somehow connected is this Mailer quotation I have run across, “Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment,” whose origin (in Mailer texts) I do not know. It leads me to think of the distinction between pain for entertainment and real pain. I think much psychotherapy is interested in the former *as a way to evade* the latter.
Ah! That makes a lot of sense…. your last sentence. I don’t really understand the “pain for entertainment”, but I could understand the notion of pain for personal gain, which could be leveled in contradistinction to a deeper sort of pain, which may be hard to speak of.
Recently, I was watching a documentary of war journalists and wondered whether I may have missed my vocation. I do understand this deeper level of pain, from experience, although it is in a way unspeakable, lending itself to repetitive nightmares, profound guilt and sorrow. The journalists of course, being writers, attempt to put these experiences into words, but I’m sure that unless you’ve had similar experiences you might assume they were merely writing for entertainment. The problem I see here is the cultural milieu, which holds that we all ought to be putting ourselves out there for personal gain and that there is a problem if we do not do so. It was as if, from the current cultural perspective, we are remaining in primary narcissism if we do not communicate — and therefore put ourselves out there — but if we do write, then that is considered to be instrumental narcissism. In either case, and no matter what you do, you are not able to escape the imputation of narcissism to enter genuine communication.
What puts up a barrier against genuine communication? I think it’s people lifestyle choices. Most people don’t experience much of anything and therefore can’t relate to whatever is beyond their experience. Also there is the issue of the fragility of ego. We are taught to see ourselves in competition with others, rather than in terms of a relationship. That’s not a personal problem, but a problem of the economic system and how it functions or fails to function.
I relate to the bad dreams and the war guilt (brought on by being spectators of war) that is professed by many of these journalists. They’re not exceptional people in the way that contemporary culture views “awesomeness”. I could relate in particular to one guy who said that as a child he was very shy and alone and being in a war zone was one place he found where he felt in control. There was also the sense that you never feel more alive than when you face the proximity of death.
Anyway — thanks for the author link. Looks like the sort of writing that appeals to me.
Pain for gain, would this be pain that can be made sense of, pain that has a concrete payoff? If so pain for entertainment would also have a payoff, albeit a negative one such as not having to progress. I am thinking of people who stress unnecessarily for the sake of feeling something is happening, and not having to actually do something to make something more interesting happen.
I meant that identity politics is a form of “pain for gain”. You cry very much about your hard luck because you think society owes you big — particularly people whom you identify as having the opposite identity. I’m not into “pain for gain”, but so far it has been the only game in town. You have to wonder why that is. People can’t feel the full range of emotions in each other and simply acknowledge they are there. Does one need to be a Buddhist monk to have been able to master this? It’s just human, but more: It’s the ability of a human to recognize that one is human. It’s very little. But it seems to require so much.
I think people who can’t feel may therefore resort to stressing. If you feel, then every feeling itself is a lived act — a state of self-acknowledgement of what one is feeling. But if one cannot feel, then one only has the ability to intellectualize or to stress.
I’m starting to make sense of some of the discourses posted in commentary about American popular culture recently. I’m thinking of The Last Psychiatrist and a recent, similar article on Cracked, which advises people who are unhappy with their lives how to stop hating themselves. They hate themselves because they are passive. They’ve been told they are great just the way they are, but being great just for doing nothing doesn’t feel like anything. Consequently, the self-hatred. If they started to do something, they might acquire a real identity. Interestingly, both The Last Psychiatrist article and the associated one at Cracked go off track around this point, insisting that one must create a culturally male identity. In the first instance, one does that by eschewing the “narcissism” culturally associated with investing one’s time and money in the humanities. In the second instance, one must actively pursue social status, though making oneself socially useful, in order to attract “girls”. Both of these solutions seem to lead away from the narcissistic bubble one might seem to generate by seeming to “do nothing”, but their answer is to try to gain social approval in what is deemed to be a more substantive sense, by doing something that isn’t artsy or associated with one’s feelings.
It seems to me that so long as one is running away from what one actually feels, which is the ‘masculinist’ answer to the question of cultural narcissism, one is still doing nothing for oneself in any way that matters. You will still end up with a hollow core, despite all your busy activity in a realm of reality that necessitates a purely instrumental consciousness. Your narcissistic core remains because you haven’t attended to your true self, but have run away from it into being busy and occupying yourself with activity. In particular, your hatred for the humanities and for what they represent to you — “feeling” — will make you hollow.
But for a person who can feel what they feel, life is never hollow.