ENGAGING THE INEFFABLE: On Hope, Nostalgia, Time, Symptoms, Secrets, Memory, Joy, Gender, and Other Intangibles

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Preface

How can we examine and reflect on our experience or eavesdrop by invitation on someone else?s when at times there are no words or even a language? How can we conceptualize unformulated thoughts and feelings that do not have the shape, container, or syntax to convey to another? The issues of these essays are the ones I visited daily, hourly, in my twenty-five years of working intensely with patients in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. My privileged access to the lives and minds of both the ordinary and the extraordinary was catalyst for my own engagement of these ineffables, as ubiquitous as they are elusive.

Psychoanalytic literature focuses more on the pathological aspects of many of these subjects, on scary fantasies, cold mothers, dead people, and bad dreams, to perhaps lose happiness, creativity, hope, humor, inspiration, joy, and other positive transformations. Resolution of issues of deprivation and conflict does not itself bring joy and success; coming to the end of the old story does not create a new story.

We are each writing our own story, though it may seem predesigned by destiny or ghostwritten from the past. Core organizing assumptions, many of them unconscious, form themes of hope, possibility, fate, and gender. We create personal storylines using default models of time, memory, feelings, and empathy. Personality, states of mind, symptoms, and secrets camouflage the invisible decisions of each moment.

ENGAGING THE INEFFABLE approaches some of the intangible yet not imponderable intrinsics of human experience, and provides the reader with a catalyst for engagement, reflection, and personal growth. I challenge the misleading simplicity and assumed meanings of each of the topics to focus unique configuration and meaning for each individual. As for so much of life, we live the answers so that we may then be able to ask the questions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Nostalgia
2. Hope
3. Time
4. Storylines
5. Symptoms
6. Secrets
7. Memory
8. Joy
9. Feelings
10. Psychoanalysis
11. Embodiment
12. Fairytales
13. States
14. Empathy
15. Gender
16. Change
17. (In)Visibility
18. Fate
19. Dying

NOSTALGIA (Excerpt)

Nostalgia, generally thought to refer to positive reflections about the past, is an instrument of forgetting dressed in the attire of memory, the idealization and hope of a former period more than the actual occurrences. It is still a memory, but a memory of what never was, even at the time. We remember gratifying times in adolescence, former loves, school or sporting experiences, and nostalgically resonate with the expansive, hopeful, idealized aspects of the era. We remember our past as it was, and also as it would have been, as nostalgia revises history.

Memory registers perception at that moment in time; nostalgia seems more about what did not quite happen, though it came so close as to record a near miss, circumscribing fantasy while igniting hope. Memory's longing and past incident speak the same voice in the moment of nostalgia. Nostalgia bridges the present to a better past, air-brushed memories informed by yearning and backlit by retrospective idealization. The ideal becomes the real of remembered experience, defending against too-painful actual reality. Nostalgia attends to archaic longings by filling in the memory, while altruism does so by proxy. In nostalgic reflection, there is no mourning for missed or lost experiences, for the fantasy is the memory, a pretend satiation of primordial hunger. While nostalgia recognizes that the past can never return, it elevates the idealization to past reality, a memory newly tailored to fit a wish or perceived need.

Nostalgics collect memories, but only ones that have been edited, reshaped, and possibly even recast and set on a different stage. Often cued by particular music, a certain smell, or the resemblance of a person or object to past experiences, real memories and real fantasies blur. A nostalgic portrait as reality, such as an idealized picture of a largely absent parent during childhood, may substitute for the disappointment of repeated empathic failures.

Nostalgia is aesthetically crystallized and enshrined in art, antiques, and memorabilia. The bittersweet elation of nostalgia reminds us of what is missed and, at the same time, engages the absent experience, to be remodeled by wish?s archetype.

Like the verbal tickling of teasing, nostalgia also lies alongside the truth, not at the center of it. Nostalgia binds up and packages past hope in that space of unfulfilled longing, keeping it alive yet knowing deeply that it can never be filled now any more than it could then.

Nostalgia's river of sentiment is never to be followed back to its spring, for it would lack something, or worse, at its source might be discovered the contamination filtered from memory over the years. The dedicated nostalgic remembers the colorized, augmented version of stark, black and white experiences, or, in more extreme instances, of the missed experiences as unapparent at the time as they were impossible.

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HOPE (Excerpt)

Hope focuses on a better future, a wishful expectation that tomorrow someone, some event, or perhaps even time itself, will bring fulfillment. In extreme instances, hope is not what the future is, but that it is. When Pandora's curiosity overcame her to open the box sent by the gods and calamities were uncrated into the world, the last to emerge, as the myth had it, was hope.

Hope's blueprint is mastery; its reverse image is ineffectiveness. Hope maintains motivational fuel--purpose--as central theme in the plot of our life story. In childhood, hope is the gaze into a parent?s eye for the approving reflection of "good enough." The inspiration for hope is to be believed in, subtly imported from a significant other such as parent, mentor, or teacher, to become a belief in oneself. Hope is guide to the void, sentinel for that which never was, stand-in for reworking past conflicts, current fuel for motivation, and promise of what may be.

Hope, ambition's daydream, lives in a duplex arrangement with the uncertainty of actualization. Optimism, the anticipation of the best possible outcome, is only a neighbor to hope, for hope is built on a foundation of desire and ultimate need with expectation of fulfillment.

Hope devises many designs. A truly intimate relationship personifies both hope and purpose: a partner dance, the co-constructed mix of two real people, handing each other their souls, their best feelings, with the hope that each will give it back to the other, enhanced. For each to be catalyst for what the other needs to grow more of. To hope that this relationship may share what others perhaps could not bear: the white-heat rage and shattered expectations spawned from the ancient yet still smoldering fires of hurt and helplessness, fashioned into a directly pointed arrow at the other to hope that he or she will neither retreat at its firing nor flinch at its impact. To know that you have to be in a new story before you can give up an old story; that for a long transferential winter the old and new stories are so intermingled they don't feel different; that the hopelessness of the present is implicit, procedural memory of the past, activated now to distinguish past from present; to never lose the scent to the trail of renewed development. To not trade freedom for safety, or aliveness for certainty, and to be human in a fuller sense than previously allowed or dared.

How surprised we are to learn that our terror is not in the dim shadows of the past?s unknown, but in the hopeful light of this moment?s change.