The Creative Solution

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own.The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in – not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is as at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his “private religion” – as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own “beyond” and not that of others.

E. Becker, p.171

Сэдер תשע”א

 

Out of the herd

… personal heroism through individuation is a very daring venture precisely because it separates the person out of comfortable “beyonds.” It takes a strength and courage the average man doesn’t have and couldn’t even understand – as Jung so well points out. The most terrifying burden of the creature is to be isolated, which is what happens in individuation: one separates himself out of the herd. This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself. These are the risks when the person begins to fashion consciously and critically his own framework of heroic self-reference.

E. Becker, p. 171

За нашу (и вашу) свободу!

Через два часа идем к Свете с Мишей пить кровь христианских младенцев вино и есть мацу. Д. будет охранять наш покой на сторожевой вышке своем командирском ложе на родной базе.

Хаг Песах самеах, гвиротай веработай!

Nearest at hand

… people need a “beyond,” but they reach first for the nearest one; this gives them the fulfillment they need but at the same time limits and enslaves them. You can look at the whole problem of a human life in this way. You can ask the question: What kind of beyond does this person try to expand in; and how much individuation does he achieve in it? Most people play it safe: they choose the beyond of standard transference objects like parents, the boss, or the leader; they accept the cultural definition of heroism and try to be a “good provider” or a “solid” citizen. In this way they earn their species immortality as an agent of procreation, or a collective or cultural immortality as part of a social group of some kind. Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution to the problems of men. It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man’s condition: the problem of the consecration of one’s life, the meaning of it, the natural surrender to something larger – these driving needs that inevitably are resolved by what is nearest at hand.

E.Becker, p.169

Авигаиль

 

Из тестов

“Человек женского пола. Он с улыбкой, счастливый. одет в сарафан до ног. Волосы кудрявые.”

"Мне на этом рисунке нравиться что отец пришел из Морского флота и ребенок радуется: от того что прилетели утки."

(Рассказы к рисункам)

Пастрама-мама

С маминой подачи Чу уже второй раз запустила проект “Пастрама”. Индюшиная грудинка с чесноком, перцем, горчицей и специями. Просто, дешево, диетично и очень вкусно. Горячее и холодное.

שליחותו של הממונה על משאבי אנוש*

Хороший, трагикомический фильм израильского режиссера Эрана Риклиса по одноименному роману А. Б. Иешуа с абсолютно неизвестными мне актерами (кроме Гури Альфи - известного израильского комика).

ШШШ

* The Mission of the Human Resources Manager

Object dependency

Personal relationships carry the same danger of confusing the real facts of the physical world and the ideal images of spiritual realms. The romantic love “cosmology of two” may be an ingenious and creative attempt, but because it is still a continuation of the causa-sui project in this world, it is a lie that must fail. If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become a Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. One can be utterly dependent whether one needs the object as a source of strength, in a masochistic way, or whether one needs it to feel one’s own self-expansive strength, by manipulating it sadistically. In either case one’s self-development is restricted by the object, absorbed by it. It is too narrow a fetishization of meaning, and one comes to resent it and chafe at it. If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. As Rank put it, explaining the historical bankruptcy of romantic love: a “person no longer wanted to be used as another’s soul even with its attendant compensations.” When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, if it is real. As Rank so aptly says, this double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man. It is impossible to get blood from stone, to get spirituality from a physical being, and so one feels “inferior” that his life has somehow not succeeded, that has not realized his true gifts, and so on.

E. Becker, p. 165

Диалоги на кухне

- Какой перец ты хочешь: красный или желтый?
- Мне все равно.
- Тогда я возьму себе зеленый.

The Romantic Solution

Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God: “God as … representation of our own will does not resist us except when we ourselves want it, and just as little does the lover resist us who, in yielding, subjects himself to our will.” In one word, the love object is God. As a Hindu songs puts it: “My lover is like God; if he accepts me my existence is utilized. No wonder Rank could conclude that the love relationship of modern man is a religious problem. 

Understanding this, Rank could take a great step beyond Freud. Freud thought that modern man’s moral dependence on another was a result of the Oedipus complex. But Rank could see that it was result of a continuation of the causa-sui project of denying creatureliness. As now there was no religious cosmology into which to fit such a denial, one grabbed onto a partner. Man reached for a “thou” when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died. Modern man’s dependency on the love partner, then, is a result of the loss of spiritual ideologies, just as is his dependency on his parents or on his psychotherapist. He needs somebody, some “individual ideologies.” Sexuality, which Freud thought was at the heart of the Oedipus complex, is now understood for what it really is: another twisting and turning, a groping for the meaning of one’s life. If you don’t have a God in heaven, an invisible dimention that justifies the visible one, then you take what is nearest at hand and work out your problems on that.

 

E. Becker, p. 161