Читать книгу ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART - David Dorian - Страница 16

Anchors in the Past

Returning home after a visit with Mantuo Luo, I turned on the car radio. The male voice sounded intelligent and authoritative. He was a Hindu guru named Moksha, which means “release.”

Every time we dwell on the past, every time we return to a painful episode, we increase the possibility of reproducing it. Every time we remember a past trauma, we reinforce the neurocircuit; we rearm it. Instead of progressing, we are regressing. That is the problem with psychoanalysis, the product of a Jewish mind accustomed to be mistreated and persecuted. Freud was the inheritor of five thousand years of trauma. His father endured anti-Semitic remarks in the street of Vienna. He faced academic criticism for his theories of infantile sexuality. Disappointments, sadness, bad memories anchor us in the past. To bypass the past, we should avoid talking about it at all costs, burn photos, get rid of all objects that are associated with painful experiences. We should welcome amnesia. Bad memories, if not revived, disintegrate. The circuit is disarmed.

I was intrigued by his views on mental health. All therapeutic endeavors aim at exhuming the past to neutralize its toxicity. Could all these psychologists be wrong? We believe our memories define us. I am what I have experienced and done. Identity is biography, and biography is psychology. Everyone believes it is so. Our traumas explain us; our remembrances determine us.

If this approach, which is to keep on emerging the traumas, is erroneous and we could find ways to circumvent the traumas without dwelling on them, it would put a lot of mental health professionals out of a job. But without trauma, world literature wouldn’t exist. Literature and art are attempts to deal with trauma. Trauma is responsible for human civilization.

There was a commercial on the radio. An American company was promoting a special brush specifically designed for dogs when they are shedding. It offered 79 percent more hair absorption than the standard hairbrush for dogs. Users of this product were interviewed and expressed in enthusiastic language how that brush literally saved their lives by making the air cleaner in their home.

The interview continued. Moksha recommended to consciously and deliberately block those memories. Do not let your mind visit that emotional injury in your past. Do not linger around events that had become agonizing souvenirs. Forgetting is divine. We are all innate masochists, he claimed, attracted by all forms of suffering. That is a derangement that is common to us all.

Our torment is of our own making. Isn’t enough that we have been hurt by these happenings? Why do we revisit them again and again? Why do we replay those scenes ad nauseam, savoring the hardships we had encountered at some points in our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood? We are haunted by what has been done to us. Not only we are victimized by what has happened to us, but we are doubly victimized by the memories of the bad things that happened to us. End the persecutions now. This is a self-inflicted martyrdom that has to stop, for our sake, so we can live completely in the present and relish our presence in the world of here and now.