Thanksgiving 2009

It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy.
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom, 203

Psychoanalysis is a psychology of pain.
Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 259

This Thanksgiving I am grateful for many things: my wife Julie, my children: David, Beth and Sarah, my wider family, friends and acquaintances, food, home, music (I’ve been listening in recent days to Paul McCartney Good Evening New York City), movies, poetry, books, the ability to make some positive difference in the world, exercise. I am also grateful for those who help keep me open to myself and the world.
Rachel Naomi Remen reminds us of our need to be open to our own experience. The past year or so some of my favorite conversation partners in this journey of trying to stay open to experience and learn from it – all of it, even the painful stuff, have been writers who are psychoanalysts or who themselves are in significant conversation with the psychoanalytic tradition. Two writers, in particular, have been insightful dialogue partners – Michael Eigen and Ernest Becker.

Becker, writing about why growth and change are so difficult writes about the going through hell of a lonely and racking rebirth where on throws off the lendings of culture, the costumes that fit us for life’s roles, the masks and panoplies of our standardized heroisms, to stand alone and nude facing the howling elements as oneself – a trembling animal element. (The Death and Rebirth of Meaning, 146)

There is a hunger for nuance, for psychic taste.
Michael Eigen, Feeling Matters, 153

It takes a lifetime to grow into oneself, to become a home on can say yes to.
Michael Eigen, Flames from the Unconscious, 103

I am grateful for the journey and for these companions.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David