In yesterday's post I commented on the paradoxical use of the mantra of Change as used by various candidates for the Presidential nomination of their party. Several candidates insist they are the agents of Change, even though they exhibit little that indicates either what they would change or how they would Change it. The most obvious component of Change is an poorly disguised wish to "stop the world" and take another vacation from history.
Perhaps it is a little unfair to examine the words our candidates use, since in the Post-Modernist era of deconstruction, Humpty Dumpty's comment apparently reigns supreme:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
However, Psychoanalysts always must be carefully attuned to the words their patients use and the various meanings and layers of meanings the words contain.
[An illustrative digression:
I was once referred a young woman by a colleague who had grown frustrated with the lack of progress she had made in two years of therapy. She met all the criteria for a successful treatment but seemed impervious to his interpretations. He was not an analyst and thought a more intensive treatment would be useful. The patient spent a fair amount of time describing to me a very conventional and unobjectionable childhood. Her primary complaint invovled difficulties with boyfriends and what was most striking was that despite her outward vivacity, she evinced a pervasive and gloomy, inner deadness.
In a session relatively early in her treatment she complained about her distant but occasionally overbearing father and said she felt at times that he had "colonized" her mind. I was struck by the word and asked about it. She initially had little to say about it. I asked her associations to "colonizing," and to "colonies." She thought of how the Western powers had taken over other countries and oppressed their inhabitants. She often felt oppressed. I asked her about the root of the word, "colon." She revealed she had a long history of GI complaints, especially constipation, and that it was such a part of her life that she hadn't thought a Psychoanalyst would find it interesting. For several sessions we struggled to understand her reactions, her use of the word, her omission of salient information, the meaning of the constipation she had suffered from childhood. One day she told me that she had left out something else, something she had never told anyone else. When she was eight years old, her father had sexually abused her; he was drunk and anally penetrated her. Her constipation started soon thereafter.
It is possible, perhaps likely, that this young woman would have eventually revealed this history in a more direct way, but the shame and rage that had kept her past bottled up, literally and figuratively, may never have come out, and certainly wouldn't have emerged as early as it did, had she not made her "Freudian slip" and had I not been attuned to it.
She had a reasonably successful treatment, though she had to move out of the area for her work, with much psychological work left undone.]
Some of these thoughts have been sparked by Barak Obama's peculiar construction of The Audacity of Hope. (I have not read the book and do not plan to; I am strictly concerned with the title and its meaning.) I have thus far found Barak Obama to be a very appealing and very interesting candidate. At the same time I am struck by the paucity of details in his presentation. His speeches are uplifting but platitudinous. Beyond his record, brief though it is, of traditional left-leaning Democratic liberalism, his major appeal appears to be his "audacity of hope." The language is almost an oxymoron. COnsider Audacity:
au·dac·i·ty [aw-das-i-tee] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun, plural -ties. 1. boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.
2. effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness: His questioner's audacity shocked the lecturer.
3. Usually, audacities. audacious acts or statements.
Audacity is an acitve, aggressive word.
Contrast with Hope.
The Myth of Pandora's Box contains the deepest yearnings of men for a lost Paradise. In the myth, Pandora is created by the Gods as a gift for the Titan Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, who stole the Gods' fire and for that was tortured forever. Pandora has a gift, a box she is instructed to never open. When her curiosity gets the better of her, she opens the box, unleashing all the ills (famine, pestilence, war) that mankind has had to contend with ever since. She quickly shuts the lid, but too late to trap what she has loosed upon the world; only Hope remains. For those who need a refresher on the legend of Pandora's Box, Wikipedia has more, including links:
The more famous version of the Pandora myth comes from another of Hesiod's poems, the Works and Days. In this version of the myth (lines 60-105), Hesiod expands upon her origin, and morever widens the scope of the misery she inflicts on mankind. As before, she is created by Hephaestus, but now more gods contribute to her completion (63-82): Athena taught her needlework and weaving (63-4); Aphrodite "shed grace upon her head and cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs" (65-6); Hermes gave her "a shameful mind and deceitful nature" (67-8); Hermes also gave her the power of speech, putting in her "lies and crafty words" (77-80) ; Athena then clothed her (72); next she, Persuasion and the Charites adorned her with necklaces and other finery (72-4); the Horae adorned her with a garland crown (75). Finally, Hermes gives this woman a name: Pandora -- "All-gifted" -- "because all the Olympians gave her a gift" (81).[2] In this retelling of her story, Pandora's deceitful feminine nature becomes the least of mankind's worries. For she brings with her a jar[3] containing[4] "burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men" (91-2), diseases (102) and "a myriad other pains" (100). Prometheus had (fearing further reprisals) warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus. But Epimetheus did not listen; he accepted Pandora, who promptly scattered the contents of her jar. As a result, Hesiod tells us, "the earth and sea are full of evils" (101). One item, however, did not escape the jar (96-9), hope:
Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not
fly away. Before [she could], Pandora replaced the
lid of the jar. This was the will of aegis-bearing
Zeus the Cloudgatherer.Hesiod closes with this moral (105): "Thus it is not possible to escape the mind of Zeus."
There is absolutely nothing audacious about Hope; if anything it is the last shred we hold onto when despair threatens. It requires no "boldness or daring," no "confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions" to have Hope.
Hope is what we have left when events have overtaken us and we have recognized that the outcome is independent of our efforts. We can no longer control or influence events, we can merely Hope that Zeus will be merciful on us.
The spirit of passivity that accompanies Hope fits with the traditional liberalism (proposed by populists on both left and right) that proposes larger government as the answer to our current difficulties.
Perhaps I am making too much about the word, but I have the Audacity to Hope I am wrong about Barak Obama and he has much more to offer us than Hope.
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