Outsmarting Death Two Times E-Book

Günter von Hummel

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 175

Beschreibung

The discussion about no life or life after death can be considered solved after reading this book. Because neuroscientists have recognized that between the medically even with modern methods determined end of life and the really final death still a span exists in which brain activities can be proved. These processes can also be explained theoretically with psychoanalytical understanding. It reminds of Sisyphus, who, in contrast to Oedipus, is not so well known in Freud's psychoanalysis. But Sisyphus was not only a hero regarding the severity of life, but also a role model in dying, outsmarting death twice. The narrow passage between life and death represents a life of a different kind that can be neuro-psychically grasped. And so it is no longer about a life after death, but about one while dying. This orientation probably also plays a role in Sisyphus, but it can also be used for a direct self-practice for today. With the method of Analytic Psychocatharsis the author has combined psychoanalytic and meditative procedure, which, even practiced by oneself, helps to outsmart death even today by using this span of life in dying. Because this other life can be used only who has learned it before to a large extent.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Introduction

What does Sisyphus offer?

Life while Dying

Attempts at Resuscitation

The Sisyphus Complex

A Psychoanalysis for all

Prometheus

Appendix

Bibliography

1. Introduction

In the middle of the last century, the Japanese writer Yasushi Inoue wrote a story about a man and a woman who met by chance in a secluded hotel by the sea without knowing that they both had the same intention: to leave life in tranquility. Since his book is called Shi to koi to nami, in English 'love', one certainly suspects immediately that the two will fall in love and not do what they intend. If the fact of such a meeting - they are the only guests of the hotel - is already quite artificial and not very plausible, the end of the story seems to me even more curious and almost perverse. The two protagonists come closer to each other only in a very bumpy way, but whether there is really love involved is never quite clear, although this is the firm intention of the author, which is characterized by traditional idealism.

Already on the first evening the two know about their identical motives and leave this coldly stay in the room. Even after the unsuccessful suicide of the woman - by drowning in the sea - on the day after they met, both continue to hold on to their intentions and only talk past each other. However, in return for the fact that the man helped her with a few things and words after the mishap of survival, she gives herself to him the following night - without any love, only in return, as she says. But when he then wants to jump from the cliff into the raging sea the following night, she had secretly followed him and says that she does not want to hold him back. However, if he jumps, she will also jump and die. Either way, live or die, nothing matters to her. And thus he cannot realize his decision to kill himself, because he would then, in addition, cause her death, also committing murder, so to speak.

The author does not use this argument, but in my opinion it is clear that not only love, but also blackmail is involved: "if you kill yourself, I will kill myself too". In this last conversation, the woman confronts the man with the irrelevance of his desire to kill, because his motive is that he has been 'dishonored'. While the woman's suicide decision was caused by lovesickness, the man's was caused by self-inflicted high losses of money and the danger of criminal prosecution for bribery. In Japan, bankers still throw themselves out of their skyscrapers after bankruptcies because of such 'dishonors', which is rather not the case with us in the western area. In our country, people kill themselves because of deep depression, severe abandonment or hopeless life circumstances.

"I will try to live", the man thinks to himself in the end, even if it is not said why, because still there is no talk of great love. It didn't have to be said, but one senses in the author the intention of the ethical construct, the samurai ideal, the traditionalist calculation, that it should be about a very special, dramatically originated and highquality love, which is supposed to dissuade the two protagonists from their intention - after the infinitely curious coincidence of their meeting - in a rather blackmailing and almost perverse way. Finally, they let go of their plans only in the sense of a mutual zero-round: if he wants to end his life because of this 'dishonor', he should do it, she does not hold him back - she says - just as he would not have held her back the day before. Like you me, like me you - without further explanations.

Because of this, because the story seemed so transparent to me, I thought its blackmailing and sober ending was a little perverse. Yasushi Inoue should have written the story differently; for example, he could have put more binding words in the woman's mouth and let her say to the man: "Give us one more day to be able to talk about our relationship. Then decide whether you want to jump or not“. After that, Inoue could have written about all the difficulties that existed with the two of them - betrayal of love on the part of the woman, total bankruptcy and breach of law on the part of the man - and then continued to ponder about what kind of love exists at all, how it could be lived out, and why it must come across to the reader in no other way than as so noble and so holy.

One could also put it this way: as in general, besides living and dying, regressing, falling back into earlier psycho-physical states, the return to the beginning as such, also plays the decisive role in this story. It is not at all about love (of whatever kind), it is about a hold, regaining of an alleged primordial trust, by more than X or Y (I choose these letters because they represent at the same time the sex chromosomes, man XY, woman XX, which are so important). Because in the movement and in the completely soundless primal scream in which both tear each other back from death, they also abuse each other as living. They live now only as a credit drawn on death, which they will one day have to repay. Oh God, life is bleak and love is difficult!

The same problem is also the subject of the film 'Love' by director M. Haneke, which was universally praised and received many awards. In the very old couple shown, the wife suffers a stroke and becomes increasingly demented. The husband cares for her devotedly, with great commitment and imagination, but towards the end of this empathetic drama, after still speaking to her confidentially, he smothers her with a pillow and lays her in bed draped with flowers. So again, throughout the film, something is conjured up that is supposed to be quite deep love, perfectly empathic in terms of everyday psychology and with a supposedly wonderful outcome, because the man hears her even after her death and also sees himself leaving the house with her, and so on.

But I don't know if it's better to say that the story ends tragically or even with a murder? Because maybe the caring man was just a narcissist who only got into the role of the optimal, comprehensively empathetic helper and in the end has to let out the true feelings: Destructiveness, coldness, murder. Because why didn't he talk to her before about how to arrange the end of life, maybe she would have preferred a more gentle and professional euthanasia. Because simply pressing a pillow on her, putting her in terrible suffocation, still feeling her defiant wriggling and other things cannot be an act of love. But this is exactly what the director tries to suggest, and most people believe him.

Because 'spiritually' she was already no longer there, also physically no longer healthy, and so it is assumed that it had been her own, intense wish to be redeemed anyway. But what is she being released from? People with dementia no longer really and painfully realize their departure from social life, their loss of memory, their apparent monotony, while it affects their environment, their relatives, much more and they suffer much more from the inaccessibility of the dementia patient than the patient himself. After all, the amount of care required is becoming ever greater, and if one wants to do everything alone, it is also excessively demanding and somehow pointless. Isn't it the man who finally goes crazy, doesn't know what to do, and thus finally kills his wife under the pretext of a good deed? Shouldn't the title of the book and the firm be 'Love', but 'The Deepfakes of Love'?

The film is perverse and whitewashes the aggression and hatred smoldering in the background with almost religious whitewashing. If narcissism, hatred or ignorance, the usual downsides of love, had been more openly in play, the whole film might have become a melodramatic tearjerker. For this would require great, deep-psychological and dramatically skillful narrative art, which is not in sight here. But this way the film - completely hiding everything abysmal - becomes a great romanticized success and moves the masses. As in Yasushi Inoue's story, pathos and ethos are not emphasized or clearly named, but rather these terms are supposed to arise in the reader or viewer - by themselves, as it were, from behind: thought or felt or even heard with devotion. The pillow, the murder tool, should thus be nothing else than the seal, than the heraldic love sign, in any case nothing unkind. How it goes on with the man then, cannot be shown any more, but must be embezzled.

For in order to conceal this embezzlement, the man subsequently has hallucinations of his dead wife, which are concealed fantasies of guilt, as they often occur with murderers and murderesses (e.g. Clytemnestra). In reality, he would have had to appear desperate or crazy, even if the excessive love and embellished empathy had actually taken place and could have been shown at least somehow bindingly. Even without having to recognize narcissism and murder guilt at such an advanced age, it would have been only half the truth and would have turned the film into a grotesque. Love lies; sure, that's the big topic today.

Can't it all be done completely differently? Can't you invent it (the combination of death, life, love, etc.) creatively, freely, big, lustful and strong? No, nonsense, all just inflated vocabulary. There must be - instead of all this chatter and talk - a dying and regressing in constructive form, in which one ends up neither dead, nor near dead, nor mad, nor in love delusion, nor otherwise aberrant. The matter does not have to be deadly serious, but it does have to be serious. I want to write about this and describe a procedure which - scientifically justified - provides a clear way out, a clear X-and-Y and a love also for the negative in itself. Thousands of people have already done this, they will say with a wink.

Well, then first a story that will not be boring, as the two stories (Inoue's story and Haneke's book and film) certainly are not. I use the reports about the old Greek heroes, for example the saga of Sisyphus (and a little bit also that of Prometheus), in that with them the plump and lustful heroic life is ruined by the wanton and ruthless goings-on of the gods, love comes along anyway only death-bearing and everything already has a perverse touch from the beginning (so it is quite modern?). But it will not contain a love lie.

Admittedly, it's exclusively male gods who are afflicting Sisyphus, thus only XYs. Couldn't one have written about a goddess, who indeed seeks the heroic man's life, but then the narrative ends in a love, which - without having to interpose an equal opportunities officer between man and goddess - ends in a regressive, regressive, procedure, which connects both beyond XY/XX? Anyway, I want to stick to the historical antecedents and their interpretations and offer a serious, scientific tract, a guide to Sisyphus and to a self-practical, self-analytical procedure developed from it. Above all, I want to write about life in death, that is, about life not after but in death, insofar as it has not yet died completely. Whether and which love, which life and death are involved, will then be secured for each one to decide for himself.

That Sisyphus stands not only for the agony of constantly rolling a boulder up a hill, but also for having twice cheated death, is known to very few. It is even less known that one can learn something from him in this respect for today. In our modern times, people believe that death can be cheated, outsmarted, especially with the help of highly developed medical technology and specialized medicines, and that life can thus be prolonged a little further. But this calculation is not entirely correct. For one thing, the drugs are not as great as one imagines when reading generalized reports about them. Certainly, Janus kinase inhibitors, for example, have enormously improved the treatment of myeloid leukaemia and similar diseases, and biologicals for rheumatism have also brought benefits, albeit increased side effects.

The situation is not so good with the new and highly praised checkpoint inhibitors and CAT cells, which are effective against certain cancers. Over 90% side effects are reported, some of them severe, and deaths have also been related. Often, new, high-profile cancer drugs extend life by only a few months, and the benefit is only external, as quality of life is usually worsened. On the other hand, people make far too little use of the possibilities of not only extending life externally with these disadvantages to the quality of life, but increasing life internally and elevating it to its proper purpose. Because the biological vita is only one side, always people have already strived for the true, in fact, in principle life, which goes far beyond the mere vita. Why prolong the bad life when there is another, good one?

I don't mean mystical, esoteric, religious and otherwise cultic approaches to keeping death at bay or even suppressing it altogether and invoking love sky-high, as Yasushi Inoue does. In doing so, I appreciate his books and his Buddhist- and Confucian-inclined way of life, with which he has been a role model for many readers. However, in this book I will stick to the science as it was developed by the French psychoanalyst J. Lacan.1 I take his psychoanalysis as a starting point and also bring - inspired by Yasushi Inoue - meditative aspects into play in my explanations, which shall ultimately culminate in the description of the announced self-practice (an expression of the philosopher M. Foucault).

In the middle of the last century, the physician and psychologist Carl Albrecht designed a rationally critical method of self-analysis and practiced it for years in a self-interpreting way, which was still attached to mysticism, but can nevertheless already be declared as rational. He practiced the procedure of 'listening into oneself' by switching off everyday thoughts and concentrating on a concept coming from within and exclusively wordrelated.2 Thus, an already solid and more or less ethically significant, literal expression should come to light from within. Albrecht tried at the same time to examine rationally these words coming to him, in order to be able to give them a 'real' and profound valuation in a holistic and ethical direction.

In C. Albrecht's technique of a contemplative listening into himself to the mystical word coming from within, one senses immediately, however, that through the 'mystically arriving words' not a really new, real knowledge imposes itself upon him, but that it is a knowledge which he - Freud would say: in the preconscious - already has. The 'mystical' inspirations namely work like poems, which always have something darkly sublime about them like "Heart", or "Oh stone", "Light"! Albrecht's words repeat a firm patheticness and also awaken memories of the old German, of something that he already knows from somewhere, e.g. from theosophical poetry or religious allusions. He chooses something, he doesn't let the actually unconscious come to speak, he is already too conscious in his knowledge that his ‘arriving words’ will contain something elegant and then he only speaks this out. He lacks the Freudian or also the Socratic Eros, he represses something, something in him does not dare to make more daring assertions, and so his Daimonion (Sokrate's inner voice) sounds like religious poetry.

A really concrete or even bold statement, a knowledge from the unconscious that would be new, startling or apt, because aiming at Plato's 'divine madness' or at something that could be passed on to people as new, revolutionary, does not come about in Albrecht. It is like with many 'meditative' methods, where the medium gets the message only from the already familiar preconscious, not really from the unconscious, the inner transcendent. Why should a message from the unconscious make use of our ready-made language, is it not more obvious that it sounds incomprehensible at first, and we have to decipher it first? Shouldn't it sound like a foreign language? Nevertheless, Albrecht's attempt was courageous and interesting.

Although not directly now, I have continued in his footsteps in a similar way, trying to proceed in a more scientific, modern and psychoanalytic way. My method of Analytic Psychocatharsis consists of two exercises, of which only the second one contains this listening into oneself. I will not explain this method here again in all details. Only this much: the listening in is already preformed in a "linguistic-crystalline" (an expression of J. Lacan for the unconscious) form by the first exercise, in which a liberating, cathartic experience occurs. Namely, formulaic word formations are meditated upon, which contain several meanings in a single lettering, so that one cannot commit oneself to any of these meanings during meditative repetition and must remain with the pure - sometimes seemingly nonsensical - basic formulation. So, although they consist of clear language (linguistic), no meaning can be extracted, and so, these formulawords concentrate and narrow down everything linguistic to a minimum (crystalline).

This, however, strongly promotes contemplation in a direction analogous to psychoanalysis. One becomes free of disturbing thoughts and emotions, so that thus a form of catharsis, of liberating relaxation occurs. If one then concentrates in the second exercise on 'listening in', e.g. only on an inner tone, word-related 'phrases' occur, which have to do directly with the unconscious. I say 'phrases' because here too, as concerning the unconscious, Lacan spoke of so-called "ultra-reduced phrases“. Also with Albrecht - apart from the unscientific methodology - the ‘mystical words’ coming to him were concise and ultra-reduced. The unconscious knows no usual syntax or grammar, but its statements have picture and language character (crystalline-linguistic), if necessary one must rationally touch up like even Albrecht did this.

Mostly, however, these "ultra-reduced phrases" are as Freud also claimed of some dreams: "as if freely read off the page".3 Freud reports here of a dream in which the phrase "erzephilic" occurred. The dreamer himself immediately had the idea that the words "erzieherisch" (educational) and "syphilis" are contained in it, behind which a conflict of the dreamer was clearly hidden.4 Written under each other, one notices that these broken dream letters are something where word-sound images intertwine like in the Freudian slip of the tongue. In the process, another word, whose meaning was displaced, inserts itself into the consciously uttered word, i.e. into its word-sound-character, whereby a completely different statement comes about than what one is conscious of.

The disguise by the inserted repressed was here easy to recognize for the dreamer, however Freud writes nothing to it, which was the actual problem of the dreamer. After all, one does not give a book about prostitution to a woman so un-self-consciously and then also immediately think of syphilis (as noted in footnote 4). But anyway, also in meditation it is not the repression but the shifting that is more in the foreground, which is visible in Albrecht's method. He simply shifts everything into the consciously elegant and pathetic. This is not the case with Analytic Psychocatharsis, which squeezes between repression and displacement and shifts unconscious content toward the "ultra-reduced phrases" that have to do with the identity of the subject. For the sake of simplicity, I will mention an example from my own experience in the very next chapter.

But first again a hint, why I spoke of life in the midst of death, thus of a condition, which is seen from the outside as end of life and with electroencephalography and magnetic resonance technology also scientifically precisely can be determined, but from the inside looks completely different. This is not only claimed by many mystics or myth tellers, I will also quote neuroscientists and give psychoanalytical arguments how in the transition from life to a very last death still other such regressive processes have meaning in the dying process. Because so said dying cannot only be learned, as one can often hear from esotericists, but its psychic structure can be experienced already long before.

1 It is neither a natural nor a spiritual science. Based on mathematics, Lacan called it a conjectural science. Conjecture means assumption, one proceeds from one well-founded assumption to the next until the last certainty is found.

2 Albrecht, C., Das Mystische Wort (The mystical Word) (1951) S. 185

3 Freud, S., GW Band II, Fischer (1999) S. 308.

4 The dreamer had given a book with the title 'On Prostitution' to a woman in the evening in order to have an 'educational' effect on her, but then had the feeling himself that this might have had a 'poisoning' effect (like syphilis) on her.