I use dominance to achieve an elusive sensation of safety. I use submission to protect me from danger. Twin fears plague me. First, “dissolution” – annihilation, fragmentation. A non-existence lying beyond deadness that I imagine would result from my being abandoned, from loss, from being out of mind. And second, something like murderous aggression, destruction, harm, that I imagine could result from my untrammeled desire.
The twin fears are a Mobius strip. Aggression leads to abandonment leads to loss leads to annihilation leads to aggression… and then, all over again.
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At its best, this configuration allows me to rework my childhood traumas triumphantly. In such a triumphant reworking, I conjure a scenario, a relationship, in which I fear neither abandonment nor my own aggression. In which I leap to the other side of the Mobius strip, where desire leads to gratification leads to a sense of vitality leading, once again, to desire.
At its worst, the configuration recapitulates the very childhood traumas I long to master.
Freud wrote a great paper called “Remembering, repeating, and working through,” in which he described this very phenomenon. It’s a psychoanalytic paper, about psychoanalytic technique, but honestly, it’s just about life. I read it in college, and it stuck with me. Even then, I read it as a powerful description of what I knew to be true, but didn’t yet understand, about my own experience, and memory, of trauma. I reread the paper every year or two; I understand it to be something approaching a universally apt theory of human suffering.
That, and the Dhammapada.
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