"[C]ollections of words that seem [not] to do justice to the complexity of what we feel."

* * *

Some excerpts of Adam Phillips writing (in this fantastic book), from his chapter entitled First Hates:

For the ego to sustain itself as good [...] depends upon expelling everything experienced as bad into the outside world. And that world we make outside [...] is the place, or one of the places, where we put objects and desires we wish did not belong to us.

The developmental question, in Freud's view [...] is what is unbearable about oneself and where is one going to put it? And the consequent preoccupation becomes, once one has supposedly got rid of it, how is one going to live in a state of such impoverishment, so emptied of oneself?

But of course Freud fantasies -- and the fantasy that makes a phobia -- are forms of magical thinking; in the phobic fantasy you convince a part of yourself that the bad things are elsewhere only because there is really no elsewhere (or the only real elsewhere is the place you cannot put parts of yourself). Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness -- meaning recognize it as yours -- then one can take some fear out of the world. In this psychoanalytic picture the treatment is a method of retrieval; almost, one might say, of the misplaced persons in oneself. 

In Freud's view, the ego depends upon its phobia. It is, so to speak, its first relationship, and one that is inevitably paranoid (paranoia being, as it were, a refusal to be left out).

Saw him as I was biking near the bayou that ran underneath an old railroad track.

Shot this photo without stopping, only using the handbrake for the slightest moment.

I always identify with this gentleman.

I'm struggling to differentiate between what is running away and what is running full speed into the unknown beyond me.