Category: Thinking

Some­thing vague­ly Lacan­ian has been run­ning through my mind the past cou­ple of days. a monolec­tic about iden­ti­ty. when a per­son­’s iden­ti­ty is secure, (and by secure i mean that the pos­i­tive aspects that a per­son per­ceives in them­self are val­i­dat­ed, affirmed and reit­er­at­ed by some­one else) this enables them to revis­it the dark moments in their past and learn and heal from them. this revis­i­ta­tion is not nos­tal­gic which in effect cre­ates a world that is an ide­o­logue and can­not be returned to. the revis­i­ta­tion instead is tru­ly cathar­tic, the truth is con­front­ed and dealt with instead of mythol­o­gized.

the dif­fi­cul­ty is suc­cess­ful­ly chal­leng­ing this trau­ma-mem­o­ry with­out sac­ri­fic­ing your own iden­ti­ty in rela­tion to it. that is why you need a bud­dy to reaf­firm and hold on to your self while you are off slay­ing what­ev­er drag­ons are in your past.

i don’t know quite if this is right or not, but i think i have been either brave or fool­hardy and gone off to wres­tle with mem­o­ry with­out hav­ing the nec­es­sary back­up. may­hap, it has made me more indi­vid­ual or may­hap this thought is a result of an indi­vid­u­al­ism that exist­ed before trau­ma was con­front­ed. in any case i’ve a prob­lem with indi­vid­u­al­ism. but that is anoth­er sto­ry.

i sup­pose i’ve been suc­cess­ful at these con­fronta­tions (if they actu­al­ly hap­pened) oth­er­wise i’d be a bit loony.