I was reading this book for my Brit Lit class and my professor proposed that we write a panoramic view of our lives.
Out of everything, what would I put down for people to see, as if my life was the compilation of a series of events with no beginning nor end. Just a series of facts in no order of importance. I find that rather difficult, rather complicated to do.
Are we, humans, am I, a series of events, no order? no beginning nor end, just a series of events that happened?
I don't think so. First of all, according to modern psychology, aren't traumatic events, the ones the cause an enormous amount of psychological damage, so hard to cope that the traumatized person forgets the event that led to the trauma altogether? How much do "scenes", independent events, are important in themselves? How much can they matter out of context?
I'd rather believe that I'm a product of everything, every tiny piece of information that I gather, every dream I don't remember, every unconscious though that I am barely aware of.
I can pinpoint some events that I consider bigger. Moments of strong overflow of emotion. Most of those where accompanied by nightmares, tricks of the mind, extreme stress and such pleasant things.
So no, I shall not write a panorama of my life for several reasons, but mostly for two: (1) I don't like to dwell on my past mistakes, the "if's" and (2) I don't think this way to approach my life is the best way to look at it.
If I want to see what I was, I just have to see what I am now. I am the product of what happened and the seed of what will happen.
This is precisely where Freud and many other psychologists/psychoanalysts differ, I mean, when so much effort is put into chronology, you lose context. If you focus on facts randomly put side by side in a mosaic-like fashion, you lose causality. The most reasonable approach that focus on the context and its contingencies, a thing that a couple of good people such as Dr. C.G. Jung or the Humanist and Gestalt psychologists really got right, is the present. It's all about the present with them, which feels like a nice breath of fresh air if you come from a Freudian background. The lacanian approach, however, is completely different: you have to create a whole new language to speak of such things (the concept of "lalangue"). There's no such thing as time, so to speak. That's what we got ourselves tangled with since someone came up with the whole Structuralist theory. We're all fucked. :P
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